God(s)
A journey between Atheism and faith in the Divine, and how I came to know God.
My family wasn’t religious growing up. Like many Asian families, we had a few “Fat Buddha” sculptures around (whom I would later find out was a 12th century saint of the Zen Buddhism lineage and often confused with the “original” Gautama Buddha). However, nobody ever told or taught me any Buddhist precepts or teachings — I think the statues might have been for purely aesthetic purposes. My mother would later tell me that she “believed” in God, “just in case”. It was a sort of crude, self-developed version of Pascal’s Wager no doubt.
The first time the concept of God was introduced to me was by the mother of some childhood friends that lived across the street from us. I was in kindergarten or first grade over at their house, and she had mentioned something about God to me. I was totally lost. “Who’s God?”, I asked. She seemed a bit taken aback that somebody, even this little Asian kid, had never heard of God. I don’t think Atheism was a very popular concept yet in the 90’s. She told me to ask my parents.
I got home and was engrossed by the idea of this God character. Why was he talked about with such reverence? Did he live around the neighborhood? Why wouldn’t my neighbor’s mom just tell me? When I saw my sister later that day I immediately asked. I remember her reacting in a way of surprise and excitement. It was as if she had this hidden admiration for the idea of God, and now could finally talk about it with someone. She explained that God was this idea of an all-powerful and all-knowing creator who lived above the clouds. She seemed enchanted with the idea.
She was absolutely astonished by the notion that God knew exactly how many hairs were on your head. This never impressed me however. After all, if this dude was all-powerful then why *wouldn’t* he know how many hairs were on your head? It was just magic, it’s not like he did any work! I was more intrigued by the seeming logical contradictions, such as: “Could God create a rock so strong that even he could not break?” (my childhood formulation of, “Could God create a rock so heavy that even he could not lift?”).
After that initial exposure, God would stay dormant in my life for the next several years. To me, it was a nice thought experiment, but even my adolescent mind could never gloss past all of the inconsistencies I found. This precluded me from taking the idea of God seriously, such that I was barely bothered when me and my sister would hang out with her friend who was a Satanist. He was, funny enough, a super friendly and upbeat and adventurous guy with green hair whose parents were a priest and priestess of the Church of Satan in San Francisco.
Once during my elementary school years, I had a Mormon babysitter who was a family friend. I was friends with her little brother who was my age, and she would come over and watch me when my mom was working, and even though she was in high school, we became pretty conversational. Eventually we got to the topic of religion, and I kept questioning her about these inconsistencies about the faith in God. Once while she was leaving, I took her Bible and pointed out something specific to her (which I cannot remember now), and she said she would have to ask a priest at her church for answers.
I never saw her again.
I heard years later that she had fallen away from the church, had gotten piercings and dyed her hair, and gotten pregnant while still in high school. Was I, a kid in elementary school that she babysat, the one who broke her faith in God?
Curiously enough, I would become fully invested in the faith in God just a few years later. Around the time that my sister gave birth to her first son, she began going to a non-denominational church called the San Francisco Church of Christ (part of the International Churches of Christ), and often took me along to Sunday morning and Wednesday night services in the Bay Area. I don’t know when it happened or what exactly came over me, but I became enamored with the faith. I think it was a combination of the love and community of the church, but there was also something truly meaningful in the messages being shared. For the time being, I disregarded my rational qualms with faith, and fully embraced the spirit. I became fully engaged in the Bible studies that my sister both partook in and hosted, I attended and volunteered for church events, and even traveled for church retreats. Other church members started to feel like family, and I wanted to be baptized, though I never was (my sister said I was too young to fully grasp what baptism symbolized, and that it was something to be earned).
(I ended up visiting the local “descendent” of that church a few years ago. Remarkably, the sense of love, community, and meaning all remained in-tact. However, there was a clear and almost cult-like attempt to “recruit” me, which I remember was a hallmark of the church when I was younger, and something that ended up contributing to the church’s controversy and subsequent reorganization.)
I don’t remember exactly the moment it stopped, but as I grew into my high school years and my sister became more settled in her family, I fell away from the faith in God and started back down the road to Atheism. My sister had also quit the church as the members encouraged her to leave her husband and at the end of the day she chose him. She ended up joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses. One of the last times that I remember having a normal interaction with her before she committed suicide (as I discussed in my piece on addiction), was when she took me to a Jehovah’s Witness service. Between the idiosyncrasies of their faith and the productions of my rational mind, I felt no resonance at this point. Much like with my old babysitter, I started pointing out a handful of contradictions and inconsistencies in the scriptures. Also much like with my old babysitter, I believe I broke my sister’s faith — the only anchor keeping her grounded in the world…as it turned out. I remember as I was speaking, she looked visibly shook and said she would have to consult an elder at the church on these questions. I don’t think she ever got the answers she was looking for. One can make all kinds of conjectures about how this event impacted her, but I know in my heart that it was the catalyst that drove her to stop trying to hang on to this life.
As I started college, I found the writings of “The Four Horsemen of New Atheism” (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens — Hitchens I still hold a great admiration for to this day for his intellectual honesty and raw IQ). Their arguments resonated with my own, and as a philosophy major, I had many arguments and debates with the religious faithful. Although I would often come off as abrasive in my youth, my true underlying desire was to find something that made sense about their faith. There was a cognitive dissonance in the air between my rational conclusions and their unwavering faith. Were they simply deluded sheep as The New Atheists suggested? Did they suffer from a chemical imbalance in their brains as Freud argued? I wanted to, and almost had a need to, find out not only what fueled their belief but also if I was missing something myself in the whole equation. I even had a debate over several weeks through email with one of my philosophy professors who happened to be religious, which led me to no greater understanding.
I was never intellectually uncharitable to the other side’s arguments. Once I wrote an almost 8,000 word paper on Alvin Plantinga’s “Free Will Defense of Evil” (which sought to allow for the coexistence of an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent God and evil in the world), where I “steel-manned” his argument against several “inferior” critiques, before I laid out my own.
The only thing that slightly gave me a clue was a Communications professor (who I still regard to be the greatest instructor I ever had in school) who was teaching a class on religious communication. Once in class he proclaimed that religious belief was not based in a rational argument, but rather an *experience*. I had no clue what he was on about, but I didn’t dismiss it and it has always stayed with me in the back of my mind. Funny enough, during these years, as much as I would fight against religion and the idea of God in my rational life, all of my favorite music were Christian metal and metalcore bands. I would often find myself singing along with lyrics that praised God as fervently as if I believed the words that were coming out of my mouth. It was a nice little dualism that I was conscious of, but didn’t bother me.
The question of God mostly took a back seat in my life until I encountered the work of Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is a psychologist who came to prominence with several appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Jordan gives many lectures that involve improving yourself, your life, and “sorting yourself out” as he would say. Nuggets of wisdom such as “Clean your room”, “Take responsibility for yourself and the world around you”, and “Tell the truth and do what you know you should be doing”, seem simple and straightforward yet resonated with masses of men across generations, including myself. It was in all honesty, wisdom that was probably missing in our lives — I know that was the case in my own life. He frequently makes references to biblical wisdom and talks about God in a way that is not off-putting in the way many who lecture about God are. He seemed to talk about God in a sort of metaphorical way, yet didn’t exactly come off like he was an atheist at all. He reminded me of my old Communications professor that I mentioned earlier in that way.
As a result, I began interpreting religious texts as metaphorical lessons about ourselves and our own psychology and how to live properly in the world. I conceptualized God as the “Logos”, or underlying dynamics of the universe. Thus, if the universe or life was a game, God was the stage upon which the game was played, the rules the the game were played by, as well as the game itself. In the same vein, Christ would therefore be the archetypical representation of the “perfect player” of the game — a figure or ideal to aspire towards. “The Son of God”.
This interpretation served me well and created a sense of equanimity between my rational mind and the religious enterprise. This was until I discovered psychedelics. I was using them for therapeutic reasons: processing trauma and exploring the depths of my own psychology. I had no interest in any kind of “spirituality” or anything like that. I did however start meditating on existential questions which stemmed from my philosophy years, such as:
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- Does the external world exist, and if it does, what is it like?
- Do we live in a simulation?
- What is consciousness?
Eventually, with higher and higher doses of psychedelics as I became more experienced, I was able to have what some might call a “Mystical Experience” or what others may call “Ego-Death”. I won’t go into details about the experience or what I saw or felt, as one of the defining features of the experience is its ineffability.
In the Johns Hopkins clinical trials with Psilocybin, a certain portion of the participants report feeling something that “feels more real than reality”. This is something I can attest to through my own experience. The only metaphor I can give is that of VR. Imagine having an Oculus device and while wearing it, you see a VR world that mimics the real world. It is beautiful and complex and vibrant with color and texture, however you still know that it is a game, and when you take off the headset you can see the stark difference between “real reality” and the VR. The “Mystical Experience” makes normal reality feel like VR — that is to say, a lower resolution version of what is actually real. It is not a visual effect, as this experience typically happens when your eyes are closed and your consciousness is transported to another place entirely. I know that a statement “more real than reality” seems like nonsense…unless you start to accept that possibility that our normal waking reality is not all that there is.
Along with this “lifting of the veil of reality”, comes the curious wisdom that all things are of the same essence…and not only of the same essence but the notion that the essence in question is in fact God itself. This is to say that you, me, the tree outside, the rock on the ground, everyone and everything that exists in this universe are all God in different forms. You also get a sense that there is a purpose for all of this, and that purpose is for God to learn about itself and to evolve and grow and experience all that there possibly can be to experience.
What did I stumble upon?? It was almost as if my metaphorical interpretation of God had come to life in a sense. God was in fact the literal stage of the universe, making up every quantum particle and photon of light and every combination of those particles, yet brought to life by the universal consciousness that pervades us all. Interestingly enough, this also makes God, by definition, fit the classical qualities of “omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence”. Interesting.
I searched for what could explain what I had seen and felt and what I understood to be truth at the deepest level of my being. This must have been the experience that my professor had mentioned all those years back! I searched and found the lectures of the spiritual teachers Alan Watts and Ram Dass, and they were echoing word for word, point for point, precisely what I had experienced. It wasn’t like going to a church service or some lecture where you might accept some of what was said or even 99%. This was 100% resonance with what I had witnessed first hand. This led me to exploring different ancient and mystical religious beliefs. The worlds of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, Neoplatonism, Theosophy, Hermeticism, Taoism and even Christianity opened to me. In all of these different traditions, I saw the same truths being delivered. All of the great religions of the world suddenly made sense, even to the rational part of my mind (or what became of it), and they were all espousing the same message.
What I thought were contradictions in different faiths — such as the single capital G God in monotheistic Christianity and the many lesser gods in polytheistic traditions such as Hinduism or Ancient Greek/Egyptian mythology — were actually founded on a misunderstanding of the message as well as a confusion of the literal with the metaphorical. The many gods of Hinduism, for example, are supposed to be a representation of the different archetypes that the Self may manifest (much like Jungian Archetypes). The principle gods Vishnu and Shiva, represent Order and Chaos respectively, or Yin and Yang — the two fundamental forces of the universe which are found throughout each human soul. Yet Hinduism has a higher unifying principle — Brahman. This is what should be understood as “capital G God” or the “Holy Spirit”, or the Tao as it is known in the Taoist tradition, or the Logos in the words of Jordan Peterson, or the Monad in Gnosticism.
After searching my entire life for God or at least a means to disprove his existence, I was finally able to find Him when I was able to look deeply enough into my own being. As the great mystic poet Rumi had said:
“I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.”
I hold faith in everything I have expressed about what I have found. It is faith, because at this point, it cannot be proven with a science experiment in a lab. However, it is not a hopeful belief either. As Alan Watts had said:
“We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would like or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.”
The faith that all is God, and that there is no real end to our existence, and that this life is all a game or dance or unfolding drama, is not based on something that sounds nice or what I might wish it to be. It is rooted in the evidence that I have experienced through my own being. Adherents of materialist or modernist philosophy may claim that it was all a hallucination or chemicals playing tricks in the brain — and this is very much the type of explanation that I would have given in my younger days. However, I would venture to suggest that anyone who makes such a claim has not had the experience for themselves. Furthermore, the claim that these mystical experiences are a hallucination or delusion hold no more weight than the claim that our ordinary waking life could be a hallucination…and if that could be the case, then we are right back where we started.
“Skepticism is just a lack of imagination masquerading as intellectualism”
I hold many beliefs now, including some fun conspiracy theories. Some just because they are fun (Hollow Earth), but others that I am relatively confident in their truth (“Extra-Terrestrials” who are not fundamentally different from us, and are aware of our planetary existence). The main impetuous is a broadened mind that allows for possibility much more than it rejects or judges. I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with holding a belief that seems fantastical, because if it bring some semblance of joy, or happiness, or (most importantly) wonder to your life and doesn’t cause any negative consequences, then it would only be foolish to deny yourself of holding it. The worst you can be is wrong, in which case with many cases with the topics discussed, you will be dead anyway. Best case scenario, you’re right and can continue the wonder of exploration. It’s like the inverse of Pascal’s Wager. I don’t take much in life too seriously anymore, and that includes myself and even my own beliefs.
So yes, I believe in God. I believe that I am God. I also believe that you are God. And I believe that after we are done experiencing this incarnation, we will meet in another place as family, before we venture onto the next adventure.
=)
