Have Faith, Science is Reaching
Every day science and spirituality inch closer toward each other. As human beings, we sometimes behave in ways that can’t necessarily be explained through science, and yet as a society, we have largely been conditioned to forgo faith in favor of facts, finding meaning in laboratory results which can be duplicated on command. We’ve been conditioned to prioritize our five senses. If we can see it, hear it, taste it, smell it and/or touch it, only then can (and should) we believe it.
And yet we can all think of times when something inexplicable happened, when maybe we sensed something invisible or followed a hunch or didn’t listen to intuition, and our personal experience gave us the evidence we couldn’t deny. Many things that we once deemed “woo-woo” are more frequently being found to have scientific foundation. Of course ancient texts have outlined the connection of our spirits to the stars for millennia but without an opportunity to google for proof, or interview the author of said texts, our modern brains push aside such resources as questionable.
I am the first to admit these times we live in throw me off my balance game, but I also happen to subscribe to the idea that this is an incredibly exciting time to be alive. I feel like we are stepping precariously at the threshold where one world ends and another begins. Maybe it was similar to how it felt to be alive during the Industrial Revolution but I imagine this time we are in is more dramatic because of the speed of technology and communication. In previous eras, news had to drip across oceans in order to spread, and a lot of news was likely old by the time it was received. Of course now we live in a time when everyone has a voice and so what we call news can be a shapeshifting conglomeration of headlines that filter through a stream of hearsay and opinions. We have only ourselves to count on when sifting through news sources for accuracy and credibility. It’s tempting and easy to “share” what we want to believe before we have really rooted out the source. Human beings are quick to judge and our brains are fallible.
This “fallible brain” is the thing that led me down a rabbit hole that continues to lure me further along to learn about neuroscience. I’m no science student and much of the lingo is beyond my layman’s terminology, but thanks to the internet, the curious among us can listen to experts sharing their knowledge about their specialties. Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab podcast is one of my favorites. He’s a neuroscientist from Stanford University and he explains in detail how our brains operate in conjunction with the rest of our bodies. One of his recent guests elaborated on how we inherit memories from previous generations through biological and psychological processes. I learned about this several years ago in an NLP program but the science wasn’t laid out in this kind of detail. While I personally believed the things I was learning about how trauma for example, has the potential to affect us even in utero, admittedly I leaned on my faith and what “felt” like the truth, more so than I did on the science. Now however, thanks to huge leaps in technology, scientists are able to prove the science, how epigenetics links memory in our DNA from one generation to the next. Honestly, it’s wild.
My Friends, we are on an epic ride. It’s tempting to close your eyes to the adventure, but this won’t shut out the sensations that your soul is pleading with you to remember. The problem may be that we’ve lived in the dark for so long that we can’t conceive the brightness. It’s time to open our eyes wide and embrace the ride!
