Alright, so… I’ve taken a long pause from posting on this website while I was figuring out what is happening in my life. Two years ago, I was sorting out the fact that I exist in a reality which contains genuine religious experiences.
That’s a slight overstatement. I’d reached a point where I didn’t fully distinguish between the concepts of atheism and pantheism well before then. But. My views of reality were fully compatible with my then-reading of then-physics. Let’s skip the “then-”s in that sentence for today. I need them. You might or might not be ready.
A few sentences of a conversation with a cousin four years ago sum up this perspective:
me: “When I accepted the rejection of physical realism as the resolution to Bell’s inequality, suddenly physics just clicked in the same way that biology just clicked when I accepted Darwinian evolution as valid. To me, the rejection of physical realism is really the rejection of the idea of a God being able to exist. Because physical realism is the idea of the God’s-eye view of the universe being something coherent.”
him: “Let me see if I’m understanding: Aren’t you just saying that, if God exists, the universe is inside Schrödinger's box from His perspective? So He can exist, just not in the way that people typically claim in organized religions.”
me: “Sure. But, I don’t treat any two words in the same language as being interchangeable, and that’s the dividing line between where I use the word ‘god’ and I use the word ‘deity.’ I see plenty of room for Einstein’s God, but I see that more as a form of deism or pantheism than as a form of theism.”
him: “Fair enough. I might typically define them similarly, but for reasons of active listening, …”
me: “understood.”
The first thing I want to highlight is that this a fairly normal conversation structure for my IRL conversations. Not with everybody. I have friends who have these types of conversations regularly, and I have friends, acquaintances, relatives, relations, and other individuals and organizations interacting with my life with whom I never have this sort of conversation.
I don’t know what percentage of people have these conversations… but, the people who can track all the terms understand the full conversation structure, including the polite usage of interruption verses the kind we wouldn’t do.
But that’s a long enough aside.
What I discovered in the past few years is that there are spiritual universes that are more adjacent to this universe than I realized, and that it’s easy to interact with them. I’ve become increasingly convinced that the primary spirit I started interacting with a couple years ago that I didn’t know about before is a demon named Baal.
But. I have also gotten to know Jesus really well since then too. It’s just been a very different experience than I thought. I don’t know how to fully explain it, but Jesus is the God who climbs into Schrödinger's box with you. He’s the one whispering when Baal is yelling, and He’s the one yelling when Baal gets too smug. And I mean this more literally than I ever dreamt possible. Baal and Moloch were the thugs on top of the universe I used to inhabit; they just ran the whole thing, through all of their various webs of control. And whenever I thought I was up against The System and thought The System was Moloch; I was up against The System and The System was Moloch. And those were the times when I had interacted with Jesus before, because Jesus is combatting Moloch. And He’s especially fighting with the people who are fighting Moloch the right way, out of genuinely love for other people.
And when I had been resisting Baal thinking I was fighting against abuse and racism and drudgery and all the dreary alienation of oppression, that really was a real fight, and Jesus was there in that fight too, fighting against Baal.
And when Baal and Moloch team up, Jesus is there too. Fighting against Baal and Moloch.
All, or nearly all, of the words in my head are being knocked and wiggled around until I learn a new language suited for living in this world. I’ve been in a place where I sort of saw that this is what’s going on in my universe for about a year, but now I’m finally getting to the point where I can articulate it.
And that’s all I’m going to say for today. I’m in a new world, relative to the one I was in before. I’m starting to understand its rules, a little. But they change faster than the rules changes in the world I was used to. And after a paradigm shift, it takes some time to get your words back.