Reality Shock: What to Do when the Great Mystery Comes Knocking

Imagine you’re a skeptical scientific materialist. It shouldn’t be difficult, because that particular vibe of metaphysical speculation prevails in the dominant culture, despite its lack of fit with the religious and philosophical traditions of that very culture. If you grew up in the dominant culture, you know famous people with that orientation, and you got exposed to it throughout your education. It’s so much a part of the water we swim in that we actually have a hard time seeing it. 

But let’s say you work in science as your profession—maybe something sexy like neuroscience. You feel conscientiously committed to scientific materialism, and have the fastest eye roll in the country when it comes to anything even vaguely woo. (Having photos of Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dan Dennet, Michael Shermer, James Randi, or any other defenders of the faith is optional in this scenario, but it’s okay if you want to go all in.) 

Now let’s say you have a relative more in touch with some of the older streams of culture—maybe your mother wasn’t born in the U.S., and she learned from her own culture how to do something like read tea leaves or coffee grounds. I’m a first-generation U.S. citizen with family roots in Greece, so I’ve seen this in action. 

Traditional coffee in Greece, Turkey, Iran, and various Arabic cultures (among others) consists of powdery-fine grounds simmered directly in a small coffee pot, like the one pictured above. It makes for a rich and robust cup of coffee that goes nicely with good baklava, and you get a think sludge at the bottom that you might slurp up a little as you take your final sip. 

Imagine your mom makes you that kind of coffee, and after you drink it she likes to flip over the cup, letting those fine grounds roll down the inside of the cup and set themselves. Then she turns the up over and “reads” your coffee grounds. 

You roll your eyes. 

But then the darnedest thing . . . she knows stuff. You have left home. You’re a successful neuroscientist. You have your own life—including lots of things you purposefully neglect to inform your mother about. And yet . . . she knows about some of it. 

This can’t be. 

You draw on your background as a scientist, perhaps thinking, “I am going to science the #%&* out of this, and figure out how to explain it away!” But you can’t. Mom just keeps getting things too right, including some that—objectively speaking—go beyond conceivable coincidence. 

You got trained to follow the evidence. And now you have actual evidence—for things your own training has told you cannot happen, things that go against your sense of reality itself. What the heck do you do? 

You start poking around, to find out if anyone has looked at any of this sort of woo-woo nonsense in a serious scientific way. Horror of horrors—you discover that actual scientists have performed some of the most rigorous experiments possible, giving clear evidence that something very woo seems part of reality itself. 

You discover that, rather than these things amounting to silly “supernatural” baloney, reality itself seems super. You find out that, as Jeff Kripal puts it, nature is super, and the super is natural. 

This happened—minus a touch of poetic license—to a perfectly lovely cognitive neuroscientist named Mona Sobhani, PhD. And she details it in her book, in page-turning details. It’s called, Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist’s Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe, and it’s a really fun book, taking the reader on an engaging tour that ranges from precognition through life after death. And Mona makes for a lovely guide. 

Maybe you already find dominant culture science in need of a paradigm shift. Maybe you even think you know a lot about these matters. Or maybe you already want to dismiss them. In all of these cases, this is a book worth reading—and one that goes by quickly. If you know very little about these matters, my recommendation remains just as strong. 

All of us need to think through these issues together, because they have to do with the nature of reality. As I say so often: If you look at the state of the world or the state of your life and wonder how we all can do better, one of the first things we can do involves recognizing that we have obsolete models of mind and reality, and obsolete ways of thinking that go with them. In order to begin to rejuvenate ourselves and our world, we need to challenge those obsolete models. Mona’s book can help with that. 

Though I took poetic license with her story (e.g., she most assuredly did not have photos of any of the high priests of scientism on an anti-religious altar), Mona really does have a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from USC. She’s a former research scientist who completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University with the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project. She’s currently an author and entrepreneur. And she really did begin the journey documented in her book with coffee readings from her mother—readings so good her friends all wanted to come over for coffee too. The journey took off from there, taking her—and us as readers—on a wild ride. 

Mona was delightful to talk to, and you can check out our dialogue by following the link in the comments—I think you’ll enjoy it, and it makes for a nice introduction to her book. I’ll put a link to her book as well, because it’s worth reading. 

I’ll follow these brief reflections with a little more consideration of the challenges that reality itself presents to us (in another essay), but it seems important to emphasize a central issue. It came up at the end of our dialogue, when Mona said that her book was a lot of fun to write, but that a lot of the experiences documented in it were not very fun to go through. 

Once we let that sink in, we realize that something in us might actually try and keep these experiences at bay. A powerful enough experience creates what we could call and ontological shock. That’s a fancy word for a shock that goes to the core of our sense of reality itself. It can shake us in ways nothing else can. 

When we encounter something that stops us in our tracks and forces us to confront the possibility that reality itself is not what we thought it was . . . that’s not an easy thing to get our heads around. And so, ahead of time, we keep away from such experiences—often by mean of unconscious processes. Something in us avoids them at all costs, and so they never arise, or they get quickly minimized or written off as coincidence, hallucination, or anything else that accords with scientism. 

What a crazy situation! Our heads create an abyss between us and reality, supported by our culture’s standards of knowing and being. But, as Nisargadatta said: Mind creates the abyss; the heart crosses it. 

That’s not really the best way of putting it these days, because we use it to make another duality—head vs. heart. A somewhat better way to say it: When we receive a reality shock—or simply accept the soul’s calling to the adventure of our life—our primary discovery comes to the vastness of what we are. 

Reality shock scares the ego because it shocks open the tight barriers the ego has made around body, mind, and identity (including barriers of space and time). Once we let go, we discover strength, courage, magic, and mystery we never thought possible—and even feel afraid of—and yet they reflect our true nature. We are far more wondrous than we realize, and so is this world and this Cosmos. 

It requires initiation for us to enter that mystery more fully, and sometimes those initiations can feel like quite an ordeal. On the other side of them, we might embrace every last moment that the ego viewed as a catastrophe. Depending on the ordeal, that could take lifetimes. But, ultimately, we will see it all as nirvana—as inconceivable as that might seem from our current perspective. 

Our reflections here have two major points. On the one hand, I’m recommending a delightful book for you to read. But the recommendation comes even more so because of the deeper point, the more fundamental point: We need a more intimate experience with reality itself. It’s already knocking at the door of the soul—Sophia, the divine, or the great mystery constantly rap at the door of our soul. Are we ready to answer? 

The world we share seems to have an urgent need for us to answer. And part of the benefit of reading books like Mona’s is that it helps us to learn about someone else’s confrontation with reality shock, it helps to find out that we are not alone in this (as Mona herself found out too), and it helps to learn about all the evidence for a wider and wilder reality than the one our culture imposes on us. 

Keep learning. Keep finding out about the more, the stuff that goes beyond what the ego can hold (taking extra care when the ego tries to identify with it anyway). The whole community of life depends on us to hear that knock—and answer it. It is our own vastness inviting us into itself.