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It would be an understatement to say this will be different from what I generally post here, and it will most certainly veer past pseudoscience into the realm of dime-store philosophical claptrap. Consider yourself warned.

Having been raised in an environment with no discernable spiritual doctrine, I'm a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool agnostic. Religion never particularly interested me as an explanation of existence or code of ethics, and the older I got, the more skeptical I became of its very human origins and rhythms: a structure that reinforces a set of behaviors with a vague and unprovable set of rewards or punishments after death, sometimes used for good, but most often used for bad. Interpretation of random, chaotic events as synchronic or representative of higher powers, such as when a rare good thing happens in otherwise terrible circumstances. I got it, I just never bought it. So my bespoke relationship with the unknowns of existence had a pretty rational sandbox.

The meaning of life is propagation. The "rewards" of life are simply hewn from a social/financial form of natural selection. There is no sentient, conscious, human-like being overseeing all existence; only sentient, conscious humans could conceive of such a limited "god". Good deeds versus bad don't add up on spiritual ledgers, but the karma reaped from what you sow is very real on a human-to-human level. Rather than seeking an answer about how or why we're here, we should marvel at the innateness of nature. Not just warm sunny days, trees, birds, streams, and oceans, but the infinite expanse of a living universe populated by sextillions of stars and the infinitesimal interactions of molecules that make it possible.

The soul, to me, was easy: it's the only thing about you that never changes. It is literally both your DNA and who you are. From birth to death, your cells die and replenish. You grow, learn, and challenge yourself. You can be struck with a disease that erases your personality, but you are always you. At least that's what I believed. Now, I'm not so sure.

We homo sapiens have forerunners going back billions of years. In only a tiny fragment of the age of the universe, we went from a quadrupedal gait to walking on the moon. Our evolution in the grasp of tools went phenomenally fast, and in doing so, as Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle suggests in True Detective , "nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself": consciousness. Suddenly, we stopped being animals who simply operated on instinct. We weren't just thinking, we were thinking about thinking. Then we started expressing those thoughts, first physically, then through art, then through language, and before we knew it, we created culture. In 20 quintillion tries on this planet, nature has not repeated this feat, at least not to the level of a species using invisible currency to acquire needless goods through a telecommunications object of astonishing sophistication used with offhanded ease. We can be so menacingly dumb and remain supported in society because of the unrelenting forbearance of the systems that allow us to survive.

When I think about that, I'm certain that my ancient ancestors saw an eclipse and were pretty sure the world was about to end. That thinking is simultaneously stupid and highly advanced: taking note of something extremely abnormal and internalizing what affect it might have on you. So when I consider humanity's relationship with the supernatural, I'm heavily on the side that repudiates interpreting random phenomena through the confirmation biases of consciousness. But when I consider the ubiquity of religion and spiritualism, I'm beginning to wonder if it's all an imperfect attempt to articulate innate feelings, inclinations, premonitions, and extrasensory perceptions we simply lack the existential vocabulary to adequately describe.

I'll make a simple example: how many times in your life have you heard about someone innately knowing about the death of a loved one? It's the sort of thing we hear frequently, and based on our beliefs, we either ignore or accept it and go about our day. But how often can we hear about something like that and ignore or accept that it's part of a pattern that has nothing to do with our beliefs? The most prevalent example of this is mothers losing a child. Fathers have connections with their children, for sure. But not the same way that mothers do. And I absolutely include adoptive parents in this equation: how much can you care about someone before it exceeds your ability to understand it?

I'm not suggesting that "love" transcends time and space, like McConaughey's Joseph Cooper in Interstellar (McConaughey again? Damn you!), and reject wholesale the notion of the perfectibility of man often explored in such sci-fi narratives. In viewing the entire history of life on this planet, a talking ape is patently absurd. Yet that's where we are. I accept Arthur C. Clarke's maxim that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Can we say the same of a species? How can we project where evolution will take us, and which signs and signifiers we're living with now? We're still debating what consciousness means. Is it possible that the human race, having evolved a consciousness, is evolving methods for that consciousness to transcend the boundaries of known existence?

Allow me to pour some cold water: this notion is INSANE. It's certainly not backed by anyone with a reasonable assessment of human sociology or biology. How would you study this phenomenon? Abnormal, or parapsychology? The most advanced scientific minds of the day would rightly dismiss it as balderdash.

And yet.

And yet…

…there's still some part of us attracted to this notion. Consciousness, in all its complexity, favors the simplicity of believing that because it exists, it will continue to exist. Are psychics real? What about mind-readers? Do the dead exert influence over the living? How could any of this insanity legitimately play a part in a rational world?

Simple. We define the rational world through the crude lens of personal experience. And if we favor a scientific approach, we're married to observable, empirical evidence. But how often do we explode through a paradigm, challenging what we previously held to be sacrosanct through the embrace of heretical notions? A round Earth? Breaking the sound barrier? What do we know to be impossible now that's limited by our ape brain?

In short, I don't think we're turning into the X-Men . I'm still uncertain as to whether there's an afterlife, psychics, mind-readers, premonitions, or telepathy, or if the phenomenon surrounding those notions are interconnected. But if they are, I don't believe any answers lie in human-based religions based on deities who preceded us or authored our creation. I'm more inclined to believe we are evolving abilities that we, described in Ex Machina as a race of "upright ape(s) living in dust with crude language and tools", have yet to understand.

This essay was constructed by an upright ape who likes to tap letters on a plastic panel for the sake of personal enjoyment, fulfillment, entertainment, the hopes that it leads to salaried employment, and to distract him from his less than ideal existence making sure the local food purveyor has products available to customers every morning.

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