Why I am Christian again

Puncturing the vault of heaven to rediscover earth.

In college, while my friends were getting slammed at house parties, I was working as a bouncer at a hipster bar called Red Star. Lots of IPAs and a jukebox playing Bob Dylan. 

I took the job specifically because hipster bars were less rowdy than other bars, so I could sit on a stool outside and read. That was where I first read “The Selfish Gene.” Richard Dawkins wrote that book directly to me. It was a stairway from the swampy superstition of Louisiana, up to clean reason. All human behavior could be explained, genetically. Mmm, fresh water.

From my stool, I watched the bar goers' drunken mating rituals. I was having less fun, but I knew something they didn’t. I was smarter – safer. 

I got off of work at about 2am, hurled the last sour-beer-smelling trash bag into the dumpster and ambled the 5-minutes to the bank of the Mississippi river.

In reverence to the sodium lamp lights glimmering in the water, I dreamed of hanging out with people like Dawkins: smart people at the firmament of reality. My moonshot ticket into those circles? I wanted to be a famous writer. My book was science fiction and a theory of consciousness… yeah, like most novels, it’s still sitting on my hard drive, unpublished. 

The research (meaning, I read a few books) I did while writing that novel taught me a thing or two. Before we continue with this story, I need to do some world-building. To keep us loosely in the narrative, picture me thinking about this on the bank of the Mississippi. Yeah, that’s good. 

The Lower Levels

I partly learned from Ken Wilber’s writings, there are (at least) seven levels of consciousness.

Level one is just pure awareness. Blind drunks, animals, and infants, basically. On a call with the founder of AA, Carl Jung said people drink alcohol because they want to be one with the universe. That’s right on. 

Up we climb… level two is elevating from merely awareness of self to the awareness of a singular other. For toddlers, it’s Mother. At Red Star, it’s a potential hookup. Even at this low level, there is a drive to unify with the other and hopefully return to level one, through sex. A return to the womb, so to speak (or, actually, pretty literally).

Climbing higher still, level three is the level of the immediate family. Italian gangsters live here (I just rewatched Goodfellas). For kids, this is where Dad enters the picture. At Red Star, though, this is awareness of not only the girl he wants to take home, but also another guy who wants the same thing. This evokes wanting to punch him in the face about it. See, once the other guy is out of the picture, he can return to level two (just him and her) and, if all goes well, level one (sex). 

You’ll notice that there is immense gravity downward. Only desire and fear are able to pull someone up a level. This is important to remember as we climb even higher.

Level four is the awareness of the larger tribe surrounding the immediate family. It’s the “walk of shame” the morning after. This level brings in social status and group think. It is a mythical and deeply religious level. Whether it be Islam, East Coast intellectualism, or tribal mythologies — as long as you only understand the world from the perspective of the tribe in which you were born, you are in level four. This is one of the more stable levels.

In my sphere, level four was the semi-modern Christian landscape of my Louisiana upbringing. For me, Dawkins represented venturing a level higher, to level five. A powerful, yet lonely new vista of “objectivity.” 

Most “normal” people (Western kids with religious parents) are somewhere between level four and five. They both suspect that there is something outside of what they’re born into, but they cannot (or will not) fully commit to it because it would be too mentally distressing. That cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, so many become alcoholics about it, again, seeking the bliss of level one.

Dawkins – a trained scientist who's also not temperamentally inclined towards community bonds – wants to fix this disconnect by having us leave level four entirely. To that end, he became famous by debating level fours. Mostly Christian fundamentalists. They lose automatically because they unconsciously adopt some of his level five materialist assumptions, which seeped into the church starting 300 years ago during the Enlightenment. For example, they try to argue that the Bible is somehow the best science book. Funnily enough, both Dawkins and the fundamentalists assume science is the most fundamental Truth. But since Dawkins is an actual scientist, dunking on them is easy.

At the time, I fully agreed with him. Despite the pain of leaving my home tribe, I wanted to join him. It felt like the courageous thing to do. So, I dreamed about getting there from where I was — a levee on the Mississippi.

That is, until my roommates rode up on their bikes to meet me after work. 

The Fifth Firmament

We decided to go “urban exploring” in the mostly abandoned downtown Baton Rouge. I don't remember the exact demographic reasons why downtown was abandoned. Something my social justice friends called “white flight?” Anyway, it left a lot of derelict office buildings for us to explore.

We climbed fire escapes, kicked at cracked glass, and slinked our way into the forgotten office buildings. The walls were white, the carpets thin and green, the furniture plastic and utilitarian. But in the abandoned orange light and dust, utilitarianism took on a sinister, almost unholy tone. I remember how loudly I could hear my own breath; the fear of finding something horrible – a dead body? the police? the ghost of an accountant with unfinished business? I wasn’t sure. 

But, eventually, we explored everything we could reach. Excitement waned. 

So, I lowered my shoulder and burst through a sheetrock wall into an unexplored area. There we discovered a room with no windows or doors. There was only a dark, human-sized hole in the far wall. We clambered through that waist-high hole, which was a brick tunnel connecting our building to the neighboring one (to this day, I don’t know what that was for). From there, we found our way up staircases — higher and higher was the unspoken goal.

We were acting out that classic wood carving of the explorer on his knees reaching out beyond the firmament. Somehow, the dissonant half level four, half level five assumptions held by adults around us were shown to be self-evidently incorrect in this temple of abandoned modernity. 

We found our way to the top floor of one of the higher buildings, and then onto the roof. We propped open the metal door with a chunk of concrete filled with rusted rebar. After smashing some bottles and gazing at the quiet streets below, we laid on corrugated tin, looking up at the starry night.

What does it all mean?

They were raised in Louisiana Catholic homes; children of good families of lawyers and architects who go to church on Sunday and return to sterile modernity the other six days of the week. I, on the other hand, was the child of working people. Because of my lower class, I was less motivated to fit in, and more motivated to show them I knew something they didn’t. As we learned, it takes social motivation to climb to higher levels. That was mine.

You know, I said, Lots of other people out there are looking at the same stars and believe entirely different things. Look, those stars, millions of lightyears away, balls of burning gas, were indifferent to us. Perhaps even dead, since their light was just reaching us after millions of years of traveling through cold empty space. By some incredible chance, we found ourselves thrown into existence as big-brained monkeys. But the universe didn’t care if we lived or died – we could be scrubbed clean for eternity by a supernova too close or a quasar too on target. 

Maybe we should be brave enough to face that abyss; to tear our way into the unforgiving night. 

Being modern kids raised on TV, we barely believed our own level four myths anyway. Virgin birth, child sacrifice, original sin – bronze-age myths to control you. We could escape it.

Dawkins said, objectively, our genes are selfish. They only want to survive and reproduce. Religion is just yet another manifestation of the selfish gene: a “meme,” which is an abstracted gene (a term he coined), which also just wanted to reproduce. They weren’t “true,” they were just useful. But not anymore. Don’t you see?

To this day, my friend tells me I was the first person that convinced him that there was no God. Maybe that was a mistake. But, I imagined that there were other people, out there somewhere, free of all superstition. 

Level five says there is an “objective” view of reality we need to adopt in order to be “rational.” The scientific view.

But like a magnet approaching the same pole, this realm could not take me in my entirety. I was too irrationally human. And the gravity downward was too powerful. I needed a clean slate.

Chaos Beyond the Fifth 

So, after skipping my own graduation, I got in my car, and I drove to the clean desert of Texas, seeking redemption. I made a little life out there, reading books which told me to work harder and think rationally (Ayn Rand). Maybe the poison of level five would eventually transmute into a tonic. I had faith, ironically.

My girlfriend came to visit me from Louisiana. In my sad little $500-a-month studio apartment, we (stupidly, like you do) decided to take a big dose of psychedelic mushrooms. 

I still remember so clearly what I saw: the religious beliefs of my childhood, which once seemed so cosmic and important, were nothing more than a CD. Two dimensional. That much, I already knew. But, worse, the beliefs that I had gained from Dawkins were also nothing but a thin CD in the vastness of the real cosmos. Enlightenment-style rationality was just another perspective in an infinite number of perspectives. True reality was so much more than my tiny human mind could begin to understand. I had been watching shadow-plays on the wall of The Cave, but the light outside was blinding. 

There is certainly mystery to the cosmos. And it is very mysterious. Dawkins seems to think this sort of thing is made up, but I had first-hand experience now, and I knew it wasn’t.

These were my exact words: “There is no ground to stand on.” I had found nothing beyond the firmament of level five but madness. Everyone, including Dawkins, was just guessing. Worse, my constant questioning had left me alone in the desert without human connection, except what was left over from Louisiana. I had truly become that McConaughey character from True Detective. I had been twisted beyond recognition and I feared I could never go home. 

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

I moved back to Louisiana with my tail between my legs – New Orleans this time – in a new apartment with my girlfriend. I hated being back in that swampy place of tarot cards and shrunken heads (level four). But, there was no redemption in the desert. So, I tried to bury the dead and start my life with her. But, in New Orleans, the dead don’t want to stay buried (you know, because buried caskets literally float to the surface in the swamp). 

After just two months, some 40-something-year-old Tony-award-winner took an interest in her, and that was that. 

My brother lived in Texas and told me to come stay with him. In a Uhaul filled with everything I owned, I was headed back to the desert. But, this time, I wasn’t seeking redemption, I was seeking oblivion – level one. To that end, I found a bunch of drinking buddies (a replacement “family,” level three). These were some of the more fun times in my life. I was also the coolest I had ever been. My nihilism seemed to impress girls (level two). 

At a Renaissance festival one night (go figure), I was with my new friends, throwing axes and whatnot. Later, drunk, I didn’t make it to my tent, so I was lying on my back in the woods. The crescent moon watched me between limbs. The edge of the firmament was still calling to me in a still, small voice.

After that, I stopped drinking. My ego healed a little, so I started reading and writing again. Slowly, I tried to make sense of what I had discovered in that studio apartment trip. 

The ascent from the religion I was born into to the next level, the “objective” level of Dawkins, was just a yet another zoom out of social perspective. From the level of tribe to the level of all tribes. Really, though, if you zoom out further, there are an infinite number of “objective” perspectives out there, outside of all tribes. All seemingly “objective” lenses (even science) are chosen by the person creating the “frame” to gain power for him or his group. The problem is deep (and undeniable) because, according to what cognitive science, quantum, and AI researchers are figuring out, events don’t happen outside of our ability to perceive them. You have to pick a frame! French postmodern literary critics first discovered this in the 70s, and I read a bunch of their writing during this time. 

I had firmly made it to level six. And it, it would turn out, was even more dangerous than level five.

Level six says there are an infinite number of ways to view reality, and none of them are True in the final sense. Every statistic is just a story told via numbers. 

Level Five Fights Back

People like Dawkins try to fight level six with the stubborn insistence that there is one objective view of reality (the scientific one). That perspective can even tell us morals, they say! Sam Harris does his damnedest in his book “The Moral Landscape.” But, as David Hume famously said, you can’t get an “ought” from an “is” (no matter how hard you stamp your foot). Trying to derive morality from science was certain to fail.

And it did. While Harris and Dawkins were busy dunking on level four yokels, there was a chaotic level six above them, saying, “You’re both wrong.”

Narrative/moral frameworks emerge from a much deeper part of the brain (and, by extension, reality itself). And even Dawkins unconsciously uses these narratives as motivation to do the work he deems so important. 

Dawkins is driven, for example, by the Christian idea that “the truth will set you free” (which is why his contemporary, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says he is “the most Christian man she knows”). That drive for Truth (Logos) comes from the narrative tension between Hebrews and the Greeks, which he himself acknowledges caused the development of the Enlightenment and Western scientific thinking. 

See, without a transcendent faith in Truth (the Logos), why not fudge (or embellish) your findings to advance your career? Dawkins is helping to dismantle everything that gave rise to his very ability to think scientifically. It’s like he’s sawing at the branch of an old tree he’s perched upon because he feels himself to be flying. 

This downfall isn’t just hypothetical; it’s happening. 95% of social science papers cannot be reproduced. Even the hard scientists are not immune, with “serious” researchers babbling about “wormholes, superstrings, and mini-superspace,” mostly doing what amounts to, as Adam Mastroianni puts it, “Macaroni art with numbers.” 

Dawkins himself finds this phenomenon baffling and frustrating. But a level six could have easily predicted it (and, famously, one particularly angry one did). 

This problem is so obvious, it’s amazing that modern people are so blind to it. Dawkins says, for example, “Intelligent people only believe in things with evidence.” Sounds reasonable, but… what the hell does he mean by “believe?” Certainty? Faith? Conviction? All are appropriate in some situations and not others. He unconsciously chose the narrative framework (religion) of Scientism (without providing any evidence, ironically) and then insisted it is self-evident. But, I believe that I will still be alive tomorrow with zero scientific evidence. I also believe my mother loves me and that Ted Chiang is the best short story writer. I do not require empirical evidence. Does that make me “unintelligent?” Of course, belief is sometimes appropriate on account of evidence; if you’re doing science, for example. Yet, most of the time, faith is required to go about our normal lives. This is the fundamental issue with trusting “The Science” or “The Experts.” 

As you can tell, I was getting more and more irritated with Dawkins’ sterile and 2D view of reality. Instead of seeming like clean salvation, it now seemed silly. I couldn’t orient myself via scientific facts (not even machines can do that). I needed a framework that told me how to live.

Notice: a lot of people on the internet do try to orient their lives via scientific facts. Without a transcendent aim, they obsess over “biohacking” and “productivity hacks.” And they’re all just that – hacks. They over optimize for quantifiable goals (like wealth and status) by sacrificing what is not yet understood or simply can’t be quantified. The unintended result is becoming slaves to the unseen tyrannical narrative of modernity. You’re always picking a frame.

It was time for me to somehow fully let go into participation with reality. I think I heard some Alan Watts lectures about this stuff?

Hedonism at Level Six

Yes, of course. Off I go into meditation and woo-woo spirituality. And I practiced it like hell. Heading further West, I went to a Joe Dispenza meditation retreat on a mountain in Colorado. By pure chance, I was chosen out of thousands to have my brain scanned by neuroscientists while I meditated. 

I had scientific proof (ironically) that I was in level six: when I meditated, I had strong theta brain waves (that’s good). I had plenty more mystical experiences, without drugs. I could stay in the present moment pretty dang well. 

In a bland hotel ball room filled with meditators, a small, smiley man approached me. Out-of-place optimism dripped from his teeth. He handed me his card. On it, he claimed he was the incarnation of Christ, Aphrodite, and the Buddha. Despite these incredible (literally) credentials, his goal of the retreat was to “manifest” a hot beach body. Hm. I was struck to the bone by this man. Despite giving everything to spirituality, he was even more confused than me. No real purpose other than pathetic status ambitions. 

I run into these types of people all the time in LA. By “tolerating” all narratives, they truly embody none of them. The result is some mix of existential confusion and status obsession.

Even beautifully articulate spiritual thinkers like Alan Watts (I still love to listen to his talks) tell us that our ego's not real, our past isn't real, and our future isn't real. We should therefore forego them. How? Meditate until you “pop” off all narratives, into the narrative-free infinite bliss of the present moment (level one). But Alan Watts drank himself to death by his 50s. I hope the bliss was worth it, Alan. But I doubt it.

During this time, I was in one relationship after another (career and romantic), unable to fully commit. Unable to build a life that wove together my past, present, and future. Level six blinded me to how all the parts of my life interconnected, so I was always willing to elevate one part (pleasure, usually) at the expense of many unseen others. I was still playing whack-a-mole. Chasing girls, manifesting money, working out, micro-dosing. These soothed, but would never take me home. 

Again, I considered heading back to Louisiana. Maybe level four was the right answer after all. Could I return there? The call to cowboy simplicity seemed romantic to me again, but I felt I would always be a faker. A self-conscious hipster. I had seen too much. Should I pluck my eyes out?

Maybe I have a moral responsibility to!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s article was making the rounds on social media, “Why I am now Christian” a few months ago. She was one of the more famous atheists, so this was sort of a big deal. 

In her view, Christianity is a practical solution for political concerns: you know, the collapse of Western civilization. She’s basically making the Nietzschean argument that we need the unifying force of God to combat the pseudoreligions that arose in His place (dangerously fragmented political ideologies, mostly). She quotes G.K. Chesterton: 

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” 

Nice. But, it all feels a bit… utilitarian? Well, that makes sense. She’s an old friend of the most famous level fivers, the “New Atheists” including the man himself, Richard Dawkins. 

She notes that rejection of religion has not reigned in the utopia of reason as the New Atheists hoped. All that happened was that the religious instinct was unconsciously transferred to the political realms. Having zealot-level convictions for your political aims without the accompanying humility (believing in a higher power), things tend to get nasty (20th century is the case study). As a result, again in the 21st century, we’re facing what feels like societal collapse. You know the story – Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Putin, and Zelenskiy. We no longer speak the same language, but the babbling tribes now have nuclear codes instead of bronze swords.

I’m not a particularly political person, but I do notice this. Chronically online people probe for my political alliances, and if I don’t share theirs, they shun me like an infidel. Worse, they don’t even recognize their devotion as religious.

Ali’s solution seems like a moral call for us to return to level four Christianity like scolded children. She seems to be confessing that we’re just not strong enough to deal with “objective” reality, nor should we tolerate societal decay caused by level six’s moral relativism. So, she’s more like a level five/six who dims herself into level four by necessity, not Truth. Dawkins’ pleading and yet dismissive response is absolutely no surprise to anyone. He sees it as a weakness, as I once did.

Her solution reminds me a bit of the alcoholic's – give up! and dim yourself closer to oblivion. Maybe that’s not how she sees it, but that’s how I would’ve seen it when I was on the bank of the Mississippi. Hell, maybe I should’ve done that. Maybe my life would’ve been easier. But I couldn’t. 

I would either find salvation in the wilderness, or die beyond the firmament. 

The Tower of Babel

Around this time, I had a dream. It took on the shape of one of my favorite short stories by Ted Chaing called “Tower of Babel.” 

I had climbed up the six levels on my Tower of Babel, and now I had finally reached the solid granite Vault of Heaven. It was cool, white, and unmarked. There was no way through or around it and there was no way back down. I was stuck here for the rest of my life (or maybe eternity?), alienated from God, reason, and other people. I had abandoned earth with no hope to get to heaven. I now understood why God warned us not to build the tower. But did he hate me for it? Could I be forgiven?

But, then there was a voice. My ears could not hear the pitch, but it resonated in my bones. I knew it had always been with me. It had come from the deepest parts of my spiritual, mythical, and evolutionary past. 

It said, simply, “Give up.”

Not what I wanted to hear. So, I said, “God, give me answers or kill me!” Be careful what you ask for. “Knock, and the door will be opened to you.”

At His Word, I phased through the white stone. On the other side, I was immersed in the water that God had once unleashed to flood the earth. I was sucked into a vortex and couldn’t tell up from down. I clawed for air, but I would drown. But I would die close to heaven, and that felt OK. 

Then, suddenly, I found a surface. I sputtered up a lungful of water. When I got to my feet, I realized I was back on the bank of the Mississippi river. I saw that glimmer of sodium lamp light on the dark water. 

Somehow, it seemed, heaven and earth touched, even though they seemed so far apart. Ah! Reality is a 4D sphere.

Like the Ghost of Christmas Past, I walked back to Red Star. I saw the people drinking and doing their mating rituals. They were playing and connecting with each other, however imperfectly. It was better to be un-self-consciously dancing than sitting on a high stool, judging.

From the jukebox I hear Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

Then, on the roof of the abandoned office buildings, I met Dawkins. As we talked, I realized that he was right. We did function by genes and “memes” that only wanted to survive and propagate. But memes are not just hyper-salient meta-parasites who twist our minds to their own ends. They can be our idea of ourselves, our idea of other people, the great Mother, Love, or the Creator. They are real. In fact, these are the realest things that there are. If Dawkins would simply have taken his most famous idea to its conclusion, he would’ve become Jung — memes are just shallow archetypes. But he wasn’t having it, and that was fine.

He couldn’t see that by trying to escape all narratives, we do not gain access to some objective “CCTV” to reality. We simply adopt a dead, modern myth that is decidedly anti-human, like the aesthetic of the abandoned offices.

Run, boy, run!

The stars are shockingly bright far away from the city. In the distance, there were some hippies dancing around a bond fire. They stare into the abyss. They are brave. They smell like patchouli.

But, just because you can't orient yourself by scientific facts doesn't mean you let go of all orienting mechanisms. That just leaves you in a place where the world is upside down and you worship what is ugly instead of what is beautiful. We still need ideals. Even though, from our limited perspective, they are always approximations toward ideals.

Movement toward ideals requires something more than level five “propositional” knowledge. I need “participatory” knowledge. Riding a bike rather than reading about how to ride a bike. It’s being in the Tao, as the people in the East have described. Or, walking the straight and narrow, as Jesus said. Being in “flow” as modern people call it. Holding various ideologies in mind, and yet, raising the Creative force that brings everything into being above it all. Being truly awake and therefore submitting to death. To walk with God, naked in the Garden.

Suddenly, my language took on religious themes. I couldn’t help it. That’s what religion is for.

This is level seven. 

The Sacred Seventh Level

The key insight here is that, yes, level six is right: There are an infinite number of “objective” perspectives. But I have to zoom out just one more time. To do that, I compare these perspectives through time. That is the definition of a narrative! Now, we have access to much better questions. Like, “What is the narrative that, if adopted fully, would most likely lead to a good life?” 

People like Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung helped me understand that all the world’s mythologies (narratives) share a common structure. Like music, there are infinite ways to bang on piano keys, but only a tiny few give you Beethoven.

Jung, C.S. Lewis, and Heidegger helped me hear that Christianity is the crescendo of all mythologies. Meaning, all other stories were reaching and fumbling toward His ultimate conclusion. Every god and titan was a spiritual abstraction of the interconnected landscape of our minds and nature, all asking the question through their warfare, “Which of us will have the last Word?” The most obvious answer was power (embodied, if you like, by the Greeks and Romans and their chaotic gods of domination). Those ideals weren’t just “immoral.” They were incorrect. They didn’t work! 

Instead, somehow, a low-status carpenter who was tortured and murdered literally defeated those psychotechnologies! That’s not a figure of speech. In case you hadn’t noticed, Christianity is the most successful faith on earth (despite the Church’s corruption and flaws). Rome and her gods of glory have fallen. This is mind-blowing historical information. Can we ask ourselves How the hell did that happen?

Christ redeems all the previous incomplete narratives through His deepest phenomenological Truth: willingly die to yourself so that you can be reborn. Through this heroic self-sacrifice, reality snaps into proper order. He tames Mars to fight in God’s army as Archangel Michael. 

Now, here is where language fails me. Words, by their nature, are too level five to fully arrive here. That’s why we do art. But, words can at least point toward the transformation. Heidegger did this way better than I ever could.

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.” ― Martin Heidegger

If you want to find God, look lower. Take up your cross. 

This works, even in the worst possible circumstances. Jesus broke the 4-minute-mile of human morality, and now we’re all faced with the knowledge that it’s possible. What I do with that level seven insight is fully up to me. But I can’t unknow it.

To fully arrive at level seven as modern people, we have to forget, for a moment, all of the level five materialist brainwashing. We can't allow ourselves to say, “Well, myths are neat and all, but they're not really real. What's really real is what is measured – science.” Nope, you’re already buying the modern myth with that very statement. There is no escape, myths are deeper than science. Myths give rise to our very ability to do science. Born, as it is, from Christian universities, themselves fueled by much older alchemical curiosities. 

But theorizing about this gets us nowhere – we must participate. I must take them so seriously that I am willing to die for them. How is that possible?

To be an “adult-onset religious person” (level seven) is to realize that these stories are metaphors, but to also understand that metaphors are realer than material facts. The mind is a “metaphor” of the brain, but you are still your mind, not your brain. In the same way, God is the “mind” of the cosmos. 

“The whole of nature is a metaphor or image of the human mind.” — Emerson

Ok, then, how do I know what’s “real?” I don’t want to get lost in level six again…

The Reality of a concept is best measured, perhaps, by my willingness to die for it. After all, there is no life without death, so we’re all dying for something. Now, I can ask myself another good question: “What story am I currently dying for?”

“Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you don't want it to be.” ― Carl Jung

I had been acting out of tragedy. But… how do you redeem a tragedy?

It didn’t matter if I believed it or not: I am in the historical narrative of Christ. That is the musical motif of our species. Whatever I do, I am merely adding texture to the story already in motion. All great works of art and lives properly lived are offshoots of this narrative. Just watch movies, read books, and learn about great people with an eye for this story – it is undeniable and unavoidable. Every great person who has pulled our current reality into existence followed Christ’s example. Any exception only proves the rule by inverting the Truth and therefore reinforcing it. 

That’s just how reality works. It’s not arbitrary. We know from everything we’ve observed in overcoming addiction (the “false idols” of modern men) that we must die to our previous frames and be reborn to new ones, over and over. Christ showed us that that principle works at its very extreme limits; even if it means humiliation, torture, and bodily death. By His example, then, we become willing, without reservation, to die to ourselves. We have faith we will be the soil from which the Creative force of the universe can use us to our greatest potential. That’s true at the macro level of societal injustice all the way down to your DNA. It’s a fractal.

The end of history will either be our completeness in becoming like Christ, or our destruction. There is no medium path. Everything works on compound interest, after all. That’s why we are called to bring the Kingdom of God to earth, or reign in Hades (death).

At the risk of over-explaining the metaphor (I’m a chronic level fiver, unfortunately), submitting to that is what drowned me at the seventh firmament. But that death brought me rebirth, back to where I started. A hero’s journey, which redeemed my tragedy.

But it’s a step further still than Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

It's not that all these stories have similar themes and are therefore interchangeable. They're all culminating towards the historical and embodied Christ, by definition. Every pagan mythology and scientific fact is not denied by Christ, but is redeemed through his archetypal self-sacrifice, which we might emulate in our best moments. 

“All the raging elements are tamed in the presence of Christ. Bacchus, fauns, and satyrs stop their drinking orgies and start dancing. Zeus stops cheating. Athena stops envying. Zephyr, the westerly wind, dies down. And winter itself abates unable to withstand the approaching steps of eternal Spring.” — Eugene Terekhin

But, to be clear, I can’t convince myself of that with level five thinking any more than I could convince myself to fall in love. This relationship with Christ, although it is patterned into every level of reality, is still a choice for us. That’s why it’s beautiful. It’s more like a marriage proposal than a logical proposition. The love comes first, the reasons for the love, second. Even my own life of hopeless struggle up this Tower of Babel is somehow redeemed by that love. I don’t fully understand that. I no longer need to. Instead, I embody it and watch magic unfold in my life as a result.

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.” – Joel 2:25

Redeeming All Lower Levels

From this place, I could finally see all of the layers that had come before me were all instruments in a symphony. For most of my life, I was hyper-focusing on each instrument, and what I really needed to do was hear the harmony. Properly understood difference is what makes harmony beautiful. Then, once I was ready, I could fully participate. 

And then, suddenly, I was a child again, in church, looking up to the stained-glass image of Christ. And I saw everyone else there, looking up and singing their willingness to follow the savior to their own death.

Level four Christians sometimes insist that the Bible is true by level five analysis. Young Earth Creationists, for example, accidentally impose a scientific framework on the ancient text, because they’ve been conditioned by modern culture to believe (fear?) that level five is the truest level. But, what I hear them saying now is, “This is more real than a deconstructionist materialist perspective! We must understand them as True!” And that’s right on. 

I could deconstruct you, for example, by saying you’re “just a bag of chemicals.” And that would be correct from the level five perspective. But nobody really thinks that’s all we are. And nobody would dare act that out! That would make you a psychopath. 

Elders in my home town maybe didn't have the level five words to articulate that Truth in a way that satisfied me when I was a rebellious teenager, but that didn't matter anymore. They were in community, unselfconsciously. That was Good.

Yes, we have to scrutinize our superstitions and think critically. Sometimes, we have to strip away everything so we can get to the first principles. And that's true and good, but it's not always beautiful. Beauty tells us when things are in harmony, and which things need to be more like that. Don’t be a wet blanket – you know beauty when you see it.

I went to a symphony of Beethoven's Seventh. It moved me, and there's no talking me out of that. Why would I care to try? A Dawkins type might cross his arms and say “It’s all just a bunch of vibrating air, isn’t it? What a silly waste of time.” And, from this place, I just laugh. I mean, it is funny. Vibrating air!

But, I stopped scrutinizing the vibrations and started hearing the music. No one could have forced me. Now, I wouldn't try to force someone else. The Universal Consciousness outside The Cave is, after all, unknowable, so, humility, you know.

The seventh level is outside of the climb altogether. It’s neither higher nor lower. Every time my most terrifying experience of humility allows a Higher Power to elevate me beyond my own short-sighted will, I’m in level seven. These moments are all around me, if we can bear to see them. Before Christ, only fools “paid it forward.” Now, our entire society depends on the chosen few who dare to sacrifice themselves for the love of others. Look, I don’t believe that Christ shifted the fate of the cosmos because “God said so.” It literally happened! Now, we take His radical proposition as something so completely obvious that no one needs to say it. 

But, apparently, I do need to say it! I needed to hear it, anyway.

Going higher and higher eventually forced me down. To my “rock bottom,” as alcoholics in recovery call it. And that’s right on every level. I have to be in a relationship with the people around me, right here and now. To do that, I sacrifice the urge to climb higher to safety via intelligence, correctness, or status. It's better than the smug sense of superiority level fives like Neil DeGrasse Tyson get from tearing down symbolic thinking in favor of a sterile nerd’s fantasy of being technically correct. Get off the stool and dance, you fool. There is no lasting safety, anyway. We’re all dying. 

At the other extreme, I also became sober and stopped seeking oblivion via pleasure. Or, well, I try, one day at a time. My desire for oblivion is satiated by my conscious approach to the personal death of level one, rather than a hollow (but maybe necessary when I was desperate) visit there by force of chemicals. 

I try to choose the impossible third option: voluntarily die to my false self to unite consciousness with unconsciousness. I face death in service to others, specifically to my family and friends, through whom I am able to see the face of God. 

Paradoxically, this elevates me. 

But I can never know that it will before I take the leap.

Faith

Psychologists know that facing fears makes you stronger. Faith literally changes your genetic expression. What is the limit to the embodied transformation possible via spiritual courage? What if we fully faced Death itself? Would I literally rise from the dead? What does that even mean? For how many millions of years has that spirit been influencing our evolution? We don’t know.

I don't need to know. Or, I just need to know vaguely enough to shut up my level five mind. More than I could ever know whispers as the voice of the Creator through my perfectly adapted human biology. We are not aliens in this place. A modern lie! The cosmos comes alive by our very imagination of it. When imagination conflicts with data, I should ask more questions and think more deeply, not mock my imagination. I just had to learn to listen. To rest.

“YHWH, you are my shepherd—I want nothing more. You let me lie down in green meadows; you lead me beside restful waters: you refresh my soul. You guide me to lush pastures for the sake of your Name.” – Psalm 23:1-3

For the first time since I was a child, I slept peacefully through the night. I had a dream about building a house made of sound and light.

In the morning, I get on my knees (low) and pray. Then, I drive to the coffee shop to write, buy a coffee, look the barista in the eye, ask him how his day is. I remember his name, Andrew. When I finish, restore a little order to the table and chairs.

Listen, this essay might make it seem more complicated than it is. The truth is, we all know all of this in our bones. If you embody this, even children want to emulate it (like how toddlers prefer a Picasso to finger painting). This behavior-aligned-with-reality is seen and therefore ripples into the social web in unexpected ways. For example, my subtle decisions in the coffee shop were noticed by someone who eventually struck up a conversation, and that ended up becoming a life-changing friendship (and career opportunity). The meek inherit the earth, see? It’s not just a finger-wagging moral code. It’s the shape of reality.

The simplest testimony here is that my life is better now. I am extremely active in a small community church in LA. I am connected to many people who care about me and who I am happy to be in service to.

I want to share with you the shape of the world: heaven touches earth. Maybe these words will shut up the babbling level five brain long enough to let something amazing happen. Simply allow the light to shine through the cracks.

"Modern man can't see God because he doesn't look low enough.” – Carl Jung

After all my searching, I finally feel at home in the world. To that kid gazing at sodium lamp light glimmering on the Mississippi, this particular adventure is not what he expected. But, returning home with a deeper understanding of my origins was what I was yearning for but didn’t know how to ask for. 

God's not dead. He is waiting in our collective unconscious, ready to transform our world through us.

At my fullest obedience to death, the earth shakes and cracks open. The savior becomes one with the snake. All things become possible. 

That is why I am a Christian again.

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A special thanks to just a few of the people I couldn’t have written this without. The conversations we get to have are my favorite part of life. Thank you so much.

Will Mannon Michael Dean Kyle Joachim Riley Van Cleve Grant Shillings TJ Norton Steven Foster Small GospelsCharlie Becker(who I take inspiration from to write more personally) and Henrik Karlsson for his encouragement to “write for the people who are invested in your becoming.”