From Church to the Self: A Journey Through Belief, Myth, and Meditation

WARM UP. Good greetings to everyone, thank you for joining me today for the blog. This week brought its challenges full force late into the week. After a great start to the week with some meetings with friends, my men's group has been rockin’, and our friends successfully delivering their baby into the world, a few business matters popped up that needed to be attended to quickly. A few schedule changes and needing to get things done quickly sometimes really mentally strains me. Occasionally I have a tough time with quick changes, I take my mental sanctitude seriously. Recently I returned from the sanctuary and while I was there I was alerted to a few things linguistically that perhaps needed to be clarified. The use of the term “church” has always been a term used by me to describe me going to worship, however the term church belongs within the Christian faith, which I am no longer a part of. So I will discontinue my use of the word church to describe my going to worship at the sanctuary. Oddly I found myself conversing about god to a client that I really haven’t had much interaction with in any real way. The conversation kept to superficial matters rather than getting deep into the topic of how everyone perceives the word “god.” There are a litany of words that I find are misrepresented, misinterpreted, and misused, two of such words are “god” and “love.”

Rather than go down the rabbit hole of representation, interpretation and use of those words, let's travel down my own religious path as today's topic. I did in fact go to church up until my 18th birthday as religion and the christian faith was something forced upon me rather than something I chose. Besides “no tv sundays” in my household to give the “tv a break” we were required to attend church each and every sunday with few exceptions. If you decided against attending, your punishment was to be grounded to the house. As I grew older, I grew out of church. Growing older meant I wanted to spend more time with my friends, more time with my video games, and generally not be around those groups of ‘old people’ and ‘weirdos.’ This reminds me of one of my core memories that I will not forget. This was one of those Sundays and instead of going to church, my fathers father (grandfather) had been in the hospital for heart complications. Whatever the situation that was going on in my life at the time I did not want to go visit. I had even gone as far as to make a card for him that I had depicted my grandfather as Clyde “the Glide” Drexler dunking a ball, and inside something to the sentiment “Love you, hope this is you when you get out of the hospital.”. And as life would have it, I never got to give him that card, because I wouldn’t ever see him again. Had no clue at the time that that was “my last chance.” Still brings tears to my eyes, perhaps I’m still hurt. That just provided me a great opportunity to practice one of my greatest gifts I was given when deciding not to go to church any longer, meditation.

When I no longer had the familial requirement to attend religious gatherings, I was provided with an opportunity to expand my worldview. Maybe more appropriately referred to as having my mythological knowledge expanded. What a journey that has been. Moving from Christianity I was introduced to Taoism by studying Bruce Lee’s teachings of martial arts. Bruce Lee was a philosopher and much of his personal philosophy had its roots in the dao. Many of the things he would write about to describe his art were often approached philosophically and often he would refer to the tao. This motivated me to read a book or two of the Tao de Ching and loved its ability to describe the art of life in a very beautiful and intuitive manner. There is a period of time in my life that I would have identified as a “Daoist” and a few of you readers might remember hearing me say, or recall the dog tag I owned that read “it is what it is.” This reminds me of a passage from the bible, “this too shall pass.” From Bruce Lee it led to Alan Watts, a poet, philosopher, and Daoist teacher.

The Tik Tok university of the 2000s was YouTube.. Alan Watts did a lot of recorded seminars and decisions that were uploaded to YouTube, that just so happens to be how I have been able to listen to hours upon hours of his teachings and perspectives. Alan Watts often mentioned meditation, christianity, buddhism, and eventually his discussions led me to find Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell was a mythology professor and is referred to as a “comparative mythologist.” He did a series of discussions that really brought everything home to me. One of the first ones I recall having a strong influential impact on my worldview was “Myths of Today.” In a separate lecture I listened to him describe where all the major religions originated from on a world map, then describe how geographically they began to spread. He spoke about how there are eastern religions such as taoism, buddhism, hinduism, etc separated by the three abrahamic religions of judaism, christianity, and islam. I listened to hours upon hours of his lectures and through those discussions he described the basic beliefs of nearly all of the major world religions. He described where the people were from, what kinds of environments the people endured, and that helped me paint a personal mental picture of why these religions exist. While I was studying up on YT a ‘brother’ of mine began attending a monastery near his hometown. He and I spent hours upon hours discussing Buddhism, which led to me mostly listening and learning. He is a great teacher and mentor of mine. We then spent time discussing our lives, past, present, future through a ‘Buddhist lens.’ This is where I learned meditation.

COOLDOWN. What a gift. Trust me when I say there is no greater gift that you could give someone than the gift of meditation. If you are a person that struggles with spirituality, religion, or ‘god,’ go re-educate yourself. relearn with a fresh perspective. Your views were not your own when you were taught about religion. Get yourself a really good mentor, teacher, educator. Learn about all of the major world religions. Sit quietly in a quiet environment with your eyes closed and simply ask yourself mentally “who am I?” Ask in a manner of curiosity. Ask as many times as needed. If you ever get to the answer, you will know when you have it. Other people that know ‘themselves’ will also know that you know. How you might ask? You will have to ask yourself “WHO AM I” to know.

Take Care, 

G$