...in which the author takes on the question "What is the meaning of existence?" without the benefit of being stoned. Good luck.
For me, the fundamental question is actually a variation: not what is the meaning of existence, but what is the nature of existence? Is the physical world a manifestation of consciousness, or is consciousness a result of neurons firing off in our brains? Or do both physical and spiritual worlds coexist in more dimensions than we can grasp?
Either I consist of an immortal spirit in a mortal body, or I don't, in which case the physical body is all there is, end of story, end of search. One might think that as one ages, one would become increasingly skeptical and this would seem more and more likely to be the answer. But on the contrary, as I age I become less of a skeptic.
As inexplicable experiences pile up over the years, it becomes hard to discredit all of them. Almost everyone, if prodded, will admit to having had at one time or other some extraordinary experience that can't be explained other than as a sighting or hearing of a spirit, be it an angel or a ghost, or as a psychic phenomenon of some kind. People will say, Look, I'm not saying I believe in ghosts, I don't know what I believe, but I know what I saw.
I myself have heard a dead man sobbing; not just any man but my husband. Not in the middle of the night, but in the middle of the afternoon. Not far away, on the wind, but up close and unmistakable. This is only one such experience; one can be brushed off, it's harder to brush off a dozen.
I've heard the argument that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, but I don't buy it. Think how extraordinary the claim that we would one day fly in heavy machines would have sounded had it been made a thousand years ago. Or the claim that we would one day communicate with others halfway around the world nearly instantaneously. To reject all extraordinary claims that can't be proven is to close one's mind to the possibility that there are things we simply can't yet explain.
Being unwilling to brush off a wealth of evidence leads me to conclude that there is more to existence than the physical world. I guess, then, that we all have a spiritual essence, housed in a physical body. The theory that body and spirit are created simultaneously implies that the creation of the body gives rise to the spirit. But how can the physical body produce an entity that will continue to exist after the body decays? I struggle with the idea that the body gives rise to the mind for another reason: because evidence suggests that the mind is the more powerful of the two.
To believe in this simultaneous creation of body and spirit, one has to accept that the spirit is created by God, who, seeing a couple humping in the back seat of a 67 Ford Fairlane or a lab technician mixing sperm and egg in a petri dish, is compelled to create a soul for the offspring. Of all the possibilities, this seems the least likely. It seems much more likely that the stuff of the spirit is out there, and is pinched off into the body opportunistically, and then released when the body is destroyed.
To be continued...
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