Opening up to the Weird

Despite my lifelong interest in all things fantastic I’ve always been extraordinarily skeptical of the supernatural.

I scoff at ghost stories. I have explanations for everyone else’s unexplained phenomena. I have a hard time believing in the existence of a Christian God or pagan gods. I’ve heard others talk about their experiences and listen politely, while internally knocking holes in their stories and wondering what trauma or defect led them to said belief. 

I still have my doubts. Perhaps cold hard materiality does reign, and all else is illusion. But lately I’ve begun to open up to possibilities of something more.

This is no big revelation caused by a life-changing event. I didn’t see a ghost in my hallway this Halloween, or a zombie rise from a moldering grave. 

It’s just the slow awakening of some new sense in me that I’ve been missing something vital.

I believe, in some undefined, abstract, still to be explored way, in the supernatural. Because I think without it, we’re missing something vital.

I’m not talking about chain rattling ghosts or UFOs, but something spiritual that is innate to humans and probably necessary for our functioning.

The work of Carl Jung has been my catalyst. We all of us operate with an unseen system, the unconscious. Beyond that, a collective unconscious, archetypes encoded in our brain and nervous system, inherited from millennia of memory.

There is a reason why the Heroes Journey persists across vast gulfs of time, transcends cultures. It’s inexplicable as a physical phenomenon but it’s no less real. We feel its power.

Art cannot be reduced to its component atoms. A scientist can study a fleck of paint, or a letter or a word, but the artists’ whole finished art is something categorically different than its components, subjective, irreducible, ineffable. Stories are real, they have power.

That is a form of magic that is real.

I used to believe in something more than the physical, as perhaps most children do. Then I stopped, perhaps somewhere around high school. School and life and work, failures and disappointments (and deadlines and commitments, to quote one Bob Seger) wrung that out of me.

I’m letting it back in, after nearly four decades. But just a crack. I’m not throwing open the doors of rationality--there is no chance of that happening. I am just admitting that some aspects of life are irrational, that the universe cannot be explained by the movement of subatomic particles.

Here I am, at 52, open to irrationality and accepting the possibility of the weird. Faintly embarrassing but that’s my old sensible self talking. I never saw this coming… which I find wonderful and weird and inexplicable in and of itself.