It’s funny to be an ex-cult member.  The world you find yourself in just does not quite make sense.

Like a sugar head rush from a breakfast cereal.  Or a permanent case of jet lag.  You’re missing several pieces to a puzzle that seems like it should fit together….but it doesn’t.

Maybe it’s not supposed to.  Maybe religions, worldviews, belief systems and even philosophical perspectives are just ways of filtering the vast, nearly infinite amount of data that we encounter from birth.  Without one, you don’t really know who you are, what you’re supposed to do; you don’t really know how to interpret your experiences or make sense of them.

If this seems too meta, try an example on for size.  Imagine you’re living in a virtual reality human, who at its core, is actually just a biologically functioning system.  You go on dates, you eat ice cream, you work at a day job, you vote, you nod your head when people are explaining their feelings to you or interpretations of live events.  You smile politely when it seems like you should.

The problem is, you are missing the “filter” through which any one thing means any one thing.

Let’s take your date.  You feel the physical, sexual attraction, but you have no cultural information (or expectation) of what to do.  To go back to his or her place?  Call the next day?  Desire children?  Imagine the two of you turning into space dragons and conquering other planets?

At the LITERAL level of “belief” – not even, necessarily, the religious or cosmic level – you are just a zero.  Do you ‘believe’ you OUGHT to do X, Y, or Z next ?  That it’s right?  Not right?  There is no right?

This is what it feels like to get out of a cult, and experience what Hassan (1986 et al) and others in the field have termed “floating”.  You are the ghost in the machine.

Sartre would say – You are free – so invent !  And this is an interesting answer.  Maybe all “free will” is invention, or the ownership we feel when a decision finally gets made, who knows how.  The default becomes utilitarian – if no one gets hurt, it’s probably fine.  The default, for me, also had (now comical) enormously cosmic points of view – my action is pitifully insignificant in view of the infinite vastness of the Universe.  Whatever happens, or doesn’t happen, is really over in the blink of a cosmic eye and has no bearing on anything whatsoever.

This, of course, is a silly way to view life – it also begs an important question – since everything therefore pales in comparison to some non-human, non-observer ‘cosmic eye’ of the Universe, what could possibly be a criteria for something to matter?  We enter into David Hume’s territory.

But to make a long draft short…nothing lasts forever.  Floating doesn’t either.  But an interesting question remains, are all filters mendacious, relative, and ultimately just a useful evolutionary adaptation?  Is there more truth, in other words, in being ‘filter’ free, and therefore completely open, at all times, to all horizons and all information?