Why I’m No Longer Embarrassed About Being ‘Spiritual’

It’s not all tie-dye, crystals and chanting.

At least, not for me.

In fact, the thought of some of those things makes my skin crawl.

What does ‘spirituality’ even mean, anyway? I guess it’s unique to each person.

To me, it means that there is something beyond the five senses — that we have a soul, and this soul, or consciousness, is nonlocal- it cannot be defined in terms of time or space.

I’ve only ever relied on two things when it comes to this — scientific evidence ( there’s more out there than you think), and my own lived experience.

My first appetite for knowledge in this realm was when my cousin Daniel died of a brain tumour, aged 6. He was blind because of the tumour, and yet insisting that he could see lights, and that a ‘door was open’ and reassured his mum he ‘was going to be ok’.

That stunned me at the age of eighteen, and I began devouring knowledge.

I read all the scientific books you could imagine: on Near Death Experiences, Precognition, Out of Body Experiences, Telepathy. I wasn’t especially interested in stories. I wanted to know whether our mind was somehow not confined to our brain. If the evidence pointed to something else, the implications for humanity…