Revising My Reality
Growing up in the modern West has been a painful spiritual struggle for me. The culture that I have been raised in follows the Cartesian split of spirit vs body. I am stuck between two polarized ontologies: the ‘modern’ and scientific one that argues everything can be explained by science and the religious one that argues for the presence of God, but a God who is firmly situated outside of earth and all matter and embodiment. These warring visions of reality have both caused deep psychic wounding in me and have made my struggle to find my own path all the more difficult. They both completely obscure any way other than these two choices, and as it turns out, my way is neither of these. Writing in the first century, Plutarch observed that the theologians of his day argued that God was the cause of everything, while scientists and philosophers argued that science and its laws were the cause of everything, but he pointed out that they were both wrong due their incomplete understanding, “Hence the reasoning of both parties is deficient in what is essential to it, since the one ignores or omits the intermediary and the agent, the other the source and the means.”[1]