My Spiritual Journey 

I am a religious person, in the sense that I have attended church for most of my life. But I am not “religiously” so, probably because I was a psychologist and tend to think about why people do the things that they do, including why they believe the things that they believe. Insofar as religious affiliation is concerned, most churchgoing people at least nominally espouse the religion in which they were brought up. I was brought up to be a Christian by Christian parents, and only began to question my church’s teachings when I became a question-everything adolescent.

In writing about my spiritual journey, I have tried to track the development of my understanding of God; and what a journey that has been. It has taken me through a look back at my experience with the Baptist, Salvation Army, Pentecostal, and United churches, brief encounters with Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, a Jewish synagogue, a Sikh gurdwara, a Buddhist temple, and even a Wiccan coven. It has introduced me to Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and various schools of Buddhism, including Zen, with its emphasis on enlightenment, the realization that nothing in the universe is as I have created it to be, except in my own mind.

As a scientist, I have not been oblivious to the extent to which the thinking of those of us living in Western society is constrained by an essentially dualistic conceptual system, and the possibility of supplementing that kind of thinking by examining the utility of the concept of oneness, in this case oneness with God:

The Muslim mystic, Rumi, told the following story: A seeker knocked at the door of the beloved – God – and a voice from inside asked: ‘Who is it?’ The seeker answered, ‘It is I’; and the voice said: ‘In this house there is no I and You.’ The door remained locked. Then the seeker went into solitude, fasted and prayed. A year later, he returned and knocked at the door. Again the voice asked, ‘Who is it?’ Now the believer answered: ‘It is You.’ Then the door opened.

In a sense, this is discreating the world that I have created in my own mind and experiencing a reality that is perhaps more spiritual than religious. I have found this journey to be fascinating, and I hope that it might be at least informative for others.