Knowing In The Unknown

Spiritual doubt is common. You might believe there’s something deeper out there, but that’s coupled with discomfort over its intangible intricacies. The solution? Jump off the fence and welcome “spiritual knowing” into your life.

- Peter White

Many people take their spirituality for granted. By spirituality, I am referring to an individual’s experience of the sacred or transcendent that expands their sense of self into a more unified state of awareness. It’s usually associated with a search for deeper life meaning, with questioning identity and having a willingness to change through personal transformation.

Whether pursued within a structured religious expression or a more informal, personalised context, spirituality is viewed by spiritually aware people as a core aspect of identity. They have a “spiritual knowing” that grounds them to something greater than their mortal lives, a knowing that helps them deal with life’s challenges. It’s not that they never experience doubt; it’s just that they hold that experience within the comforting embrace of a faith or deep knowing.

Others, however, experience the gnawing discomfort of sitting on the fence, doubting the idea of a spiritual reality. They are not atheists who reject a spiritual basis to life. These doubters, perhaps a large proportion of agnostics, hope for some continuation beyond death. They may have experienced spiritual and/or psychic experiences at times but feel uncertain about the validity of materialist and spiritual perspectives.

Each perspective — that there is just this meaningless, happenstance physical world or that there are non-physical dimensions and beings beyond our perceptions — can feel too fantastic to hold comfortably in doubters’ incredulous minds. Compared to our normal, mundane lives, both the void and the infinite possibilities of spirit worlds feel fantastic, in the sense of unbelievable.