Suspending Disbelief
by Jason John Bartholomew
I have, for many years, been a person who if you really bothered to delve and I really bothered to be honest, didn’t really believe in much of anything. Of god, my fellow man, unicorns, leprechauns, love I had pretty much retreated to a fairly nihilistic, existential place. And fair enough.
I have recently, after a few years of having my non-belief system turned inside out, upside down and shaken like trying to get sand out of a beach towel, found myself in a radically different worldview that at first is going to seem to defy all logic: I now pretty much believe in everything, including wildly contradictory concepts and constructs.
“Ridiculous, bordering on insanity,” you may be thinking. But it isn’t. It’s actually perhaps the most rationale and sane place I’ve landed so far. Let me explain.
First, let’s talk about capital T- Truth. For most people, their beliefs are extensions of what they believe to be the ultimate Truth. Most People. Aren’t they precious? Nothing is more embarrassingly ridiculous than people pretending to know Truth. I vacillate between wanting to laugh at these Truth bearers and feeling that really uncomfortable feeling you get when someone is putting their decidedly un-self-aware maxi-ignorance on full public display. (Town Hall meeting are really great places to see this dynamic at play in the real world.)
Here’s the rub: Truth is Truth regardless of what anyone believes. That’s what makes it Truth: it doesn’t require your belief system, or mine. Moreover, I haven’t a clue what Truth is. More likely than not it’s a thing I neither believe nor disbelieve as it’s probably something I’ve never even considered or encountered or conceptualized and even if I did, encounter a fractional sliver of it, I probably didn’t understand what I had encountered.
So once I realize that Truth exists independent of my perception of it and independent of my beliefs, then my belief system is relieved of any need to conform to a logical consistency since it is no longer attempting to narrate my concept of Truth, which I have already acknowledged is a ridiculous, super human feat.So now I can believe whatever I want pretty much without consequence.
As I am a creative person and a writer and I like having a broad palette to draw from, I choose to believe everything. I believe in heaven and hell and reincarnation and in consciousness being just a bunch of temporary firing neurons. I believe in zombies and vampires and a kind devil and an evil god and unicorns and fairies and aliens and witches and magic and trickery and deception and changelings and Christ and Buddha and Crowley and Chomsky and Nietzsche. I believe it’s all a conspiracy and that’s it’s all just an evolution of human spirit. I throw in with science that say the earth is comprised of huge plates floating on a core of magma as well as philosophies that say the earth is hollow and inhabited by an alien reptilian race as well as Creation and the Garden of Eden as well as Darwin’s evolution. I believe the world is billions of years old and only 5,000 years old.
And while this may all seem grossly contradictory to YOU; I’m finding it sort of marvelous as it allows me to be constantly agape with childlike awe and fun and to have an imagination that can still, at 47, run wild and rampant. So in the big Battle of Truths, I’m the one who wins, by consciously swallowing all of it hook, line and sinker. And I can. Because none of it is the Truth.
August 24, 2016
