A Walking Corpse

 Not for all, but like many Christians, my true authenticity was dead and buried  inside me. It was the source of longing and emptiness within myself that was like a child locked in a  closet. I did not "know thyself," as the ancient Greek philosophers said was both the hardest thing to do and yet the most important.

Taught to believe I was a "born sinner" crippled my ability to fulfill my true design,  convinced as I was that I could only be saved by someone other than myself. And not just anyone could save me, so broken and bad was I born, but only a God! Accepting such a belief created a deep dependence in me on my Catholic Church, while my true self was locked like a lighting bug trapped in a jar of self doubt. And as I grew up, that lightning bug became the traumatized and neglected boy buried in the tomb of a man who's identity, who's worth, who's whole meaning, was based on Catholicism, without which I was all flesh and no bones. My Catholicism had turned me into a scarecrow, in other words, my ego but a puppet operated by the hand of my "infallible religion." 

My desire to be more, experience more, learn more, and live more, on its own terms, was wholly stifled and starved, like flowers kept from the sun and deprived of water. The little boy who never got to think too far outside of the box of his brand of beliefs had become a caged animal, straying no further beyond the invisible bars of my beliefs. I was a nameless inmate in the Shawshank prison of my religious beliefs.

My outer shell of conformity operated as a defensive ego that protected my true self like castle walls. But a castle is also a prison house, and a tomb  for curiosity and creativity, the freedom of which are essential for finding and forging all authenticity. And authenticity is the only path to spiritual transcendence or enlightenment. 

The problem is that any attempt anyone made to help me free myself from my religious ego, which they could see straitjacketed my creativity as much as it entombed my curiosity, felt like an attack on my comfort zone, around which I had labored to build high castle walls of "beliefs" - as much about others as myself - in order to protect me from the things I thought might lead me to hell. But my fear of doing or believing something that might lead me to hell in the next life, only made this life into a hell itself. 

 Put another way, any attempt to resurrect my true authenticity felt like I was being crucified for my beliefs, when in truth, the only thing that was being crucified was my "beliefs," in order to free me from the cocoon of convictions those beliefs had spun around me like a spider capturing its prey. The light of truth of who and what I really was felt to my religious ego/identity like sunlight to a vampire. Truth burned, as such, because my "beliefs" were telling me I had the soul of an ugly duckling, and all because I was born with a soul befouled and broken by the stain of original sin. 

 And thanks to my Catholic training that taught me the only unforgivable sin was to doubt God (which really meant to doubt the Catholic Church was infallible in its moral claims, despite how it behaved), nothing convinced me this was true more than the longing I felt in my soul. My Catholicism had led me to interpret that longing as proof we had separated ourselves from God and long to return to him. But that meant we were like human yo-yos, that God had let down from heaven but, because our string had broken from His finger, we had failed to wind back up. The Catholic Church, as such, operated like the much needed yo-yo string we could all count up to bring us back up to God. It was like a rope ladder, in this sense. But because God spoke only through the Church to humanity for the last 2000 years, which was proof that the Catholic Church was indeed God's infallible mouth piece, it was also my spiritual umbilical cord or IV that nourished the emptiness inside my soul.  

Yet no matter how hard I tried to fill that emptiness with Catholicism, it was never enough to feel true love. It only made me feel approve of, for only defending my Catholicism like Sampson fighting Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.  As it turned out, however, the jawbone was my - I was the braying donkey who derived the dopamine salvation for his religious ego by pretending to know more about an infinite abstraction than anyone else, which is like arguing that I've counted closer to infinity than anyone else.  

The true source of my longing was not for the brand of "God" being sold by my Catholicism, which I had been raised to be addicted to for all my meaning and identity, but the infinite curiosity and creativity within me, that felt like a swan that wanted to fly over the prison walls I had built up around me like a castle. 

As John Maserati said … 

Christians have been waiting for Jesus for 2000 years.

Muslims have been waiting for a messiah from the line of Muhammad for 1300 years.

Hindus have been waiting for Cali for 3700 years.

Buddhists have been waiting for Maitreya for 2600 years.

Jews have been waiting for the Messiah for 2500 years.

Sunnah has been waiting for Prophet Issa for 1400 years.

Shiite Muslims have been waiting for Imam Mahdi for 1080 years.

Druzers are waiting for Hamza ibn Ali for 1000 years.

Most religions adopt the idea of a “savior” and say the world will remain filled with evil until that Savior comes and fills it with goodness and righteousness.

Maybe the problem with believers on this planet is that they expect someone else to come and solve their problems instead of doing it themselves."

Then I realized that, if God is everything, than that includes me. And the illusion was that I was born separated from God, which was used to get me to doubt myself. And by doubting myself, I separated from myself in favor of trusting my religion more than myself. 

What the serpent had succeeded in convincing Adam and Eve of was that they would become like God if they ate of the apple he was selling them. What they failed to realize is that they were already like God, because they, like everything else, were all cells in the same body. And the serpent turned them against themself, like cancer. 

 The doorway through which we walk in and out of the tomb is ourself.