Consciousness clings to what stability it can find.
It does so in a way that is part instinct, part training, and part x.
Solve for x, and you will have isolated/identified that which feels it is ‘living freely’ in some sense.
Does x = self? mind? ego? No; these are words which reference useful/relevant concepts, none of which equals x.
It could be said that the function of consciousness is to synthesize order out of fundamental ambiguity, which could explain the existential terror we sometimes feel when a mental framework momentarily becomes transparent, and we glimpse through into primordial chaos.
Perhaps, however, this process of coherence-creation is a function not of consciousness but rather of it’s two partial constituents: instinct and training (nature and nurture). Perhaps x sits outside of this process, or else alongside it. Perhaps x, like breathing, is autonomic by default yet open to voluntary control. This would mean that the conscious being has the option to exist within the coherence its instinct and training has created, and the option not to.
That we have the option to step outside coherence itself is… well, beautiful. It’s also terrifying.
When I consider that it is the most potentially empowered aspect of myself which is perhaps most responsible for the moments of chaos and/or ambiguity I feel, I begin to understand why it is so important that we have compassion for our selves.
I nurture compassion not only for the part of me which invites chaos into my equation for fun, but also for the part of me which cherishes the mental objects which have become regular fixtures for me.
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We seek ideas, people, things, behaviors, and symbols which connote security and substance, because on an essential level we are terrified by our own ephemerality. Well, that associated feeling is perhaps my own, and I feel it only on occasion. But the fact of our ephemerality (at least relative to what we can imagine for ourselves) is incontrovertible.
I am inherently a tragic figure, because each moment of my being is singular, unrepeatable.
Your religion, your spirituality, your faith – choose one or all three of those terms – is that which imbues your life with meaning and substance.
This is why new ex-Christians typically find themselves either profoundly disoriented, confused, and heartbroken, or else stumbling headlong into a new ideological framework that feeds the same pathways, pushes the same buttons (could be atheism, could be a marriage, could be yoga, could be an actual cult – in theory, literally anything with which a person can identify could serve as a replacement framework) .
For me, losing my Christian faith felt remarkably similar to a ‘breakup’ (as in, a breakup between human romantic partners).
How do most people respond to breakups? Either by quickly finding a new relationship, or else by wallowing in self-pity and/or forlorn analysis. And that’s only after the breakup is finalized… sometimes the late stages of a relationship can drag on for months, years, decades.
I sat here for 20 minutes just now trying to isolate/remember a moment of having officially ‘begun’ my process of transitioning out of the Christian faith. The truth is: it’s complicated. I remember quite vividly, however, the moment of my officially coming out as an ex-Christian (aka the moment when my romance with God officially ended).
I was sitting in Curtis dining hall with a new friend whom I’d met during my summer orientation before beginning undergrad. We were now into our second or third month of classes, and I think we’d just come out of a late night together (studying? No, I think we were taking an evening class). Anyway, it was dark outside. The two of us were alone at a large grey table. The hall was silent but for the staff and a few other weirdos who were dining in the off hours. I’m not sure how the conversation turned to religion, but I remember shot of adrenaline I gave myself when I realized I was about to tell him I wasn’t a Christian. The statement meant nothing to him, as he wasn’t a Christian either. It was like I’d just told him I wasn’t a duck. There’s not a chance he remembers anything about that lackluster dinner. I don’t even remember what my exact words were… something along the lines of “I used to be super involved in my youth group.. like, I used to lead worship and everything, but now I’m an atheist”. A totally normal thing to say at a small liberal arts school outside Columbus, OH.
I don’t remember it as a moment of victory, or of empowerment even. It was a moment of terror and unfamiliarity. I’d known only seconds before the words had come out that I was going to say them. The atheist label actually didn’t last very long; I could probably count on one hand the number of times I actually used the term in relation to myself. Also, it would be another year or so before I came out to my parents (and to my pre-university social context more broadly) as a non-Christian who drank alcohol and went to parties (those behaviors were intrinsically linked, for me at the time).
But I remember that moment. I remember the cold grilled cheese, and his awkward smile. I had entered a new world. For the next week or so, I was exhilarated. But that feeling faded fast, replaced by an anxious terror as I began to realize that not only was I alone in a cold, dark universe, but also I was alone at this unfamiliar school. There were maybe 20 actual Christians in a population of 2000, and none of them were going to deviate an iota from the good path. Everyone else was a lifelong humanist, or an agnostic, or an atheist… not that anyone really thought to hard about the subject, but those were the energies which pervaded the culture.
Pick up any breakup-related self-help book written in the last decade and you’ll find that the optimal approach to recovery involves first owning up to the heartache, feeling it, being it, and then gradually letting those feelings fade into memories… and then into mere shadows of past impressions as you discover/establish and then nurture new/brighter aspects of meaning in your life/world (bonus points if they’re not tied to other people, to material possessions, or to anything too distant from consciousness itself).
It’s not ‘rocket science’, as they say. But also… it kinda is. I’ve known the secret to breakup recovery from a young age, and yet I’ve never really been able to get it right. Each time I encounter loss, it’s completely new. It’s profoundly sad. Somehow, uncannily, it’s always a surprise. I know that permanence is an illusion, yet I am irredeemably, inevitably, unashamedly attached to SO MANY disparate ideas. If I woke up tomorrow in a world without keyboards or touchpads (this is an absurd example, but bear with me), I’d be liable to spend the first several hours of that day luxuriating in the doomed memory of what those technologies had meant to me.
If you want to know how hopelessly nostalgic a person I am, all you need to know is that one of my earliest childhood memories (perhaps the earliest… no way to know) is of looking at a picture of my 2-year-old self and feeling the saddest I can remember ever having been in my now 29 years, for I knew that not only would I never again enjoy that particular flavor of consciousness (hard to put into words what the exact flavor was, but I remember at the time that I could still recall what it was like to have been 2… it had something to do with innocence and ease) but also that I would inevitably lose the memory of that phase also, until one day it would be as if it never happened to me, fully lost not only to my own recollection but also to time itself. My sadness was compounded by the realization that this cycle would likely continue, with each iteration of my self ultimately being lost. I could have explained it better at the time, honestly. But the felt sense of that moment of prepubescent grief is still with me today. tl;dr I was like, 4 or 5 years old and already grieving the end of my childhood, my mortality in general, and perhaps also the immateriality of memory.
– – –
What the hell is my point?
First of all – and this whole paragraph is really a prelude to a separate essay about the relational aspect of all this – there is a sense in which it is good and healthy to practice authentic self-expression/conversation which involves these thoughts/feelings you are having. Conversely, it is dangerous/unhealthy to keep said thoughts/feelings ‘bottled up’. But if you do choose to express yourself to friends/family (strangers are easier, but the same rules apply) with any degree of sincerity/authenticity, thereby becoming necessarily vulnerable to their responses, you have to accept that each of these non-you humans is going to respond in accordance with its own programming rather than in accordance with your concept of what is proper. What does that mean? It means that, in all likelihood, these conversations will create additional pain and/or ambiguity for you (but that’s largely the point… each interaction can be a mirror which helps you to see a new part of your self, or else it can reveal a new piece of the collective puzzle more broadly, and your processing thereof will feed your own constantly evolving perspective). You could steel yourself against this possibility of additional pain by cauterizing the part of your self that cares what your friends/family think, but this would (in large part) defeat the purpose. Authentic self-expression isn’t the entire goal… authentic CONVERSATION (aka, a two-way-street type of expression, the long-term form of which is ‘relationship’) is what we really crave. If you see yourself as some kind of enlightened teacher, come to save your family from the clutches of delusion (rather than as a mere person – one who has been experiencing an ideological shift)… you are 100% doing it wrong. You’re not listening. You’re not participating. You’re part of the problem. Anyway… this is why many people (myself included) choose to procrastinate these ‘coming out’-type conversations. They’re difficult. Just don’t procrastinate too long. And when you do finally open up, notice the sense in which you are naturally going to be ‘attached to’ (in the buddhist sense) or expecting/wanting particular responses from others. That’s counter-productive. BUT at the same time… you need to have pre-meditated boundaries. Again, this is a prelude to a whole separate-but-related subject. I’ll transition us out of this run-on ‘bottle episode’ of a paragraph and back to the main topic of this essay by saying: at it’s core, this whole situation is between you and God. Don’t lose sight of that. Don’t fixate on others’ responses to your expressions.
It’s ok to feel broken up when you’ve broken up, especially if the guy who broke your heart (well… perhaps you’re the one who did the honors) is your former God / invisible, omnipotent, all-loving best friend.
When you go through a breakup, part of you dies with the relationship. That’s what you’re mourning. The grief is beauty itself.
I guess the ideal way to ‘lose’ one’s religion is to reform it without losing it per se, but this is about as hard to accomplish as becoming instant best friends with your Ex.
Religion/spirituality/faith is what keeps us from feeling that life is fundamentally devoid of meaning and substance. Or… to phrase it more positively… it’s what maintains our connection to meaning and substance in a world that is in large part superficial and absurd. Does that mean religion/spirituality/faith is delusion? I mean, kinda. But so is money. So are borders. Blah blah blah post-modernism. Does the artificiality of religion/spirituality/faith make it inherently bad? Definitely not. Can you point to any aspect of your personal ideology which is definitely 100% ‘truth’ aka completely NOT in any sense a delusion (collective or otherwise)? No, you cannot.
Christianity works for some people some of the time. In aggregate, it has been quite useful to our species over millennia, as have the other monotheistic faiths. On an individual level, I would not recommend monotheism to anyone who isn’t already invested. To folks who are already in its grasp, I say don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater if you can help it.
To lose your faith in God is to lose something which has been carefully safeguarded/taught/cherished for generations. Aka you have to acknowledge that a kind of void will appear in your life when you’ve at last admitted to yourself that your concept of God was/is illusory.
How to fill the void?
Drugs are (at best) only part of the answer. At worst, they’re your literal doom. Most likely they’re just a diversion. The same can be said of partying, dating, socializing in general, music, work, and literally every thing or pursuit or activity which can be named.
You don’t fill the void. You don’t give in to it either.
You can deconstruct it, you can talk about it, you can write songs about it, smoke weed about it… at the end of the day, you’re just going to have to live with it. I could go on about specific methods/ideas/practices which I’ve found helpful/fun/empowering but really it’s going to 100% depend on who you are and what kind of trip you’re on.
10-or-so years have passed since that day in the dining hall when I took a leap and exited Christendom. A LOT has happened in those 10 years. I wouldn’t say that Christianity is behind me, but rather that it is a part me which I’ve subsumed and recontextualized (more on that later). I’ve crossed many more rubicons since then, sometimes back-and-forth but never without pulling a new piece of the puzzle with me.
I no longer believe that my meaning is to serve and be loved by a literal God (pre-modernism), nor do I believe that there is no meaning except that which I create on my own strength (post-modernism), nor that meaning is everywhere and the trees are magic (pre-modernism again). I simply live.
That’s not to say that I don’t still think about these things. Obviously I do, or I wouldn’t be writing this. But I’ve learned to maintain a sense of humor about it all. A sense of irony, I suppose. And that’s what metamodernism is all about, in theory – the ability to be sincere without losing one’s sense of the absurd.
In the end, the truest and most summative statement I can make is perhaps this: I’ve expanded my capacity for experiencing ambiguity (also loss, pain, hardship, etc.) without having a bad trip about it. I’ve come to revel in the inherently subjective, inherently partial, entirely temporary state of being that is humanness. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Which is good, because I won’t.