Echoes in a Hollow Space

Please note that I have capitalized Skepticism. I am referring here not to healthy skepticism, which any reasonable person must apply to dubious claims, whether of the paranormal or elsewise, but to the sort practiced by the Skeptical Inquirer, various magicians, Richard Dawkins and others who have made Skepticism their one true religion. Pseudoskeptics, in other words. These Skeptics use sometimes very sloppy science to bludgeon experiencers into submission, have been caught in out-and-out suppression of genuine inquiry, and when all else fails fall back on tropes without evidence to counter claims of the paranormal. For them, no evidence—no matter how good—can ever stand up to their “it must be faked/hallucination/lies” counterargument. All, of course, expressed in the most pompous and mocking tones.

Dishonest Skepticism does not achieve its most desired goal: the extermination of all belief in the extraordinary. In fact, it encourages people to disregard what these Skeptics are saying because it’s so easy for most people to see through that kind of dishonesty. Worse, it encourages people to disregard skeptics and experts of all sorts. It’s not a very long leap from disregarding a dishonest Skeptic to questioning the veracity of immunologists during a pandemic.

Yes, reasonable people will still use their brains in those matters, but the doubt begun with dishonest Skepticism grows in the dark and spreads like a cancer. People who are credulous, who have had the experience of their own eyes mocked or disregarded without sincere investigation, are more likely to believe well-told lies. Once they’ve bought any of the lies, it’s easier to sell them the next lie. Very soon, the fact-based, science-backed words of the genuine expert can be dismissed as “that’s just his opinion.” (Something I’ve actually heard hoax believers say about the COVID precautions urged by Dr. Fauci.)

Maybe the spirit of one’s dead mother didn’t appear beside the bed to say she was happy and not to worry, maybe it was just a comforting dream. Maybe those weird lights in the sky were just a misidentification of something natural, although they did perform in very unnatural ways. Maybe that immensely tall hairy manlike creature didn’t stand in front of you ten feet away before loping off into the woods and disappearing. Maybe that was just…well, very hard to rationalize that away without falling to the fake/lie/hallucination trope—but you get my drift. The thing is, a healthy skepticism would say, “I don’t know what it was you saw. It may be exactly as you say, or it may have had a rational explanation, but I don’t have one right now.” A Skeptic, on the other hand, would not rest until the experiencer was mocked into submission, hiding away in the dark corners of the internet where the Religion of the Lie can take root and spread.

Do I expect the Skeptics to rethink things and shut up? Of course not. This is their religion, after all. True believers never reconsider their positions. They know the Ultimate Truth and will go down in flames to defend it. Just like those who believe lizard people have taken over the government and are eating babies in the basement of the Capitol building. Unfortunately, these two extreme fringes of discourse threaten to take the rest of us down in flames with them.

Belief has always been experiential in nature. I suppose, healthy skepticism is non-experiential in nature. Skepticism, on the other hand, the unhealthy variety, strikes me as a bone-deep existential terror that the Skeptic may not know the answer to all things and that there may be more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

Yesterday, I decided to try a new deck of tarot. I had a reproduction of the Marseille deck that I'd never used and was going through it preparing to ask what they call interview questions to get to know the cards. I was shuffling them, hadn't even asked a question yet, but one of them leapt from my hands and fell on the floor, which is always supposed to be significant. It fell sideways so it was neither upright nor reversed.

What card was it? This guy:



I stared at it, gobsmacked, then laughed. What else could I do? I picked him up and immediately opened the Marseille interpretation booklet.

Upright: "Energy and resources to advance, still looking for the right direction. Hovering above practical constraints. Determination and perseverance."

Reversed: "Confusion, negative and inhibiting thoughts, self defeat. Sloppy use of one's own tools may cause damage."

I was still puzzled as to what the Knight was trying to tell me, but in the interval between then and now, I think I have a clearer picture. I went back to when he first started making his appearance, when he came up twice in the same reading, both times reversed. It occurred to me that I should perhaps always read him from the reversed position? But then I thought about the way he’d landed on the floor, sideways. As if I were at a tipping point and it could go either way.

It also occurred to me that I am at somewhat of a tipping point in my life—physically, spiritually, and in my creative life. I’ve been treading water, not really pushing myself too hard, allowing rationalization to dictate my momentum (or lack thereof) rather than just getting on with things.

So maybe Mr. Knight is telling me to get over myself and get moving.

If that’s not what he’s saying, I’m sure he’ll crop up again because I firmly believe the Universe repeats itself until you do get the message. Sometimes with slaps upside the head. And the slaps get harder the longer you refuse to listen.

I’m listening, Universe. I just hope I’m understanding.

Random quote of the day:

“The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.”

—Octave (Jean Renoir), The Rules of the Game

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I've been thinking all week about a friend of mine I haven't seen in some years now, who left my life just about this time of the year. It was partly sparked by a conversation I had over the weekend at jefffunk's place after his trip to Babylon. It got me thinking about another time and another place, a different me. Then everyonesakitty touched me with her remembrance of lost friends. So I thought maybe it was time to write this down, to remember my friend.

His name was Mark.

Mark and I knew each other for twelve years, from the time we were sweet young things—infants playing at adulthood. Mark was a sweet young thing: big brown eyes and an innocent and trusting soul. He'd do my hair and instead of the usual dishing, we got into some soulful conversations. Okay, we did the usual dishing, too, but mostly became the scandal of the salons for the serious talks we had. So when Mark got tired of salons and asked if I wouldn't mind coming to his house for the hair sessions, I did. We had even more soulful conversations after that. He'd tell me how he longed to see his family, but how he didn't go up north for visits often. He'd been raised in a really strict and narrowly-focused religious sect, and his family all pretty much believed he was going to burn in hell for moving to L.A. and living his lifestyle. His mom was okay—she did think he would burn in hell, but she wanted to see her baby boy and welcomed him home. But his step dad pretty much preached to him the whole time, emphasizing how his soul was doomed and how he would burn.

"How can he say that? How can he believe that?" I asked in outrage.

"That's just the way they believe."

"I'm sorry, but I can't believe in a God like that, who would make someone gay, then punish them for His own handiwork. I cannot believe a merciful God would do that."

"Maybe you're right," Mark would say mildly. I knew I'd said too much and shut up.

Once or twice he confessed to me that deep inside he believed he was damned, too. He'd been raised that way. Kind of hard to shake it.

I don't think Mark played the field much, but his longtime live-in did. All I know for sure is that one day, he said, "We've broken up and he's moved out." That was all I could get out of him. I don't know if Mark became HIV positive through his lover's amours or his own—because we never really discussed the fact that he was HIV positive. See, this was in the bad old days, the worst days of The Plague, when persecution was still a real possibility. Doctors didn't know much about AIDS, no drugs had been developed to keep it in remission. AIDS gave only the promise of a young death back then. I knew a number of gay friends who didn't discuss their HIV even with other gay friends. You just never knew who would go into a panic and cut you dead. People were fired from their jobs, driven out of their homes and neighborhoods and schools. It was ugly.

Sometimes we'd talk all around the issue, Mark and me, about the stringent health regime he was on, how there was a lot of nasty stuff circulating out there, how you couldn't know if some little bug would turn fatal, about how he'd given up dating. Our eyes would meet and I'd swear he knew that I knew. I should have just had the courage to say, "I know and I'm okay with it." But I didn't. I kept going back to the same thought: I'm intruding. It's his disease. It's his decision to share or not to share. Maybe that was just my rationalization because I lacked the courage to confront it head on.

One of those regrets I'll always carry. You need to say the things that are important when you have the chance, no matter what they are.

Anyway, Mark got sick. "A bad case of the flu, but I'm going to be okay." A bad case of the flu was often the first sign in those ugly days that full blown AIDS had arrived. Many who had AIDS never made it past this stage, but Mark had been taking really good care of himself and he pulled through. He told me to come over on Saturday and he'd cut my hair. His first Saturday of having people over and getting back to work.

For some reason I completely spaced out that day. I looked up and it was a half hour after the time I'd said I'd be there and it would take me the better part of a half hour to get there. I called Mark to grovel and apologize. Choked up, he said, "I thought you'd decided not to risk it after I'd been so sick." I said, "I would never do that to you, sweetheart. I would never do that." "I'm glad," he said, the relief pouring out of his voice. "I've got someone coming in twenty minutes, you want to do it late today?" "I don't want you to tire yourself out your first day back. Let's do it next Saturday." So we set up a time.

I didn't talk to him during the week because I knew I'd see him on Saturday. Another regret I'll carry.

I set out for Mark's good and early. As I drove through a patch of the Marina—really, one of the blandest places you can imagine, with a tacky coffee shop on one side and a not-great hotel on the other, and loaded with angry ant traffic—I suddenly got swept up in the most remarkable emotion, a sensation of pure joy, coming out of nowhere, sparked by nothing that I could determine: a synapse in my brain opened and poured forth the sweet juice of life. The world seemed to pulse with it: live this moment, and this moment, and this moment . . .

I was so excited. I couldn't wait to get to Mark's and tell him about that remarkable sensation. When I got there a middle-aged woman answered the door. A middle-aged man hovered over her shoulder. The woman had dark circles under her eyes and an air of heaviness, utter exhaustion, as if she'd been beaten and could barely stand. "Is Mark here?" I asked uncertainly.

"I'm his mother," she said. "We're just cleaning out his apartment. Mark passed away last Wednesday night."

"H-how?"

"He thought he'd beaten that pneumonia, but he hadn't. It came on very fast and they couldn't save him."

"He was such a wonderful man," I said.

Her shoulders sagged, the man standing behind her flexed his jaw a few times and stepped away from the door, out of my line of sight, and I realized—this woman and this man thought her baby boy was burning in hell. "It's nice of you to say so," she said. "I guess I should have called the people in his address book, but I didn't have the heart. Maybe later." I don't know if she ever did because none of us ever got that call. I can't say as I blame her, but I also couldn't help wondering if I would have ever known what happened to Mark if I hadn't missed seeing him the Saturday before—or if I would have just called to a disconnected phone, gone to an apartment cleaned out and rented to someone else.

So I drove back home, sobbing, and I passed that same patch of road where I'd had the remarkable feeling of joy. I thought bitterly of what a farce it had been, what an illusion. But the feeling still waited by the side of the road, a tiny flutter of remembrance and echo of feeling, and realization thumped me on the side of the head. That was the message, dummy, delivered before I knew he was dead so I would know it for what it was later on: Mark was not burning in hell. He was not.

I used to know a guy named Ed who was a Calvinist. That alone was remarkable to me—I didn't think Calvinists existed anymore, but Ed sure did. As I understand it, Calvinists are pretty strict in their beliefs about sin and morality and right behavior, so much so that one of the tenets of their faith is that when Judgment comes, only the Elect will be admitted to Heaven. And they've even come up with a calculation, derived from numbers they say are encoded in the Bible, to estimate how many human souls out of all the billions who have ever existed are going to make the cut: 144,000.

So I asked Ed if he really believed that only 144,000 souls were going to be saved come the End of Times. He nodded—one of the fast, tight-necked nods that scared people make. His eyes showed a lot of white, too, like a horse seeing a stick on the ground and thinking it's a snake. I asked him if he thought the rest of us were going to be pitched into the lake of fire. Again, that tight, white-eyed nod.

Ed was an engineer so he had a pretty good grasp of math. I can't clearly remember if I was actually impertinent enough to ask him if he thought he'd be one of the Elect—I was pretty young and tended towards impertinence, so it's possible. But looking back, I don't think I really needed to ask that question. Ed's fear was palpable, a daily ritual. Ed knew in his heart of hearts that he wasn't "good enough" by Calvinist lights.

He was the most terrified person I ever knew, if you looked beneath the surface of things. Tightly controlled, afraid of shadows, hyper-cautious about everything, every deed and morsel, extremely safety-minded and risk-averse. He always seemed a bit squirrely, ready to jump at shadows. Not hard to imagine why. If Ed truly believed in the Calvinist creed, then the thought of death had to fill him with terror. His faith, as he interpreted it, was a torture to him because he was convinced that all that awaited him when he died was the lake of fire.

I can't say that I really see the point in a belief system like that, but different strokes to different folks, as Sly Stone said. Perhaps Ed needed the fear. Or perhaps he'd been so indoctrinated at such a young age that he couldn't escape the prison of his thought patterns.

I've thought about Ed now and again over the years. When I was younger it was with shake-my-head amazement and a bit of derision. These days, it's with pity. Faith—it seems to me—needs to be a living thing, not a dying thing, though God knows many a creed has arisen that glorifies punishment. Glorifying punishment, instilling an unnatural fear of living, seems a perversion of Spirit to me. But what do I know? I am clearly not one of Ed's 144,000.

Ever since the final word count on my latest novel hit 144,000, Ed's been on my mind and I've been picturing his tight-lipped face. No, no, I'm not going to reduce and cheapen Ed's terror to a discussion of my novel. It's just on my mind a lot this morning, this afternoon, thinking about the boxes we shut ourselves inside of, the lakes of fire we sometimes create out of our own lives.

Life is about living. For all I know, this is all we've got. Spirit calls to me and I listen, but nobody really knows a thing. Not the Pope, not Billy Graham, George Bush, the Dali Lama, the imams and ayatollahs, not Ed. Not me, not anybody. There is no received wisdom that wasn't first filtered through the skull of some poor mortal, where the lines of communication are prone to misinterpretation, self-interest, cultural biases, rationalization. We're all just living inside our own skulls, making leaps of faith.

I think it's important to believe in something, to make some kind of leap of faith sometime in our life. But when I look back at Ed and folks like him, I realize they aren't making leaps of faith about anything. It seems to me that life is the true test of faith. If what you believe is not enriching your life; if it is not about living but about death and revenge and self-righteousness and judgment, then it is most likely a false faith. Spirit does not want us to "kick ass" on anybody else. Spirit wants us to concentrate on our own hearts, on making our relationship to our own souls as clear and as loving as we possibly can. Anything else is a perversion.

No lake of fire could be worse.