Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot. Being religious doesn’t make you a bigot and being atheist doesn’t mean you aren’t one either.

I had a similar 180 though, I used to be an atheist but in the last year or so I pivoted into druidism. Turns out following a religion that focuses on spending time in nature helps to get you out of the house when you’re going though a depressive episode.

Yeah, I had a world-shaking 180 for spirituality after I read about Zen Buddhism.

I was a really proud atheist and thought all religions were just believing in something supernatural. Until I actually gave an intellectually honest try at understanding them. Most theistic religions I couldn’t get on board with but after I read Three Pillars of Zen, something just clicked and I joined my local sangha. Also begun to understand a bit more about religiosity in general after, though I’m still not a fan of Abrahamic religions in particular.

You say you were “intellectually honest” so I’m curious what it was about Zen that appealed to that kind of approach?

The way I was introduce to it framed it specifically as not believing in anything you can’t verify in your own direct experience. The book I read ( penguinrandomhouse.com/…/the-three-pillars-of-zen… ) was actually pretty unrelentingly pointing out how much of what I thought to be obviously true was actually just a belief. Meaning what I think is the average westerner experience of the world as explained by science. It didn’t offer me a set of ideas to believe in, it offered me a way of disbelieving anything I couldn’t know for myself to be true.

Like I said it was pretty world shattering. I realized there is a world BEFORE any thought and that is definitely more real than anything I can think about. I joined the local sangha because things got a little weird for me for a time and my friends kinda thought I was going crazy haha but in my perspective they were the ones alarmingly missing something incredibly important. And I still kinda think they are but it’s not my place to try to “convert” them. Since there’s no point. You need to have the active desire to actually understand.

But aren’t there things that you can objectively know to be true? Wouldn’t this just lead to believing whatever you want to believe?

I feel a little timid about trying to answer this because at this point, I know that people can talk about these things intellectually forever and it just won’t… click. It’s so hard to write about too because if I tried to write in a way that very perfectly reflects my experience, the text becomes weird and cumbersome ( and then when I don’t, people try some gotchas like “ahaa but you refer yourself as “I”, doesn’t that mean you still believe in an individual self”, no but writing more precisely gets in the way of the message ).

First, believing whatever I want to believe is definitely a danger and actually you see this a lot in spiritual discourse that leans towards Buddhism, especially via New Age stuff and “McMindfulness”. Many people happily discard the mainstream beliefs but then they get hooked on their idea of what is true. But the merciless approach that Zen Buddhism has is that nothing you think about is totally true. It’s more like a reflection in a mirror ( Interestingly Plato was also alluding to this in his Allegory of The Cave, so this realization isn’t unique to Zen ).

That includes the concept of “objectivity”. Objectivity relies on the idea that there is some external third party to human experience. But once I looked, or more like was forced to face it, I realized that there is no such thing. I can exchange ideas with what appear to be other people and have an agreement. Like we can probably both agree that we’re looking at a screen now. I anticipate an objection here on the “other people”. I don’t know if “other people” exist outside of me but I know that I don’t have control over anything that appears in my mind. Something that I can call “other people” appears, and they have their likes and dislikes and it can be painful if I’m not respectful of that. This is where compassion teachings come in.

Oh and I’m not anti-science at all. Science is great at revealing patterns in the way things appear. Happy to go get my vaccinations and all that.

Tell me you had a certain experience without telling me you had a certain experience.

Were you specifically taught to not talk in certain terms about how your world “shattered”? Because I was.