September 12th 2009 : permalink : Comments
jnana yoga: the way to god through knowledge
I was a full-blown atheist during the summer before my freshman year in high school. I remember doing a lot of rage blogging against Christianity at the time. This changed when I had the dream a week or so after school started. It was my first and only time dying in a dream and when I did, there was nothing. I spent the rest of the dream in nothing and as I slept, I was aware of this. It scared the shit out of me. That morning I decided I would turn to religion.
I went to my English teacher (and now friend) Evonne because she mentioned she graduated with a degree in Philosophy and was working on Theology masters. I asked her if she had any literature on Buddhism because I was interested in it as a candidate for religion. She did have some reading material for me and after I read through it, we started to have discussions afterschool. She was my introduction to philosophy as I learned about Rene Descartes.
“Cogito ergo sum” opened up a new way of thinking for me and soon I found myself unable to believe that anything, or even anybody, is real. I became a solipsist. Solipsism is the philosophical idea that one’s own mind is all that exists. The natural reaction of anybody around me at the time was to argue for their existence, since I was claiming they were just a product of my mind along with the rest of the world. I basically claimed my inner I to be God.
I quickly learned that people don’t really take too lightly to being called imaginary. This lasted for a while, actually. During my junior year, I was a TA for Evonne and during second semester she got a student teacher named David who told me to check out Alan Watts’ lectures and the book I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta. At the moment I was reading some essays about The Matrix trilogy and there was one about its Islamic influences.
The concept of a single entity at the core of everything and then every part of the universe, be it you or me, being that entity and the separation (that is, the belief that we are not one) being an illusion (“maya”) was extremely interesting to me. Around this time I was also discovering for myself string theory and multiple dimensions. My love for mathematics attracted me to Imagining the Tenth Dimension by Rob Bryanton.
Joseph Campbell recognized the reoccurring monomyth (also known as The Hero’s Journey) in fairy tales, myths, stories (hell, even Voltaire’s Candide follows it perfectly) across many different cultures. Similarly, Middle Eastern cosmology, Eastern thought, and Western advances in quantum mechanics all made sense to me.
I would tell my friends about God in an inaccessible dimension, perhaps being the dimension itself, like a seed from which a tree emerges which begets branches which beget branches and so on and so forth (each branch being an abstraction, a new dimension, a subset of God) until we get to the leafs: parallel universes and in those leafs, the cells are us.
I quickly learned that people don’t really take too lightly to being leaf cells, metaphorical or not. I evolved from atheist to theist but my journey was not over. I arrived to the final stage in my senior year AP English Literature class taught by Siegfried Dominique De la Cruz Abuel II who, like Evonne, became my friend later after many afterschool discussions. While my ideas were interesting and amusing, as all religious ideas are (“for it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it,” said Aristotle), existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit and absurdism of Albert Camus’ The Stranger conquered all. Not singlehandedly, for their way was paved for them by Kurt Vonnegut’s books and interviews.
I concluded: I don’t need God. There might be one, but there’s no way for me to be sure of it. Why not just live a good life without an intolerant dogma and be kind to others?
tags: meditationgoddeathphilosophy“Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists.
– Kurt Vonnegut at Isaac Asimov’s memorial service, A Man Without A Country (2005)
