Lessons Learned in Negotiating the Landscape of Consciousness

Following the destruction of my dominant paradigm in 2004—the year of my divorce, the year of my losing my doctoral program for the second time, the year of my losing nearly all of my worldly belongings save the few personal belongings I had with me and my car (the only things my ex-wife had not insisted I do away with in pseudo-obedience to a confused understanding of and allegiance to god)—I withdrew into a deep depression.  I was homeless, jobless (as my then employment had come to an end given closure of funding)—so I scrambled for a hole of an apartment and the first job I could find within a foreign space—within the private sector, an existence so starkly different from what I had just known in academia, that I look back on it with gratitude as being instrumental in pulling me out of the pit into which I had descended.

I did not know anything anymore.  I had no friends.  I had no family that I had not horribly alienated and estranged.  All that I had was connected to my ex-wife and her family and she chose to walk away despite all my efforts to keep that home together—according to my understanding of what god wanted of me—in a context that was so far beyond fundamentalist doctrine as to be nearly militant.  There was little joy in that existence with my ex-wife and her family—it was, for them, only a means to an end—of final justification with god.  But that family trended so dangerously close to an exclusive fundamentalist paradigm—they never saw it happen—such vitriol and hatred for all they considered “other”—and one day, I became the “other”.

I had failed—I had done something wrong—no, it was deeper than that—I had never actually done “it” right—“it” being the proper building of a relationship with the “real” god.  The problem was, I still didn’t know who that was—it was 2005 and I had strived to know this divine expression for nearly eight years.  I had forsaken all of the other knowledge I had gained, the experiences that had formed me—I put all that away and chose to be “reborn” into this paradigm—but it did not deliver—not relative to gain or blessing or purpose or promise, etc.—no, just in terms of knowing god—that was the initial promise and one that was assured everyone taking this step toward Him—but it didn’t happen.  I was often accused of letting my mind get in the way—strangely, this is a very Eastern way of looking at things—mind, ego getting in the way of knowing truth—the true Self.  But that’s for another time…

As the days and weeks passed, I realized that something was stirring deep beneath that depression and hopelessness I was feeling—it was a sensation of “damn it, the sun keeps rising each day and life barrels forward…what the hell am I doing? This isn’t me…it was never me…all I’ve ever done is seek what lies just beyond my reach…I never let someone else dictate my journey…I am a seeker first…always relying on that internal compass…that god gave me? I don’t know…but I know what I have to do…”

And with that, I re-embarked on the journey that had been so abruptly halted eight years past—at age 32 I started back down the road I was on at age 25.  I was alone, cast out, left behind…but I was me again—I struggled forward with the perfect ability to soar or screw it all up according to my own volition—no one to blame or credit but myself.  And this is the rough rubric I utilized to move forward toward the man I now know—what I can remember of it nearly a decade later…

A path of pure seeking: these are the rules to a new journey…one that is new for each of us, but also the oldest journey human beings have taken from the first moment the first hominid became aware of self and place in the world…that individual left the forest and caught sight of the horizon…it seemed different on that day than ever before…it seemed to be imbued with a new sensation…what was it? Promise.  But there was also fear…things did not come naturally anymore…there was the experience of fear for the first time…of something that did not present immediate threat or danger…no, there was now fear of the unknown.  And so began this journey to know the unknown…to make it familiar and able to be possessed, organized, codified…personified.  This new creature embarked on a journey along with many others…some sought the path of greatest and immediate comfort…others sought to proceed fully into the cloud of unknowing.   That is my path…and I have some recommendations for those who travel that path…and I hope that you will find them useful as you travel that path as well.

Direct experience: I made a commitment to first and foremost utilize all the senses at my disposal to embrace the process of sensemaking as I negotiated the world in which I existed.  For too long I had relied on the reports of people who claimed to know some absolute truth and substantiated such claims through their charisma.  I may have even related to certain people in certain ways, but my experience is my own and it is what can ultimately serve as the evaluative criteria that can help me move forward with the confidence of having made a sound decision relative to that experience.

Pattern seeking: I became aware early on in my life that I was especially adept at identifying patterns—in communication, emotional response, human decision-making—even certain natural patterns that exist throughout the environment.  During my time committed to fundamentalist thought, I put all these considerations aside and especially turned my gaze from the patterns that continued to manifest all around me.  After the collapse of my world at that time, I realized that the only way for me to commit wholly to the fundamentalist lines of thinking with which I was presented was to ignore the natural patterns and their respective outcomes, of which I was consistently aware.  I no longer wanted to commit to a pathway that ran contrary to my natural instinct—some would say god-given instinct.  It is easy to deceive the mind, less so the natural senses and the innate ability we all have for self-preservation—that is what allows us to see the patterns that highlight what can benefit or harm us.

Symbolism: my time in fundamentalist thought revealed a great propensity that such thinkers have for the literal—not only in scripture or doctrine, but in everything that they choose to take in.  However, when it comes to so much of what has been added to the human lexicon since recorded history commenced—the symbolic has a great role in how we make meaning of our condition and place in this world.  The mysteries of the world and of life have been best described and most clearly understood in the symbolic sense—even the divine has been comprehensible when viewed in the relative and symbolic sense.  It is only in the literal—the demand for all things to be made plain, identified and explicable in human terms, that we fail to grasp the real mystery—that we fail to know the true nature of “god.”

The power of the story: related in many ways to the concept of symbolism, the power of the story is a great human asset and rite—I regretted losing this level of enjoyment I had with the great stories of the world and the mysteries they revealed about what lies before and beyond.  Even the bible, such a rich literary experience, full of terrors and wonders—was made shallow and two-dimensional through the fundamentalist lens.  Stories are powerful in that they help us come to terms with that which we cannot understand—we should never forget their power.

The universal in human experience: when I existed in the context of fundamentalist thought, I lost my relationship with the universal in the human condition—that which connects me with everyone else—some would say that this is the spirit of god that binds us all together—I lost this and am now convinced that the fundamentalist ideal is the one most devoid of spirit.  That is why there is so much yearning and tension marking that paradigm—and so little natural happiness—because there is so much discomfort with the unknown, with mystery—and ultimately with anything that is “other.”  There are a great many people out there, all of whom are god’s creation—and regardless of your perspective or world view, they should all be approached with curiosity and wonder—not with an either/or clause of submission/acceptance or rejection. Other forms of thinking have a great deal to offer us and can even help validate or deconstruct our ways of thinking.  What are we afraid of? Our paradigms should all inspire us with confidence—that they can stand up to the test of the human condition in its entirety.

Follow no person: immediately following the collapse of my life, I committed to never again subjugate myself to the will or opinion of another person–there had been entirely too much compromise on my part in this regard–willingly surrendering myself to someone else’s perspective either because I thought they might have answers to the questions I had been asking or because I thought god had appointed that person as someone worthy of my followership.  It was with great loss that I learned the lesson that no person is ever in possession of any knowledge or wisdom beyond that which is contained in the collective human consciousness–and if anyone is doing anything more than offering a helping hand to a fellow traveler on the journey, then this is, at the very least, a dubious venture.

Constant comparative analysis: the methodological foundation I built through my graduate scholarship has helped me to better assess, evaluate and process the information I have gained since my personal paradigm shift. In coming out of the fundamentalist paradigm, I was able to see that I not only had the benefit of direct experience to empirically temper the information I received about the metaphysical, but I also had the benefit of the knowledge base I had amassed over the course of my lifetime—and with this experience base, I was able to use the method of constant comparative analysis to refine the inputs I was receiving and to assign value to this content. Previously, I had made it a habit to go against my better judgment or the questions that continuously arose in response to dubious teachings in order to accept these on faith. I didn’t really understand what this meant at the time—and I acted on flawed understanding. Faith is actually the bridge between what we reasonably know and what is speculated about or unknown—in the direction that what we reasonably know is pointing. It is NOT blind obedience—especially to the wills of other human beings.

Emergent themes: looking to the themes that arise out of a consistent examination of one’s experience is an extension of the constant comparative method of analysis. We may think we know something objectively, but this method of analysis takes into account all of what we think we know and have experienced and helps us to derive the truth of our lives from that data. This is the approach toward objective consideration of our selves—and it often yields surprising, if not unacceptable, insights into our character. My foray into this area of self-examination yielded a terrible truth—that I had stubbornly ignored the sum of who I was in order to embrace a flawed concept of who someone else wanted me to be—all because I wanted the apparent ease and comfort of life in the fundamentalist paradigm—all questions answered, no mysteries present—the path laid out comfortably and assuredly ahead of all of us. This was not the truth—and my own thematic analysis told me as much.

Follow the emotion: in reflecting on my experience in fundamentalism and juxtaposing it with other experiences I had, whether professional, social or familial—I came to realize that emotion is an excellent indicator that reveals why someone may be committed to a particular thing. It may be the emotion of intense gratitude and devotion for a saving grace—or it may be the emotion of fear of consequence—but there is always some emotion or combination thereof that can be traced back to an individual’s decidedly subjective interpretation of things and decision-making toward what they claim to be absolute and objectively embraced. In the circumstance I was in, I knew these emotions well in all the people around me—bitterness, needing validation, hopelessness, wanting to be rescued, feeling like something was owed—and yet the paradigm was often questionably reducible to a surface level of apparent pure love and gratitude toward a divine hand overlaying a substratum of intense desire for god to do something for the person. Was this the sum of god?

Follow the power: in a similar vein, an awareness of the dynamics of power lost or gained by an individual or group becomes a telling indicator of the validity of any particular claim regarding omnipotence, divinity or truth. Some people I’ve known utilized god in a very specific way when they saw that I was hungry for a knowledge of god—they wanted to be able to control a person and never feel out of control in response to that person’s straying or abuse or violence—so they used a distinctly fundamentalist portrayal of god to keep this man in line for years on end—squashing any aspect of questioning or free thinking with accusations of disobedience or apostasy. It worked—only too well—and these people possessed the power. I thought it strange that their exercise of power in this decidedly unethical way was not in any way exposed through reading after reading of doctrine—rather, their approach was maintained through doctrine and pulpit alike. Such is the power of these various aspects of religious agency.

Beware the absolute: Lao-Tzu wrote, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name; the nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the named is the mother of myriad things”. This represents a foundational concept of Eastern thought—that human beings are to be comfortable with the expanse of the infinite and the infinite mysteries therein—that it is not for us to know the unknowable and that any claims to that end are dubious and to be questioned. Such a perspective also removes the personal dynamic between god and man that is so often described in fundamentalist teaching as god’s personal direction of your life and responsiveness to every whim or desire you express. This, however, is an inherently flawed relational dynamic—it places an infinite god in a finite context—the context of our individual perception. And this leaves us all at a loss when god seemingly does not hear us or answer our pleadings—but how can we know the larger plan and reasoning behind such decision-making? Doctrine says that our minds cannot exist on the same level as the divine—and yet we persist to think we know god based on a finite set of words penned by human beings. I question the perception of the divine personified as a father figure rather than something transcendent beyond this world—it is the contemplation of the transcendent that is the transcendent experience for us—not an explicit knowledge of a man sitting astride a cloud—I don’t want god to be anything like a human being—that terrifies me.

Rely on evidence: I list this theme separately from the methodological themes because it bears mentioning in the context of people positing religious doctrine as evidence for god—this is tautology in its purest form. When I began to rely on evidence-based examination, I started to consider doctrine in larger contexts—comparative religion, global belief systems, historical narratives, philosophical treatises, scientific knowledge, etc. This cross-functional examination is what provided the evidentiary basis for my decisions of the past several years not to become atheist or anti-theist, solely embrace scientism or technocratic ideals, not to become pantheist or monotheist or claim one religion over another. I simply decided to make the transcendent the object of my study and examine the bridge of belief that connects human beings to that hypothesized transcendent space. It is in this context of inquiry that I do not want to be exclusionary—it is not a reflection of my personal belief—but I cannot inquire into the belief systems of Muslims, atheists or Jains if I have a presupposition that they are all doomed to hell—or more simply put, that they are wrong.

Expect to be wrong: and this is the correlate to the idea presented above—I do not expect others to be wrong, nor do I operate on the presumption that I am right. The bible, or any other such book, can stand on its own merit—I’m not sure why so many fundamentalist thinkers have made careers out of defending doctrine, as apologists—such texts should not need defense, but should be able to withstand the strictest scrutiny. If I believe a thing, it should be testable and falsifiable—otherwise, I am doomed to believe something that is as impermanent as a cloud.

Never stop wondering: the problem with my time in a fundamentalist paradigm is that it and the people that comprised it consistently robbed me of the joy of wonder. No contemplative approaches or questions were allowed—if I wondered about anything, it was immediately met with a bible verse and an expectation that my questioning should be immediately sated. Any wonder that was ever expressed was done as a function of pre-written, pre-approved doctrine either quoted or turned into song. No original poetic expression was allowed or appreciated—just simply judged as to its doctrinal merit relative to its biblical accuracy.

Never accept something when afraid: I learned three lessons throughout the course of my life relative to fear: 1) never run when you are afraid; 2) never act when you are afraid; and 3) never believe because you are afraid not to. This last premise would have served me well prior to my indoctrination into the fundamentalist paradigm—but alas, I ignored this premise and let myself be slowly enchanted by the promise of salvation from the horrors of a fate that my savior created as a punishment for my not accepting the proffered saving grace. What an extremely odd way to go about relating to your “creation”…