My Life As An Atheist -Part IV

This entry is a continuation of "My Life As An Atheist." To view part one, click here.

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About a year later, at the end of the year 2000, I graduated from music college, and began experimenting with religion. I was looking for guidance and trying to find out what happens to us when we die. I tried Scientology for a brief time, but quickly figured out that being a Scientologist was worse than being a Christian. (Read this blog entry for more details.)

I had an inclining interest in Buddhism and Eastern philosophies. I read some books and meditated, and became interested in Zen and Enlightenment.

It was very casual, but it was cool.

With any religion comes the goofy stories about the weird feats that some guy did thousands of years ago. I always threw those stories right out the window as soon as I heard them. Buddah once sat under a tree for 302,394,034,214 years... Cool. Who gives a crap?

I liked Buddhism because even though it had those stories it wasn't about the stories. It had a set of philosophies that made sense and that helped you feel better. It was about unifying yourself with your surroundings and feeling good so that you could go out and be good to others.

There were Zen centers and similar places around, but the only places I knew about charged money to go to the classes or to meditate there. I, being a broke guitar teacher, could not afford the fees. As a result I never attended.

That didn't matter to me. I saw it as more of a philosophy on life and a way for me to keep my head on my shoulders.

On my 25th birthday, I went back to college. This ate up most of my time and I didn't have a lot of time to think about religion or Buddhism. From time to time I would meditate and even took a Tai-Chi class for my gym credit. While I always respected Buddhism and its philosophy, I've never considered myself a full-blown Buddhist.

Trying to understand enlightenment, I would have discussions with my Tai-Chi teacher, who was a Taoist. He didn't even believe in enlightenment. A belief in enlightenment didn't matter in Buddhism anyway because a major paradox was that in order to reach enlightenment, you had to not care about or think about enlightenment. One of my books described enlightenment as no big deal. Once you reach enlightenment you just have to keep going anyway.

I guess it would be sort of like passing your freshman year of college.

Over time I developed a kind of "Personal Philosophy Religion" that many people typically have where they say things like, "I don't really know what to believe. Religions say and do all of these crazy things. Religious people scare me, so I don't know if I want to get involved. I feel like there's a god, but I don't know what that god is." I definitely didn't believe strongly in one religion, rather I believed in a mesh of all of the religions. All religions overlap somewhere, and wherever they overlapped, that's what I believed -don't kill, don't steal, be good to others. If there is some kind of afterlife, whatever god existed would understand the confusion about world religion and see that I was a good person.

:: Part V Coming Soon ::