Hello Me (Prologue of Zimism)

So I have decided that this holy month, I want to rediscover myself, and reaffirm the stance I'm going to take towards life, everything from my belief in a deity to my relationship with people.

Before this, I've been going through life day-by-day as a philosophical fence-sitter. In almost all aspects.

I acknowledge that there are things you can't 'sit on a fence' about and are things that are automatically compliant to my principles.

Moral principles like the wrongness of child rape, mass genocide,etc.

Theological adherence like the existence of God/gods/deities and His/Her/Their/ role as creators in the universe.

But among other things, I did not believe in absolute truth. Specifically, not being biased or party to any side, but claiming that everyone has their faults, and certain attributes has to be taken on a selective basis and conglomerated as "situational truths"

No absolute truth in political parties, ideologies, specific peoples, religions, etc.

My view towards spirituality was all-encompassing. I am not an empiricist, (if I was I would've been an atheist), neither am I an agnostic (because I believe transcendent realities can be proven, even if it's not necessary to do so).

I was saddened by the narrow concept I was raised up in, that a particular mode of prayer was the only one acceptable, and I grew to found out other truths regarding mediums or methods of reaching spirituality.

It was Noetic science that taught me that the focusing of the mind through meditation or prayer have the potential to alter matter, i.e. reality itself.

And it wasn't specific to how the Buddhists did it, or how the Muslims prostrate on the ground.

I accepted that principle, so I didn't believe spirituality had to be discarded even if I wasn't taking sides.

But that must mean that I'm taking a secular stance? That I'm saying that religion is something personal towards an individual?

Personal? Perhaps. Secular? Not entirely.

First of all, may I remind myself that I also consider political ideologies as non-absolute, be it democracy, communism, socialism or monarchies. And that in no absolute circumstance did I say any 'worldly' ideologies had the right to supersede theocratic beliefs, or disassociate itself from them. But so is it the other way around.

My maxim living through this adamant state of a-partisan and a-religiosity is "If there can be many fictions, why can't there be many truths?"

But I believed in deities/deity and I did not have faith in the universe coming into being on its own.

But I disapproved of the idea that God plays ant farm with the universe, putting in ants just to see how they behave, and then later decide whether they go to hell or heaven later on.

This simplistic notion of purpose for human creation disgusted me.

But I believed in Him/Her/Them existing and providing, and sustaining the continuity of the universe simply because of the beauty of Existence in all of it's rationality, irrationality, organisation and randomness.

I also didn't believe that this deity had to be an organism. That it could be a Force.

Did I believe the universe was predetermined? No. But I dwelt in the romantic concepts of coincidences and irony. I love literature, and human creativity. The love for all things abstract motivated me to ask more questions, and that life isn't about finding infallible answers.

I believed in the existence of many realities (refer to maxim above), in the possibility of fantasy worlds, in the existence of other beings, the existence of other dimensions.

I did not believe that life needed a Purpose. Or even Existence or Creation.

I did not believe in Good Vs Evil. No ultimate Satanic figure. No ultimate fighters of Justice like Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad (note: not of their existence, but of their infallibility). I believe Man can serve right within society and among Man as a whole, but there are no absolute methods, and things are always situational. Machiavelli would come close tot his, but his ignorance of moral highs are not within my principles.

Moral principles are questionable, but practicality should never be based on simple quantity.

I did not believe in dogmatic moral principles, or 'social safety nets'. Like the advocacy of certain religions disallowing casual relationships between men and women simply because of the fear of social chaos, jealousy, adultery and later the destruction of the family institution (I was laughing while I wrote that). Or the automatic disapproval of fornication, or premarital sex, and the downright oppression of homosexuals and homosexuality. The argument of things not being 'natural' is also something I discard. Normality is changeable, and nature itself changes and evolves. If you want to claim that it isn't natural, animals (last time I checked they were part of Nature) practice homosexual intercourse too. The list of 'social safety nets'' are almost endless in today's society.

When people ask what I believe in, and if I trust them enough to be understanding and not acerbic towards my statement, I would tell them that I'm a theist (latin theo - god, ist - believer) but I do not believe in absolute truth.

This month what I'm planning to do is to reaffirm all of these things, write them down, and find out where I stand in as many things as possible.

I will pray, the way Muslims pray, and find spiritual serenity through that, because that's the only way I know how to reach spiritual serenity and utter focus so far hoping that contemplation would be fruitful.

But I'm not trying to find an ultimate answer. If I do along the way, I hope I know what I'm doing.

Paper Shredded

It's understandable why you always feel bad.

Your friends are more beautiful than you, more selfless, more intelligent, more hilarious.

& Everday you see them living their lives, you start to feel worthless. You don't feel special at all.

But the fact that they need you as much as you need them, tells you they're imperfect too.

Heck sometimes, they're worse off.