Confusions Candide

         For most of my life a convinced rationalist and atheist, I've with confidence learned of certain things, and had certain experiences which leave me without a cohesive worldview or understanding of some of these subjects, but I nonetheless felt a desire to pen this chaotic testament to certain mysteries, along with minor ruminations on the philosophical questions my new ideas, if sound, would tend to provoke. 

           Two nights ago, after damping a cloth with then heated ceremonial castor oil and sleeping with it over my forehead(in a ceremony said to reveal past lives among other aims,) I dreamt of a tattooed African man who loved to play music, and danced gracefully with bracelets of purple flowers.   So, believing the dream and other recent epiphanies, I'm trying to re-form some coherent semi-understanding of the cosmos, self, and reality itself. 

          I'll face juxtaposed our evolutionary/familial/genetic selves, our physical-body selves, our oft idiosyncratic personal or civilization-created identities, and lastly our spiritual-self or likely selves, for as Pythagoras: Ancient Greece's great mathematician, philosopher and 'meta-physician' began: "The very air is full of spirits..." and thus it seems likely that plurals or plenitudes of spirits pass through or inhabit many human lives, though we may very well have one personal soul.

             I should clarify that for most of my life, even against frequent religious, mystical, or spiritual conversion pressure, I held firm to a conceptually liberal and yet entrenched scientific atheism, in which I not only believed in E.S.P. but knew the details of studies and the strongest theory and the probable mechanism: "gamma rays." 
             What started my evolution from this idea-set was a "trip" on the powerful African psychedelic/medical-semi-panacea known as Iboga(which out-right cured one of the hellish health-ogres that afflicted me at the time,) but within a week some very strange, possibly magical phenomena/afflictions entered my life(and marriage.)  The worldview I'd held as so true and so noble really began to crack some weeks later researching a subject related to my afflictions: Count Dracula and his area of Romania.

         I found that there was extensive scientific and video evidence of Dracula's continued ghost-like existence and influence(for example, through his lovely but possessed great-grand-daughter and sons, likely among many others.)  In the same region is the mysterious Hoia Baciu Forest, where even less natural and explainable events occur, for example the frequent appearances of consistently recordable red-lights spanning multiple feet, and moving as if with intention.  They appear only after dusk and have strong, often though not universally negative effects on humans who encounter and/or psychically connect with them.

         Before this, faced with even dramatic feats of distance e.s.p., or say "spoon-bending" formerly called telekinesis, or any of a dozen mysterious phenomena, I either shrugged skeptically or accepted evidenced examples as being likely legitimate(just not immune to science or nature's laws.)  

           See, I only ever subscribed to those pure understandings of science which among other things delineated logical approaches, held sacred principles of truth-seeking such as Occam's Razor, and were bound by century-synthesized systems of inquiry and egalitarian-dissent.  These were the principles of science which over the generations elevated its practitioners from oft executed and occasionally merely persecuted criminals, heretics who would contradict the ancient, morality-preserving Catholic Church over the delusions of demonic telescopes or strange skeletons dug out of some barren Asiatic desert. 

               Yes, scientists ascended from lowly outcasts to revered heroes of civilization and wealth-spawning industry from the earth-shifting cotton-gin to the exchangeable musket parts which gave their Western contrivers a smooth if bloody road to victorious imperialism from Shanghai to Cameroon to the ancient gleam of  a new empire's "crown jewel." Yes, at first it was by applying rigorous, skeptically-slanted principles and methods to create all kinds of transformative technologies and understandings, and by these methods like peer-review and peer-repetition, even highly prominent scientists with popular theories would, if incorrect, usually be found so, or at least found to be lacking anything near proof, making this or that proposed phenomena such as "the black hole" a mere theory until stronger, straighter data came in.

             But true science always had to battle with the petty depravities of the human pack and the human mind, and perhaps also with the desire of the laymasses for clear answers to all questions from clearly coronated, all-knowing authorities, coupled with the even stronger ego-impulses among impostor "scientists" to replace the kings, cardinals and popes as omniscient demi-gods taking from their flocks all manner of Asiatic homage: gold crosses and carved gem idols, Ivy League professorships and cultural laurels, as well as Artemis-sprung young ladies of breeding, talents, and the heaven-opening secrets of the finest of their sex.

             Basically, high science and hubris science struggled and intermingled for centuries and until recently, high science seemed to have at least held even.  However, here in America the titan among the nations, our culture has entered a strange and decadent phase of confident decay, which is not a central topic of this essay.  But I will say that in the public or press debates, in what our college textbooks call facts and what "theories," and in the sloth, quackery, and scalpel-ready megalomania which has largely replaced truly scientific medicine in so many hospitals, institutes, and levels.  Yes, science that plays by the multiple-sided, rigorous codes of science has lost a lot of ground, one might even say has been silenced and pushed to the edges.

            But that only troubles me slightly anymore, because I now know that as incredible as it might seem that the orderly revolutions of stars and meteors and suns, and the clock-like clarity of Darwinian genetics could be discovered through science, and then neatly elucidated by the impeccable examples of the hunted snow-shoe hares, or of London's black and white moths during months of ash-storm.  Centuries later, such logical elegance carried on the knowledge-hungry quest of that macabre scholar-monk who with obsessive observation and notation riddled from a sinful slave-city of copulative fruit-flies the reproductive mechanics of our own blue, grey, and brown eyes. It was easy to think the same could also reveal the architecture of our characters, and even reveal as factory-like the creative pinnacles of men-of-genius, to fix the melancholic seasons of the same, along with the other madness' and over-ambitions of the alterable, newly-'human' genome-carriers.         

             But I've come to see that whatever be the merits or destined future role of true, ethical, and logic-revering science, as opposed to the thriving but corrupted and guildedly inferior hubris-science: still, even the first can't lead us to an understanding of all important parts of our world, our cosmos, or even our own lives.  And yet I hope don't encourage anyone, unless they honestly feel fulfilled there, to go back into the disempowering pews and the vapid conceptual-waters that seep into the sacramental structures of profit-worshipping cities who want the firm rules and lamb-like ideals of Christianity, but follow him not to minister to the diseased nor to give deeply to the poor.

          So, I make no recommendations, and I draw no conclusions.  I only confide to the reader that the reality I knew, and the worldview I favored now seem to me incomplete and fragmentary.