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Turns out, I'm an atheist.

Yeah, caught me by surprise too. I just realized over the past week that for years I've been dancing around the point, trying to find ways to "believe in god" by finding different ways of defining what god is. But just about everybody, when they hear the word "god," thinks one thing: a personal god, a supreme being -- most often the creator of all things -- who has an interest in the lives of individuals.

I don't believe in that.

I believe in a "god principle," that there is something that emerges from within us -- whether from biology or from some intangible 'spirit' -- that demands living an ethical, authentic life. But that's not what the monotheistic world (i.e. Western/Near-Eastern culture) means by "god."

So I guess that makes me an atheist.

For all of history we have thought we lived at the end of days. Probably the constant surprise and wonder at the exquisite beauty and tragedy of our existence got to us after a while and it just became ingrained in our DNA: It can’t get any better than this. -- In our thinking, that tends to inform both the good times and the bad times. When things are good we think, It couldn’t possibly get any better than this! And we’re discouraged we doubt, Things are never going to get better.

So I guess at some point we just started believing it: Things can’t possibly get any better/worse so this must be, The end of all things!

Certain spiritual traditions teach the practitioner to find the "center" and eventually to always live "in the center." Buddhism talks about the "middle way," and modern psychology teaches us to find "balance." This is a very simple concept and so its full profundity is rarely discovered. I often talk about the ego or the egoic self, but what I'm really doing is conflating multiple selves for the sake of simplicity. These "selves" are really perspectives that are developed enough to have voice. That is, we operate from certain combinations of states, assumptions and attitudes frequently enough that we consider those to be our own. But whose are they really?

Why do we seek god? Why do we seek transcendent experience and understanding? Why do we live our lives, following particular prescriptions and prohibitions? Why do we need to find god? Are we incomplete without god? Is there a god-shaped hole at the center of our being that needs filling? This is a fundamental question to anyone considering following the spiritual impulse because without understanding why we do it, we cannot wisely ascertain how to go about it.

Many of us have been taught to believe that we must find god in order to be complete; and in many traditions that really just means "accept" or "accept and obey." That's certainly the most obvious interpretation of the spiritual impulse, and it's not a bad place to start because it creates within us an urgency to act. But acceptance and even finding imply a finality to the act; that it is a conclusion in and of itself.