1 Apr 2009

test post yay (rambling, failed effort at an opening post)

Posted by Teapots Happen

the blog of a man haunted by synchronicity and the ghosts of his skeptical past

2006 was a big year for me.

It was the year I was set adrift from the rock of rationalism, and it was the year I first made eye contact with my own entropy.

This blog will be focused primarily on the former.

I have struggled with what to say in the first post. but I think the trick is probably just to dive in, be casual as I can, and just write, for now at least.

No one is here yet to read this post, and by the time people come it will likely be well buried. In fact, for now I will share it with no one – these intial posts are places for me to talk to myself – in order to determine what direction I want to go with this project.

So. I sat down with the intention of writing about my deeply divided mind – particularly as it relates to the specific issue of coincidences/synchronicity and the more general issue of reality’s mechanical or magical nature.

But now I hesitate – I’m not sure if I want this blog to me about me, or about experiences I have had / my thoughts about them. DO I really need to get all biographical? I guess that the Teapot Story – which I was also of course meaning to write about here – will require my personal backstory in order to be properly told.

But for now – let’s talk about the present.

Right now, I feel divided. These coincidences I am writing about – there are times when I am completely certain that at least some of them are magical, mystical – communication from the living Oneness of Everything – a sentence I was already cringing from as I wrote it, making it come out rather weak, because – there are also times when I am certain that I have gone soft in the head – a combination of wishful thinking and neuronal deterioration has left me grasping at patterns, desperate to invent some meaning to cling to.

A secular humanist probably has no problem with such ‘meaning creation,’ although most would probably have the decency to keep it hidden from others. But I could never really understand humanism, secular or not – “making meaning” was an empty phrase to me, without vitality or power. I was suspicious. It was far too close to the wishful thinking, or ‘faith,’ of the Christians in their nonsensical beliefs. I sought meaning only in Truth. Truth revealed by Reason would be my compass, my map.

Well, I’ve changed quite a bit since my days as the President of the U of mN Atheists & Humanists, but I still have this unshakable obsession with Truth. I want it. I need it. I’ve determined over and over that a quest for Truth is impossible, absurd, even meaningless. But I can’t stop picking up the lance and charging the windmill, no matter how many times I land on my ass.


(this was one of the unfinished attempts at an opening post for this blog, marked as “private” for the last couple of weeks – I was going to trash it but decided I might as well publish it …) 4/16/09

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