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Through white hell and beyond...Hello,
who do I claim to be? Seriously, I don't know. And it drives me nuts.
I usually attribute myself with adjectives such as atheist, skeptic, spiritualist, anarchist, naturalist, universal darwinist. In summary: I'm passionately curious about a higher truth I believe doesn't exist.
Some time ago I had a mental breakdown/psychosis kind of experience in which the world-as-I-knew it simply imploded. My response was to peel off and detach from layer after layer of egoic constructs until I didn't feel anything I knew or felt was "me" anymore. I called it the "white hell" and found it to appear conspicuosly similar to the concept of Nirvana or a self-less state, except it's supposed to be blissfull...so somewhere I must have done something terribly wrong..? Instead of feeling one-with-everything I felt like the ultimate cosmic reject.
The way I see it, life is absolutely meaningless, the "real" is a desert. There is no way of directly interacting with Reality, any kind of interaction is only possible through layers upon layers of abstraction -metaphore. And in those metaphores things like conciousness, meaning and free will emerge gradually within living agents -us. And that's as real as it's ever gonna get.
If there is ever anything even remotely similar to a divinity, I would expect it to be an emergence out of human conciousness -not the other way around, which is the lesson I learn from the theory of evolution. So life is an "imperfect striving for perfection" put in evolutionary terms, or the "search for God" if one prefers the religious paradigm (which I don't). And yet if life where ever to get there is would cease to be life so if you truly want a perfect life -just kill yourself ;) No seriously, simply by existing and interacting with reality, life constantly changes what reality is. So I will -thank goodness, always be a step behind in understanding it. And I hate that! Weird.
My biggest criticism with most of religion is exactly that -I find them to be anti-life cop-out strategies. On the other hand, as I said above, life in general is an anti-life cop-out strategy, so don't be offended if you're religious. There is a tendency among atheists to fall into the trap of arrogance or hubris, we think we are better than theists because we are not suscribing to any named brand of illusionary-truth-claiming (the ultimate cop-out?) and you're welcome to point that out to me if/when applicable.
My solitary search for "truth" or "meaning" can many times be an impoverished hell, so now I'm looking for complementary oasis (plural) -hey, I'm not about to come out of my cage just yet! Since there is no sky-daddy or earth mommy who's shoulders I can cry on, I've realized looking up or looking down isn't getting me anywhere, so looking sideways to my fellow orphans" that is, the human species is where I want to go now, and where I think is the place where the co-creation of meaning happens. And that is the message I think is central to the philosophy of this pod from what I've read. I try to do the opposite of what I used to and now embrace/embody all levels of existance I find myself in instead of disengaging with it. It sucks, it hurts, stinks and bores at times, but it's still the most rewarding experience so far.
Generally I have a problem with fully engaging in pods like this because the pace is just too high and I do prefer life outside cyberspace. Also english is not my first language (swedish is). But I like poking my nose in occationally and I always learn tons when I do, hopefully you will gain something useful from my participation as well.
Well that's who I claim to be -for now. And when I go back reading it all it just strikes me how this description doesn't seem like me at all. Well, I tried...
