Spiritual Belly

I grew up in a tradition where heresy wasn’t just wrong—it was dangerous. Questioning the accepted doctrines of the faith, especially around Jesus, the Bible, or salvation, was like standing on the edge of a cliff in a windstorm. You didn’t wander into "forbidden texts" like the Gnostic gospels. You didn’t even say the word "Gnostic" unless you were denouncing it. But something happens when the safe answers start to crack. When the tidy doctrines can no longer contain the fullness of your questions—or your experiences of the Divine. You start to wonder: what have I not been allowed to see? That curiosity brought me, slowly and cautiously, to the Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic gospel that claims to record secret teachings Jesus gave to his disciples after the resurrection. It’s dense, mystical, strange. The language feels like it’s describing something just out of reach—like someone trying to put sunrise into words. And yet, something about it felt familiar, as though it w...

I used to have all the answers. Not in an arrogant, finger-pointing way—at least not from my perspective—but in that quiet, internal way certainty often carries itself. I had a framework. A map. A theology that could explain everything from the condition of the human soul to the weather on a Tuesday. Even after my deconstruction—after the scaffolding of certainty came crashing down—I’ve noticed something surprising: the instinct to teach, to explain, to fix... it’s still there. I catch myself in conversations crafting elegant little truths, offering conclusions like gifts people didn’t ask for. It’s humbling. And a little funny. Turns out, letting go of a worldview doesn’t mean letting go of the desire to shape the world. There’s something deep in me that wants to share what I’ve seen, what I’ve learned. But more often than not, that urge is less about understanding and more about a desire to fix. It’s an old muscle memory. A need to assert meaning, to tidy up the mess, to speak when m...

  It must be obvious… that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. -- Alan Watts  I came across a video recent entitled "Before Birth: Why a Soul Chooses Addiction." You can watch it for yourself by following this link . It's about 15 minutes long. It attempts to answer the question, "Why do bad things happen to people?" I come from a world of control. My job as an engineer is built on the premise that the world is like a machine and we can manipulate it as we choose. And it's not entirely inaccurate. If I couldn't control electricity, bending it to represent information and then manipulating that information to some end result, I wouldn't have a job. So it is with our western scientific world. We have experiments and formulas that describe reality. We can do drug trials to develop medicines that affect and manipulate the human body. We can create machines that shuttle ...