I live in two worlds these days. One is a rational world of skepticism and reproducible science. One where experiments are done with rigor and your personal beliefs about a notion don’t matter. Light does it’s own thing. Gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it or not. If it’s real it’s reproducible by someone. Everything is ultimately understandable and there are no hobgoblins hiding under your bed or in your yard.

The other world consists of feelings, impressions, and metaphor. It’s a mythological world where there is meaning of a sort in random events and a party scene can turn into a living painting, a tableau of the attachment to forms, the sound of each conversation distinct and focussed, all attention fixated on that moment to teach an important message, which once learned, frees you. I wander the mountains and marvel at the beauty of the moment. I meditate and the world goes a little woogy…tripy without the drugs. I feel gratitude for every moment since the bad ones usually teach a lesson and thrilled at the good times, my spine lit up with energy that makes me feel the need to dance all the time.

In the rational world I cook, take photos, work on this computer (sometimes even fixing obscure problems with it), marvel at the wonders of the science discoveries of the day, ponder politics, relationships, and how to heal my knee so I can run more. And I question everything that happened to me in the other world since that other world is just a figment of my imagination.

Some people I know and respect greatly would say that the greater reality is the first world, of metaphor of story of connectedness. Some others I respect greatly would say that the second is all there is and to think anything in the first is important is just to live in a fantasy, that the only thing of importance is physical reality, of reproducibility.

And these days I have no idea which is real and which is bullshit. This is a bit of a conundrum. Knowing what I’ve experienced in the last few months after a crazy mystical experience where I finally understood why there is such a thing as religion, having accidentally experienced the feeling of god, for lack of a better word, having stumbled like Alice into the rabbit hole, having taken the red pill, having had a huge hole in my heart healed freeing me from lots of needless psychological turmoil, it would be easy to just let go of the second world and live in that happy love and light kind of place. To walk the shaman path. Where all the people are reasonably happy and polite and where everything is okay because it’s all just play and none of it matters. It’s just a ride as Bill Hicks opined in one of his shows. We are all one consciousness perceiving itself subjectively so what’s the fucking worry?

Except that I can’t quite do that. Too many years of solving problems as a job leads me to this place where if the weirdness of the new perceptions in the mystical world are real then they should lead to repeatable observations that other people can verify. And if they can’t then they’re just a figment of an overactive mental state and not really important.

But these notions continually pop up in human history. All the religions have them at their core. All the mythologies are ultimately the same. All the stories we tell to give our lives meaning have a core similarity then that seems to imply something. Or maybe it’s just that’s what the human brain does and there is no deeper reality and we live and die like cows and cats and ferns and cactus and turtles and bacteria. No big deal.

You live you die you get eaten.

Except that to human beings need story and meaning to survive. That is an essential. It happens everywhere and anyone who says it’s not important is just bullshitting themselves.

Story in human life is the most important thing in the universe. Story is everything.

The tales we tell ourselves create meaning and create the universe as far as it matters.

In some sense everything we do is a kind of story. It’s tale we tell ourselves to make sense of our experiences and our lives. Except all mystic traditions tell that you need to erase the story to be able to perceive the reality of the universe.

And all those traditions tell the same basic tale of the deeper levels of reality. They tell that tale in metaphorical terms and poetic terms and nonsensical terms because apparently the real world terms don’t apply.

So what of that reality that no one can see unless they forget the story of the world they live in? If it’s not perceivable except by very special people who manage to transcend then is it real or is it just a figment of their stressed minds? And if it’s just a figment then why is it so damn appealing that millions, billions, of people all over the world are drawn to the notion?

The idea that they’re gullible seems too simple and yet the simplest answer is usually the right one.

This is a conundrum of epic proportions because there is no resolution except to die and I’m not quite willing to do that just yet.