There is a final scene in the film “A Beautiful Mind” where Russell Crowe, playing the elderly mathematics professor John Nash, is seen hallucinating fictional people that have haunted him his entire adult life. But whereas earlier in the movie Crowe’s character would be consumed by these hallucinations, in this final scene he is seen recognizing their fiction and refusing to engage with them.
The movie clip holds special significance for me. For one the beautiful words Nash delivered to his partner, Alicia, in the preceding Nobel prize acceptance speech scene resonates deeply with me. My wife carried me through the period of my mental illness and our love endured. It is in those “mysterious equations of love“, that I found my answers as well.
But Nash’s hallucination in the final scene also struck me, albeit in a completely different manner. I empathized with his plight as I continue to experience the fallout of my past mental health struggles. That fallout, for me, does not involve hallucinations but instead something more subtle: I experience signs from the most understated of places as thoughts coalesce in my mind. And it is through such signs that I feel the love of my god as They make Their presence felt.
Some examples include::
- I heard a sign in the first clap of thunder from a summer storm right above my house at the exact moment some key thoughts came together.
- I saw a sign at the first sight of newly hatched dove fledglings as they nested outside our kitchen window right as my mind coalesced around a thought regarding the Divine.
- I felt a sign when doubting thoughts began to surface, but were then quickly washed away when a baby rabbit suddenly hopped across my shoe during a cool autumn walk in an open field.
But just as Nash set boundaries to protect his own mental health so do I. By the end of the movie Nash no longer engaged with his hallucinations whereas I, am very reluctant in, and careful when, interpreting such signs. Interpretation is an attempt to read divine words into, what can be, the most subtle of occurrences. When combined with a manic mind that races, which mine can do, interpretations can quickly veer out of control. I have travelled down that winding and dangerous road before and for me it has led to accidents: delusions, and illness.
I have come to accept signs as a part of my life now and I believe they always will be. But interpreting such signs as some form of divine confirmation or rejection of a particular thought I have come to, is no longer on the table for me. It reduces The Greatest Love to some form of cosmic magic eight ball available for all my spiritual inquiries. Signs cannot be interpreted as confirmation or rejection from the heavens. It does not work that way. It cannot work that way. It would make The Greatest Love somehow answerable to me and would quickly lead to many more of those aforementioned “accidents”.
Today I treat signs as an acknowledgement of The Greatest Love’s presence in my World as I grapple with, what is for me, deeply personal, and spiritual questions. The signs indicate that They are always there. Always embracing me through my struggles. But never confirming or denying any conclusion I may have drawn. Those conclusions are necessarily my own and are open to revision regardless of any signs that may have accompanied them.
Contrast this to the messages and visions. The words in messages and the sights in visions were clearly evident. What the words and sights mean is open to interpretation but still, I believe, they represent an inalterable conveyance of truth from The Divine to myself. As well the experience of messages and visions was very different. Messages and visions were much more powerful. They could bring me to my knees in tears, overwhelmed with awe.
How do I determine what are signs and what are merely happy coincidences? Science and empiricism are not the tools I deploy when answering this question. There is only one instrument I have that can be of any use here: my heart. And it is what I feel in my heart at the time the sign occurred that tips the scales toward me thinking that The Greatest Love is making Their presence more directly felt in my life.
That feeling is wonder.
And I consider every occurrence of such wonder a blessing, that I will never take for granted.
Now I was hesitant to write this post. I was afraid that people would try looking for signs and succumb to the errors, miscalculations, and delusions I unfortunately faced while interpreting them. Delusions such as vast government conspiracies, or extraterrestrials, or some other nonsense. I considered all such possibilities in the past in an attempt to understand how, for example, a baby rabbit jumps across my foot in an open field at the exact moment I come to a key insight. But eventually I saw such delusions for what they were: fantasies from a mind unwilling to accept The Greatest Love’s true wonder.
And in the final calculation of whether I should write this post, I felt that discussing these signs was critical to the honesty and integrity of this blog. That honesty and integrity outweighed the concerns I had about triggering others with my words. I felt it important that the readers of this blog understand the origin story of many of the beliefs discussed herein: I believe I had support from my god. Support designed to inspire my curiosity, stimulate my questions, and instill in me a belief in love.
And the signs continue to come. After many years of dealing with them and the delusions that they occasionally spawned from my misinterpretations, there was only one possibility that could explain them while bringing solace to my tormented mind. A possibility that did not involve any of the aforementioned nonsense. Instead a god of infinite love was trying to comfort me and I just needed to learn how to embrace Them.
But to many others another explanation, mentioned earlier, will seem more likely namely coincidence. Coincidence can be impossible to disprove and I readily agree that none of the signs I have experienced require a supernatural cause. The signs did not break any laws of nature. No scientific theories were circumvented. Nor was it any one sign that made me believe my god was trying to make Themselves felt. It was the aggregate of a great many of the signs, over many years, that slowly made me believe that my god was a part of my life.
And of those who claim coincidence, there will be some that say all such coincidental events have a deterministic causal chain that was set in motion at the beginning of time. That the baby rabbit’s path could have been calculated 13.8 billion years earlier at the beginning of time if one just had a big enough computer and precise enough measuring instruments to capture the initial state of our Universe prior to the Big Bang. And I agree this is an alternate explanation. But one which gives me little hope for our future. An explanation from determinism that ties our fate to some form of mindless, random activity that defined our Universe’s state at the beginning of time and the laws that would govern it going forward. Our fate forever sealed from the dawn of time.
Such reasoning does not make for inspirational bedtime reading. It is, for me, a depressing view of our Universe and one which I place no faith within. It is one which I choose to disagree with because I choose to believe in a Universe created by a god of infinite love capable of intervening on a personal level, over a godless, heartless, preprogrammed one.
Both paths are unprovable and so I choose the path that best explains all I have seen, and heard, and felt, during my lifetime.
I choose the path that follows those mysterious equations of love at least some of the time, over mere coincidence all of the time.
I choose wonder.
A Love Story 