This post is probably going to be pretty long, sorry about that, but I have a lot of catching up to do.
I have explored a wide variety of paths: Christianity, Daoism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Materialistic Athiesm. You can look over my blogs from the past and see at least part of that journey. I think the normal human reaction to this is "that poor nutjob can't figure out what he is." And that might be a perfectly valid observation, if peeling through the layers of cultural obfuscation and confusion in this to some extent inherently mysterious and baffling world was something you could reasonably do at one go. As if you could figure out the Universe over breakfast. And then after breakfast you could clap yourself on the back and say, "job well done mate, check that one off the list" and go on to something else, something more serious like making money or keeping up with the joneses or banging your secretary. ;)
It is a measure of how seriously I take the process of sorting out our place in things, that I was willing to ingest and be ingested by many varying points of view, often at odds with each other. And of course I acknowledge now that it is not a process that will ever be finished, but it doesn't mean that nothing is accomplished either. We often have an "end-result" orientation in this culture, a linear strand of time and effort with a termination point, and in this case there is no "end-result." It is not so much a house to be built, and then one day the house is finished. It is a vegetable garden that you have to keep putting lime and poop and human toil into and there is not in the long scheme of things an end state, as if you will one day give up eating vegetables. Even if you abandon the garden, the garden continues without you for as long as there is soil there.
I do not denigrate any of the states that I have passed through. I do not look at my time as a Christian for instance and go, "that was a waste," because it wasn't a waste. I learned a great deal. Sure, I wouldn't mind the prospect of being able to insert my older and wiser self into my body as it was at age 20 so that I would have more time for what I am doing now, but that's not how it works. But it wasn't wasted time, it was useful time. Particularly considering how deeply confused the present time is and Western culture at this time is, one should expect to have to explore a lot of side alleys to get somewhere.
And regardless of where I was, there were these very altered states of consciousness. In fact, as a Christian I had some pretty epic altered states going on, which is probably why I liked it, lol. There is a huge difference between going to church to talk about God, and going to church to meet God, and I was doing a lot of the latter, and it is a shame that more Christians don't do that. What "God" was it that I was actually meeting there? I think that is an extremely difficult thing to answer, but I don't think that my state of mind was very common among those who shared the pews with me. I don't think that most people go to church to "trip out", excusing the crass phraseology, while I most definitely did go to church to experience a very very altered state. Wilhelm Reich spoke of these sort of cramps and stutters in our energy flow, ways in which we ourselves break up and sort of try to stop the outflow of energy, and this sort of stuttered crippled energy flow is for most of us sort of the normal state. Well in many of these altered states, that flow for me seems to be unimpeded, as if we are most of the time trying to make music with a broken kazoo, and then suddenly we are a whole brass section, trumpets blaring. That seems part of what was going on, and for that to happen it requires that the "inside" us and the "outside" world have to be restored to a continuous state in some way. To be united and made whole. Then I interpreted the other part of the whole (besides me) as God: now I would say the Universe.
Of course conflict, division, distinction, is as valid a modality of life as harmony and unity, but the problem is that we have forgotten how to unify. Science breaks things down into finer and finer distinctions, which is fine for its own purposes, but you will never make a whole frog out of a dissected one. Nature has a nervous system of its own as it were, that we are a part of, but in modern society we don't know how to hook back into it anymore. As a result, we have this ecological crisis which is not merely an ecological crisis of plants and animals but of us as well. We've gotten sick too, very sick, and if Nature is running a fever we certainly are as well. We've lost connection to the non-human world, and as a result we gaze ever deeper into the navel of money and power which are the new gods of humanity. Replacing the old gods of forest and stream and air. Even our relations to each other, never mind Nature, have become divided and unwell, spawning ever more psychopaths in its wake, because the failure is in some sense inherently psychopathic. To be a psychopath is to not recognize the value or humanity of another person and view them as a means to our ends. For a long time, we have not recognized the value or "personhood" if you will of the natural world, that the trees and animals have their own interior reality and their own value apart from their utility to us. So it is no wonder that the knife is finally turned on ourselves now.
There are certain persons who were probably born to have the function of a bridge between the human and non-human world, ones whose nervous systems are attuned to things most people can't experience. This is a blessing and a curse, because ones such as these are never fully at home in the human world or among humans, because in a sense they aren't entirely human. The way this sometimes used to be expressed in ancient Europe was through the idea that someone had some fay blood in them, the blood of the elves, or that they were actually a fairy baby that had been swapped for a human one. All by way of trying to explain how some humans seem to be set up as a bridge of sorts between the human and non-human community. The fey and the elves were a holdover from the nature spirits of the ancient past, the spirits of the trees and the forest and the lakes and streams. In other places, such people might become shamans or medicine men or whatever phraseology you prefer. I wasn't born in such a place, I was born in Texas, in America, in the 20th Century, and so I had to spend a lot of my life figuring out why my interior experience was so different from what I saw, and from what the other humans were doing.
So here I am now, a late middle-aged man with one heart attack under his belt, trying to figure out if there is anything I can do to help contribute to the cause of putting Humpty Dumpty together again. But firstly and mostly, to try to saturate into these mysteries. To ingest them and be ingested by them.
