I spent some time today reading about religion, God, and faith. Although I'm not religious, I yearn for the comfort held in religion's promise of attainable redemption and salvation. I want to experience the "oceanic feeling": what Sigmund Frued described as "a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded", but that he also dismissed as just in our heads. I fear he may have been right, but I'm still open to the possibility.
Here are some pieces (one of which is a poem by William Blake) I came across earlier:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article3090488.ece
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=d256048a-cbef-4752-a7b2-58d7a68e836a&k=18488
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10015255
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/4204/
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070625/aronson
http://www.bartleby.com/236/58.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-dawkins/why-there-almost-certainl_b_32164.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=searching-for-god-in-the-brain
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=191304
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2778493.ece
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html
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i've read in many places that there are two kinds of states of oneness...the false one, and the genuine (where we actually merge with the divine, the eternal, whatever you want to call it). some drugs make us feel the first kind, taking us back to the "oceanic", unconscious type feeling of being in the womb. this is a denial of life, and a deep yearning to go back in the womb. it's deeply, deeply thanatos talking. this drive should never be denied, but listened to extremely carefully, because, perhaps paradoxically, it points the direction to true oneness, not through escapes like the constant use of drugs....but through coming face to face with an aspect of one's deepest self. and then there's the genuine merging with the Great Ineff(able). each one of us, i believe, has are own completely unique path to this. religion comes nowhere close.
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