Searching for Lucidity in Mysticism

Can we remain rational in the presence of uncertainty?

Last winter, I was living in the Portuguese countryside, where I had the chance to have my aura read by a medium. I was very curious to live this kind of experience because I have always been fascinated by people who can see beyond the physical landscape. After making an appointment, I went to a small village and met her in the basement of a house. The room was quite dark and cold and was filled with New Age artwork, and some relaxing and peaceful music was playing in the background.

Before reading my energy, she gave me a few rules that I had to follow in order to facilitate her work, like not closing my eyes or crossing my arms or legs because it might infer with her ability to visualize my energy, I was surprised that she didn't also ask me to turn my phone into airplane mode. Then she began to initiate the ritual and asked my permission to communicate with my spiritual self by requiring me to say my full name three times in a row.

She began to portray my spiritual self as a child glowing in yellow, running through a valley while surrounded by buffaloes. I seemed very happy to be in this place, as if I had always belonged there. In another vision, she saw me wearing goggles while being very focused on building something, perhaps a piece of art. She then pictured me during childhood, not listening to my parents because I always wanted to learn things on my own.

The way she understood these visions was that:

• I was in the right place at the right time. (I guess?)

• It is important for me to stay focused on my work because I can be easily distracted. (Good point! I have ADHD...)

• Denying parental authority causes me to have a certain lack of understanding in some areas. (Quite relevant)

Later, she came up with the age of my soul which is currently 77% and apparently that's pretty old! This number is not subject to the number of past lives, but rather to an overall progression. However, this percentage is not expected to change in my current lifetime, but may evolve in subsequent ones.

Then she went back to one of my previous incarnated lives, where she visualized someone who physically resembled me in an apparent Ancient Greece landscape. The man was wearing a crown of laurel leaves and was dressed in white sheets (sounds pretty cliché), and was performing in a theater with another man, for whom he felt nervous because he had feelings for him. He was afraid that people would find out his secret because he seemed to be an important person, at least, his father was a very powerful man and wanted him to be less sensitive and feminine to become more skilled with weapons rather than performing arts. But following his father's wishes was not suited for him, and decided instead to pursue what he had always wanted to do. Sadly, a war erupted, and his father had to send his army, plunging his son into a situation he wished he would never have to face. During the fight, he wasn't really comfortable waging war, and inevitably, would die on the battlefield. She explained that throughout his life, he failed to align spiritually with the relationship with his parents, deviating him from the person he could be.

The last part of her session was an overview of my 7 chakras, where she framed each of them in different stories associated with an underlying meaning.

The root chakra: Connection with the body

It's nighttime, and I'm sitting by a slowly dwindling campfire. This is usually a sign of weakness, often related to not being healthy enough.

The sacral chakra: Expressing emotions

I walk down the street while being partially trapped in a giant ice cube that interferes with my movement, which can express a struggle to be emotionally available with myself and people.

The solar plexus chakra: Self-esteem and confidence

I'm on a stage, speaking in an empty theater, but no one is listening to me. I look like a confident person with high self-esteem, but I hide these facts from people. This is a common sign that you feel comfortable alone, but not necessarily with other people.

The heart chakra: Love and compassion

I'm in a garden at night and am very happy to contemplate my beautiful crystal lotus flower reflecting all the colors, but at the same time disappointed that no one is there to see it. I can express self-love, but I find it difficult to open up to others.

The throat chakra: Communication

I hand out a blue megaphone to talk about work, a pink megaphone to talk about emotions, and an unplugged one that I don't use. I mainly use the blue and pink, but I never use the latter and seem to be afraid of it. I am comfortable adapting my communication style/personality to different contexts, but have a hard time talking about specific topics while keeping them secret.

The third eye chakra: Intuition

It's still dark, and I'm walking on the grass, obsessively looking up at the sky, which distracts me from important details. This chakra is wide open and quite advanced, it's supposed to be the strongest one, but I'm not using it properly as she said “You're driving a Ferrari at 30 mph” and this could be due to me being too mentally oriented at the expense of emotional connection.

The crown chakra: Conscious energy

She said that it's obvious that I practice meditation (which is true) as she imagines me floating in the clouds, very relaxed and peaceful, which is a good sign of a person's propensity to feel harmonious.

We concluded the session with a small conversation in which I asked her how she became a medium. Since childhood, she always used to interact with spirits/dead people before she normalized this until she realized she had predispositions to follow this purpose. On a daily basis, she deals with lost souls that found themselves stuck because they became too heavy to escape earth, often as a result of not being able to accept existential truth. She tries to guide them to inner peace and ultimately helps them to leave this world. As an example, she recently met an angry plumber who was wandering as he recently died from contracting COVID after doing extra work. He was really annoyed that the people who hired him had never mentioned that they had been infected. She ended the discussion by telling me that I would need to wait 3 months, if I ever wanted to do another session, because reading spiritual energy is like stirring the ashes, it needs to settle down and rest. Not respecting this delay will result in hearing the same story, even through a different person. Oddly enough, I was willing to check this out, but concluded that I don't have any more money to spend on this.

Overall, I genuinely enjoyed the experience and was surprised to find that many of the topics she covered were spot on, especially the one concerning my struggle to be emotionally connected with myself, a matter that I'm actively working on with my therapist. However, I still remain skeptical of the narrative she presented (especially the one about Greece), as much of it seems completely out of touch with reality and could be open to many interpretations. It's frustrating that most of what she said is impossible to prove or debunk and sounds closer to pseudoscience than anything else, but on the other hand, I feel strangely conflicted that part of me still wants to believe it despite how strongly it seems in opposition to my current beliefs.

One of my favorite quote from David Hume is “reason is the slave of passions”. While there have been various explanations for this statement, my understanding is that “reason” is always subordinate to “passions” or emotions. In other words, we believe we are rational creatures, when in reality our decisions are ultimately motivated by emotional input. In today's context, Hume would say that seeing a medium is triggered by inner desires and could not be purely the result of a rational decision, as reason itself never leads to actions. For instance, when you go to the grocery store, you may consider that the process involves many rational choices such as how to go to the store, what food to choose or how to pay, but what initially drives you there is hunger. Following this logic, it is likely that I'm just looking for a compelling argument as a gateway for being “rational”, and trying to justify that the story she told me is true. My main motive might actually be, my curiosity relentlessly pushing me to seek answers. I have to admit that all of this sounds like a little game I'm playing with myself, yet I still want to reach a conclusion, and I'm willing to go down that road with a little more digging.

I've always considered myself as an intuitive person (not to mention that it is supposed to be my strongest chakra) because many times, I've deceived myself by choosing logic over gut feelings. Furthermore, I was also quite good at spotting liars in secret identities board games, and I'm rarely afraid to talk with scammers because I'm more curious about their tales than afraid of ending up hooked by them. Sometimes, I'm wondering if what makes some people more intuitive than others is sensitivity, but I eventually joined this initial assumption with Daniel Kahneman's explanation given in Thinking Fast and Slow: “intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” Human sensitivity can be regarded as predisposing a person to grasp more information in a natural environment and, consequently, improve accuracy when it comes to recognition of social patterns, especially since most human communication is nonverbal. Could this explain why some people are better at subconsciously analyzing human behavior, while often finding their intuition more pertinent than deductive reasoning?

In this case, I would be tempted to follow my intuition and take her words at face value, which would involve finding a compromise to ingest incoming information entangled with principles in total contradiction with existing beliefs, mostly forged by scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, I find it quite plausible that there are people capable of reading energy or understanding things without necessarily engaging in a conventional method of communication, which does not prevent them from having their own modes of conceptualization, leading to different styles of narratives, as observed in religions and, despite the possible veracity of what is stated, it doesn't necessarily resonate with everyone.