Into the Mystic...
2/25/2026
While we wait for the world war to break out into a full-blown hot war, it feels like there is no better time to talk about the nature of reality and the deeply dark time we find ourselves in. A hobby of mine is listening to people’s NDEs (near-death experiences). I stumbled upon one today that was a mix of interesting and problematic. It reminded me of another one I ran across six months ago. Both of these NDE’s focused on relatively recent New Age notions that we plan out our lives before we get here and that everything that happens is mapped out by us before we are born.
In the early 1990s, while working as a psychic and after spending nearly a decade exploring shamanic and mystical paths, the New Age was exploding, and with it the idea that people manifest their reality. I’m not saying there isn’t some truth to this idea. It is clearly a concept in direct opposition to a long history of Christian ideology, where god is punishing, we have one life to get it right, and we are judged forever and cast down into a pit of hell if we get it wrong. Christians invented “Manifest Destiny,” the notion that certain people had god on their side and the right to torture, pillage, steal, and commit genocide. Unfortunately, the history of Christianity is a brutal one, the Burning Times, the Middle Ages, during which there was prolific psychotic torture of anyone deemed a “heretic,” and dare we forget the Spanish Inquisition.
I was born in 1967 and came to know Jesus through musicals like “Jesus Christ Superstar” and the Civil Rights movement. The words and deeds of Jesus struck me as high spiritual truths, and since I didn’t step foot in a church until I was in 4th grade, Christianity seemed like a pure and righteous religion. I had no idea of its history until after I converted to Catholicism as a kid (once my father died). It was after attending Mass and CCD that I began to question the effectiveness of the path. The first thing that struck me was the hypocrisy. How could people go to church, hear the teachings, and manage to live their lives without it changing their behavior?
