The Big Questions: Illusions, Belief, Religion, God. Who Knows?!

Yes. This from Brain Pickings and Oliver Sacks  seems essential. Yes. We need our illusions to keep our heads in the game:

"To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in."

And this answer to a reader's question from Nick Cave about religious belief and belief in God seems on target and essential too.  What totally resonates with me: "resilient and doubting," and the primacy of "uncertainty" and the humbleness of belief: "sorrowful, and joyful, broadening and deepening, imagined and true." I love that kind of mysterious, uncertain grappling with belief, god or no god, and what it means in a humble life of leaning to the light.

"Amalia, I find that my religiousness is a slowly emergent state, one that is entirely drawn to the Anglican church of my childhood, and that the haunted presence of Christ is the essential and defining quality of that state of being. Christianity, for me, is bound up in the liturgy and the ritual and the poetry that swirls around the restless, tortured figure of Jesus, as presented within the sacred domain of the church itself. My religiousness is softly spoken, both sorrowful and joyful, broadening and deepening, imagined and true. It is worship and prayer. It is resilient yet doubting, and forever wrestles with the forces of rationality, armed with little other than the merest hunch or whispered intuition. The defining characteristic of my belief, and which I consider to be a fundamental imperative in my life, is uncertainty. This questioning impulse is the essence of freedom and the creative catalyst that keeps the wheels rotating irrevocably toward God."

This totally resonates with me. I grew up in the Catholic Church, under the eyes and direction of those black-habit wearing nuns. What did I get out of those years? A conflicted psyche. A sense of mystery, poetry, drama, theater.  There was beauty in the rituals. Those crazy-ass things: baptism, prayer, penance, communion, confirmation, the stations of the cross. It was all so over the top theatrical. I never really bought into it all, but it was quite dominating, and oppressive. Jesus seemed like a tragic dude, who got a raw deal. As Nick Lowe once asked: "What's so funny about peace, love & understanding?"

I do believe we can believe in big things without using our beliefs as a club to hammer other folks. Best to believe in the mystery, in love, in purpose, in the great unknowable uncertainty, the great cloud of unknowing that will always surround all things human. For me when I think "god" I think "good," the vibration of goodness and life. Yes. That's something to believe in. The more open-ended, abstract, fuzzy, mysterious, the better. Amen.