I was raised in America among the working poor in the 1990s. My dad's family is Jewish converted to Methodist Christianity and my mother is Catholic. I never had trouble accepting that I was gay and for this reason it didn't take me long to dis-believe anything from the Judeo-Christian God of my parent's and their families. "I'm gay, they think that's an unnatural sin, but I clearly 100% had no choice in this cos I've been gay as long as memory goes back so therefor the fault is in their religion, not my natural self." I mean, I always always always knew I'd like boys not girls, from a primal inside feeling since way before puberty.
When I got older I read Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion" and like any smart millennial of the early century I ate it up. I read him, Hitchens, Harris, Bill Maher, blah blah blah, I ate up the atheism stuff like it was cocaine. I think knowing how offensive it was to the religious got me off, to be honest. But repeatedly the religious folks I'd get into debates with online would say the same thing, "you have a god-sized hole and it's empty" or something to that idea. And unfortunately they were right, but for the longest time I just rode the high of knowing I was scientifically minded and knew better than the religious nut-jobs. Especially the OLD folks afraid of dying and trying to make it up to Jesus last minute. I was unafraid of death cos death was just void and I was nothing but inert matter.
Many years passed, I finished college, got a house, had money, looked great, and yet life lacked any meaning. I tried filling it with friends and exercise and community and reading and video games and it just didn't work. Life should have been great, I mean I was at my physical peak, had some money, and had a partner of 11 years! Well, then gay marriage passed in America and it presented me with a path... either I wanted to marry this dude or I didn't. Long-story short, I decided I did not want to take that final plunge, and if after 11 years, why stay together? So we separated.
I moved to a much bigger city so I could chase the materialist maximalist dreams of lots of sex with hot people, lots of money, and most importantly *high status!* I wanted more than anything to be admired for being cool and hot and smart. ALL this stuff... in a world that lacked meaning and god wasn't real.
And it worked..... but still... life was meaningless.
Why bother if when I die it's just a void and nothingness. I mean, science knew what happened less than a second after the big bang and could explain the death of the universe in a multitude of ways so basically we already knew everything. There was no god. No meaning to life. I was a speck of insignificance and my life didn't matter (however, I of course still operated under a western-learned philosophy as if I was the one and only thing in the universe that *did* matter).
Eventually a mix of money problems due to the high price of high status, completely failing at dating after 11 years, and a complete lack of any answer to the question, "what is the damn point?", I decided to take my own life. An overdose of pills was my choice because all the other ones sounded too painful. And for a while, I thought it was working. Memories from that night are blurry and difficult, but I remember my body no longer feeling connected to me. Very hard to describe. It was nothing like I had ever felt in my life (I mean, I had been drunk and stoned before, but it didn't feel anything like that or anesthesia).
I will never forget the indescribable feeling of no longer being alone in my 8th story downtown apartment. I was surrounded by love, by god, by my family that had passed before me. And then it ended and I woke up hours later with pills and vomit all over my bed.
My NDE was disappointing compared to the ones I had heard about on the news. I didn't see god or any angels or a tunnel, but there came a point during it when the room I was in was no longer there and I was enveloped by feelings that just thinking about brings tears to my eyes.
But this was it. This was the first thing that felt like anything real at all. This was the first time I felt like the universe had mystery or something unexplained. I had been unquestionably an atheist and anyone who thought otherwise was stupid. But now I had finally come to something I couldn't explain that I had experienced myself and suddenly the universe wasn't so dead and horrible after all.
The entire experience re-ignited my passion for life but it didn't take long until all the materialist and western status anxiety crept back in and took over, including the nihilism. I changed from calling myself an atheist to an agnostic but that was about it. I got interested in new age mumbo jumbo and as Bernardo so eloquently puts it, "absolute bullshit." I noticed many other gay men my age end up in Wicca or meditation or tarot or astrology, and I tried it all. But again, complete bullshit. None of it made any more sense of the world to me, and I couldn't see how so many gay men and women could get drawn into it!
The materialist world fully sucked me in and I began to chase a new dream, a dream of becoming an astrophysicist. I didn't want to work in government finance anymore, I wanted to understand the universe as best I could and the only place I could that would be in a laboratory as a scientist. My best friend lived in England and I had the ability, after a few years saving, to study math and prepare to go back to school while I saved to pay for degree in astrophysics. I was accepted into a fantastic school and even received a significant scholarship for international students due to my testing performance.
Then COVID hit the same exact year I was ready to leave America and move to England to study and become a scientist. But I refused to delay or change plans. Life was finally going to go great, after 35 years. I was going to leave America and become a scientist and everything would make sense and life would have meaning again.
I made it to Manchester in September and started my education. Within a few weeks I knew it was not going to work but it took months for me to truly accept it. It wasn't what I wanted, and worst of all COVID destroyed absolutely every bit of enjoyment I could have had in living in a foreign country. I didn't get to go out to eat (not even once), barely got to see my best friend, and spent day after day after day alone and stuck in my flat during lockdown. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.
Day after day of feeling like a failure to my family and friends who had cheered me on for such big exciting journey, and I couldn't even cut it for a year. I hid the fact that I was acing my classes from my father, because I didn't know how to get him to understand the problem wasn't my grades, it was literally absolutely everything else in my life. And as fascinating as physics is, it wasn't bringing me the meaning that I had hoped. Life had no meaning and my absolute love and curiosity for understanding was not being quenched by physics even a little. Quite the opposite, it was only making life seem even more pointless.
I've had a rough life since my mother left me at 4 years old, I've been homeless, I've been bankrupt, so hardship in life wasn't exactly new. So I did what any millennial would do, I smoked a ton of cannabis and drank my brains out with my friends when I could.
Then I came across The School of Life with Alain De Botton and learned about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in my spare time stoned at university waiting for it all to end. They seemed to hit the head of the nail so perfectly but they *definitely* didn't get rid of the nihilism. Now because of them I KNEW for sure life was pointless and meaningless.
But then I came across Bernardo's name again and remembered he claimed life was just mental or something, I dunno, something stupid. But I listened and listened and listened and everything he said just made so much sense to me. I could go on forever about his ontology. Suddenly not only did everything, literally everything, make so much more sense in the world, he had done something I hadn't believed possible. He gave life meaning.
Religious meaning lacked science (to say the least)... and science lacked soul, and for some reason we live in a world where you must be one or the other and religious text is taken as divine and literal. Until the last couple months, I have never realised how encoded into my thinking the materialist world is. And now, with his ontology understood to a strong degree, there is meaning and wonder and majesty in the world. There is the will as Schopenhauer described which fits so elegantly into natural selection. Finally! !!!
My NDE gave me a taste of things but Bernardo's works spoke to the logical, scientific-minded self as well as the scared animal yearning for meaning. I didn't expect this post to be this long, but I could go on forever in how more meaningful and purposeful life is now. I will assume anyone reading this will already be a fan of his works so I'll assume a lot of similar feelings.
There was a point when I thought that Dawkins and all the other evangelical atheists were doing such a good service to the world but I think they fail in so many ways. First they mostly just preach to the choir, and even if they do convert someone from dogmatic faith to being an atheist, they're merely pulling away bad but not replacing it with anything except, "god doesn't exist, but you should be moral and good because it makes you feel good even though those feelings are fake algorithms developed by natural selection and just survival techniques."
I think a lot of young men my age (35) have felt the atheist hangover. The high of saying "f-you" to religion is great but there isn't a replacement ontology except for dead matter and a dead god. Bernardo's ontology is a proper replacement in my opinion. Atheists seem to think we'd be living in a utopia if there was no religion and I couldn't disagree more. I think we have to have meaning and reasoning in life as self-aware metacognitive beings. What is really out there in physical reality and what is the truth? I don't know, but I think the direction of truth is better taken with any book written by Bernardo Kastrup than in any religious text or atheist manifesto.
I don't know the point i'm trying to make, outside of just connecting to other people around my age who might have had the similar experience of atheism during it's big days of the early century.
So, I once thought I was a speck of dust and nothing mattered. How does that differ today? Well today, I believe myself to be a portion, an excitation of the will, of the consciousness of the universe (or God, as I like to say, but is a loaded word). I don't think god has a plan, or a purpose, or has any self reflection. I do think there is a purpose to life, I mean it's the most complex thing in the universe and it REAALLLY seems like the universe headed into the direction of creating life, cos it doesn't seem to do anything else exciting. Now days there isn't a huge question of how souls get into animal beings? no! Instead life is merely the appearance of dissociated consciousness across a boundary of perception. And how can life have meaning now? Easy! I am a GOD! Well, a teeny tiny portion who has the important duty of existing within and experiencing reality from a first person perspective within the mind of god. And when I die, well, this particular pattern no longer fluctuates but it is not the whole, it is not everything, and I will simply be a part of the whole of consciousness again.
I don't know how to properly articulate that this gives rise to a completely different way of life and thinking and meaning, but it does. I still enjoy the things I enjoy but now things are just different. I no longer see people I interact with as "others" but now they are me, just me in a different episode of life that I don't have access to, and I should treat them well because they are me and I am them. And on top of that I should treat myself better because I am god.
I don't know how long this feeling of having meaning will last but it feels different than anything else before in my life, and I can't thank Bernardo enough for doing such an amazing job articulating and truly delivering a message that once you truly understand, makes not just ripples, but waves in life!
