Note 10: The vampire problem
Imagine the following scenario: you meet a vampire. They tell you that being a vampire has all the mythical perks of being a vampire, and very few of the drawbacks–you essentially turn into a superhuman. It also changes your view of the world in a very radical way. They offer to turn you, but you have to decide now. And once you’re turned, there is no going back. Do you say yes or no?
The rational answer to this is no. First of all, how do you even know they’re a vampire? Even if they are, how do you know they’re not lying? Maybe you’d hate being a vampire, not to mention the bad rep vampires have. Answering yes means taking a leap of faith, eschewing rationality. It’s a leap into the unknown.
If you had asked me when I was an atheist whether I wanted to become spiritual, I would have answered no. I had bought into the contemporary narrative that emotions and rationality are separate things, where the latter is what really matters in the end. And sure, without rationality, we wouldn’t have built a civilization. But without emotions, we wouldn’t feel alive. At least for me, the subtle praising of rationality translated into a duality, where you’re either a rational (and therefore intelligent) person, or you’re a silly drama queen (I’m sure this was exacerbated by being a man). It is first now that I understand that the answer is not to be rational, or emotional, but both. This is one case when can have the cake, and eat it too.
I didn’t seek it out, nor ask for it. but I remember the exact moment I got the question: would you like to be a vampire? The rational thing to do was to hold on to what I knew I had, it was good. I had no idea what waited on the other side. But the same curiosity (an emotion that if caught, causes asking a lot of questions) that has driven me to explore science, drove me to say yes.
It still feels awkward talking about it. I haven’t had the right words or language. I still feel residual shame, radiating from the memory of the rationality-over-emotions atheist I left behind. The problem with spirituality is that you cannot define it in rational terms. Sure, I can tell you that to me, god and you and me and the universe are the same thing, but that’s like saying sex is flesh rubbing against flesh: technically true, yet utterly lacking. The only way I can describe spirituality is that it’s a wave motion. At the crest it’s an experience. It’s ineffable, magical, intense and you feel it through and through, balls to bones. When your brain tries to grasp it, it uses the most powerful concepts or metaphors in your mind to explain it. I understand how those that have been taught that “god” is the most powerful concept will experience the crest as “meeting god”. To me, I met the universe. Or rather was it. It’s a connection to everything and everyone that is felt, not thought. At the trough, it’s like a light, just beyond my field of vision. It’s the emotional front to the back of rational understanding that we all are part of the the same process that began 13.8 billion years ago. It’s there to remind me to live that connection every day. To trust. To be kind. I fail a lot. But ever since this experience, I’m succeeding a lot more than I used to.
I have had this note brewing for a while, trying to answer whether my spirituality was a solution, or a result of my midlife crisis. Writing this, I realize that I have been asking the wrong question. My midlife crisis is a result of my newfound spirituality.
Emotions are not worth more or less than rationality. They are like front and back. You need them both, yet chances are that you are actively suppressing one of them, just like I was. But thinking about it is like thinking about going to the gym. You need to practice. For me, the practice was crying. Crying in front of someone else used to be my nightmare. Crying means expressing one of the most vulnerable emotions, and I used to see it as unmanly and weak. This was especially hard in the movie theaters, because I respond to emotionally scored scenes like Pavlov’s dogs responded to the bell (well, except that I drool with my eyes). Only once I had re-trained my ability to feel did I realize how much of the experience of a good movie I was denying myself.
The note here: Suppressing the expression of an emotion eventually leads to the suppression of the actual emotion. If you never exercise an emotion, you’ll eventually forget how to feel it —and it will rob you both of experiences and a key to decision making.
(Imagine if caterpillars were rational: “So, Carl, what happens once I’ve built this cocoon? What? I turn into goo? Sure, you claim being a butterfly is awesome and that being goo wasn’t bad at all, but I’ll stay a caterpillar thankyouverymuch”)
