As a tween (decades before the term was invented) I used to take long walks around the neighborhood, a safe, quiet lower-middle-class suburb of Cincinnati. I would work out issues, carefully verbalize explanations, explain things to imaginary audiences. Was I a strange kid?
On one of these walks, when I was 12 years old, I had my first memorable encounter with the Divine. I was thinking about God, where he lived, what he did all the time, and it suddenly struck me --- quite literally struck me psychologically, emotionally, almost physically --- that God didn't just hide in the church waiting for us to show up on weekends. What kind of lame-ass deity would that be? God was everywhere, "He" was right there with me at that moment, beside me, within me, all around me. I may have had mild spiritual experiences before that, and just don't remember. But from that day on I never doubted the existence of the Divine, and I felt the presence of the Spirit many times.
I did not talk to many people about this, but later I was at a friend's house, the subject of religion came up, and I told him exactly how I felt. The subject was dropped pretty quickly, but he told me later that it was almost creepy, like he could feel another person, another presence in the room as we talked.
The dominant message of Outliers, as I understand it, is that talent, intelligence, and perseverance matter much less than we usually assume. Success and failure are heavily influenced --- sometimes wholly determined --- by where and how we are raised, by rare circumstances (more often a chain of circumstances), opportunities and lucky breaks. We, humanity, could produce many more success stories if we could figure out how to spread the opportunities around and teach people how to be successful.
I've come to understand that 12 was young to have a first true, sticky, non-dual experience. It seems that other people I read about, like Eben Alexander, Russel Razzaque, Eckhart Tolle are usually in their 30s or 40s when struck by spiritual lightening. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church. Almost literally. My family went to services Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and usually a couple of committee meetings, choir practices, pot-luck dinners throughout the week. It's frightening now to catalogue all the things Southern Baptists get wrong. When it comes to our understanding of the Divine, our relationship to it, their own Bible, their own history, not to mention the wealth of teachings from other prophets, traditions, cultures that they vehemently ignore --- it's as if Southern Baptists are determined to stay as willfully ignorant as possible.
Yet, here's the thing: in our home it was understood that God was real. We prayed to him, asked for help and guidance. My father would pray before any big investment, we would pray for friends who were sick. There was never a hint that our prayers were just for our own mental health; I was raised to believe that praying to God can bring about real change in someone's life. They could have told me that the Divine was short and hairy, had furry feet and tusks, chewed tobacco and farted a lot. It didn't really matter, because at least I was emotionally open to the idea that it did exist and was accessible to me personally. And maybe because of that, I was able to reach through the fog of Protestant untruths and halftruths in order to truly connect with the Spirit. Maybe even bad spiritual training was better than no training at all.
I've always thought it brilliant that Krishnamurti refused to start a church. Instead he started schools. One in Ojai, California, one in England, a few in India. He didn't talk about teaching kids a certain path or dogma or way of thinking; he talked instead about teaching children to overcome their conditioning and thus end it. David Lynch advocates teaching meditation to school children.I often wonder how much better off we'd all be if our kids were gently introduced to the spiritual side of their own nature, before they grow up to be responsible adults whose ego has turned into an ogre that is that much harder to tame.
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