I clearly remember the day that I lost my faith. It was on the 29th November 2010. I remember because I posted this exact question on Social Media as a reminder.
I’d woken up that morning with the most intense feeling and sensation of dread that I had ever felt. For the first time ever I was aware that I was alone in this universe and it scared the living daylights out of me.
Had anything really changed since the previous night when I had fallen asleep? Had I been wavering in my beliefs for a while or was it a sudden change of perception? It felt sudden and it felt like my ‘God’ had left me. Maybe I had chosen to leave him/her but all I knew, right then, was that I was alone.
This was a first step for me. Unknowingly at the time, I had let go of my old religious believes and all their doctrines and started down a path to embraced a wider sense of my spiritual self. For me this meant that I had let go of Christianity and decided to embrace nothing and everything at the same time. I had become aware that if there was a single truth, that all versions of the truth must be as valid as each other. This would include the teachings from other religions, scientific theories, as well as my own sense of my conscious self as a physical manifestation of a mainly unknown and magical universe.
It began with the absence of faith. Everything that I had believed I knew to be true was now gone. I needed to begin by reconstructing my moral, ethical and social compass and regain my sense of right and wrong. This was more difficult than I thought because I was now aware that I was wholly responsible for my actions. That might sound a little strange and even rather obvious, but have you ever stopped to think about who you’re answering to with your actions? Religion has a lot to answer for and whilst I’m aware of the many benefits that religion has brought us over the years, I’m also aware that it’s the single biggest cause of many of the atrocities that we have committed to each other over the ages.
There is a change happening. It’s happening everywhere across the globe and it’s been happening for a number of years, only I’m not sure everyone is fully aware of what this change is and what it means for us and for our future destiny. You don’t have to take my word for it, you just have to listen to your own internal voice and if you can’t hear that then there are plenty of others out there saying exactly the same thing.
Something is wrong but you are unsure what it is.
In my opinion, this feeling or spiritualist movement more than likely started during the 18th and 19th century during the industrial revolution and the abolition of slavery but really became prevalent in the early to mid 20th century with people like Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragettes and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the African-American Civil Rights Movement. It peaked during the 1960’s and by the 1980’s we had begun to replace religion with something new and far more exciting. The free market economy aka Capitalism aka Money. (I’ll explain more about how and when the United States of American conned the world and enslaved the human race in a subsequent post. They literally changed the rules of the game, dealt the deck in their own favour and made everyone else play by their new rules.)
Since then we’ve been doing things like Live Aid, Comic Relief, Children in Needs and creating charitable organisations like they are going out of fashion. Things on a national or global scale to raise the awareness of the suffering of others, which is a good thing, but there has never been enough momentum to really change anything. We’re still doing the same stupid things that we’ve always been doing, like killing each other, destroying our home (planet earth) and supporting the systems, like the global financial and banking system, that create and maintain inequality.
So when I lost my faith, I not only lost it in religion but I also lost it in humanity.
Why?
Until now I haven’t been unable to answer that simple question but I can now. It all goes back to what Mahatma Gandhi said “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
I am the universe made manifest. I am made from the same stuff as the stars. We all come from star stuff. You only have to think about “you are what you eat” (another topic for another post) to realise that we are just matter and energy, the same as everything else.
I am also a human being. If I don’t have faith that I can change within myself, what hope can I have that we as a species and as a people can change and make this world a fairer and more just place for us all to live in?
I’ve tried over the last 4 – 5 years to live a more humble life. To put others before myself and to always do the right thing. I realise now that changing the system isn’t the answer. We need a new system. Maybe we don’t even need a system any more, who knows. I’m not saying that I have all the answers, but I do believe that in order for things to change, I have to regain my faith in myself and in doing so regain my faith in humanity. This doesn’t mean I’m going to become a Buddhist or join the communist party, but it does mean that I need to be open to what may be, rather than continue to believe in what is.
So I ask you to ask yourself, do you have faith and in what do you put your faith and why?
