I Am The Seeker
Part Eight of a Multi-Part Series “Towards Religion and Meaning”
Note: This is a multi-part series, if you haven’t read the previous posts, I highly recommend checking them out to catch-up before proceeding, here.
- Part One: Why I Turned Away From G-d
- Part Two: Declaring My Atheism
- Part Three: The Repugnancy of Religion
- Part Four: The Superficiality And Thoughtlessness of Religion
- Part Five: The Silencing of Religion
- Part Six: It’s Cool To Be An Atheist
- Part Seven: “Culturally Jewish”
I look back on the first semester of my Sophomore year with both intrigue and bitterness. It was my first semester living in the frat house and I certainly embodied it through a constant state of intoxication. My drug of choice? Marijuana.
Weed was strictly superior to drinking, for me. You might pass out from smoking too much, but you’d never black out or wake up the next morning with a terrible hangover. These facts, coupled with living in a frat house with others who shared this view, made it very easy to go an entire semester stoned.
We would smoke everywhere — our rooms, our cars, the garage, the balcony, the roof, we would even smoke in the women’s restroom in the frat house (when no women were around). Conversation topics were few and far between —whether discussing the origins of the universe, the upcoming Pacquiao fight, how disappointing Longhorn football was, or the miscellaneous category of what I will dub ‘High Thoughts’.
High thoughts were typically unintelligible, but almost always came from a genuine place of intrigue. Take the time that one of my buddies came to the realization that “Everything is made of rectangles”. Yes, everything is made of planes (what he was really trying to say), but this is a rudimentary fact, as planes are foundational to the third dimension.
Like I said, these conversations typically didn’t lead anywhere, but we craved them. We craved them because they allowed us to drop all of our suppositions and start from scratch. And we weren’t alone — the majority of Jews on my campus classified themselves as “Culturally Jewish” and, they too, were seeking to understand the hidden truths of life, meaning, purpose, etc…
The exchange of ideas in these circles gave us a sense of community and comfort, but failed to ever provide something substantial. And yet, while this seemed like an inevitable conclusion, we continued searching. We were seekers, and despite our constant conquest, we knew neither what we wanted from the world nor what the world wanted from us.
