To explain how my experience of enlightenment is so unlikely, I should probably describe the spiritual culture of my childhood family.
The family I grew up in was rigidly atheist. I have often described my family as ‘Fundamentalist Atheists’. Not your garden variety atheists, no, we were ardent militant atheists. Science was our religion, and scientists were the clergy. There was a deep respect for nature, and the scrupulous observation of facts, figures, and information from the senses. If you couldn’t see it, taste it, hear it, touch it, well, it likely did not exist. Dreams, thoughts, emotions, were all products of personality, which of course was destined for oblivion upon death.
But overall, intellectual analysis of quantifiable evidence for us was paramount. And this physical life was all that existed.
Likewise, there was also a complete disdain for organized religion. In a way, I believe both my parents were wounded Christians, and stubbornly rebelled by throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They were much like Bill Maher, the political entertainment celebrity who suggests that religions are like dangerous fairytale mongers. Taken literally, and when scrutinized organizationally and politically, I might agree. But just as the religious scholar and author Karen Armstrong suggests, I have come to learn that many sacred teachings from religions are also enormously valuable when approached allegorically.
However, while I was growing up, I learned to deeply despise religions, without ever having studied any of them. I was well indoctrinated into my family’s xenophobic spiritual belief system.
So realistically speaking, there was no possible way to predict that I would eventually be subject to the most sacred and sought after spiritual experience countless seekers have aspired to for millennia. I was certainly not doing anything to cultivate such an experience. It came very much uninvited.
Occasionally it happens that atheists might experience glimpses of Divine Order. It may be a sense of deep overwhelming connectedness while in nature, or an out of body experience at a spa – the kind of experience that provides only a hint of the Absolute, but triggers a lifetime’s quest for spiritual understanding.
Full spontaneous awakenings to the Absolute meanwhile are also known to happen, but usually only in those who are open to it. Seldom, if ever, do we hear of it happening in someone so far on the opposite side of the spiritual spectrum as I was.
There are over 7 billion ways to enlightenment. In my book I share mine.
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