I got this article from a site published by my friend, Gaston in his blog (gromero.blogspot.com) and found it to be quite interesting and gave me a new perspective to things. I think I'm hungry for God and I'm just filling it with all the wrong things. Pray for me.
Thunderbolts.info12-22-4
http://www.rense.com/general61/most.htm
Existential quandaries often create confusion and terror in human beings. That is why life's "big questions" are best pondered in a peaceful state of mind. Nothing is more dangerous than an anguished Homo sapiens asking, "Who am I? Why am I here? What does it all mean?" In a state of emotional agony, the answers one receives to these questions will be distorted by one's pain.
Since I've been in the public eye as an internet essayist, I've received hundreds of emails from people waxing philosophic about Life, the Universe, and Everything. Their insights are often very thoughtful and moving, but although I try to stay open to all input I receive, few have succeeded in shaking the foundation of my personal "paradigm."
About a week ago, I found myself in the midst of an intense spiritual crisis. I was confronted with the reality that a budding romantic "relationship" was nothing more than an unrequited fixation on my part. This sent me into a bit of a tailspin of depression and self-doubt. Simultaneously, I was inundated with dozens of emails in response to a philosophical piece I wrote entitled, "To Live Only For God." Most of the responses were positive, but some were challenging, and even hostile.
A few respondents took me to task over my assertion that God is neither insane nor cruel. They essentially claimed that no one has any objective, empirical proof that God is good, or even that he exists. Indeed, they argued, God's insanity and/or non-existence might go a long way towards explaining the perpetual fuckery of the human race.
Ordinarily, this brand of rhetoric has no sway over me. I know the arguments of atheists and materialists like the back of my own hand, and I've always found them amazingly shallow, illogical, and generally too absurd for words. The notion that life is an "accident," and human beings are collections of particles that somehow learned to think, feel, and love through the process of "evolution" has never inspired fear or doubt in me. But for the briefest of moments, the blackness of my thoughts pushed me into the abyss, and I pondered the question: WHAT IF THERE IS NO GOD?
Uh...Whoops...Oh shit....
What followed this minor indulgence of dark curiosity was a colossal mind-fuck straight out of a Twilight Zone episode. For an hour or a day, I felt like an astronaut expelled into the barren regions of space. The world turned into an alien environment, one as hostile as it was insane. I considered the hypothetical ramifications of God's non-existence, and I decided unequivocally that there is no word in King's English to describe the awfulness of this scenario.
Never mind that "no God" would almost certainly mean "no soul," and therefore, the end of my body would be the end of my consciousness -- i.e., the extinguishing of everything in the Universe. I suppose one could cope with this travesty by holding out hope -- albeit quite flimsy -- that science might one day find the key to physical immortality. But I could NEVER cope with the fact that "no God" and "no soul" would ultimately mean the non-existence of love.
Think of it. If you are nothing more than the sum of your physical parts, what you experience as "love" is just a series of chemical reactions in the brain, a totally inane and animalistic "biological imperative" necessary for the propagation of the species. A parent's love for his or her child would be of no greater integrity than an amoeba's instinct to reproduce asexually. I suppose this occurred through billions of years of evolution, as our spongy little gray matters somehow developed the concept of "love" as a defense against life's inherent meaninglessness, to prevent us from destroying one another.
Of course, there is no REAL reason to love an animated sack of muck and water, which, let's face it, is what we are if the atheists are correct. We would only love each other out of brute NECESSITY. Oh, and also, it might be "pleasurable" for some people.
Additionally, if there is no God, we can pretty much throw into the crapper the whole concept that "all men are created equal." How can a sack of muck (a human being) be intrinsically equal to another sack of muck? Atheists have no answer to this, other than to say that THINGS WORK BETTER when we think this way.
And what of creative expression and other intangible beauties and joys of life -- music, art, literature, and all forms of subjective truth? These things also have no intrinsic value, but are just the inevitable by-products of highly evolved brains with the biological need to "entertain" themselves.
Furthermore, if there is no God, then we are truly ALL ALONE on this flying speck of dust and water. No order, no meaning, and no help from anyone or anything. Instead, we are left with random chaos, animalistic instinct, and every man for his self. Shit happens, and only fools weep because of it.
These torturous fictions repeated in my head for a seeming eternity. I never really bought into this irrational train of thought, but it did manage to put me in a black mood and ruin my day. Eventually, I sobered up, and these absurd ponderings retreated to the darkness from whence they came. And it became obvious to me why I wasted my time entertaining something I KNOW to be false.
The truth is, although I am a joyous person by nature, I can barely remember the last time I felt genuine gratitude. How long has it been since I uttered the phrase, "Thank you, Father," without a grimace on my lips? Life has become a complaint, because I cannot seem to shake this feeling of LACK.
I can write of concepts like Oneness and Unity from years of study and personal experience, but alas, for me, they are just concepts. However, this was not always so. In my adolescence, I consciously discovered Oneness, and I embraced it with the joy and abandon of a child at play. But as I grew older, my experiences and revelations cemented into a thought system, and I could not think of Oneness without thinking of LOSS -- as in, what must I sacrifice in order to achieve union with God? Worldly desires? Personal ambitions? Material acquisitions? Romantic love? These are not things any human being would abdicate without a sense of bitterness.
A God who would demand sacrifice is as frightening as the concept of God's non-existence. A God who would demand sacrifice might well be insane.
My only solution to this terrible fear of loss is to remember the occasions I saw and embraced the Truth - that God only wants GOOD for all of his children. This was not a conclusion I came to conceptually. It was an inarguable fact, as I bathed in God's love like an electric baptism. And upon this experience, I knew that true Oneness with God does not entail sacrifice.
In subsequent years, my intellect (a tool of the ego) has created phantoms and bogeymen to try to frighten me off my path. I can only live without fear of these imaginary monsters when I surrender to the light of God's love. In this infinite aurora, everything real is illuminated, and nothing unreal can hide.
