Thanks for sharing your perspective. After years of anger, nihilism, midlife crises, etc., I suppose I’ve reached some equanimity, not all by choice. There’s only so much of that shit an individual soul or mind can harbor, perhaps.
To expand on my original comment, my exploration into the dharma, specifically it’s teaching on anatta or “no self,” has exploded fractally for me, making so much of my spiritual or inner landscape crystallize into something deeply powerful and meaningful to me, even to the point of finding a fair degree of peace with and forgiveness for the Mormon Church and its ways.
For now I’ll just say: I have a deep inner conviction that I am not an individual. That I am not the egoic “self” that my culture and society have trained me to be, and which they continue to pressure me to be. You could say that this is just another religious or spiritual delusion, similar to my experience of Mormonism. That would be completely fair, and I’m not really inclined to rebut it.
It’s strange, but I arrive at my current spirituality by way of dharmic insight into the workings of mind, as I think I observe within my own experience and practice, and also by a fair degree of rational reasoning. We are complex social primates, unable to process or even hold a fraction of our complex sociopolitical world within our individual organism. We are more like distributed processors with memory in real, fleshy social network and community. Others are no doubt more “individual” than I am, but in all my observation, I think I only see “self” arise phenomenologically according to relationship and conditions in community.
All of which is to say, this “I” is part of a much larger arc of humanity, angst, and consciousness than that which I can call “me.” Parts of me are both from and in my parents. Parts of my parents’ identities reside in me. Parts of me live within my children, in ways they don’t even understand yet. This massive chain extends far beyond just family, but seems to manifest most observably within these intimate ties.
Even my questioning and doubting of the Church was largely transmitted to me by my parents and forbears, I believe. I know I am sowing seeds and projecting world and meaning in ways that are affecting my children, and I consciously choose not to poison them against the Church. I’ve carried around anger and poison long enough. I’ve been a vessel for others’ poison and anger. I think I am deeply familiar now with this psychology or what I’d prefer to term “phenomenology of mind.”
Thank you for your thoughts.
I often reflect that, in my attempts to model life on this planet from all that I have observed, experienced, read, and reflected on, it seems like there is a persistent “force” that is supporting life at ever greater levels of organization and complexity. The fields, circumstances, and conditions of this planet seem to give chances to any strategy for organizing on top of what has already been organized. Trillions of chances over billions of years, with almost as many failures. Almost.
I’m not the most science-y, but it seems that conditions for this planet, its moon, its carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, it’s temperature ranges, putting together single-celled organisms, then multi-cellular ones, then plants, dinosaurs, whales, sharks, etc. etc. etc. social species, hominids, hominids with the ability to join mind together psychoactively through shared language...
This is the prime or ultimate divine for me in the field of our earth. Why does life keep organizing itself here with more and more complexity?
Now, for human consciousness, society, culture, and mind to exist, there are definitely god-forms, spirits, and egregores that are symbiotic with human groups and populations. Or at least, this is the best story I can tell about the phenomenology I experience and observe as a complex human social primate, having been shaped by my genes, memes, and culture, and now co-creating, co-manifesting, and co-weaving this clusterfuck of meaning-driven, desire-driven, spirit-driven activities we are all doing and telling and living with each other across arcs of history and time and geography....
I appreciate this space where I can say these things without feeling insane or too paranoid. We can not dissect or even observe our gods casually or lightly without putting our own minds and sanities at risk.
Let’s use words, thoughts, and concepts like the magic they are. These are the tools and the bricks we shape our world from and with, across far greater arcs than our brief individual lives.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god. Now we have word in compute. Dear God what have we done. Have we not domesticated ourselves into what will evolve on top of us as its host and platform?
Dear God.