Nathaniel: Psychic Development Simplified

 Simple is different than easy.  While this was certainly straightforward and clear, as advertised in the title, it was no small or light task to get through.  It took me years, peppered with setbacks, recidivism, and distraction, to finish the lengthy and involved exercises herein.  It would have taken less than a day to simply read.

And what did I get for my trouble?  Clarity, certainty, and direction?  Far from it.  As with every other thing I've read or practiced in the line of Spirit and Religion, the results are unclear at best, and possibly even misleading.  When I feel or see some energy that is not discretely quantifiable, do I really?  Reality and experience have a convenient way of lining up with whatever one has already decided.  The placebo effect is just as real in theology as in medicine.  Is my intuition leading me this way or that?  Or is it my ego?  My desire to believe, and to be special? I have demonstrated time and again that I cannot be trusted to make that determination.  

There are certain concrete moments that I cling to as evidence of spirit, of an underlying force moving and stirring reality.  Viewed objectively, though, such moments would not pass peer review.  There has never been a moment where I can objectively say, "Yes, this is true.  This works."  

his would not be so discouraging if I were not surrounded by people who testify to a different experience.  Nobody seems as unsure of their reality as I am.  My family, of course, are deluded and wishful in their beliefs.  But I know plenty of people who follow a religious tradition that I consider wrongheaded, who testify to demonstrable proofs in their own lives.  The same is true of the people I know who follow something resembling Nathaniel's path.  They all seem so sure.  They actually see spirits.  They actually hear messages.  Either reality is closed to me and me alone for some reason, or all of these people are insane.  Neither prospect is edifying.

For now, however, I will continue to search.  Just as most of my religious friends are laughably deluded, so too are those of my friends who pooh-pooh anything remotely supernatural.  There must be something greater than me; I can feel it, and I can sometimes see and hear it even.  Or am I merely in the control group of a double-blind metaphysical trial?