When Certainty Cracks
Cuando la certeza se resquebraja
The teacher shares personal experiences from adolescence that shattered a deeply materialistic worldview, illustrating how direct experience can undo even the most firmly held beliefs about the nature of reality.
When Certainty Cracks
The teacher shares personal experiences from adolescence that shattered a deeply materialistic worldview, illustrating how direct experience can undo even the most firmly held beliefs about the nature of reality.
By "our philosophy," I mean our beliefs, our mind, our interpretation of reality.
I was the most skeptical, scientifically, materialistically minded fifteen-year-old you would have found within twenty thousand kilometers, until things started to crack. I began to have experiences that defied my entire belief system. I had no belief in anything spiritual. I was the most anti-spiritual, anti-religious person you could imagine. Physics, chemistry, and math were my reality, and I held that position in the extreme.
Experiences that defied belief
Then I began to have very factual experiences. I've shared some of them here before. Once, I was on a train and I started to feel an incredible pain. A thought came, almost like a voice, telling me something. That in itself was strange and new. It told me, "That's not my pain." I thought, "If it's not mine, whose is it?" Then I could see, about five meters away, a woman, and the voice said, "It's hers." I was around sixteen years old, going to school, and I thought I was losing my mind. The pain became so unbearable that I thought I was going to collapse to the ground. The moment I nearly fell, she collapsed. And the moment she collapsed, all the pain was gone. She had passed out.
That experience defied everything I understood about reality. How could I have been feeling what she was feeling?
A shattering of beliefs
That was the beginning of a pretty dark time in which all of my beliefs shattered. I had no concept of past lives. Then I found myself working through what could only be called past-life trauma, because I could not function. I could not leave my house due to the terror I was experiencing just sitting in my room. Very real memories arose, as real as anything from this life, accompanied by pain more intense than anything I had felt in this life. Clear memories, vivid experience.
Whether it was my past life, someone else's, or something else entirely, it was as real as this life. These memories were as real as any others. So it all goes in the same bucket for me.
I share this to undo a little bit of your certainties. Perhaps it can save you the long process I went through: decades of resistance, disbelief, fighting, and struggling.