Three back-dated posts: October 24, 26 and 29, 1994

[vaneramos]

"...God is already writing on me."

My Gethsemane moment

Mystical awakening

The beginning of critical thinking

Reflections: These three entries record an essential turning point in my life. Again, I remember it but did not realize I had written about it. Reading it this morning I'm going, "Wow!"

The first passage describes a communion service one Sunday morning. These events were informal, my favourite part of church life. Various people might request songs or stand and read passages that had been meaningful to them during the week. That day I fell into what seemed to me a huge chasm of understanding and connection with God. My religious experience turned abruptly toward mysticism. The insights I gained were not entirely new, but came sharply into focus. For those of you reading Pilgrim's Cross, the novel in my fiction journal, this Gethsemane experience was the inspiration behind Trent's dream.

For the first time since my conversion to Christianity in 1983, I began to explore my own identity and question my church's teachings. The title of the book I criticize in the third entry, Experiencing God, seems ridiculous now. It dictated the prevailing evangelical view, which, while purporting to foster a personal relationship with Christ, in fact utterly discounts mystical experience, i.e. a dynamic interaction with the divine personality leading to apprehension of personal truth. A more accurate title for the book would be Obeying the Bible. Ironically, the ex-gay movement offered more acceptance of my spiritual journey.

My misgivings were regarded as a sign of spiritual immaturity and led to alienation from my church friends. In addition, my ideas about relating to Christ through his suffering probably facilitated my fall into debilitating depression, diagnosed in April 1995. On the other hand mystical experiences helped me resist suicide through that horrendous year and the unravelling of my marriage. They even guided my decision to come out, another kind of born again experience, on January 28, 1996.

This explains why my website, Silvan's Glade, designed and written mostly between 1997 and 2000, is largely devoted to mysticism. It's not as easy to explain why I'm an atheist now.

Comments

[kwintt.livejournal.com]

Are you atheist or agnostic? It's harder to be an atheist than agnostic because it requires a certainty to KNOW that there is no God.
Me, I'm a Deist. Like Washington, Franklin and Paine.
I feel comfortable with the idea of a creator but I don't believe in any revealed writings and dogma. Those things always seem to emerge out of politics, wars, cults, power plays, control of one group by another ... and other unholy manipulations.
Strangely, I believe it is possible to have a mystical relationship with God if you get all the human stuff out of the way. Which may be one reason why some of the major religions discourage mysticism. They don't want you to have a direct relationship that cuts out the middle-man. They want you to go through THEM, their dogma, their approved version, their collection plates. In my opinion, if God IS, then direct contact (the mystical experience) should be every creature's birthright

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I don't know with certainty there is no god, but I believe there is none and we would be better off living on the side of skepticism. It makes more sense to me now, to consider that consciousness arose from natural processes rather than the other way around, i.e. that some kind of supernatural mind created the cosmos. The mystical experience is a psychological response to the infinite or anything that resists understanding. During crisis it motivated my natural instinct for self-preservation, and for that I'm grateful. The admission that I can't know and understand everything about the universe or myself doesn't make me an agnostic; I'm only trying to be reasonable and tolerant of people who believe otherwise.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Hey Karen, I hope my earlier reply didn't seem abrupt. For some reason, looking in my email this morning, I got your comment confused with the other one from somebody who knows me REALLY well, and we've had this discussion before, so my initial reaction was, "Why do I have to restate that I'm not an agnostic?" Anyway, I overcame my irritation before I replied, but probably didn't give it as much consideration as if I had realized the comment came from a new friend. :-)

Actually I agree with your assertion about the mystical experience. Whether it is divine contact or a profound psychological phenomenon, it is available to anyone who takes time to seek it. Religions that discourage it are practicing mind control.

[kwintt.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you clarified because it didn't seem like you (at least the you I'm happily getting to know) but I thought gee, I guess I pushed a hot button and didn't know it. But I wasn't offended. Part of the fun of getting to know someone else is learning about them, and it's so much harder in text than it is in a face to face conversation.
I should have known from your writing that you are so precise about language that when you said atheist you meant that ... I come across so many people on the web who use words loosely and interchangeably. But you are clearly not one of those.

And I agree back with you completely about mind control.
Conversing with you is helping to clarify what I mean, too. I am hopeful that there is a God because I guess I like the idea of some structure or order to it all. Randomness makes me anxious in the everyday sense and it makes me very anxious in the eternal sense. Yet I'm also drawn to Buddhism, which, although structured, is atheistic, there is only cause and effect, each event giving rise to later events; there is no entity in control but there is a sort of structure that predicts peace and justice will finally prevail. Have you read The Book (on the taboo against knowing who you are) by Alan Watts?
I guess how we interpret the mystical experience depends upon whether we are dualistic or non-dualistic. I try to be non-dualistic, but my Western roots keep pulling me back to dualism. Deism is a sort of half-way point between the two worlds, I suppose, in which "God" is unknown and unknowable. It might be Other or It might be us; we just don't know.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

As someone who tries to write quickly and intuitively, I sometimes make mistakes with words. Last year I described a series of escalators in an old department store as internecine. What my mind was grasping for was "arcane and labyrinthine." I never found a word that satisfied me, but to anyone unfamiliar with that department store, those escalators might indeed prove internecine! Precision aside, I am a word lover.

With respect to seeking God, I wonder whether the thing we're looking for is order or authority. As social creatures we naturally incline towards a heirarchy. It presents a problem when we assign moral value to the structure itself, rather than the community it is intended to support.

Nature is not altogether random. It is governed by certain clearly defined laws as well. Others we may never understand, although we're scraping at them. Chaos Theory, for example, has offered some tools for predicting outcomes in complex systems. As a philosophical naturalist, I believe in a fairly simple social order. Humans are social animals; the needs of the individual must be balanced against the needs of the community. Both are essential.

As for eternity, I admit death is my worst fear because I believe my consciousness will cease. But it encourages me to make the most of today. The easiest way to waste it is to succomb to a sense of unrealistic urgency. Anxiety is my great weakness. Lately I have been learning to let go and just Be. I imagine there is something Buddhist in that, although I have never studied Buddhism. I have never read Alan Watts either, but I'll put it on my list!

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Here's my take on the revelatory experieces - they are something we all have, or at least most of us; they are not wrong, or delusions, or juvenile. But what we make of them, what we interpret them to mean, I think can be all those things.

my decision to come out, another kind of born again experience, on January 28, 1996.

Here's what this lead me to ask: does that mean he relates to being gay as he did to Xty? Then I wondered, what did being *sexual replace in my life (I now relate to sexuality as I once related to ... what?). An interesting line of enquiry. It feels as if there's something to it.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

The social phenomenon of gayness in North American society can easily be compared to the Christian culture most of us were raised in. The born again experience and coming out are strikingly similar, at least they were for me. Other people have made the same comparison: a dramatic change in lifestyle, identity and self-expression. The right-wing political claims about the gay agenda are unjust and discriminatory, but not altogether unfounded. Gayness is a sociopolitical movement that manifests differently from how it would in a prevailing culture more tolerant of sexual expression.

That said, I don't relate to my sexuality the same way I did to Christianity, at least not anymore. For starters, I favour a heterogenous community precisely because my church community was homogenous and intolerant. I no longer consider my sexual preference the first defining fact of my identity. Allowing myself to express it has alleviated some of the urgency. This opens room for my creative pursuits and role as a father, along with relationships to specific people (lovers, family and friends) to take precedence.

Besides I always hated proselytizing. Now I'm not expected to convert anybody, be an activist or devote my abilities to a cause.

Christianity left a hole, though: the place where I once derived motivation from religious fervour and the sense of collective purpose. It enabled me to do all kinds of things that scared me, like proselytize, marry a woman, and continue working at a job I hated. Anxiety symptoms like mine are characteristic of people leaving cults. I never felt the same degree of support from the gay community, but maybe it's just as well. I've had to seek motivation within myself. We'll see how that turns out.