How does one describe what it is to wake up one day and find God gone? Only one friend knows I am currently an atheist, and as a lifelong atheist who has never had any experience more divine than a general wonderment at the universe, he inquired what that was like from my perspective. I said the first thing that came to mind, "It was like waking up one day and not being able to see blue any more."
More accurately it was like one day realizing you hadn't seen blue for a while, and couldn't remember when the last time was that you had. It had snuck up on me without any fanfare or even so much as a "by your leave". Where, I wondered, was the angst? The intellectual struggle? Instead, like that poor little fish Francis, it had been there one moment, and then all of a sudden, "Poof!" and I had woken up one morning to find the bowl empty. As children always draw the water in a fishbowl blue, that is perhaps about as fitting a metaphor as you could wish for.
I supposed I must have been too tired to engage with all that, and wondered if I wasn't perhaps a bit depressed. I suppose that I have been, and yet I've been far more depressed in my life and in times past that has not had the same effect, and eventually led to a heightened spirituality.
When I was much younger I often experienced a state called Derealization and less often a state called Depersonalization and I thought it was perhaps some species of this I was now experiencing. Alas, it does not seem to be true. Derealization is the subjective experience that the world around you is unreal, and Depersonalization is the experience that you yourself aren't real, though your intellect does not actually believe that to be the case. Unlike people who experience it suddenly in relative adulthood, or as a side effect of anxiety or depression, my Derealization arrived in childhood, before I thought to question my sanity on its account. It was rather pleasant and daydreamy, in my opinion, and came and went as it pleased without much attachment to my emotional state. No, this was not at all like that.
Things are most definately "real" and they feel subjectively real. They simply lack a certain je ne sais quoi. As though there had always been some spark of magic in the world that gave it a sort of depth that was now lacking. Like the world had always been 4 dimensional for me, and it was now unaccountably in mere 3D. For my friend, who has always seen the world in 3D, this is an unremarkable thing. Just as life without sound, without music, and without laughter is an unremarkable event to the d/Deaf. As they have always gotten along just fine without those things, grasping what the loss of them might mean is more of an intellectual excercise than anything else. For the music lover, or the musician, facing such a prospect is a bit terrifying and certainly depressing. Sure I can live without it, but will what's left without it be worth living?
I wondered if I had somehow gotten stuck in a state with things somewhere between real and not real, which is still up for consideration but seems unlikely. Things are rather almost unbearably real, or else it's unbearable that that reality is all that I have. It's not as though I haven't experienced heightened reality before and feel a need to avoid it. I have experienced a heightened sense of reality but only in conjunction with a heightened sense of spiritual reality accompanying it. For nine months of my life I experienced an ongoing, interactive and responsive spiritual state that was a great amazement to me, as well as to everyone who watched all my difficulties and shortcomings disappear overnight. Call it super high-def plasma screen 4D with surround sound. I had to deal with the loss of that too, when I was struck by a car and suffered a head injury. But that was the loss of something I'd gotten by surprise, with no effort, that most people never get. A loss, yes, but easy come, easy go and count your blessings that you ever experienced it at all. This....this is different.
At this point anyone bothering to read is wondering why I still sound a bit, well religious. I know that people have certain expectations...religious people who become atheists are supposed to become antagonistic toward religion, point out all the holes in the Bible and demand that religion be destroyed as the greatest evil ever. In short, they are supposed to become Atheist fundamentalists and religion is the new AntiChrist...or AntiAthiest. Fortunately, I was raised to be Biblically literate and not a Biblical literalist. I always knew there were plotholes in The Book in English....and some of them are stubborn enough to stick right back into the Greek and the Hebrew. Some of my favourite books and movies have plotholes too, and yet I love them. Some of my most inspiring books, or most useful books have spelling mistakes, poor grammar and typos all over them. I even once found a mistake in a physics book....I can't tell you which in case reading it destroys your faith in Science.
If the word atheist brought you here in hopes of foamy mouthed denunciations of all the cranks that still believe, you're on the wrong blog. For all its misuses and problems, I still think that genuine Traditional Religion, but not fundamentalism or liberal religion, is the best way in which to organize society and train children to become good community members and healthy adults. Unfortunately, I rarely find anyone who turns out to be really practicing any religion but some sort of Idolatry. When you have God in your pocket, hissing you your lines, and giving direction, what other people do is irrelevant. When you no longer get the inside track info, and can only meet God through His/Her followers, behaviour starts to matter a great deal.
I don't know that I will remain an atheist. This may be simply a brief moment of doubt. It may even be the beginning of a deeper relationship with the spiritual. A Dark Night of the Soul. A contemplative mystery. I do know that it changes nothing. Science drove me to Religion. Reason brought me to Passion. Intellect, brought me to Faith.
And at night, the sky is black.
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