The Chosen Myth

I replaced religion with scientific discourse and rational thought, but that left a certain emptiness that I have not been able to fill. An excavation that has led me to search for spirituality – a more ancient wisdom, a form of a deeper Thing. Which I suppose the closest thing a naturalist can come to is Ionian enchantment or a transcendent experience through meditation or psychedelia.

I have had these things, and yet the discontentment remains.

Ever since resurfacing from the Great Depression, I have made an effort to get out of myself - both by clambering out and by going deeper within. And I have undoubtedly formed some incredible connections with other humans (and there are many wonderful ones in my life). I have glimpsed windows of Insight that lie within the deep substrate of the mind. Yet instead of making me feel more integrated, this has created a kind of paradoxical isolation of the inner me (the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life).

I strive towards the development of my personality, the relationships that define me, a prolific career, monetary accumulations, improvement of my physicality, a consumption and saturation of the self with culture.

This secularised modern heaven of self-fulfilment and actualisation should be everything I want, shouldn't it? Aren't you meant to just plug these things into the equation to spit out Meaning and Purpose?

The end of Faith has merely led to a frenetic and reductionist materialism. When god died, I was allowed to grow to the full extent of my dwarfishness, to indulge all the trivialities of my petty human wants and desires in the pursuit of a mechanistic "truth" and "freedom".