Dancing With The Gods
Back to Eric's Home Page<br>Up to Site Map<br>10 Jul 1995
Dancing With The Gods
An autobiographical account of my `religious' beliefs and how they got<br>that way. If you start this, please read it through. Stopping<br>partway would probably leave you with some very silly<br>misconceptions.
I was raised Catholic by a Catholic father and a relaxed Protestant<br>mother. I had my first mystical experience in 1967 at the age of 10,<br>at an old-style Latin Tridentine mass in the hills outside Rome, as<br>the priests were censing the aisle of the church during the Offertory.<br>It presented itself as a sudden, intense sense of being in a moment<br>outside time, an eternal instant co-existing with every other eternal<br>instants of history, with the illusion of time and change stripped<br>away. "As it was in the Beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World<br>without End, amen" conveys the flavor exactly.
I was aware even at the time that this experience was inside my head, induced<br>by the Mass but not specifically Christian in content.
From an early age I was exposed to, and very interested in, skeptical/<br>scientific accounts of the world. Reichenbach's "The Rise of Scientific<br>Philosophy" and Korzybski's General Semantics taught me to value evidence,<br>logic, and rationality.
On Thanksgiving Night of my twelfth year, as I was being offered the<br>sip of sherry my family hauled out for the kids at holiday meals, I made<br>the first major spiritual commitment of my life. I realized that the<br>religion I'd grown up in was like the wine -- attractive but cumulatively<br>toxic, promising exaltation but delivering the death of reason.
I quietly refused the wine. I am a teetotaler to this day, refusing<br>not only wine but psychoactive drugs of all sorts (I do drink tea, which<br>affects me very little). With it, I renounced -- and swore enmity to --<br>not only my birth religion but any other form of belief founded on<br>faith and soi-disant `revelation', as opposed to evidence and reason.
For years after that I was militantly and indiscriminately anti-religious.<br>Spending ninth through twelfth grade at a Catholic school hardly<br>discouraged this :-). I read the Bible and the Koran and the Upanishads<br>and the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead and found them wanting. I<br>developed all the attitudes, knowledges, and ignorances of an Enlightenment<br>philosophe. I read Voltaire and Russell. And drank no wine.
Sometime early this period I was first exposed to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism.<br>It was immediately apparent to me that (ignoring the religious stuff) there was<br>interesting content there. I consciously experimented with meditative<br>techniques, treating them as a sort of mental calisthenics in an effort to<br>alter and broaden my perceptions. (This was the early Seventies; people were<br>still wearing bellbottoms and peace symbols, and the hippie "doors of<br>perception" thing was still very much part of the Zeitgeist.)
My second major mystical experience was a successful though unexpected result<br>of one of one of these experiments. It happened on a school bus at about 3:30<br>on a fall afternoon, I think in 1972. I had been attempting to visualize a<br>larger and larger range of distance scales in the cosmos, from angstroms to<br>megaparsecs. I was holding in my mind vibrating hydrogen atoms and galactic<br>clusters, and I tried to push further in both directions. And something<br>happened -- something that was a bit like seeing the point of a joke, a bit<br>like an orgasm, and a bit like being pinned by powerful headlights. I believe<br>it was a classic satori, ego-death, consciousness of All (though I did not<br>understand those terms or their implications until years later).
By the time I entered college in 1976, I felt I had learned most of<br>what I could from such mind-games. Lest you get the wrong impression,<br>they had never been a major interest for me. For every minute I spent<br>thinking or reading about religion or mysticism, I undoubtedly spent<br>thirty devouring huge amounts of science, history, philosophy, and<br>mathematics. (No, I didn't have much of a life! I was a skinny, runty<br>kid with cerebral palsy and few social skills, fanatically devoted to<br>improving my mind because it was the only part of me that seemed to<br>work right. I was all hungry intellect and raging hormones :-))
I had filed the whole topic away as interesting but not worth a lot of my<br>time -- not likely to produce scientifically replicable results and too<br>close to what I saw as the huge, nasty mind-mangling traps for the stupid<br>and credulous otherwise known as `conventional religions'. I had grown --<br>I readily admit it -- rather smug in my enlightenment, quick to dismiss<br>religiosity and mysticism in general as a sort of childhood neurosis of the<br>species, to be abandoned by any rational individual and eventually by<br>everybody as we march forward into the light of secular scientific<br>understanding.
Anyone who can't predict from the above that my complacency was soon to<br>be shattered has no ear for irony...
When I was...