Beyond Belief: Reality Is Not a Worldview

A Sunday morning quasi-sermon on philosophical schizophrenia and waking up to what's real

Dear Living Dark readers,

I don’t usually send out posts on Sunday, but today I decided to share with you an effusion of words that just kind of happened when I sat down to write after meditating this morning. In honor of the day, I’ll label this a short sermon, though it’s really more like something I would say to you in conversation over lunch, if the talk turned intensely spiritual or philosophical and we were sharing the nitty gritty of our respective journeys and the wisdom to which they have led us.

Be advised that my next post after this one, perhaps to be published as early as tomorrow, will be Part 3 of my “Cosmic Creativity” series, which actually kind of dovetails with the “sermon” below—which may be why this all suggested itself today.

As recounted in detail in my recently published personal journals, for years I suffered from what I came to call philosophical schizophrenia. I shifted manically and helplessly from worldview to worldview, vividly grokking what it was like to see and know everything from a series of mutually exclusive perspectives.

From week to week, or day to day, or sometimes even from hour to hour, a new intellectual-emotional viewpoint would settle over me, and for a time I would inhabit the mindspace and viewpoint of an evangelical Christian. Or a committed agnostic. Or an atheist-materialist. Or a Sartrean existentialist. Or a neo-advaita nondualist. Or a philosophical egoist. Or an aesthetic idealist. Or even a lonely Lovecraftian rational ego stranded in a nightmare cosmos filled with dreadful forces and entities.. These and more. I would deeply feel the force of each perspective, and I would see how each made its own brand of coherent sense out of everything, giving a semi-coherent account of the world and my place in it.

I would also sense the insufficiency of each of these, not least because I knew that I would soon be seeing and feeling things differently.