The Abyss of Doubt

From faith to philosophical free-fall (Parts 1 and 2 of "My Search for Certainty")

Dear Living Dark reader,

Have you ever been excited by an old manuscript discovery when the manuscript was written by you? This happened to me recently when I stumbled across a nearly ten thousand-word essay that I wrote almost thirty years ago for an audience of one. Or maybe an audience of two, if you count me.

In February and March 1996, when I was in my mid-twenties, about a year and a half after writing my first horror story, “Teeth” (which was not published until 1998), and six months before beginning my master’s degree in religious studies, and in the midst of my prolonged period of suffering from psychologically and spiritually debilitating sleep paralysis attacks, I produced a 33-page document that I titled “My Search for Certainty.” This was in response to a request from a new friend whom I had met the previous summer at a Southern Baptist church in rural Southwest Missouri that my wife and I had begun attending. He and I quickly discovered a common interest in books, ideas, and the development of a self-aware understanding of self and reality, and we began to engage in an ongoing philosophical conversation.

Back then I tended to verbally footnote almost everything I said in such discussions, giving correct attribution to the sources of my ideas, and quoting many passages from books almost verbatim, encompassing the likes of Meister Eckhart, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Lovecraft, Huston Smith, Robert Anton Wilson, Walker Percy, Richard Tarnas, Theodore Roszak, Alan Watts, Descartes, Dogen, C. S. Lewis, E. F. Schumacher, the Bible, and more.

At last, having endured my manically multiple-sourced style of conversation for several months, my friend challenged me to state what I, as an individual, really thought and believed on my own, apart from the arsenal of notions that I had acquired from other people and that I could whip out at a moment's notice. This landed with a sense of “challenge accepted,” and for the next two weeks I poured myself into formulating my answer. The project utterly consumed my energy and attention. The result was “My Search for Certainty.”

Up until a week ago, I thought this document was lost. In fact, I said as much a couple of years ago in a footnote to one of the entries in my first volume of collected journals.¹

But last week as I was digging through an ancient folder full of papers that has been stacked beneath a music cabinet in my office, and that I have moved to several different houses and cities over the years, I was astonished to find the complete manuscript, written on my old Apple computer, whose model name and number I have since forgotten, and printed—if I recall correctly—on a printer at Southwest State Missouri University (today Missouri State University), where I was then in my second month of working as a media producer after having spent the previous three years employed as a videographer in the live music shows in Branson.

Those who have read volume 1 of my journals will recognize the headspace and spiritual condition in which and from which I wrote “My Search for Certainty.” The essay is an autobiographical record of my early journey through what I have sometimes called philosophical schizophrenia, the piercing inability to believe or disbelieve in any philosophy or worldview, combined with an equally piercing drive and desire to do so, resulting in a dysfunctional state of frequent, frantic shifts among different emotional states and belief systems. The same essay is also an early attempt to convince myself that I had successfully found the cure in a mystically inclined and intellectually inflected practice of self-inquiry, as informed by a library’s worth of books by various authors, philosophers, and sages.

Having rediscovered this piece so many years after I wrote it, and having been reminded of how intensely the writing of it engaged me, I decided to share it here with you. When I reread it now, in my fifties, I am struck by both the relative clarity of its expression, which conveys my twenty-something state of mind and style of writing (and talking) pretty accurately, and its youthful hubris, which I now re-encounter with a bit of a cringe. On page after page, the essay reminds me of just how zealously I tried to believe back then, and to persuade my friend to believe with me, that I had achieved some kind of steady-state position of quasi-mystical certainty that approached spiritual enlightenment and gave me special insight into God, the Bible, and life itself. I am also struck by the essay’s intensely expository tone, which makes it sound as if it’s addressing a larger audience. This was a side effect of my immersion in philosophical and spiritual literature during my first decade out of college; it was not only my mind but my emotional and stylistic sensibility that proved a natural sponge for such things.

I’m also surprised to observe that, on the whole, I still agree with the basic outlook and insight upon which the essay is mounted, though of course I find the mode of expression and the handling of many ideas to be frequently juvenile in their youthful over-confidence, unrecognized parochialism, and occasional flat-out inaccuracy. Through a combination of extensive reading and personal observation, I had come very early to a recognition of the fundamental nondual insight about the provisional nature of the customary sense of identity as rooted in the psychological ego, along with the accompanying understanding that the solution to the riddle of life lies in recognizing one’s real identity as something more fundamental. This still remains central to my understanding today. But back then it was mostly head knowledge—passionately embraced and engaged, to be sure—and it took years before my delight in intellectualizing for its own sake wore thin enough that I could see how its recursively self-referential nature had made it into an isolated island of meaninglessness, and thus a source of suffering. As my journals amply document, in 1996 I still had many years of cyclical suffering and confusion ahead of me.

It’s also worth noting that I say almost nothing about supernatural horror in this essay, even though it was central to my interests (and to my personal experience) during that era of my life. Since I was writing for a friend with whom my connection came in the context of an evangelical Baptist church, I focused pretty exclusively on religion. Today I think I must have also used this as a way to distance myself psychologically from the existential horror that I was struggling with at the time.

Nobody besides myself and that old friend, with whom I have now been out of touch for nearly a quarter century, has ever read this piece. I now publish it here as it was originally written, in five separate, numbered sections (spread across three posts and three weeks), on the chance that something about it might connect with you. Who knows, you might see something of yourself in it.

All footnotes have been newly added to clarify or amplify a few things.

Remember, when you get to the next paragraph below, the narrative voice switches from that of me today to that of my 25-year-old former self.

Warm regards,

My Search for Certainty

Part 1

Introductions are usually written after the material they introduce, and this one is no exception. As I look back over what I’ve written below, I am struck by the structure I have put into it. My insights and understandings came slowly over a long period of time, not in a simple linear sequence as this essay makes them appear. The act of writing imposes its own form onto things, which is fine as long as it is borne in mind.

Some of the lines of thought pursued herein may seem obscure, so here is a small background to hopefully clarify them: I was raised in the First Christian Church of Cassville, Missouri, where I was baptized at age nine and served as piano player from 1987 to 1988. My father taught Sunday School and sang in the choir. My family’s social life centered around the church, but I don’t remember us being particularly religious in the passionate sense. Church may have meant more to my parents than I knew, but for me it was just something we did. It had always been that way.

I went to church camp or a youth conference nearly every summer of my adolescence, and I began to experience what are sometimes called “spiritual highs” during these weeks. From age fifteen to seventeen I harbored an intermittent desire to be a preacher, and I began my senior year of high school with a firm intention to “live for Christ” in spite of all opposition. By the time I graduated, I was so desperate to get away from home and church that I felt suffocated. I burst into college with joy at the prospect of getting away from the people who for my entire life had told me who I should be.

The other part of the equation can now be filled in: I am a compulsive reader. I will read anything that falls into my hands, and I have been known to read things that are in other people’s hands, too. Before college my tastes ran mainly to fantasy and horror, but by the time I entered the University of Missouri I had made a decisive shift in the direction of philosophy and religion.² I minored in philosophy, and I read more books in college, both in and out of class, than I care to mention. My book collection is still growing, and although I believe firmly in the immense value of reading, in recent years I have learned that it can be dangerous. If one approaches any serious literature without a firm base of critical and interpretive principles, one is likely to lose oneself in a labyrinth of words. The very fact that so many people can believe so many different things creates a subtle change in one’s thinking: All perspectives begin to appear equally true (or false). One eventually comes to the conclusion that there is no reason to believe or disbelieve anything.

At first there is an exhilaration at the prospect of being able to believe anything at all, but this is snuffed out when one realizes that there is now no reason to believe anything in particular. Most people in this state opt to believe in nothing, which leads to some unpleasant consequences. I have experienced these firsthand, and I feel fortunate to have survived. The rest of this essay is a description of the labyrinth from the inside, a record of how I found my way out, and a discussion of what I’ve learned from it all.

Part 2

“The fund of data available to the human mind is of such intrinsic complexity and diversity that it provides plausible support for many different conceptions of the ultimate nature of reality. . . . [E]vidence can be adduced and interpreted to corroborate a virtually limitless array of worldviews. . . . Because the human understanding is not unequivocally compelled by the data to adopt one metaphysical position over another, an irreducible element of choice supervenes.”

—Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind

The following is a journal entry I made near the end of my journey through agnosticism. I wasn’t truly lost at the time, but I was reflecting on the experience and trying to make sense of it by describing it. What I wrote conveys its essence rather well. It is long, but accurate:

I have believed many different things in my lifetime. I have tried to believe many more. I have changed worldviews almost as often as I change shirts. Some would say that I have not sincerely given any worldview a chance, that I have let my changing day-to-day whims, which everyone experiences, dictate my day-to-day philosophy of life. I readily admit that at times this has been the case, but the real issue is much more substantial than these occasional shifts. In fact, I’m inclined to claim that even these changes of “whim” are to be taken seriously, since they point to an important insight, which is this: A person holding a worldview will interpret various aspects of his life in ways which serve to increase his belief in his worldview. Imagine a hypothetical Protestant fundamentalist Christian. If he or someone else gets sick or has an accident, he will attribute the unwanted situation to an evil being who causes pain and sickness. If he looks all around him and notices pain and misery in the world, he will take this to be a vindication of his worldview, which sees the physical world as the Kingdom of Satan. Protestant fundamentalists take seriously the Bible’s designation of Satan as “the prince of this world,” and thus pain, sickness, and other miseries are to be expected.

The first principle of worldview skepticism should be coming clear right now: Whoever goes looking for evidence in favor of a worldview will find it, because the very criteria for judging the evidence come from within the worldview itself. Logic and reason do not supervene. They take their direction from pre-logical, re-reasonable sources. Thus a Protestant fundamentalist interprets the existence of suffering as evidence in favor of his worldview, while the Vedantic Hindu takes the same information and interprets it entirely differently, specifically, as a function of karma. The worldview is held first, before any thinking or logicizing is done. These activities take place within an already established worldview, and thus their limits and parameters are preordained.

The start of this process is an interesting problem for speculation. Once a worldview is established there will be no lack of “evidence” to support it, since the worldview itself determined what will and will not be accepted as evidence and how certain situations and occurrences will be interpreted. But how are the basic tenets of a worldview arrived at in the first place? Why did the ancient Hebrews worship solely a wrathful personal being such as Yahweh and look forward to a once-and-for-all eschatological climax to history, while the Hindus of the same historical period worshiped a plethora of gods and goddesses and believed the cycle of creation–decay–destruction–non-existence–creation to be eternal? What was the impetus that led to such seemingly irreconcilable beliefs?

It is easy to see that the events and situations of our lives can be interpreted in a variety of ways. As mentioned earlier, Hindus ascribe ill fortune (as well as good fortune) to karma, the effect of positive and negative energies accumulated during past lives, so that there is perfect justice in what is happening to each individual all the time. Buddhists share a similar view, but stress the non-existence of the self. Taoists believe positive and negative, good and bad, define each other, so one cannot have one without the other. In the matter of the multiplicity of world religions, Hindus accept all religions as possible ways to truth or salvation, while Muslims think Jews and Christians are partially right, but only Allah’s revelations to Muhammad as recorded in the Q’uran are the complete truth. Regarding the natural world, mere contemplation of it does not take one an inch in the direction of any worldview. No one would ever arrive at, for example, Protestant Fundamentalism without having it described in words. Vedantic Hindus view the natural world as maya, a mirage which is only perceived as real because of avidya, ignorance. Jews and Muslims join Christians in affirming the ontological actuality of the world, but they draw different conclusions from it. Scientific materialists hold that matter alone is real, and thus every apparently non-material phenomenon has a material explanation. When it comes to history, scientific materialist utopians see it as the upward progress of human scientific and technological knowledge out of the dark night of superstition and ignorance. There is no transcendent meaning to the march of events, and any meaning at all is created by man himself. Current social and global problems are the result of stubborn clinging to outmoded beliefs, and peace and prosperity are indeed attainable through human effort. Hindus view history as the progress of four yugas, or ages, which comprise the birth and decay of the phenomenal world. The current age is the Kali Yuga, the last and worst, hence the problems plaguing us are to be expected. Certain members of the intellectual/spiritual community often called “New Age” think the violence and hostility and hatred and suspicion and brutality abounding in the world today are the inevitable by-products (or harbingers) of the fact that we are at the edge of an epochal transformation in the human species, a transformation into a higher and better state of being. Such transformations, they say, are always preceded by great anxiety, just as the threshold of adolescence, adulthood, or middle age is a stressful time for the individual. From all of this, and more importantly from individual reflection, it should be obvious that the ways of interpreting the world are many; in fact, they are as numerous as there are people.

There may be an objective, ahistorical truth existing independently of human understanding, but it does not reveal itself to us as such. It does no good to claim that Truth revealed itself to a certain person or group of people on such-and-such an occasion in history, because the ones living before and after the revelation are still left on their own to see or fail to see this Truth correctly. In other words, for the vast majority of people, perhaps for all of us, the question of whether or not there is an objective truth to which knowledge should conform is irrelevant, because we, with our limited perspectives, would be incapable of really knowing it even if we should hit upon it. Not can we look to other people to help us; the fact that so many reflective, sensitive, intelligent men and women of good will hold such radically divergent views as to even the direction the truth tends is an indication that we are truly without hope in this matter. Functionally, because of our perspectives as human beings, it doesn’t matter for us whether or not an absolute, all-encompassing Truth even exists.³

To reach a point where the issue of Truth itself is deemed irrelevant, even by default, is to reach a point only one or two steps removed from schizophrenia. But it took me awhile to realize that I had painted myself into a philosophical corner. When I did, it seemed as if I had climbed onto a roof and pulled the ladder up after me. I had no recourse to reason, because I now understood that reason, to put it gently, is a whore. It will prove whatever a person wants it to prove. It “derives from fundamental axioms which are themselves not subject to proof or disproof” (Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology), which of course leads one to the question, “Where do these fundamental axioms come from?” The question proved unanswerable, because any attempt at an answer begged the very question at issue. I was even required by my own principles to be uncertain of my uncertainty, and it was then that I began to fully understand what Kierkegaard meant when he wrote that the relentless speed of his own doubt struck terror in him.

The thing that hung me up, the hook that wouldn’t let me go, was the realization that every belief is a choice, and a chosen belief is not really a belief at all. There is a classic schoolboy definition of “faith” as “the power to believe what we know to be untrue,” and it seemed to me that just this sort of faith is needed in order to believe anything with certainty. To be human is to be limited; therefore human knowledge is precluded from objectivity; therefore any belief in an objective truth is chosen by the believer, whether or not he or she knows it. But if something is really true, it shouldn’t have to be chosen. It should present itself as true and demand to be recognized as such. Yet I had already reached the conclusion that we cannot recognize objective truth even if we stumble across it. I was paralyzed.

When Kierkegaard reached this impasse, he decided that the value of religious belief lies in the very fact that it is chosen, and he began to advocate a passionate but blind “leap of faith.” I tried this for awhile, but soon saw that it wouldn’t work. A willful act of belief may provide temporary comfort, but it leaves behind the awareness of the uncertainty that required willful belief to begin with. I was now left with no avenue of escape, and I watched myself fall further and further into despair as the ground of certainty fell out from under me every time I set foot on it. I was like a fly on flypaper: Every attempt at escape left me even more stuck, because the effort emphasized the problem.

This philosophical free-fall lasted some time, during which I still went about my daily routine, but with a gnawing emptiness inside me. I began to take comfort in the thought that perhaps the universe was indeed meaningless, because if it was, then my inner struggle didn’t matter. My marriage began to suffer, but perhaps that, too, was meaningless. I wrote in my journal, “Short of some unforeseeable something impinging on my consciousness from the outside and informing it with completely alien truths—alien to my current being, that it—I see not only no end to my uncertainty, but no possibility of its ending.”⁴

I didn’t really expect this slim hope to come true, so I wasn’t looking for it when it happened. Strangely, it didn’t come from the direction I would have been looking. I was in despair over the absence of an absolute, and therefore objective, truth. The word objective in this sense means “outside” or “separate from.” I thought certainty must lie outside my mind, because my mind contained my problem. When the “unforeseeable something” began to impinge on my consciousness, I was surprised to discover its location. Apparently my mind not only contained the problem, it contained the solution.

To be continued next week in the second of three installments.

1. See Matt Cardin, Journals, Volume 1: 1993–2002 (Seattle: Sarnath Press, 2002), 157, n. 1 (footnote to entry for March 22, 1996; also see the entry for March 28).

2. This claim was a rhetorical act of personal-historical revisionism. I remained interested in fantasy and horror throughout college and beyond.

3. The entry is from September 13, 1995. Nearly thirty years later when my journals were published in two volumes, I only included the final paragraph quoted here. See Journals, Volume 1, 131–132.

4. Journals, Volume 1, 124 (entry for July 28, 1995).