Loss of Faith, Now What?

Is it possible to understand reality?

The other morning I stood in my bathroom with a huge weight in the pit of my gut. I was uncomfortable. Not because of something I ate but maybe a little bit due to the fact that I have been up every night this week at 2am not being able to fall back asleep.

I used to be comfortable with coincidences, in fact I thrived on them. They gave meaning and structure to life and often proved to me that as small and insignificant that I am there was a god who loved me and paid attention to me. Since then I’ve lost my faith in a solid male god.

However, I’ve traveled down other roads of belief.

Two weeks before I learned that my step father was dying of pancreatic cancer I read a random book about vampires. The main character in the book was a young girl who learned after becoming really ill that she would be dying soon of pancreatic cancer. The first few chapters gave detailed information on the disease. Like my stepfather she thought it was her gallbladder that was giving her trouble. So when my stepfather told me the horrible news I had a tiny bit of knowledge under my belt that acted like a pin prick of light in a darkness so thick that it would take me more than a year to pull myself out.

My stepfather’s quick and painful death knocked me on my butt, took the wind out of me and changed the way that I viewed my world instantly.

That one thing. Reading that book, opened a door. I hadn’t thought about tiny little coincidences being anything other than random things for a long time. But this one thing was too much. It was uncomfortable. I came to the conclusion that maybe just maybe there was a universal force out there and that maybe the coincidence had something to do with the strangeness of time. Maybe when something so huge and significant happens in our lives time folds in on itself, gosh who knows? I decided to feel loved and just a little bit less uncomfortable. Since then I’ve lost my faith even in that.

That one tiny coincidence has multiplied itself by a thousand at least. Am I looking for things like I used to when I was Mormon? I remember opening the bible or the Book of Mormon up at random and reading a scripture. More often than not the scripture fit my situation and emotions perfectly. Much like a daily horoscope sometimes sounds way too familiar to my own situation.

In the past when strange coincidences would work towards some awe inspiring moment I was totally comfortable with that because I believed in a god that paid attention to those things.

Since then not so much. So yesterday as I stood in my bathroom I was uncomfortable with all of the coincidences that seem to have bombarded my life over the last year. Yesterday I was reading in “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” A Buddhist text. I was trying to understand what dualising consciousness means. I randomly opened up the book and holy crap I landed on the pages that discuss this topic. I started flipping through the book to find out how common this term was and couldn’t find it any where. Well poop. That book has over 500 pages in it.

Here’s a movie I found on Dooce.com called “Two Men”.

Maybe if that was the only coincidence I would be fine but it’s not and so I’m uncomfortable.

However, I refuse to just blindly grab a belief to make myself feel better. Over the last year I’ve been grasping and pulling trying really hard to understand the universe. I’ve exposed myself to a lot of information but never really understanding one topic thoroughly. One thing I haven’t done is allowed myself to learn to be uncomfortable. Equanimity maybe. How am I going to gain new insight if I keep falling back on old patterns of thinking and reacting and my old belief systems?

Here is a poem I wrote about discovering new ideas, new ways to view our situation, and new ways to live.  Sometimes I think it is important to be patient, to be uncomfortable to not decide right now how I am going to solve a problem or get what I think I want. Following the link to the poem are two links to journal entries I wrote after I created the above post. 

“The Missing Flower” http://ravenruckus.tumblr.com/post/3301612750/the-missing-flower

“Is it Possible to Understand Reality for Real?” 2/15/2011 http://ravenruckus.tumblr.com/post/3310671796/is-it-possible-to-understand-reality-for-real

 ”In Reference to Phenomena” 2/16/2011  http://ravenruckus.tumblr.com/post/3329059375/in-reference-to-phenomena