As a child, I was brought up in the Christian Church. At 15 I seriously thought I would become a Nun and it wasn’t until I took Theology for one of my A levels that I ever thought to question my faith. Having spent 2 years doing so I decided religion was not for me.

I’ve looked at various spiritual pathways, including spending a year attending weekly Buddhist teachings, and while much of it resonated just as much did not and I realised it wasn’t for me.

I’m currently loving attending the Centre for Liminal Studies and exploring consciousness, but I still question everything. Not always publicly, but I mull things over in mind, look at them from different angles and perspectives and draw my own conclusions.

On Sunday I was in Harrogate for a social meeting of a group I belong to. I had some lovely conversations but also challenged some of the narrative I was given. For example, when I was told someone had had an ‘out of body’ experience I asked how they knew that’s what it was? I was told “you just know” but that’s belief not fact. I’m not saying the person wasn’t having an experience of some kind, merely challenging the meaning they were attaching to that experience. As I mentioned in a previous post I need proof of concept. I’m not knocking anyone for whom belief is enough, I’m just saying it’s not enough for me.

I asked the group what they thought of my recent experience with the sat nav taking me to my ex boyfriend’s former home. While nobody could explain the mechanism by which this had happened, I was told it was testing whether I was now able to say “no” to my ex. I didn’t challenge this theory, but my head was wanting to know if the person offering the advice had any training in psychology or related fields and, if so, on which psychological model she was relying for her information, Jung, Freud or someone else?

I had another conversation about the colour grey. I was told that we’re not all seeing the same colour because we’re not all living the same reality. While I agree we may be seeing 50 shades of grey we are all seeing the same colour, otherwise one of the group would disagree and call grey red. I have a friend who seems to be partly colour blind. He’ll send me photos for critique and I’ll routinely say to him that the photo has a colour cast (in other words, it has an overall yellow tinge or blue tinge). If I ask 10 other people they will agree with me on the colour caste, but my friend simply cannot see it. He has malfunctioning retinal cells, which means he’s having a disordered experience of reality, not that he’s living in a different reality.

If you explore religion, spirituality or the psychic world you’re going to hear a lot of circular reasoning and word salad. Information which is completely unprovable and not based on fact. My advice is to question everything and not chuck logic out of the window. For example, someone brought up the subject of Heaven when we were talking about life after death and I had to remind them that in Islam men are promised eternity having intercourse with young virgins, which sounds nice for the guys but maybe not so nice for the teenagers whose hymens they’re breaking every day for the rest of forever. If God existed I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t be subjecting innocent girls to be painfully raped by pervy old men for all eternity.

You may be the only person in a group of 100 people questioning what you’re being told and that’s OK. Use your spidey senses and if something feels ‘off’ it probably is. Two billion people worldwide follow Islam, a deeply misogynistic brain washing cult who state that anyone who doesn’t believe in their God is an Infidel. Christians believe that their God is the only God and Jews believe that they are God’s only chosen people. They can’t all be right.

I don’t know much about much of anything, but I know enough to question everything and then to add questions to my questions. If a theory really stands up it will stand up to being questioned.