I Want To Believe

What a great, telling phrase that is, although mostly associated with fiction's least skeptical character. But it seriously sums up the dilemma faced by a skeptical believer. I want to believe - ufos, ghost activity, cryptids, elves and fairies, lemurians in Mt Shasta. I CAN'T believe in them as fully as I want. In fact, I generally swing between total belief and total disbelief. Watching Ghost Hunters, there's a distinct thrill when 'activity' is captured, and then almost an equal thrill when it is disproven. Perhaps because, the more they disprove, the more plausible are the things they can't?
Religion, same thing. I want to believe in a heaven; actually, I prefer believing in a pastiche of afterlife and reincarnation. But logic and science tell me it's most likely that we simply 'end'. I really WANT to believe. And sometimes I do.
How terrible and boring life would be if we have discovered everything there is to find. The extinct coelacanth was found alive... why not a bigfoot, yeti, sasquatch, something that exists in pretty much every culture? Dragons? Couldn't they have existed? Why do we have asian river spirits in dragon form, european dragons of fire and ice, of course Leviathan from the Bible, but never have had dragons exist? Since we're told that humans didn't coexist with dinosaurs, I doubt it's a racial memory. Then what? Proof we all began from the same few people, who told their kids strange stories, which then passed down and on to every corner of the globe?
There's an overlap for me of mysticism and science. The weirdness of outer space, of the deepest parts of the ocean, are as crazy as any fairy tale yet are documentable. The fact that what we see in the night sky is a vision of the past, the sight of a puddle of heavy water in the ocean... soooo very strange and mind twisting, yet real. Maybe we are so focused on the lore that we overlook reality. Perhaps dragons don't look like we always assumed?

My son was scared of his room the other night, for no other reason than that he's 8 and doesn't want to sleep. But we'd been talking about spirits and ghosts, which both fascinate and scare him, and me as well. Trying to ease his mind I suggested that a ghost or spirit may simply be someone in a place we can't see them at that time. When Daddy is up in the bedroom, he can be heard but not seen, yet is still in the same house. Could it be that way with a ghost? Once in a while they pass through our family room then return to their bedroom. ;) But seriously... I also explained death to him a while ago using the metaphor of a car and driver. No driver, no gas, the car stops. But the driver is still around, even if they aren't in the car. Imagine your body as the car, and your soul as the driver. He seemed to like the idea. But I wonder what we step out into as we exit the car? It's probably not as simple as the car and driver would lead me to think. But we know so little about the brain and the way it processes things, that I can easily believe we simply haven't learned to see certain things.
And it's not even a matter of intelligence - so many highly intelligent people over the centuries have believed (or refused to believe) things that we seem to fully understand now. Someone explain to me how Arthur Conan Doyle could have been so duped by obvious paste-job fairies? Guess he wanted to believe.

So the seesaw continues; the ache of longing for a miraculous, exciting discovery of extraterrestrial life we could communicate with, a truly real photo or film of bigfoot, stuff like that, so I don't feel so ... trapped, I guess ... on a contained, fully explored sphere. But the beauty of the sphere brings its own joy as well, on days when the skeptic is happy to simply enjoy the view.