The “What If” Consciousness

The American novelist Ursula K. Le Guin passed away a week ago. I watched a couple of YouTube videos of her speeches, then went to Wikipedia and read about her life. There I was reminded that her father was a famous anthropologist whose work I studied in graduate school, and her mother (also an anthropologist) wrote the book Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America, which I read long ago. Thinking about Le Guin and her family took me back almost to another era, definitely to another segment of my life.

 

It was more than 35 years ago when I read Le Guin’s novels. Also Madeleine L’Engle’s. I was wildly excited by their books—not by the plot or the characters (which I don’t remember), but by the framework, the structure of the books, the structure of the realities they described.

 

Toward the end of my science fiction phase, I started reading spiritual teachings. “It’s just like science fiction,” I said to myself, “only it’s true!”

 

There’s something to be said for suspending judgment in the face of new ideas. Instead of saying, “I’ve never heard of that. It can’t possibly be true” or “People believe the strangest things,” you can take the “what if” approach. “What if people really do reincarnate?” you might say to yourself. “What if I actually have lived before? What if I will live again?” In the beginning, that’s all you need to do. Or you might say, “Lots of religions believe in reincarnation. There are lots of stories by and about people who remember their past lives. What if they are true?”

 

Life has a way of proving itself. Once you admit the possibility of some new concept, you often stumble across allusions to that concept everywhere, pro and con. Your heart will sift through the evidence and come down on the side that’s right for you. Sometimes I stumble over things online (perhaps due in part to the cleverness of someone’s algorithms), but also a friend may mention the topic in casual conversation. Or I may see an article in a print magazine or newspaper, or even overhear someone talking about the same topic. Once I actually overheard a pair of strangers in a coffee shop in town discussing Kabbalah, which I was studying at the time.

 

The “what if” consciousness is simply a way of opening your heart to possibility. The rest is what some people call “a God thing.” When in doubt about something new, suspending judgment and asking “What if . . .” is definitely worth a try.