Spanista » Self Care Rituals, Reflections & Resources for Joyful Living by Ginny Shiverdecker

Dear Wellness Seekers,

Part 2: Faith Versus Facts Triggers Vast Differences picks up on yesterday’s post that speaks to understanding how balancing a life filled with facts with a life full of faith can open up tremendous opportunities to live and enjoy life on another level. It has to do with preparing yourself at the start of each week to see the world through a higher level lens. One that can frame up your week for a remarkable experience full of positive energy.

The foundation for this premise is based on experience that inspired the Spanista Belief System and propelled forward to share with you given the article I read by  T.M. Lurhrman. She is a reporter for the New York Times who I follow as she brings to light news on the dynamic intersection of religion and psychology. Her headline: Faith versus Facts. She states ‘Most of us find it mind-boggling that some people seem willing to ignore the facts — on climate change, on vaccines, on health care — if the facts conflict with their sense of what someone like them believes. “But those are the facts,” you want to say. “It seems weird to deny them.”

And yet a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set. Even what they count as evidence is different. And they are motivated differently, based on what they conclude. One of the reasons cited is Scholars have remarked that when people consider the truth of a religious belief, what the belief does for their lives matters more than, well, the facts. We evaluate factual beliefs often with perceptual evidence.”

Interesting indeed. Ms. Lurhrman goes on to site real life stories.

“In Scientific American, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, recently recounted such a story. On his wedding day, his bride wished intensely that her deceased grandfather could be there to give her away. Suddenly, the grandfather’s long-broken radio, which they had never managed to fix, came on, for that one day, and then never worked again. The experience rocked him back on his heels, he wrote, but it did not seem to have shifted what he takes to be real

What makes the difference between conviction and startled curiosity? In a conference last autumn at Esalen, a once-countercultural organization that’s famous for its spiritual retreats, Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, argued that how you think about remarkable experiences depends on your theory of the imagination. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he went to Kolkata, India, to study Bengali texts.

As he tells it in his book “Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom,” something happened one evening: “Although my body was asleep, resting almost anesthetized on its back, not unlike a corpse, consciousness was lucid and clear, fully awake. Suddenly, without warning, a powerful electric-like energy flooded the body with wave after wave.”

Ms. Lurhrman talked to hundreds of people who have had remarkable, unexpected experiences that startled them profoundly. Some see them as clear evidence of the supernatural and others do not. And there are those who come to a conclusive view of what these events mean, and those who hold them as evidence of the mystery of the human imagination itself.”

Good News Monday: Faith Versus Facts Trigger Vast Differences  in living well, points out the potential benefits balancing a life filled with facts with a life full of faith to open up tremendous opportunities to live a life full of positive energy. Framing each week with Faith – to be open to the times when you feel a real transcendence that confirms there is more to experience than what we can see in front of us. You will know when you feel it.

Yes, I had such experiences – Have you? Please share your story with Spanista!

(BTW – the mind blowing visual above came from QBN.com but I am not sure who created it so if you see this please give me a shout so CREDIT can be given to the talented creator.)

To Your Self Care Journey To Joy,

Ginny