Brief overview of my spirituality

 A brief overview of my spirituality, lifted from a Facebook post (or two).

Religiously, I'm a Unitarian Universalist. That's the church I go to and best symbolizes what I'm teaching my kids. Spiritually, I'm a radical polytheist with humanist tendencies.

I believe in an infinite number of deities with an infinite number of forms and an infinite number of names. Do you want a deity that responds to the name "God" that hates pinball but loves trashy romance novels? I believe such a deity exists. Do you want one that hates all the same people you hate? That one's easy, too. (I caught an episode of "Toddlers and Tiaras" where a woman basically said she prayed until she found a God who wanted her toddler to compete. I totally believe such deities exist.) Who do you talk to when you pray? You talk to the deity that you know most clearly. A person full of rage will find plenty of deities full of rage, and plenty of those willing to be the deity they're looking for.

On a very core level, I don't believe humans are unique. This means, it isn't just humans that have spirits and deities, it is everything. The interaction between things in the form of systems and relationships also have spirits and deities. Perhaps that's the ecology of a small isolated valley. Perhaps that's your own circulatory system. Everything has a soul and deities from your individual cells through the complex interactions of your clan interacting with the environment or other clans. Of note, this means I believe that all spermatozoa and ova have individual souls (and deities) well before fertilization. I'm still pro-choice, however, because none of this is unique or special in any way. The individual grains of rice that go in to Rice Krispies have souls, too, just as Rice Krispie squares have souls. Do they cease having the souls of rice, once they become puffed, once they join together as a Rice Krispie treat, when a piece of puffed rice is cut when slicing individual squares? For me, that's a legitimate question.

And, I believe in things like past-life experiences without believing in even a separable soul, let alone a "real" past life. There's a notion that there is only One, and all of reality is just the One trying it understand itself. If everything is ultimately the same Oneness, then why would the ability to remember someone else's memories as if they were your own require actually owning that person's life? It's an implicit part of being an aspect of the One. I've also experienced a vision in dream that further elaborated upon how this is the case.

I don't believe in an "after" life, so much as I believe in multidimensional beings, parts of which transcend space and time. So our spiritual aspect can experience what we might consider an "afterlife" concurrent to our physical lives being all full of blood and poop. It goes one better, I believe that on a person's death, their reference for time becomes reset to the point of their birth. In effect, they are reincarnated to the same body. They're free to make other choices, but without knowing what happened previously, they rarely make different decisions. Then deja vu becomes a memory of a previous iteration seeping through. This has direct consequences for my views on depression-induced-suicide as well as terminal/assisted-suicide. In one case, pain can only be transcended by living, and in the other a return to a joyful childhood is nothing to spurn.

I have a simple concise reason for life, the universe and everything. It is universal and inescapable: To experience and to be experienced. If your life amounts to a repository of experiences for the universe, what sorts of experiences do you want to store? What do you cherish and cling to?

I firmly believe in a biological basis for what could be called the soul. (Technically, this makes the "soul" references previously states more accurately described as "spirit". Changing that language in myself to be more clear is still a challenge.) What is a person's soul? It is that which would still be like the person if the memories and experiences were stripped away. Two people with the same soul would be a lot alike, even if they lived in different places and times. It amounts to humans being "value engines", and the formula with which we assign value to things is our soul. I know my own formula, and it is simple enough that it could easily be encoded in my DNA, if not an expression of the DNA combined with developmental hormones.

More recently, and a bit more surprising for me, I've stumbled upon what could be a biological basis for the concept of original sin.

Some of these things are, for me, decades-old ideas that I've lived with and that have gradually permeated deeper and deeper in to my being. Even I didn't really believe some of them when I stumbled upon them. It was just a matter of, "Woah. This idea has merit, even if it is totally wrong, the fruit of it is good."

The Reason for Life, the Universe, and Everything (part 3): Finding personal meaning

In my previous two posts, I covered the reason for life, the universe, and everything, then explained that you really don't have many limits on what you do with it.

As for a universal meaning, it is simple and works well for both mundane and sublime lifestyles. Anything beyond that is purely personal. You're not really limited to anything. You could dedicate your life to exploring the delights of the most exotic McDonald's locations on the planet. You could dedicate your life to proclaiming the glories of a deity. You could dedicate your life to exotic encounters of food or flesh.

The Ethic of Reciprocity: This is a commonly known in Western cultures as "The Golden Rule". Treat others as you would like to be treated. Do not treat others as you would not like to be treated. This is a near universal idea. It is a good guiding principle when searching for your own personal meaning. If your personal meaning wouldn't be something you enjoyed if someone else took it up, perhaps you should try to find another one.

The Meek may have Mighty Friends: This is a simple variation of the ethic of reciprocity. Ignoring any thoughts of karma, or mystical energies finding their way back to you, there is the simple fact that folks have friends. Even folks that may seem worthless in your eyes, may have powerful allies. It pays to expect everyone to have mighty friends. More than that, if you want to increase your friends, it pays to become a mighty friend to those that currently appear meek. You just may become friends not only with the meek person, but indirectly with that person's mighty friends.

Here's something I try to live by: We start with an egocentric universe, then twist it. With an egocentric personal meaning the world, the universe, even all of existence exists for you, to test you, to support you, to add to your own personal greatness. But, what if there was a single person that was the reason for the universe, but instead of that person being you, you were a minor character in that person's life... You would encounter that person perhaps once in your entire life. What kind of character would you be in that story? Would you be the surprising caring hand, reaching out to the person just when things looked darkest? Would you be a simple manifestation of an uncaring universe, ready to say "no" and close doors just because you can?

Do I have a personal meaning? Yes. I advocate the worship of small deities. I also like to create things with my mind. I've had dreams of creating universes, and have current aspirations to be an author.


Next week, I'm going to tell a true story relating to my "the meek may have mighty friends" comment.

The Reason for Life, the Universe, and Everything (part 1)

I've mentioned before that I have a Reason for Life, the Universe, and Everything.

More than that, to be truly universal, it can't be something restricted to humanity. Additionally, it must be inescapable. If it is the reason for everything, then it makes sense that it would be something that is unavoidable -- everything always does does it regardless of personal inclination or desire.

Quite simply, I believe the purpose of everything is to experience and to be experienced.

This is inescapable: We say that something exists when it can be experienced. If something can not be experienced in any way then few would doubt that the thing does not exist.

This is universal: Nothing about this is unique to life, let alone humanity.

It is unavoidable: Neither the hardest rocks nor the folks crippled by anxiety and stuck at home can avoid experiencing and being experienced. It isn't like death and most folks avoid it most days, though they know that one day their time will come.

Are you going to fill your life with the regularity of the tides? Are you going to fill it with new and unusual experiences? In the end both are equivalent. You, like everything else, collect experiences until at last you die. Some of us have a better memory of our experiences, but we all experience and are experienced.

This reason for existence seems self-evident upon reflection, what with some religions believing that the universe exists as such specifically to experience itself. If differentiation happened specifically for self-experience, then of course the reason for existence is so that we can experience and be experienced.

I suspect the only thing that prevented it from being self-evident was my Western upbringing, and the thing that gets a lot of people: Wanting the search, but not wanting the answer. It isn't particularly an uplifting reason for existence. It is easy to see where a person might over-think the question in an attempt to find a happier (or otherwise "better") answer.

(In the next part, I'll mention where debauchery comes in.)