I have to say inner knowing.
I was an atheist from the age of 8 to 23, I studied sciences and gained a degree in Theoretical Physics. I was not an atheist because of science, and one of my friends who was a Christian, when I pointed out the beauty and complexity of the universe (we were astrophysicists) and I asked how can you see this and believe in god?" he said, āHow can you not!?ā. I was an atheist because I had prayed to god to save a bird only to sense unequivocally that nothing was listening.
I never lost belief in ghosts and the Fae, as also growing up fey in a fey family the evidence was clear. There are subtle energies that science was not even trying to explain and people that did were ostracised and grants were thin on the ground and hard to find.
But I didnāt believe in gods or higher beings, and I thought that once you died as a human, there was only oblivion, and ghosts were residual energy recordings captured by the piezoelectric qualities of stone and other natural features.
What happened was at 23 I was suicidal and while I was planning to āleaveā I heard a voice say āyou know youāll just reincarnate, donāt youā. I thought āno, I didnāt know thatā. he quality of this message was that to my inner knowing it came from nothing I was acknowledging existed so far, something higher, but not a god. I wanted the oblivion, reincarnating would be pointless, I had to make this life work and thatās what I did.
But now my mind was curious, and curiosity is the one thing that actually drives me. Not sex and not art, which I see as the other two creative forces, but curiosity. Thatās why I was a scientist.
Clearly I had been wrong about what was real, and I wanted to know everything.
I sat on it for a while, I didnāt know about the occults and wouldnāt for many year, so I started doing Tai Chi, and then qigong, investigating and learning to directly feel and control unseen energy.
My worldview and practice is still informed by my knowledge of qigong, and it has never failed me, everything boils down to patterns of different types of energy in the end.
Energy that is sentient, which is the key difference to the view from Physics.
Iāve since found paranormal research, and empirical, proven work of psychic from people like Ingo Swann, (and developed by the military of the US an Russia), Michael Raduga and others, and realised that hidden in China is a massive body of work on qigong, that almost takes it too far and away from the spiritual again for me. Thereās also a lot of research that is considered classified, because people being able to do thinks like, walk through walls, sets up major questions for national security.
So, science does not reject everything at all. Science is about asking questions, and forming models to predict the answers to those questions. Science is not truth, and never was after it split from philosophy, itās just modelling reasons for technical observations. Psychic and subtle energy is hard to measure, and the best instrument to measure it at the moment is the human body, which is difficult to calibrate to make precise observations. Itās uncomfortable to not have every minute aspect mapped, assumptions unclear and datasets so large the patterns are hard to analyse. They just need to design the experiments appropriately when you donāt know anything about a complex environment.
