Full disclosure: I’m not here to ask questions. I came here to look for rationalists who have deep Mormon backgrounds or heritage. I am looking for “post-post-Mormons.”
I doubted and stepped away from the Church almost 8 years ago. I was reading Moroni Chapter 7 and was exasperated at trying to fit everything in my expanding world into either a “all good things come of Christ” or a “that which persuadeth men to do evil and believe not in Christ is of the devil” box.
Access to the internet has provided me with enough takes, views, and tools to completely dismantle self, reality, sanity, and world. But thank Buddha for the dharma and for caring internet communities that have helped me find some groundless ground again, only after divorce after a 20+ year, multi-child temple marriage, which were and are both deeply precious to me, and also real-and-direct byproducts of Mormon faith and belief-practice.
I still live in a rural Utah community that is caring and supportive in all those Mormon ways, and I struggle to be ideologically isolated from so many people that are interacting with and caring for my children still at home, who are on track to follow the Mormon path and go to the temples and serve missions.
I am considering starting a podcast on super-deep dives into spirituality, community, human social reality creation, and human phenomenology. If anyone wants to chat, lmk.
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.”