Grappling with Spirit, Truth and Meaning
I am mad with love
And no one understands my plight
Only the wounded understand
The agonies of the wounded
When the fire rages in the heart
Mirabai [Hindu spiritual poet-saint]
Many would agree that a dominant aspect of spirit and spirituality is passion, drive, and, yes,..Life-Force!
My background and some ancestral roots
My Great Grandfather Arthur Murphy was something of an entrepreneur. He came from Ireland to Quebec in Canada and made - and lost - a tidy sum of money. One of his ventures was an asbestos mine near Quebec. Arthur Murphy is actually in Wikipedia. He was an elected member of the Quebec assembly. Albert Murphy, Arthur’s son, needless to say, also came from the Quebec region where from what we understand, Albert Murphy was a manager of the Thetford asbestos mine.
Albert Murphy, my grandfather, was an Army engineer in the Canadian Army during World War I and fought in the Battle of Vimy Ridge which was part of the larger Battle of Arras, took place in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais in France from April 9 to 12, 1917. It was the first coordinated attack conducted by the Canadian Expeditionary Force and it was very successful. “Historians attribute the success of the Canadian Corps to technical and tactical innovation, meticulous planning, powerful artillery support and extensive training, as well as the German 6th Army’s failure to properly apply the new German defensive doctrine.” (Wikipedia, Battle of Vimy ridge)
Recently, an anonymous donor was kind enough to donate a “Poppy Medallion” dedicated to my grandfather. Poppies came to symbolize soldiers who fought in France during World War I due to a famous poem. It seemed poppies were the only flower that could grow in the churned-up ground of WWI battlefields. Anyway, my family is grateful for whomever dedicated the “Poppy Medallion” in Albert Murphy’s name. On the English side, my great Grandfather was an English Anglican bishop and he edited what is now called the Mant bible. Also, my Great Uncle, Allen Peck, flew with the legendary Lafayette Escadrille in World War I!
As a high school student I spent my Junior year (1968-1969) in Rennes, Brittany in France. That experience opened my eyes to the diversity and variation of nationalities and peoples throughout the world. During my stay in France I realized that French culture and the French diversity of worldviews is very different from American culture. My "epiphany" occurred when my French brothers, Pierre and Paul, told me, one evening, that they were going out to "rumble" with the communists. That was in 1968-1969 in France, when President De Gaulle was in office. It was at that moment that I realized that the French people just "think" differently than Americans. Perhaps since I was an adolescent at the time, from my visit Paris, I remember Paris as a magic and enchanted city with a mystical air of long lost myths and mystic beginnings.
A Spiritual and Identity Crisis
In a sense, some of the things that happened in my life are remarkably parallel to some of the things that happened to Lev Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, radical Christian, and great thinker. After writing his classic novel, War and Peace, Tolstoy had an identity crisis which shaped up to be a full blown spiritual crisis. It was almost as if his life mirrored the spiritual crises of the characters in his novels. Lev Tolstoy became obsessed with realizing the "Meaning of Life!" He questioned everything. He methodically researched all the sciences and humanities desperately seeking answers to the questions about the meaning of life. The search for meaning was so intense that Tolstoy rejected ordinary motives and human worldly emotions as shallow, superficial, and, in any ultimate sense, utterly meaningless. He became suicidal and became afraid to take a gun with him when he went riding. In the end Lev Tolstoy, partly due to his admiration of the Russian peasants who in their simplicity accepted their lot and fate on faith alone, made his own leap of faith. In the end, he adopted the assumption that there must be meaning, since if God exists then certainly there must, in fact, be human meaning. I believe this is exactly what the brilliant psychoanalyst and Nazi concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl referred to when he emphasized man’s Will to Meaning, which was the central concept of his theory about the human mind and human consciousness. It was Tolstoy's Will to Meaning that drove him to question all things and examine life and human consciousness from every angle.
Similar to Lev Tolstoy, I had an identity crisis - but it was provoked by a precognitive spiritual-psychic experience which was both very emotional as well as spiritually and ideationally profound. What happened was that I had a precognitive insight that President Reagan would be attacked, so I called the FBI in Toledo, Ohio to warn them. I had also talked with a young woman named TJ who later told me she did remember me saying I thought President Reagan would be shot. Now, consciously, at that time, I firmly believed that religious beliefs, spirituality, and psychic were nothing but superstitious drivel. So, the insight that there would be an assassination attempt of President Reagan instigated a crisis of beliefs. After going over the issue in my mind over and over again, I finally had a premonition about terrorism and sat down one night and wrote down everything and anything that came to mind. On October 18, 1981, something like six months after Reagan got shot, I notarized my precognitive “What a nightmare” warning and walked into The Toledo FBI office and went over my warning with an FBI agent. The Notarized precognitive “What a Nightmare” warning was detailed: group, fabricating bombs, money, woman, 22 were assembled, identification of the group through tagging their manifesto, death, timing.
Doubts and Fears Morphed into Ravenous Beasts
Now, one might think the “What a nightmare” experience would have resolved my identity crisis. Actually, the “What a nightmare” experience intensified the conflict. Some dark times followed. I tried to find open-minded people to talk to, but had no luck, and, unfortunately my family was very hostile to spiritual-psychic experiences. Now, I had no education or upbringing in spirituality, religion, or psychic, so I simply did NOT have the emotional-ideational structure needed to cope with an experience like that. In retrospect it is pretty evident that the “What a nightmare” experience was what psychologists refer to as a “Global-Meaning Shattering Event!” Everyone has a worldview, or ideology, and what the immortal psychologist, William James termed a "sense of reality." I would argue that a good analogy would be to compare a person's world-view - or ideology - as the "operating system" of a computer. Of course, in a computer the operating system is THE most crucial and critical software at work in the computer's operations, and similarly, a person's world-view and sense of reality is crucial because that I what allows a person to function effectively in society and the world. So, in a nutshell. the precognitive “What a nightmare” experience was a wrecking ball - which wreaked havoc with my life and my mind. To this day I still remember the ravenous doubts and fears which nearly devoured my sense of reality and my sanity.
In a very real sense, what happened is my ‘mind’ started asking questions: What is this experience that happened to me?, What does this experience mean?, Why are these experiences happening to me?, How should I deal with these experiences, and so forth. And I would point out that once one starts to question one thing one tends to bring everything else into question since in one way or the other most all experiences and ideational structures are inter-related. Also, I would highlight that back then, A Lot of fear was involved. There is Fear of the Unknown. There is the Fear of government. There is the Fear of Insanity. And for me there was a fear of others in that my family was hostile as well as psychology and psychiatry being ideologically antagonistic. I would say the "What a nightmare" experience was a Fireball experience and back then Fears and Doubts were hideous and ravenous beasts that ate me alive from the inside - not a lot of pleasant memories of that time. So, in a sense I was very much like Tolstoy in that my sense of reality had been pulled from under my feet and I had to rebuild from scratch. However I did have the "What a nightmare" experience which, since it involved the FBI, was an experience and memory in being fear generated was impossible to eliminate or, for that matter, change much at all.
The important thing is not to stop questioning!
Albert Einstein
In any case, as a result I questioned everything, and still do. In fact, my view is that people are way too accepting and do not question things nearly as much as they should. As Albert Einstein emphasizes: "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning." The ceaseless questioning was pretty much a wrecking ball which for all practical purposes destroyed my belief system. I would say I probably believe in “less” than most anyone else in the world. Things that I firmly believe in I could probably number on the fingers of one hand. As it turned out this became something of an asset. I have fewer preconceptions or assumptions than most others, and definitely fewer dogmatic commitments, so when I study and analyze psychology, the social sciences, prophecy, and theology, I tend to question everything and look at problems from about every angle.
At the moment, if I were to inscribe something on my gravestone, I believe it would be: "I asked good questions which hopefully prompt some people to think!"
My Canadian Ancestors
Albert Murphy was an Army engineer in the Canadian Army during World War I and fought in the Battle of Vimy Ridge which was part of the larger Battle of Arras, took place in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais in France from April 9 to 12, 1917. It was thje first coordinated attack conducted by the Canadian Expeditionary Force and it was very successful. “Historians attribute the success of the Canadian Corps to technical and tactical innovation, meticulous planning, powerful artillery support and extensive training, as well as the German 6th Army’s failure to properly apply the new German defensive doctrine.” (Wikipedia, Battle of Vimy ridge)
Recently, an anonymous donor was kind enough to donate a “Poppy Medallion” dedicated to my grandfather. Poppies came to symbolize soldiers who fought in France during World War I due to a famous poem. It seemed poppies were the only flower that could grow in the churned-up ground of WWI battlefields. Anyway, my family is grateful for whomever dedicated the “Poppy Medallion” in Albert Murphy’s name.
To the right - Photo by John Banks on Unsplash
