A lack of divinity

I don't believe in God and I have no particular allegiance to the idea of Divinity. I went to church when I was a little girl but that was really just for the social life - the Sunday school teacher made really good flapjacks and was motherly, at a time when my Mother had become bedridden for a few years with depression.

I've done a lot of drugs and have had mystical experiences with the best of them, just like the rest of them. I've been there with the one consciousness and I've spent my time in a sweat lodge. Been there with the spirit animal. Done that.


But since my Father died and nothing happened I decided that there clearly wasn't anything interesting in the 'other side' because if there was he would have done his utter damnedest to make sure I knew.

NOTHING HAPPENED.

He died, this man, this man who was obviously crucially important to me. He was an atheist who knew he was going to the earth and that was it when he died. So if he was wrong....and then he went somewhere else he would have DEFINITELY made a big deal about it. And yet still nothing happened.

No ghosts. No weirdness. No falling objects, no lights going on and off. No crazy messages written in blood on the wall. No letters from the grave. No coldness. No spooky feelings. Nothing. Not a damn thing.

NO. THING.

So I am a non-believer. It's not really rational, not in a SCIENCE FACT kind of way, although I am far more inclined to believe in a wormy old carcass than some kind of guiding light. It would just take a lot to convince me that there was any kind of after-life; I would have to have my own near death experience, because yours just wouldn't be enough. Not now. Not then. Not ever.

I'm telling you this because today I watched two brilliant TED talks that got me thinking about the idea of oneness. These TED talks both ended with standing ovations, and were both real life stories, told by women. In places they are uncomfortable for me, as I say, 'Divinity' is not something I recognise. But in the first instance the story of the poet being 'chased' by a poem is moving and special, and in the second story I align myself with this lady of science, a brain scientist who experienced something so remarkable it reduced her to tears on a stage in front of her audience.

I want people to watch them both. Don't just watch one and not the other - find the time to watch them together.

And then?

I don't know.

Lets talk about it.



http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html



http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html