One of the main arguments I hear against spirituality, or even religion in general, is that someone doesn’t need to believe in supernatural beings to be a good person. And that’s correct. Being kind to one another, treating someone the way you’d like to be treated, that’s all part of having empathy and human decency.
The other argument is that we have no proof deities are real. Sure, people say they feel a divine or spiritual presence, but people also talk about seeing Sasquatch and ghosts. They’re not real as in something that’s been scientifically explored and proven the way we know huge whale sharks exist in the ocean or dinosaurs roamed the earth. But also, when you think about something like dinosaurs that we know existed, while we’re getting better, there’s still an awful lot we don’t know like what color they really were. We can make guesses, sometimes we may find fragments of preserved skin, but if I draw a the same dinosaur in dark brown and someone draws it in a bright green, we both could be right.
We don’t have dinosaurs, in their prehistoric forms, around to tell us what they look like, so we have to take it on faith that the scientists in their various disciplines know what they’re doing when they draw pictures or make documentaries about dinosaurs. Wait a minute, I just said faith.
If a child or a loved one tells you their stomach hurts, most people would probably have them lay down, maybe tuck them in with a comfortable blanket or put on a favorite movie or television show, and check their temperature. If the person is old enough, you can ask how long or maybe if they ate something that upset their stomach. We believe their lived experience.
Lived experience is often described as personal knowledge about the world (including your body) gained by living, rather than having someone else explain what you should be seeing/feeling/doing to you. Believe what your senses tell you; believe your feelings, including those gut checks or flashes of intuition.
But there’s something I’ve noticed lately is that a lot of people don’t want to believe your lived experience because it doesn’t match theirs. This often happens with marginalized groups. And it happens if your lived experience doesn’t match their beliefs about the world and how it should work according to them.
We have to put faith in a lot of things. I have faith that the scientists studying Jupiter know what they’re doing when they calculate rotation and minerals, and even that the red spot will go away some day. (very sad!). I can’t go to Jupiter, or the Moon, or Mars, or any celestial body, to see it and touch it for myself. I have to believe scientists–believed their lived experience and knowledge — and have faith that they’re doing the math right.
When someone talks about their spirituality, I believe their lived experience, and you should too. Look, in the grand scheme of things, however someone envisions a higher power, whether that’s their higher self, a named deity, or one that’s known only to them, has very little impact on our lives. For me at least, my spirituality is personal to me. I share some aspects of it with you, but a lot of it I keep quiet about, because my focus isn’t on my deities and pushing them on people, but rather with helping people become fully embodied and authentic, to help them cast off the stories told to them by people who may or may not have had their best interests at heart, let alone the cultural and societal stories we internalize.
I feel like I’m just scratching the surface here, so for today (before this blog becomes a book… hey, wait a minute *jots down idea*) I’ll leave you with this thought. Why do we believe certain lived experiences and not others? What does that say about us? What does that say about the stories we have internalized? And what would happen if we just…believed people?
