The mind is the medium

I have recently been considering the possibility that I am agnostic. Certainly, I have had countless experiences that bespeak of some higher force at work, if not in the whole Universe, than at least in my life. On the one hand I once believed that I had met what could be called "God," and was shown the totality of existence and all the various supra-conscious structures that we call deity, and on the other hand, and much later on, when everything was falling to pieces and I quite certainly thought I was going to die, I gave up all sense of control and prayed, and somehow managed to find or be given that which I most needed to continue living. I was raised Catholic, yet never believed in the Christian idea of God, I have read the texts of countless religions, read about the mind, belief, mediums, and have a deep abiding sense of spirituality in my life. And yet, I am really not certain that I can prove that a "god" exists, or that it is even necessary to.

The other day Sophie was reading a book about the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, which we plan on visiting this summer, and while I've never exactly seen a ghost, I've known plenty of people who claim they have, which albeit is a quantitatively smaller experience than claiming to have met God, is still an interesting example to ask the question, where do these extra-real events happen? More and more I begin to wonder if they are not just an aspect of our subjective experience, or as the psychologist and medium Stan Gooch [via Technoccult] might put it, these events arise from our unconscious minds in the same way that we create an alternative universe in our dreams. While I'm not as inclined to side with Gooch's perspective that ghosts, and presumably dreams and God, are caused by an imbalance of the psyche when we repress our unconscious (though this might explain why so many conservatives are devout Christians), I do think it's fair to say that the only way we can know of these things is through the experience of our senses, and that when all the perspectives are on the table, there will always be more things in heaven and earth than we can ever dream of in our philosophies. I tend to agree with the Lily Dale community's definition of a Spiritualist as someone "who believes, as the basis of his or her religion, in the continuity of life and in individual responsibility," which doesn't ask one way or another for a belief in God, and frankly it seems a very materialist agenda to ask only if God exists or not, when perhaps the real question may resolve in whether or not your life has been open to and touched by more than you can rationally account for.