[old name]

Prof. Karam

HRS 4-04

31 August 2023

My Spiritual Journey

Although I could likely write pages upon pages detailing my journey in full, I will attempt to grasp it as best I can in the following lines. To start, I was raised in a Christian household as a child. My mother taught me how God is love, how he loves us all and wants us to be happy. My father, I would later come to find, resonates greatly with my current day outlook on religion/life/spirituality; we are now the best of friends. However, early on into my life starting around the age of 6, I began to ask very daunting questions; “But mommy, what if God never existed? What would there be?” Countless nights I spent staring at my ceiling, pondering all these answerless questions. “Who created God? Is the devil real? Does Hell really exist? Could God ever hate us?” From there, eventually I grew to realize many things; if all things stem from God, that includes time as well. This would mean that God would be timeless, uncontrolled by time, a singularity. An omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent entity. This would also mean that He would stand as the peak of knowledge; impossible to ever climb higher than the summit, for there would be nothing else new to understand. Furthermore, it would mean that he would know exactly what would happen and why in every instance of our lives, before we even existed in time yet; no need for forgiveness and escape from an eternal inferno below when he knew you better than you could ever know yourself, setting you out on this exact path intentionally. I also came up with many “proofs” (nothing is ever able to be fully, truly proven nor disproven; everything is subjective) for the existence of God, my first following the logic behind the concept of infinity. It goes like this: ask yourself or another, what created the universe? “The Big Bang,” many would say. What created the Big Bang? Now, some will say dark matter, and that dark matter came from quantum fluctuations. Going on, they could also say that the Big Bang repeats itself for infinity and there was no “first” Big Bang in the chain. Now, what created that infinite loop of Big Bangs? It’s a paradox, for you can always add a “what created-” before anything. I forget exactly who said it, but, “To say something happened without a cause, would be contradictory in terms.” Everything happens for a reason. Furthermore, we will always have some degree of ignorance; there will always be some level of unknown, keeping us from that peak of knowledge so we may have yet another step to climb, another goal to work towards ad infinitum. It is what makes us human, after all; what a joy it is to be stupid! As the years passed by, my understanding continued to bloom in hand with my undying empathy. I went through a few years of my life severely depressed, phasing in and out of psychosis at some points because of how badly I couldn’t bear to face the reality before me. I had lost my mother and my grandmother in 2020; 2021 was likely the hardest year of my entire life. I arrived at an ultimatum: stay in the pit, or climb out. I chose the latter. Fast forward a year, and I now can fully see just how much beauty can be found in everything around me; “perception is reality,” as it’s often said, and we will never know everything, so why not perceive reality to be your idea of the best? Working to make life as wondrous, poetic, supreme, and divine as you can make it to be? We are all pieces of God, as I see it; everything in this universe of equal value (values only truly assigned by our subjective, mortal minds). God is an artist, we are His art, and we, too, are artists going on to create even more art (Him being a “He” to many as well is yet another social construct; many parts of history playing into that portrayed masculine image, but God holds many forms, it merely depends on whose eyes you’re looking through - a goddess in some religions, many gods in others, we are all attempting to uncover what is forever unreachable given the same resources at our disposal, it only makes sense all religions are essentially identical at the core of it all). To add, a large portion of my worldview/spiritual self also comes from Native American culture. I take the most pride in my Choctaw/Cherokee blood, for their view on life I see to be perhaps one of the few true ways for us humans to be sustainable for the long term, as opposed to how we are in the modern era (climate change, nuclear war on the rise, deforestation, and etc). If we destroy nature, our foundation, we destroy ourselves, too. This further adds to my perception that all things in the universe are equal and wonderfully interconnected. Many theories boost this ideology even more, including but not limited to the butterfly effect and quantum entanglement.

A large majority of my epiphanies came through the self, not through the words of others. It was a personal, individual, spiritual journey for certain. Many philosophers I resonate with extremely I didn’t even come to know until last year; hell, I didn’t even know what stoicism meant until last October, but I knew immediately that that’s what I’ve been for ages (same with oh so many philosophers, instantly on the spot knowing what they mean; it’s incredible to know many have walked the path before me, going back millenia). Something I’ve come to fully realize how deeply I’ve resonated with for ages as well is Buddhism. Its core philosophy, and especially the primary mantra, the Om, I absolutely love; so incredibly beautiful in its simplicity, the power behind one syllable. Within us all lies the ability to bring an ineffable peace to our minds, uniting the conscious, unconscious, and the dreamlike to attain the highest mental state achievable, the point of absolute: enlightenment. To end this story and bring you to the present, I leave you with a quote from the Buddha: “The greatest gift is to give people your enlightenment, to share it. It has to be the greatest.”