There is, currently, a lot of individual, cultural, and even political investment in the apparent mass return to religion. The young are, apparently, returning in droves to faiths of all kinds. Whether this is factually true doesn’t interest me. Not because I want to ignore the facts as to bolster my own position (whatever that is), but because, in this case, not only are the statistics vague in terms of what defines a ‘conversion’ and just how long newcomers are staying, but also the overarching rationale behind these sweep of ‘returns’ is fundamentally evident, that is, there is a meaning crisis and religion fills this lack thoroughly, easily, and quickly.
Many of you who have followed both my writing and my podcast for some time will be thinking, But James, didn’t you convert to Catholicism a while back, were quite outspoken about it, and even wrote a book on it? Please tell us you’re not going to start railing against it! All those things are true. I converted, it became the driving gestalt of my life for a short while (2-3 years, roughly), amidst that peak of new-convert fervor I wrote a book, and, then, eventually, I fell out the other side exhausted, confused, and unwell. In short, I got memed, again!
But fear not! This isn’t going to be some screed against Catholicism, nor religion writ large, and any place herein where it feels as such is likely just an overflow from a newfound honesty, or maybe a place of your own that’s a little bit sore, who knows? See, we hear a lot about (seemingly) unilateral conversion stories from both sides. The tales of hard-edged, Hitchens-esque new atheist types who found the Lord and, conversely-but-the-same, tales of hard-edged, fundamentalist types who fell from faith. Each side, here, basically inverting themselves to the other, and feeling, that because such an inversion is such a momentous overhaul, that surely such a change must be the truth. What we don’t hear about very often, however, is the converts who deconvert but, in their deconversion, don’t simply return to where they were previously. I would hastily state that this is because the former, binary conversion stories, are, in both cases, stories of success. Of someone making a clear decision and realizing that, lo-and-behold, they made the correct one! Whereas the latter stories of deconversion after conversion, are, by society’s standards, tales of failure.
Stories of conversions, whether atheist-to-faith or faith-to-atheist, are understandable, triumphant linear journeys that elude complexity via their built-in chastisement mechanisms. This is to say, if one is thinking that clearly, I just didn’t understand the theology, or, if you’re an atheist, clearly I just don’t understand logic, then, this is exactly what I’m talking about. People don’t update based on arguments, debate, or logic. People don’t take advice and people aren’t convinced, ever. And so, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had become Buddhist, Hindu or Jain (You clearly didn’t understand the Dharma!), nor Protestant (Read more Luther! Oh, you haven’t read Zwingli?), nor Scientologist (You never went fully clear, so how can you really know anything?), nor atheist (If only you’d fully understood Dawkins et al…), everything is intellectually already there for all sides to perform a quick hand-wave and say Oh, you just don’t get it. Equally found within these conversion stories are return stories, ever-popular for their redemptive aspects. Wherein one falls away from faith or atheism, goes through a counter-period, and then (again, triumphantly) returns to the original position with a clear-sightedness (arrogance) they didn’t have before. You always knew? How grand!
Now, I am not trying to position myself or my non-story as anything special here, because Lord knows—or universe knows, take your pick—I’m not. But, the journeys that are often scrutinized (for lack of affiliation), ignored (for lack of affiliation), or criticized as just plain dumb (for lack of affiliation) are those wherein the binary falls apart entirely. Wherein one’s journey just…didn’t work out. See, the binary, dualistic linear, this-or-that, for-or-against, debate/versus form of thinking doesn’t like empty space, it can’t abide by neither side working and, therein, its very form failing. And so, deconverts who didn’t simply then perform a ‘return’ to the prior side are left…nowhere. It didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean I have some other, clear-cut answer. But just because it didn’t work and I don’t have a clear-cut answer doesn’t mean that your answer is true. Now, in time, I did find an answer, staring me in the face, but I’ll get to that later.
So, what happened? Well, it’s quite simple really, I got memed. The spiritual (insert whatever word you like for ‘deeper meaning’) life is a process, if one is willing to allow it, of exhausting all options. Of getting to the end of your tether. Of getting to a point where you sit down, cry, scream, weep, break, shit, vomit, and just plain shut down because everything has been used up, you have been used up, and from this comes a simple, clear, message…which I’ll get to, because… Before this letting go happens, you really have to go through the ringer, you really have to suffer enough, and I did, and one of the final undertakings in that process is the Spenglerian second religiosity, which, on the individual level, is a contextual return to that one place you never thought you’d find yourself! Liberals become conservatives, atheists become faithful, Marxists become reactionary, reactionaries become Marxists, Lacanians speak clearly, Jungians bloody calm down, capitalists discover charity, and some wretched, upper-middle class turd who has spent his life spewing forth acrid, pessimistic bile declares love is the answer. And so, truthfully, nothing has changed, they jumped the wall and sing from the other side, refreshed their cultural cookies and started again, really in the same place, just with spruced up clothing.
This is a very dangerous place to find oneself because, as I’ve already hinted toward, when a this becomes a that, when a blue becomes a red, when a yin becomes a yang, the very feeling of having moved from one side to another is, in itself, enough of a force to convince one they have found the truth. Well, I’ll say it, just because you never thought you’d end up here! doesn’t mean ‘here’ is any good, it may very well be more than enough of an organizational overhaul that everything feels like it’s in order, maybe, but does that make it true? Are you still you, only you’re saying opposite things? Has your life really changed? Has anything truly changed?
Anyway, none of this (despite its apparent vagueness), is, in retrospect, all that difficult to articulate (things rarely are if you’re as honest as you can be). I’d run the whole gamut: I’d cleansed my chakras, used some beads to pray, gone on retreats, joined various groups and orders, flirted with becoming a monk, bioenergetically charged my body, used the gateway tapes to travel to the astral realm, had a few OBEs, ejaculated up my spine, achieved a few Jhanas, used the tarot for an investment deal, summoned an angel, flirted with becoming a priest, used alphabeti-spaghetti for divination, got in some ice baths, become ascetic, summoned a demon, become an Epicurean, become a Catholic, psychosynthesized my brain, undergone CBT, done daily mindfulness, undergone human-centered therapy, breathed every which-way, attended retreats that felt off, undergone a healing ceremony, used tuning forks to eradicate…something, there are incense sticks everywhere, I own a small bell, analysed my dreams, slept on the floor, communed with an alien, automatically written a ton of utter crap, undergone hypnotherapy, actively imagined my way into the unconscious, realized capitalism is an AI, buteyko’d the hell out of my lungs, became a Stoic, primally screamed until I cried, remembered myself (always!), gematrically figured out…nothing, and are still, for some reason or other, searching…seeking! Still, something is up!
Am I saying that all of these things are bad? No. Good? No. Primarily undertaken via the same form that is usually called ‘seeking’? Yes. Is Catholicism, for instance, the same as using the tarot or achieving a Jhana? In itself, obviously not. But when subsumed into the form of seeking, which, ironically, is ongoing avoidance of the obvious, it becomes as meaningful as you want it to be. And that’s where it gets very simple—I’m talking about meaning. Most little additions to one’s life aren’t meaningful or ‘deep’ enough to prolong a sense of fulfilment for more than a year, month, or week (Hell, I threw in the towel of alphabeti-spaghetti divination after a day!). But, ah! [Complete religious system] is! Not only does it have advice for what to do in every, single, mind-numbing situation, but it also gives you (if you’re willing to be honest and admit it) a quiet sense of smug, self-satisfaction. I’m right, they’re wrong!
So, before you know it, you’re slap-bang in the middle of this great, lumbering historical system that is so evidently floundering, falling apart at the seams, and in its terminal phase, that you can’t help but wonder what the hell happened, what’s going on altogether. But you trundle on because there is more than enough books and rituals and meetings and things to be getting on with. The issue with complete systems, when it comes to self-honesty, is that there’s always some technical caveat built-in to avoid dealing with the actual problem, the likes of which is suffocated by the system itself. You can’t see you because you’re being fed through a systematic thresher of intellectual explanations and niceties. Everything has its reason, everything has its control mechanism, and everything has a relative cathartic release function—that doesn’t sound like life to me! If you ain’t getting tripped up every so often, you’re likely not living in reality.
Yet, the one thing I can’t do, as per the reality, is give you, the reader, the binary conclusion or blow-up that resulted in my deconversion, because…there wasn’t one, not really. Be nice, wouldn’t it, for me to say Oh, it was the sexual abuse stuff, or Oh, I struggled with this piece of theology, or, Oh, it was X or Y scholarly thing, because then you could wreck me, then we’d get to debating and you could win! But, as it was and as it is, there wasn’t some key moment—that would have been alike so many other aforementioned ‘moments’—where it broke down. There wasn’t some argument, or fight, or reason, or thing as to my leaving. Equally, it should be obvious by now, as I just said but need to repeat, that I can’t give you internal reasons to do with theology, faith, belief, or God to explain this, somehow control it, for that would be—in the sense of disagreement—abiding by the very system that didn’t work. No, like all real ‘endings’, there was no ending at all, it was subsumed—as nothing at all—into the ever-flowing river that is change. Which is to say, you wake up one day and find you can’t go anymore. You just can’t do that anymore and you need to take responsibility for the ending now. You wake up one day and it’s just…gone. You wake up one day and it’s dissipated, it hasn’t worked. For goodness sake! It hasn’t worked again! But this time, this time, you can’t avoid it, can you? You look back upon your works, ye Mighty, and despair! Finally, there isn’t anything to fall back upon, nothing to hold you up, nothing to use to avoid taking responsibility for your own life, none of those things have worked, not even that one—you’re a goner! You’re fucked.
Scrabbling around in nothingness with only yourself for company—awful! Looks like it’s finally time to deal with it, isn’t it? Is it? Looks like you haven’t got a choice. You’re now there with yourself, you’re there with you, looking at yourself. None of that other stuff has worked and, this time around, when the possibility of using one of those things arises in your mind it dissipates as quickly as it arose, absolutely nothing to hold on to. Oh no!...oh no, here it comes, you really can’t stop it this time, because you are seeing you for what you are, if even for just a moment, and there it is, that balloon finally bursts, it’s in your throat, you’re going to throw up…all this time…
You’re unhappy.
That’s been the thing, all along, all this time. You are unhappy. There will very likely be a bunch of connected realizations connected to this:
You’re scared
You wake up feeling a low-level dread every day
You can’t really cry properly
You’re tense
You just haven’t been true, even if that means saying I don’t know!
Security is more important to you than truth
You’d give anything to know there will be no hurdles or bumps ever again
You just can’t bear it!
You are aching for…something…
You’ve been putting up with a lot
You haven’t been taking responsibility
And I get it, quite a few people have started to say I’ve become insufferable, annoying, simplistic, or whatever else to try avoid this. I would have said the same only 2 or 3 years ago, but eventually, if you let it, it will just break, and you’ll be left with whatever your simple pain is. More than likely…
You’re unhappy.
Consider this part an addendum.
If, in reading the prior text, you’ve found yourself feeling a certain way about it, then I would say just to sit with it, see what happens.
No, I don’t think it’s some life-changing, wonder-work that is going into your unconscious and blowing your spiritual back out, it’s just honesty, take it or leave it.
However, there’s a little statement that has been running through my mind ever since all this happened to me, that I think others might find helpful, but in a sense, it’s best if you come to this conclusion on your own, so it’s not just words. But, if you want to try jump forward, be my guest:
The problem is the problem.
That’s right. Simple, really. The problem is the problem. The problem is you’re unhappy. And, the first thing you or ‘your’ mind does when confronted with a ‘problem’ is immediately try add something to the mix to try ‘solve’ it. If we have a problem, we don’t just sit with it, we quickly try cure by addition. This can be seen on a very base level such as eating junk food, watching a TV series, smoking weed, or drinking alcohol to avoid the issue, the pain. It can be seen on a solely intellectual level by means of stoic affirmations, CBT techniques, or self-justifications. And, finally, as per this piece, it can be seen on a broad, spiritual level by means of teachings, gurus, and even religions. We have problems and then we do something else. We’re upset about something so we eat. We’re mad about something so we do a breathing technique. We’re unhappy, in pain, scared, and lost so we find a religious system. In short, again, we have a problem and we do something else.
But, as I’ve said, the problem is the problem. The problem likely is that you’re unhappy and, instead of sitting with the pain of that unhappiness, you…go do something else? The problem isn’t that you haven’t found the right book, it’s the problem itself. The problem isn’t that you haven’t found the best teacher, it’s the problem itself. The problem isn’t that you haven’t found the right religion, it’s the problem itself.
Anyway, these words have not so much carried me far, as they have kept me with myself. If you find yourself drifting off, hoping that some-or-other thing will ease or heal the problem, well…the problem is the problem.
Who is it a problem for?
Why is it a problem?
Are you not dealing with some pain?
Are you just unhappy?
Are you scared?
Whatever the problem is, that’s the problem.
The problem is the problem.