12 Atheism | Where does it come from?

In many ways, atheism brings us back to ourselves.

Evolution is a slow and painstaking process. For us humans, we don’t start out doing college-level coursework during our first incarnation. In fact, during the earliest stages, we are in a state of being without much awareness. We live unto the day, tending to only our immediate needs.

Our minds aren’t well developed yet. We’re not yet equipped to do things like ask questions, doubt, think or discriminate. To get to the stage where we are living in the moment with awareness, we’re going to have to do some work.

Our journey continues over lifetimes, developing our minds and using them to contribute to an evolving civilization.

At first, we use our minds in concrete ways. Only later will we start to use our minds more abstractly. That’s when we’ll start taking on those tougher, more existential questions: Where did I come from? Where will I go? What’s the meaning of life? What am I doing here?

At this point, we may begin to notice the majesty of nature. We catch on that there are natural laws. We start to wonder. This is our first step in starting to relate to our creator.

Who came up with these laws? Who made this place, anyways? What kind of a mind could do all this? With these kinds of questions, we begin forming our first ideas about God.

We sense there must be someone out there with infinite wisdom and intelligence, and we feel we must somehow relate to this supreme being.

But we are human beings with spiritual and emotional immaturity. We also have fear and other problematic feelings that color our concepts about this superior creator.

On the one hand, we are excited about an authority that will think for us, decide for us, and thereby be responsible for us. We cling to the notion of such a God in hopes we can be relieved of self-responsibility.

On the other hand, we are afraid of life and feel inadequate to deal with it.

So we project all this onto God.

In other words, we sense the truth of this immensely powerful, wise and resourceful creator-of-all-that-is. But we can’t separate our awe of power from our fear of cruelty. We start to fear this God-of-our-projection.

In fear, we try to appease this made-up God. We cajole, submit and subdue ourselves to please this imaginary God. The figment of our imagination becomes our image of God.

In short, what started off as wonder and a genuine God-experience morphed into a conflicted and fear-laden caricature of God. The sublime becomes clouded by our destructive human emotions.

Eventually, we are no longer relating to a spontaneous, creative experience but to a projection we made—of ourselves.

Using the mind to outgrow the mind

If we allow our mind to grow in only one direction—instead of using it to resolve its own problems and conflicts—all this will remain hidden from our awareness. As a result, our relationship with God will continue to be a false one.

It’s false because it’s built on our fears and wishful thinking. The longer this goes on, the more false our concept of God becomes. Eventually, our understanding of God is essentially a superstition. More dogma than truth.

At this point, we have truly made a farce out of God.

Then one day, when our intelligence has grown sufficiently, we wake up and realize it can’t work this way: “It can’t possibly be that God directs life for us. It’s up to us!”

This is a step forward in evolution. But when the pendulum swings out from one extreme to the other, a counterreaction sets in.

Where do we go next? We become atheists, of course.

The stage of atheism

The state of atheism exists in one of two forms. In one version there is an absence of awareness of life and nature, with no perception of her laws and of the significance of creation. The other form is the reaction to—and rejection of—a superstitious version of God.

While the second form is still not quite right, it does indicate a further state of development than the first form. Until we can find a more genuine experience of and relationship to God—the real God—this second form is often a necessary transitory place to land.

While in this stage, we can cultivate helpful faculties and capabilities we’ll need a little further down the road of our spiritual development. Self-responsibility, for example.

While atheism is not a desirable end-state, it’s better than the childish belief in an imaginary God. Both are stages—although both are false and are at extremes. Yet at every stage, the soul learns.

The second form of atheism begins to develop our willingness to accept responsibility for our lives. We let go of the wished-for hand of God that shuttles us through life and releases us from the consequences of our own mistakes.

We also give up the notion that we will be rewarded if we obey some set of rules. Best of all, we release ourselves from the fear that we are going to be punished.

In many ways, then, this version of atheism brings us back to ourselves. But as our evolutionary journey continues, the concept of atheism begins to fall apart.

If we follow any scientific fact or philosophy until it reaches its logical conclusion, it is increasingly less possible to hold onto half-truths or untruths.

Eventually, our mind is going to begin to question its own motives. We’re going to start looking at ourselves. We’re going to peer deep down inside.

We develop true awareness by facing the reality within ourselves. As we proceed this way, we free ever-deeper levels of our psyche. The inevitable outcome of doing that is to have a genuine God-experience.

Such an authentic experience of God is quite different from the childish belief in a self-projected God—which the mind constructed out of fear, weakness and wishful thinking. In the authentic experience, we live in the present moment without fearing our imperfections.

We will no longer fear that God will punish us for our imperfections. We will be able to see all this without becoming frantic.

What we will come to realize is that the imperfection itself is not what’s harmful. Rather, it is our unawareness of it. Our fear of being punished, that’s what’s harmful. Our pride of wanting to be better than we are, that’s what hurts us.

How to experience God

When we no longer feel any urgency about being above our faults, we will have the calmness to observe them. Then we can come to understand how and why they came into existence. Through this process, we will grow out of our immaturities.

By fostering such an attitude, we make it possible to have a genuine experience of God. Such a God-experience is an experience of being. God isn’t then perceived as a punisher or a rewarder, or as someone who absolves us of the need to make an effort.

God simply is, and God’s laws work perfectly for us all. But we can’t come to an awareness of this—to this feeling that God is—if we don’t first face what is in us right now, imperfect and faulty and childish as it might be.

Generally speaking, this is the journey of evolution that humanity goes through. Of course, all this happens at different times on different layers of our personality, so these stages don’t follow neatly one after the other. They overlap, they conflict, and too often we attempt to skip steps and have to backtrack.

Regardless, over time, self-awareness will eventually lead us to a state of being in awareness. Simultaneously, we will begin to experience God as being.

But we can’t come to such a stage by avoiding the negativity that is within us now. Nor can we get there by learning concepts, observing practices, or following philosophies or doctrines.

No, if we’re not willing to be with our present confusions, errors and pains, to face them and work to understand them, then we can’t ever be in God. We have to live through what’s here now, even if that means sitting with an unpleasant, albeit temporary, reality.

The harm of old habits

When taking this inward journey, at first, we will only get occasional, vague glimpses of the greater reality. These will inspire us to reach for a new relationship with God. Needless to say, our whole approach to God will evolve across these stages. The way we pray—meaning the way we talk with God—will also need to adjust.

What often happens, though, is that we’ve inwardly moved onto a new stage but keep our old habitual patterns. The patterns we adopted when we were at an earlier stage no longer serve us, yet we hang onto things we’ve outgrown.

The ego-mind is a habit-forming machine. By contrast, experiences that come from our being never form habits. Only the mind falls into such traps. As a result, our memory—together with our tendency to form habits—is an impediment to true spiritual experiences.

Our goal, then, is to remain flexible. The way out is to train ourselves to face what is in us right now. Our habits have formed tired old grooves in our minds, turning bad experiences into rigid misconceptions. Habits cause us to harden our misconceptions into generalizations that are always, at best, half-truths.

There is no reason to feel frantic when we discover such errors buried in our beings. There is no cause for feeling guilty either. Nothing is gained by feeling “I should not.” Such attitudes, in fact, are the greatest barriers of all.

Releasing fear of change

We evolve through these cycles for a reason. The courage, incentive and ability to move along on a spiritual path must be cultivated. It does not come easily. This is the reason these phases exist.

Humanity’s inherent rhythms of growth cannot be hurried. We need encouragement and we need preparation. We need help in directing our attention toward our resistances, instead of doing what we usually do and running away.

Listen deeply to these teachings, yet do not fear if you need to set them aside for a time. Come back, maybe a month or even a year from now, and discover how the teachings have evolved. Of course, the wisdom will remain the same.

Hopefully, with some effort, you will be the one who has grown and changed.