My Name Is James and I’m Too Smart for My Own God

Ok, so in the midst of talking out some existential malaise catalyzed by a minor psychedelic crisis of, well, faith I suppose, my housemate says:

“My name is James and I’m too smart for my own God”

Her comments were satirical obviously, but relevant, as satire should be. The process I was going through was essentially the realization that if I am to cultivate my relationship to God in a way that allows me to directly experience a sense of “special relationship to it” then I need to establish some type of psychological construct in order to frame, or create a sense of specialness.

My challenge in that moment stems from a powerful realization that arose in my journeys with Ayahuasca. There is no thing in particular in existence that is special; special doesn’t exist in Truth or God. There is no special. There is only God, which is extremely ordinary. All belief systems are essentially false constructions of the human ego attempting to transcend its sense of isolation from the divine through building communities that surround a specific method of relating to God: an essence of self that is always present just not always ‘with’ the ego. This awareness is in regular conflict with my ego’s desire to create false spectrums of special to measure itself, and believe that the fallacious constructs that explain that spectrum are imperially valid. It also presents a strange challenge for my relationship to ‘God’.

With this no-special, no-universally-valid-belief-systems awareness, I need to create some type of construct to enable creation of special in order to feel the relative human experience of special in relation to ‘God’. Essentially, I need to build a fallacious belief system to objectify the expression of myself I call “God” in order to create the opportunity to relate to it. And in order for it to work, I need to hold faith in the validity of the belief systems that found the manner in which I relate to it. But I know that I am making it up and so it doesn’t work because in order for the construct to work, I need to believe in it. As an expression of the divine creative principle interacting with only itself, how do I set up the psychological constructs to forget that it is all me in order to create a special sense of relationship to myself when I know it is all made up? Do you see my challenge?

This brought me perspective as to why monotheistic religions stress that no other God should be worshiped and have multiple constructs of punishment and reward to maintain this. It creates a psycho-emotional imperative for the specific construct which creates the illusion of specialness for the believer.

Again, the problem is that I know it’s all illusory human ego constructs, so what do I do? Thus = “My name is James and I’m too smart for my own God”.

The potential for cynicism here is vast, but for the most part I feel empowered. Most people spend their lives just believing in God the way they were shown, others believing in their non-belief, others have an understanding based on personal experiences and navigate the implications. Somehow it feels good to be on the latter and navigating the process of blending my rational, no-bullshit understanding of human psychology with an innate human drive to connect with the essence from which all life precipitates.

…..

But then again, maybe all of this is solved by letting go of trying to understand and just being an expression of God from within and letting it reflect back in my perception of the world?

Read Part 2 to this entry here