The God Circuit in Our Brains

Every human civilization has some sort of spiritual belief system. Arguably, even devout atheists wind up falling into some forms of mysticism. It may not manifest until their mother dies or something like that.

I’m not writing this to judge atheists. I do have the opinion though that some of them are determinedly not recognizing a part of their brain.

The Carl Gustav Jung book Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious hit me like a ton of bricks when I was a teenager. I had been trying to be a Catholic to please my mother for many years but I never really believed most of it.

I did then, and still do think that Jesus was a real person and a spiritual teacher, and I don’t doubt that he had his own mystical connection to something.

I’ve always had a scientific worldview. Jung’s book gave me a framework to think about the spiritual part of my mind. It set me free from liturgy.

That never stopped me from being interested in the traditional religions of Earth, which I find truly fascinating. I have been to many kinds of spiritual and religious services over the years.

My home base was the Unitarians, which I first discovered in my teen years, but I never really thought their rituals did much for me. Growing up as a Catholic and even an altar boy made me interested in ritual.

I have been on spiritual retreats and I’ve been to rituals at several kinds of Buddhist gatherings, the Sufis, Jewish services, Native Americans, and many flavors of pagans. I attended a Latin language Catholic midnight mass the Christmas after my mother died. I have been to the Baha’i Temple in Chicago. When I was in Thailand I visited Buddhist monasteries.

Every sect has its wisdom.

Awareness that we are going to die is an unavoidable consequence of our intelligence and language. It is impossible for us to imagine how we would think without language, but it is clear that animals also grieve for the dead. Whether they fear their own death is hard to say. But fear of death has motivated much of human religion in fact.

I feel a mystical connection to all life on Earth. I don’t need to define it, I don’t need to have a god. Being part of a living thing that has been on Earth for at least three and a half billion years is extremely spiritual to me. I think my point is to say don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you can’t believe the god bit, you can still feel the spirit.