Play mystery for me

**About a month ago we moved into our present home. A couple days later I met our next door neighbors. It was a very brief wave and just a few words from my porch to their driveway. Their names are Scott and Misty.

Yesterday I was putting the recycling on the curb when Scott and Misty passed by walking their son to the bus stop a block away. We exchanged a few more words about the travails of moving, etc.

Early this morning I awoke to the lyrics of the song “Misty” drifting through my consciousness. I have heard the song before. It’s a good song but I don't recall fixating on it as portrayed in the movie “Play Misty for Me.” But the lyrics kept coming to me as though I had deliberately memorized it. Well, I actually had memorized it — without intending to. 

The brain is a mysterious place. Even slight experiences are stored for a long time and can come bubbling up with no conscious intention. That’s just the nature of memory and brain functioning.

It’s also the nature of human consciousness to fabricate rationales for why these things happen. What is the MEANING of this mysterious appearance of lyrics to a song heard long ago? Am I being clairvoyant? Is someone trying to communicate with me mentally? Am I getting premonitions of future events? What about the words themselves, are they trying to tell me something? I barely remember them, but in these episodes they come streaming back as though I’m actually thinking or saying them for some reason.

The brain works in mysterious ways. Some even call those workings “god.”

Harry Cook is a writer I much admire. He’s an Episcopal priest who realizes that much of religious theory is bullshit, and that people foolishly believe and do things based on theology or religion that don’t make sense, or worse. He calls himself an agnostic, and seems critical of avowed atheists. Much as I generally agree with him I take exception to parts of his latest essay: “Invention of the Gods.” He claims that the “god idea” has always been part of human nature,

“It seems to be hard-wired in Homo sapiens,” he says.

He then goes on to assume that there is such a thing as “god” simply because people have always thought of it. Many would argue that it is a natural response to mystery. “Anthropologists try to help us with that kind of inquiry, but I suspect they might have a hard time distinguishing fear and superstition from a human-divine encounter.” The “human-divine ENCOUNTER”? Does he really mean there's something to "encounter" outside the influence of fear and superstition?

A mystery doesn’t prove anything other than its own existence. Not the existence of another world, another dimension or some kind of supreme being. Fear and ignorance go together like … fear and ignorance and religion. It’s easy to want to counter an overwhelming question with an overwhelming answer, i.e. god. But easy isn't the same as true.

And while such delusions offer comfort there’s also no doubt about the brain’s susceptibility to jiggering. Move a few chemicals around and one feels happy. Move them another way and one feels sad. Any emotion that can happen can be induced without an objective stimulus. It’s what brains do. And anything one can imagine can feel real, even to the point of persuading others to believe the same thing. Religions come from that.

We are not complete captives of our brains. We also have the ability to supersede the dramas that brains produce. Science, facts, reality are discernible by our brains, But it takes education, a dedication to reason and a willingness to dispense with some synthetic “convictions.” It took me a long time, and much pain, to finally dispense with the comforts of religious belief. As I’ve said many times, this has not made me happier, Indeed, it has made me more unhappy. It’s the “bone on bone” of the reality that we are alone and without external assistance. We can strive to be humanists, with the hope that progress can be made toward freedom from delusion, and perhaps toward some kind of durable happiness in spite of the facts.