A Spiritual Toolbox: The Synthesis Behind My Search for the Bigger Picture
By JM Talboo
I don't consider myself a member of one particular theological camp.
I don't approach spirituality as though I found the correct book, the correct denomination, the correct guru, or the correct doctrine and can now stop looking.
My approach is almost the opposite.
I think of theology, comparative religion, philosophy, science, meditation, altered states of consciousness, paranormal research, near-death experiences, mythology and even fiction as tools in a toolbox.
Some tools are better for certain jobs than others.
And sometimes two apparently contradictory traditions are actually describing different aspects of the same thing.
That doesn't mean every religious claim is true.
It means I don't think we should automatically throw away an idea simply because it came from a tradition we don't belong to.
The Problem With the Toolbox Mentality
There is an obvious danger here.
If you treat every tradition as a toolbox, you can become someone who simply picks whichever belief happens to support what you already want to believe.
That's confirmation bias.
I recognize that.
So my goal isn't:
“Find something somewhere that proves me right.”
It's:
“Find the ideas that continue to make sense when I compare them against other ideas, evidence, experience and reason.”
That's a much harder standard.
And it means being willing to discard things.
If an idea doesn't hold up, I don't want to protect it simply because I like it.
At the same time, I don't think an idea should automatically be discarded merely because it can't be demonstrated with a conventional laboratory experiment.
That distinction becomes particularly important when discussing consciousness, spirituality and experiences surrounding death.
Science Is a Tool, Not a Religion
I have tremendous respect for science.
But science is a method.
It isn't a single collection of conclusions that never changes.
Science works by observation, measurement, hypothesis, experimentation, replication, criticism and revision.
That's precisely why I think it can be useful in spiritual inquiry.
If evidence contradicts my favorite idea, I should care about that.
But science also has boundaries.
Some questions are extraordinarily difficult to test experimentally.
Consciousness is one of them.
We can measure brain activity.
We can correlate brain activity with reported experiences.
We can investigate neurological mechanisms.
But the subjective experience itself—the fact that there is something it is like to be you—is still philosophically mysterious.
That doesn't prove that consciousness survives death.
It does mean that the question remains worth investigating.
The Survival Question
This is where near-death experiences become particularly interesting to me.
I don't regard every NDE story as automatically proving an afterlife.
People can misremember.
Brains can produce extraordinary experiences.
Oxygen deprivation, medications, neurological activity and psychological factors can all potentially contribute to unusual experiences.
Those possibilities deserve investigation.
But the existence of possible physiological explanations doesn't automatically settle every question either.
That's why I find the research and arguments surrounding NDEs worth examining.
My own collection of material includes accounts involving atheists, shared death experiences, life reviews, unusual perceptions and attempts to address skeptical explanations.
For example:
Debunking Death — Near-Death Experiences of Atheists:
Debunking Death — Debunking the Pseudoskeptics of Near-Death Experiences:
Debunking Death — Shared Death Experiences:
The point isn't that every account is authentic.
The point is that there is enough material to justify serious investigation.
Reincarnation Is Another Piece
Reincarnation presents another interesting challenge.
If consciousness is entirely produced by the brain, reincarnation seems extremely difficult to explain.
If consciousness can exist independently of the brain, reincarnation becomes conceptually possible.
Neither statement proves the other.
But that is exactly why the subject interests me.
The work of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson is particularly important in this conversation.
Stevenson spent decades investigating cases involving children who claimed to remember previous lives, attempting to document statements and details that could potentially be independently verified.
My own research page collects material on his work:
Again, I don't think the proper response is:
“Ian Stevenson studied reincarnation, therefore reincarnation is proven.”
That's not how evidence works.
The better response is:
“There is a body of reported evidence here. How good is it? What explanations compete with it? What survives serious criticism?”
That's the question I'm interested in.
Gnosticism
Gnosticism gives me another tool.
One of its most powerful themes is that ordinary human existence may involve ignorance of our true spiritual nature.
The solution is not merely obedience to an external authority.
It is knowledge.
Gnosis.
Knowing.
Remembering.
Awakening.
That connects remarkably well with some of the ideas we've been discussing about consciousness.
What if the problem isn't that we are fundamentally evil?
What if the problem is that we don't remember what we are?
That doesn't mean I accept every ancient Gnostic cosmology literally.
I don't.
But the underlying metaphor is extraordinarily powerful.
A person can possess something without realizing they possess it.
A person can be asleep while believing they're awake.
A person can mistake the prison for the entire universe.
A person can forget their origin.
And perhaps enlightenment is, at least partly, a process of remembering.
Esoteric Christianity
Christianity contains similar themes.
This is one reason I don't think spirituality has to be divided into neat boxes.
I can find something meaningful in the Christian tradition without accepting every interpretation imposed upon it.
Esoteric Christianity is particularly interesting because it looks for meanings beneath the surface of literal doctrine.
My own collection of material on the subject:
The Christian language of death and resurrection can be understood on multiple levels.
Physical resurrection.
Spiritual transformation.
Death of the old self.
Rebirth into a new consciousness.
The Kingdom of God as something external.
The Kingdom of God as something discovered within.
Depending upon the tradition, all of these interpretations have appeared in one form or another.
That doesn't mean they're all correct.
It means the tradition is more complicated than the simplified version many of us encountered as children.
The Prodigal Son
One Christian story keeps fitting remarkably well into the framework I've been developing.
The Prodigal Son leaves home.
He goes into the world.
He loses himself.
He eventually returns.
And the father welcomes him.
You can read that as a story about morality.
You can read it as a story about forgiveness.
You can read it as a story about family.
Or you can read it metaphysically.
Consciousness leaves the apparent unity of the source.
It experiences separation.
It becomes individualized.
It struggles.
It forgets.
And eventually it remembers where it came from.
The important part is that the father doesn't say:
“You left, therefore you are permanently condemned.”
The son comes home.
The story is fundamentally about return.
That's remarkably compatible with the idea that separation could be temporary while ultimate unity remains possible.
Buddhism
Then Buddhism enters the toolbox and complicates everything.
Buddhism challenges the assumption that there is a permanent, independent self.
That's fascinating when combined with the idea of a universal consciousness.
If the ego isn't permanent, what exactly is reincarnating?
If there is no fixed self, what does enlightenment mean?
If individuality is temporary, does that make individual experience meaningless?
Buddhism doesn't simply give me answers.
It forces better questions.
And that is precisely what I want from a spiritual tradition.
I don't need a tradition to hand me a complete answer.
I need it to make me think.
My repost of an annotated exploration of Buddhism, Gnosticism and The Matrix film that explores some of those connections:
The Rainbow Body
Tibetan Buddhism provides another fascinating area of inquiry through reports of the rainbow body.
The claim, broadly speaking, involves advanced practitioners undergoing an extraordinary transformation at death, sometimes associated with the body's apparent reduction or disappearance and the appearance of unusual phenomena.
I don't regard every rainbow-body claim as scientifically established.
But again, the subject deserves more than either blind belief or automatic ridicule.
My research page collects material on reported cases and research:
This is where my approach differs from both fundamentalist belief and reflexive skepticism.
I want to know what actually happened.
I want to know what was documented.
I want to know what alternative explanations exist.
And I want to know what remains unexplained after those explanations have been considered.
Jewish Mysticism
The toolbox doesn't stop with Christianity and Buddhism.
Jewish mystical traditions also contain sophisticated ideas about the soul, divine reality, reincarnation and spiritual development.
For example, Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz's work Does the Soul Survive? explores Jewish approaches to afterlife, past lives and the meaning of existence.
My page collecting material related to that work:
Again, I don't have to become an Orthodox Jew to learn something from Jewish mysticism.
I don't have to become a Buddhist to learn something from Buddhism.
I don't have to become a Gnostic to learn something from Gnosticism.
That's what comparative religion is supposed to make possible.
The Matrix
Sometimes popular culture becomes another tool.
The Matrix is probably the clearest example.
The movie combines questions about reality, identity, illusion, awakening, destiny and choice.
Its basic premise isn't proof of a simulation.
But it gives us a vocabulary for asking questions that philosophers have been asking for centuries.
What if the world we perceive isn't the ultimate level of reality?
What if the person we think we are isn't the whole of what we are?
What if awakening means realizing that the rules we assumed were absolute aren't?
Those questions don't belong exclusively to science fiction.
They appear in philosophy and religion over and over again.
The Matrix simply gave them sunglasses and slow motion.
Near-Death Experiences and the Life Review
One of the most fascinating recurring themes in NDE literature is the life review.
People sometimes describe experiencing their lives in extraordinary detail.
Sometimes the description is panoramic.
Sometimes people report experiencing their actions from the perspective of the people they affected.
That raises an interesting philosophical question.
What exactly is a life review?
If it is simply a neurological phenomenon, how does the brain construct the experience?
If it represents access to stored memories, what mechanisms are involved?
If it represents something beyond the brain, what would that imply?
Again, none of those questions automatically proves an afterlife.
But they are interesting questions.
And if consciousness survives death, the life review could have enormous implications for how we understand morality.
Perhaps morality isn't simply a list of rules imposed by an external authority.
Perhaps the deepest moral realization is experiential.
You don't merely learn that hurting another person matters.
You experience what it was like to be them.
You see the consequences of your actions.
You understand.
That would make the old spiritual idea that “what you do to others, you do to yourself” radically more interesting.
The Simulation Question
Then we have modern philosophy and science-fiction's favorite question:
What if reality is simulated?
Nick Bostrom's simulation argument doesn't demonstrate that we're living in a computer simulation.
It presents a philosophical trilemma concerning the likelihood of civilizations reaching a posthuman stage, the likelihood that they would run large numbers of ancestor simulations, and the possibility that we are consequently more likely to be simulated observers than biological beings in a base reality.
Bostrom's original paper:
The important thing for my purposes isn't whether Bostrom is right.
It's what happens when the simulation concept is placed beside ancient spiritual ideas.
Suddenly words like:
illusion
awakening
avatar
higher self
incarnation
forgetting
and
return
start acquiring an entirely different vocabulary.
That doesn't mean ancient monks secretly understood computers.
It means human beings have been wrestling with questions about perceived reality for a very long time.
Biocentrism
Another modern idea that interests me is biocentrism, associated with Robert Lanza and later work developed with collaborators.
Biocentrism proposes a radically different way of thinking about the relationship between life, consciousness and the universe.
I don't treat biocentrism as settled physics.
It isn't.
And critics have challenged its scientific claims.
But that's not a reason to pretend the philosophical questions don't exist.
The interesting question is whether consciousness is something that simply appears inside a preexisting universe—or whether our understanding of the universe itself is inseparable from consciousness and observation.
That's a profound question regardless of where you ultimately land.
The Paranormal
Then there's the messy territory.
Ghosts.
Hauntings.
Apparitions.
Electronic voice phenomena.
Shared experiences.
Mediumship.
Unusual physical phenomena.
This is where things get particularly difficult.
There is an enormous amount of garbage mixed in with potentially interesting evidence.
People misidentify things.
People exaggerate.
People lie.
People interpret ambiguous events according to their expectations.
And sometimes people genuinely experience something they can't explain.
Those things can all be true simultaneously.
That's why I don't think the proper response to paranormal evidence is:
“Believe everything.”
Nor:
“Believe nothing.”
The better response is:
“Investigate.”
My own site has accumulated years of material attempting to do exactly that.
For example:
Debunking Death — 100 Proofs of Ghosts That Keep Pseudo-Skeptics Up At Night:
Debunking Death — Paranormal Team / Investigation Evidence and Other Great Ghostly Evidence:
And more recently:
Debunking Death — When a Ghost Answers Back: The Alice Riley Investigation and the Mystery of Intelligent Hauntings:
That last point is particularly important to me.
I'm not merely collecting ancient texts.
I'm interested in what people are investigating right now.
Engaging With Other Researchers
I've also tried to engage with people doing research rather than operating entirely inside my own echo chamber.
Winston Wu, for example, has been involved in the broader paranormal and skeptical discussion for years.
My site has referenced and interviewed researchers in this community, and DebunkingSkeptics.com has listed my work DebunkingTheDebunkers among its recommended blogs.
DebunkingSkeptics.com interviews:
DebunkingSkeptics.com — Great Blogs:
I've also conducted several interviews with Shane of Central Illinois Ghost Hunters:
That matters because I don't want my spiritual exploration to become purely theoretical.
Talk to researchers.
Look at cases.
Read arguments from people who disagree.
Examine evidence.
Change your mind when necessary.
That's how an actual investigation works.
The Cumulative Case
This is where I sometimes use the controversial word proof.
I understand why that word bothers people.
In a laboratory, proof generally isn't the standard we use for empirical claims anyway; we talk about evidence, statistical significance, reproducibility, explanatory power and competing hypotheses.
But ordinary human reasoning doesn't work exclusively through laboratory replication.
We establish things cumulatively.
We look at many pieces of evidence.
We ask whether they converge.
We consider alternative explanations.
We decide what conclusion best fits the totality of what we know.
That is the kind of reasoning I'm talking about when I say that I believe there is a cumulative case for survival of consciousness.
I don't think one NDE proves an afterlife.
I don't think one reincarnation case proves reincarnation.
I don't think one ghost photograph proves ghosts.
I don't think one mystical experience proves God.
But what happens when you put all of these categories next to each other?
NDEs.
Reincarnation cases.
Shared-death experiences.
Apparitions.
Mystical experiences.
Ancient religious traditions.
Philosophical arguments.
Consciousness research.
The persistent human intuition that consciousness is more than matter.
The similarities between reports separated by thousands of years and enormous cultural distances.
At some point, the cumulative question becomes interesting.
The One
All of this eventually brings me back to the idea of the One.
This is the part where I move from comparative religion into my own synthesis.
I don't know that the universe is ultimately one consciousness.
But I think it is a possibility worth taking seriously.
Imagine consciousness as an ocean.
Individual people are waves.
The wave is real.
The wave has a shape.
The wave has a beginning and an end.
But the wave was never separate from the ocean.
That metaphor can be found in various spiritual traditions in different forms.
The important thing is that individuality doesn't have to become meaningless simply because it is temporary.
I love being me.
I don't want the idea of returning to the One to mean that this person disappears into nothingness and therefore none of this mattered.
Maybe individuality is the experience.
Maybe the One doesn't create individuals because individuality is an error.
Maybe it creates individuals because individuality is how the One experiences what it cannot experience as an undifferentiated whole.
Why Would Unlimited Consciousness Want Limitation?
And this produces perhaps the strangest question of all.
If consciousness were unlimited, why would it want to experience limitation?
Maybe because limitation is interesting.
An unlimited being can't surprise itself.
An all-knowing being can't discover.
A completely safe being can't experience courage.
A being that has everything can't experience longing.
A being that has never been separated can't experience reunion.
Maybe that's why so many spiritual traditions contain stories about separation and return.
The Fall.
The exile.
The prodigal son.
The descent.
The incarnation.
The awakening.
The return.
They may not all describe the same literal event.
But they can be read as variations on a common human intuition:
We are separated from something, and we are trying to remember what it is.
The Amnesia May Be Part of the Experience
That brings us back to something I keep returning to.
What if forgetting is intentional?
What if consciousness enters an individual life without access to the totality of its knowledge?
Then the experience becomes meaningful.
You don't know what will happen.
You don't know who you'll meet.
You don't know which decisions will matter.
You don't know what comes after death.
You don't even know exactly who you are.
You have to discover it.
That's a much more interesting game than being handed the answer sheet.
And perhaps enlightenment isn't acquiring something new.
Perhaps it's remembering something that was always there.
The Point Isn't to Believe Me
This is probably the most important thing I can say about everything I've written here.
I'm not asking you to believe me.
I'm not asking you to become a Gnostic.
I'm not asking you to become Buddhist.
I'm not asking you to become Christian.
I'm not asking you to believe in reincarnation.
I'm not asking you to believe we're living in a simulation.
I'm not asking you to believe ghosts are real.
I'm not asking you to believe consciousness survives death.
I'm asking you to think.
Take the tools.
Try them.
See what they do.
Put them next to one another.
Look for contradictions.
Look for convergence.
Look for evidence.
And most importantly:
Keep the ability to say, “I don't know.”
Because “I don't know” isn't intellectual weakness.
It's the beginning of investigation.
A Toolbox, Not a Cage
That's ultimately what comparative religion means to me.
The traditions are tools.
Christianity gives me one set of tools.
Gnosticism gives me another.
Buddhism gives me another.
Jewish mysticism gives me another.
Theosophy gives me another.
Science gives me another.
Philosophy gives me another.
Meditation gives me another.
Personal experience gives me another.
NDE research gives me another.
Paranormal investigation gives me another.
Even movies and fiction can provide useful conceptual tools.
But no single tool gets to become the entire toolbox.
And no tool gets to become my cage.
I want to be able to hold two ideas simultaneously:
“This might be true.”
and
“I might be wrong.”
I don't see those statements as enemies.
I see them as partners.
That's the position from which I want to continue exploring consciousness, death, spirituality and reality.
Not as a preacher.
Not as a debunker.
Not as a skeptic who automatically rejects anything strange.
Not as a believer who automatically accepts anything comforting.
As an investigator.
Because maybe there is something waiting for us beyond the ordinary model of reality.
Maybe consciousness survives death.
Maybe reincarnation is real.
Maybe the ancient mystics understood something modern science hasn't caught up with yet.
Maybe the universe is fundamentally conscious.
Maybe reality is simulated.
Maybe all of these ideas are wrong.
Or maybe each contains a piece of something much bigger.
I don't know.
But I'm going to keep looking.
And I'm going to keep the toolbox open.
