What a Toothache Taught Me About the Limits of Inner Peace
I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a few weeks, how I was quickly proven wrong about my own mental health and how I’ve kinda maybe been talking out my ass about how happy and zen I am.
In previous entries, for like the last year, I kept talking about how great my life is and how I’ve reached this sense of zen and constant joy and love for life, and yes, that is still true. I’m still a thousand times better off now than I was 20 or 30 years ago. My current life is an order of magnitude better than my imagined best-case-scenario I had in mind when I was a kid or a teenager.
But a number of months ago I started having issues with a tooth. My dentist told me he found decay. It felt fine, but I let him redo the crown on molar #31, but in the process he chipped the tooth in front of it, so I started getting food caught in it, so I had to go back a couple times for that, then he noticed that it wasn’t healing up properly, so I had to go to an endodontist, who then told me the root of the tooth was hosed and that it would just be a waste of time and money to try and save it. So then I had to get it pulled. Now it’s been 13 days since the extraction and it still hurts and I’m going back tomorrow to the surgeon to make sure nothing has gone wrong with the extraction. It’s been many months of dealing with this. I’ve lost count of how many dentist visits I’ve had to do for this one tooth–maybe 10, 12 at this point?
But before I had it removed, it started to really hurt, then at the same time, I got a sinus infection, so my whole face hurt. During that week of notable pain, I came face to face with how easily my zen perspective can be squashed with a little simple physical pain. Suddenly I’m no longer happy and chipper, like I’m a totally different person.
I always try to be that guy who says “embrace the suck”, “everything is a lesson”, “it’s all for a reason”, “it’s all part of a beautiful story”. But when it comes to physical pain, for some reason that is my achilles heal.
It’s easy to be a zen master when you are in perfect health and your air conditioner is functioning properly and your fridge is full of food. Sometimes folks like me get all high and mighty, thinking we have it all figured out, when in reality, we just happen to be in a good place, and don’t understand how hard it can be for others who are not in such a good place.
I listen to a lot of self-help books, and they often mention these “zen buddhist monks”, and treat them as though they are the epitome of mental health and constant joy–but you know, I just don’t buy it. I think that’s largely a myth, just in the same way that priests can get just as angry and irrational as anyone else, and can lose touch with God just as much as anyone else.
So much of spirituality in our world is a big show. You might say it’s obvious that I feel that way since I’ve been a devoted atheist for most of my life, but as an atheist you gotta look at the science and the science shows that spirituality genuinely does help people build better, happier lives and healthier communities. But how can I ignore all the horrifying things that come out of religion?–I’ve just seen so much pain, so so much pain from religion. I can’t even count the number of people I’ve met who tell stories of their parents and family never seeing them or even full on disowning them due to their religious beliefs. And I’ve seen over and over that it’s often the most deeply religious people who do the most hateful and morally unacceptable things in our society.
But there’s extreme examples on both sides, like this beautiful and inspiring documentary I watched last night called BOBBI JO: Under the Influence, about a woman who descended into deep alcoholism and self-loathing until she found God, turned her life around, and then continued on to help others do the same. Now she runs a whole bunch of shelters, halfway house type of places and has changed her neighborhood and countless lives for the better through her spirituality.
It made me feel like I should be doing more. I want to be more like her. But an atheist version of Bobbie Jo– a spiritual atheist.
I’m gonna start using that topic on medium–“spiritual atheism”. I think that’s where my niche lies: this idea that spirituality is deeply important, but it’s just as important to remember that it’s not real.
God is deeply important, the spirit world is deeply important, but in no way is it actually literally real. I’m convinced that’s the key to getting the best of both worlds: the physical success that comes from practical science based decision making, and the emotional success that comes from having a deep spiritual connection. You absolutely can have both. You just need to walk a fine line, but once you see that line, it’s quite easy to define and see. It’s just that it’s very unpopular. The religious folks all seem to insist that you need to follow their religion, to give yourselves over to it, and take it literally, even if it makes no logical sense. At the same time, the atheist community all seems to be pushing this idea that spirituality has no intrinsic value.
But it’s truly not that difficult to have both. Just be as spiritual as you want, follow the religions and spiritual practices you feel like following or make up your own, or take what works, leave what doesn’t, or adapt what spiritual folks have done in the past to work for you. All that is great, just so long as you don’t start taking it literally. God will not literally answer your prayers. Your dreams are not literally visions of things that will actually happen. Dreams and God and spirituality are windows into you as a person, to help you understand yourself and to bring you strength and imagination. They aren’t real.
When you start taking spirituality literally is when you start falling down this rabbit hole of hatred toward others who don’t think the same. It’s when you start feeling sorry for yourself because God didn’t give you the object you wanted real bad. It’s when you start making irrational decisions based on things you know deep down are not real. It’s when you spend all day praying instead of actually helping people. When you take spirituality too literally is when you drift away from the most valuable things that spirituality has to offer.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Star Wars fan claim that you can’t enjoy Star Wars movies unless you believe those movies literally happened in a galaxy far far away. I don’t know anyone who believes those movies literally happened, but I know a ton of people who draw a lot of value from them.
You can still gain all the inspiration, joy, and sense of holy oneness with the universe, without taking it literally. In fact, not taking it literally makes spirituality easier and even more rewarding. The preachers and churches lose much of their power over us when we do this, but that power is given back to the people where it belongs.
