My Journey Pt. 1: Atheism To Spirituality

All right today I'm gonna talk about how atheism,

Religion,

And spirituality can all be interconnected in a way.

I believe I originally started out more atheistic in viewpoints because my parents were pretty open to whatever I wanted and they didn't really believe in the religious stuff but my grandmother was a minister so I went to church when I was little and I remember asking one of my Sunday school teachers something like why why is this Christian God the the right God and and why can't it be some like Norse God or something like that and she didn't really have an answer for me so I kind of just decided that atheism was the way to go and that people that were into religion were just doing it because they were scared or something and yeah that was kind of my my belief because there's so many different religions and and they start from like different areas of the world and all that so how could only one of them be true is my logical brain as a child was like either there are some truth to all of them or they're all wrong and it's just people coming up with ideas because of their their fear and their inability to explain the truth of reality so that kind of settled it for me as a kid but I still was very eager to figure out what like the truth is like who who am I what's the meaning of life all that sort of thing and so I kept I kept looking I kept staying in in touch with like questioning but my conclusion since my parents didn't really have that many answers for me was that the only way I could really figure out the truth per se was to ask some sort of more advanced species and I figured since the universe and our I don't know galaxy and everything it's pretty massive there's a decent chance that there's other life out there and there's a pretty good chance that the other life out there is smart and if they're smart they're hopefully smarter than us too so I became obsessed with figuring out how I could get to space I was my decision was all right I'm gonna become an astronaut or start my own space program to figure out how I can find intelligent life out in space and ask them what the meaning of life is and so I I kind of just made that my decision and I just did as well as I could in school and graduated high school and got into a decent college or a pretty good college for engineering but after I graduated high school I had this one experience and it sounds kind of weird but it was a pretty big transformative experience it was just that one day I was hanging out my friend and I wanted to try getting stoned I went to smoke weed and I'd never done it before without having drank alcohol beforehand and so this is my first time just being playing high from marijuana and so I took some deep hits of the marijuana and then I was still always into philosophy so me and my friend were walking around talking about philosophy and then all of a sudden this like feeling hit me where it was like I was here for the first time it was like I'd never really been here like I'd never been present or I've been thinking all the time and then all of a sudden I wasn't able to think anymore and I was just wherever I was I was just there and it kind then suddenly like all this like anxiety started flooding because it felt like I was like just like born all of a sudden and I had nothing no context for like what I was doing or like who I was with kind of it was it was weird it wasn't like I didn't know but it was like I just didn't I could couldn't access the thoughts that I'd normally have available to me so it was like everything was completely new and it felt like I was just all of a sudden I didn't know who I was anymore and I was just there in the moment and it's kind of hard to explain if you hadn't had haven't had a sort of an experience like this but it wasn't like mystical or anything it was more like I feel like I'm dying and while time is very different than I had previously conceived of it like I I had this realization that all of a sudden I'm here now in this time frame of talking my friend and being high and I have no idea like how the mechanism of time works that I that I arrived here which sounds it sounds really simple and not such a profound realization or maybe it doesn't make any sense to you but it was a little bit wild to me that I hadn't really thought about that like I have all these plans for the future but I can't control where I am in time so I know the future will come around eventually but right now I'm here and so there's a lot of time between now and the future whatever moment it might be so instead of thinking about it like oh there's one hour now it's just like this moment and then I could be anywhere in any moment anywhere else in the hour it's it's difficult for me to explain because it's not really something verbal it's more experiential like like the Plato's allegory the cave kind of where unless you've experienced it you can't really unless you've experienced being out of the cave you still think that you're a shadow or something unless you've experienced this different sort of feeling of how time works you probably won't understand what I'm saying not to say that it's anything intellectual or you're not smart or anything it's just if you haven't had that experience then there's no concept to grasp on to for it so like when people say be present man or just live in the moment dude it's like kind of a cheap version of what it really means to be present because if you're truly present you're experiencing like your life fully so that it's almost like you're only alive for that moment in a sense whereas usually we're thinking part of our brains and part of our energy goes towards thinking about the past in the future if you feel like literally this is the only moment I have to live then all your energy is in the present moment and so you're just there and there's nowhere else to be kind of and it's not like you really have control over in that experience being present or not being present but you're just present you're just you're just one with whatever you're experiencing it's it's it's really good and it's like a pleasant feeling if you're not like if you're at peace kind of and and if not then nature is working really hard to get you to that place to get you to the place of peace so when I experienced it I didn't know I wasn't really at a place of peace I had a lot of emotions and fear and like fear of death and stuff like that so as soon as I let go of and I couldn't couldn't control but as soon as I had this experience of being fully present all these emotions started bubbling to the surface and I began to like have the chance to release them but since I didn't know what was happening I just kind of resisted it and started having like a panic attack but eventually my friend he got me some food and I just munched it down and I just remember it like looking at my camera and taking a picture of myself and being like well this is the moment like I didn't know what it meant but this is the moment and then every time I'd say I'd be like well the moment passed as I'm saying it and it was like so trippy kind of and freaky but it was really cool at the same time and then I remember we watched we went to a movie to like calm me down even more we saw Jurassic Park and I couldn't understand any of it but there's a two main characters and they they had an experience of love and I was like well love like that's something that's something that we can have in the moment and there's no need for rationalization it's not like a derived happiness it's not derived pleasure like me futurizing or imagining things I'll get in the future but it's something there it's something here now so then I was like well love love is like what we're kind of after maybe there's a little bit of a profound realization and maybe sounds like just a stoner idea but if you really think about just being present and what it means to be present then and a lot of spiritual texts talk about this too is like we want to be able to just be present and not have anything that we're like necessarily driving pleasure out of in the future or the past so we want to do actions for the sake of them not not to like get anything in the future or because they did something for us in the past but we just want to be here now and so how do we be here now if we we can be here now very comfortably if we have cultivated love inside of ourselves and if we have inner satisfaction and fulfillment so that might mean we have outside things that we're doing that drive some feeling of love and inner fulfillment but ideally we want everything to be self-fulfilling we want everything to be for the moment for God for source for the Tao and so that was kind of my realization from marijuana although I definitely didn't have all these breakthroughs until much later but that kind of made me realize okay there is something else to this life this consciousness whatever maybe it's not exactly how I thought it of it it's not religious in the way that I had imagined religion or spec speculated about it it's not atheistic either this it's not just like we're just flesh and bones there's something else here there's consciousness there's emotions there's no it's not nihilistic there's beauty and in the simplicity of being present and the interconnectedness of the world and that really I don't know just kind of I mean to be honest I was very anxious for the next few months because I had no nothing to contextualize this off I thought I just had a mass psychosis where I realized my insignificance in the universe and I realized how little control I have and I realized wow I don't know how to be here I don't know how to be here in this moment but it ended up bringing me to these concepts eventually of Buddhism I ended up coming across Buddhist texts that talk about the self and the non-self and how we think of this ego this mind that clings and grasps as our self but in reality it's the non-self or whatever you might say and there is consciousness this ocean of consciousness that is part that we each have a little piece of and that's the real self the consciousness that is always the same but yeah I started listening to Alan Watts and I found out about Buddhism and I just like I mean I didn't love it it freaked me out a bit still because I was I still had a massive like ego not in a negative way per se but just I didn't want to let go of all these future things I had and that I mean that experience alone immediately eradicated my desire to go to space like I mean I still care about space and would love to go but I knew in that moment that there are answers here I don't need to go anywhere else to find answers the answers are all inside of me but also inside of ancient masters who who left their knowledge for us they given us so much information that we literally can just sit on our computer for a few hours and figure out exactly what we knew need to do to become enlightened but starting from nowhere it's hard to figure out what resources to use so and and it's even more difficult to understand what they were saying because they're they're speaking from a different level of consciousness so so we we take their beautiful words from their highest state of consciousness and we try to make them fit our ego centered not in a negative way but it turns out to be negative sometimes our little minds where we we think oh here's here's a good guy here's a bad guy here's sin and here's here's goodness but in reality it's not it's not like that I don't think it's it's just they're just trying to help us they're all they're all fingers pointing to the moon and the moon's the same but the fingers are different the path is different but the paths all lead to the same spot it's just sometimes we look at the finger and we get so attached to this path and not and forget about the moon or we we try to overanalyze the finger and we try to figure out oh maybe it's the hand or we like look we go backwards we're like okay maybe it's it's the person I don't know I'm getting lost down this rabbit hole of how we can misunderstand things but I was after that like along with my ideas of a kid of this unification this idea that it's either all wrong or it's all right kind of thing I mean obviously there's outliers and and crazy people that just decide to come up with random ideas but I felt that all major religions and all major spiritual teachers had at least a little bit of truth to them they all were trying to point to the moon and using words as the vehicle made it very difficult for us to understand what they were saying and we we figured we we read words and we looked at the words too closely that we forgot that the words were just fingers pointing to the moon or just fingers pointing to truth fingers pointing to enlightenment fingers pointing to God and we saw that the we figured that the words were different and so the difference in words made them wrong but in reality it's not the words we care about it's not the teachings we care about it's what the teachings are saying what's behind the teachings what the practices are it's really all about the practices how can I let go of enough so that I can feel the truth within so anyways I came across Alan Watts and I came across Buddhism and I was still skeptical of all this religious stuff I wasn't sure about it I didn't want to get lost and and I I hadn't really established a specific sadhana per se or a practice spiritual practice but eventually I figured out like I was very anxious still from this experience I had of not knowing even though I had some some conceptualization of what it was but I wanted to figure out how can I let go of anxiety and I came across meditation just simple breathing meditation and fueled with this yearning to learn truth and fueled by this yearning to get rid of my anxiety and be fully present I made strong determination to meditate vigorously not vigorously but exactly like people said and I wouldn't take my mind off the breath and I would only do this for like 10 minutes at a time but I made sure every time I got distracted just come back to the breath and not force the breath or anything but just let it come and go and with that and my previous realization I started getting to these expanded states of consciousness nothing like astral projection or any of these things that people talk about but just being able to like close my eyes and almost see as if I was looking out into deep space and feel like I was connected to deep space and I would sit and I would feel like I'm sitting on top of the earth and I would be able to like viscerally feel you know in an expansive way the entire earth and it was some like the most beautiful experiences I've had and things would just happen naturally for me like I I don't know I met people that I really jived with and things just went super well but I still had college to do and everything and at that point I kind of I still was interested in college but I didn't really care as much about it because I had these experiences and college just felt like they're trying to push information into brains into the same consciousnesses but they're not trying to change the consciousness I don't know if that makes sense but people like Einstein people like Nikola Tesla their consciousnesses their inventive creative abilities were as a result of their their consciousness the level of I guess energy or mental strength and stamina and and and mental vitality that they had it wasn't because they had jammed a bunch of information into their their skulls that definitely probably helped them come up with some of their ideas but a majority of it comes across because we have cultivated such a mental attitude or not a mental attitude but a higher state of consciousness and so when when you go to school there's not really that much talk about how to cultivate that sort of higher level of consciousness where we will be able to come up with new ideas where we'll be able to be smarter and more intellectually stable but it's just trying to get information into your head is what I experienced I don't know if that's true for everybody but it I wasn't interested anymore I just wanted to expand my consciousness but being in the social animal I was I got sucked into the work hard play hard mentality I still want to do well in school so I worked hard to get good grades and I still want to hang out with my friends so I went out and partied on the weekends and eventually my meditation times went down I stopped having as many realizations and I got sucked into the cycle again which it happens but I still remembered the experiences I had and I would go to meditation sessions every once in a while and I would hang out with people that were into meditation sometimes and when I would go out sometimes I would have these weird experiences where like I don't know spiritual people would somehow start talking to me and tell me things which was weird and made me believe more in all this sort of stuff but eventually I started listening to Ram Dass and I started coming back to and I read this book called the autobiography of a yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda and Ram Dass talks about going on a search for truth a search for knowledge and it made me really resonate with him and so does Paramahansa Yogananda and the autobiography of a yogi and I had this inclination this idea that okay I need to go search for truth too and I had found more truth than I knew I had earlier in my in my endeavors but I guess I somehow doubted my own ability I thought I needed a new spiritual practice I somehow didn't believe that just breathing meditation could take me all the way or at least to the next phase but I ended up just deciding okay I'm gonna go look for a guru I'm gonna go look for a spiritual teacher and so I decided to go to Nepal and I decided I would have the most open mind possible because I'd restricted myself earlier in my life by having just an atheistic view and I'd also seen people restrict themselves by just having a strictly religious view and there's any sort of view that we have it can be limiting if we don't have an open mind so I decided all right whatever people tell me to do I'm gonna try it I'm not gonna believe everything they say but I'm gonna have an open mind to whatever they say I'm gonna be open to it and then I I decided to embark to Nepal and that will be part two my journey to Nepal I'm working on a video but there there's part one of my story and how I came to spirituality and believe in a unified version of God or consciousness or the universe or whatever you want to call it anyways much love may you be happy may you be healthy may you be spiritually aware and elevated may all beings be happy all beings be healthy may all beings be free from suffering I love you