I want to talk about some of the things I used to believe in when my universe was smaller. Some of my family had always been in the habit of visiting a new age shop on the westside. They sell statues, crystals, rocks, medalians, buttons, herbal tea, window stickers, prisms, and lots of books and magazines. One such book, "Behold, A Pale Horse," was lent to me by a cousin. She still displays it proudly, alongside a giant yellow book called "The Matrix." It was supposedly written by a former navy man, William Cooper, who emplored in the introduction, "I have no reason to lie to you," or some such. It was my first exposure to the most dark and rococo or conspiracy theories. The moon landing is a hoax, the government is holding aliens, the Trilateral Commission and the Illuminati are running the world, and the government plans to ignite Jupiter into a second sun. Last I'd heard, the author was involved in a shoot-out with police on lawn.

I continued to read loads of books about Nostradamus, including the rather bizarre accounts of Dolores Cannon and the inerpretation of John Hogue. Nietzsche was probably the only habit that's stayed with me. During this time, there was the first attack on the World Trade Center, the capture of Ted Kaczinsky, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the rise of the Moral Majority. Though I had never received a formal religious indoctrination, I was able to terrorize myself with paranoid fantasies of elaborate conspiracies and doomsday prophecies. Those were all dark and forboding teen years, and as I began to find new interests and aspirations, the tyrannical sabre-rattling of these imaginary foes seemed to fade into the distance.

Though I had dabbled in the idea occasionally, an authentic belief in a deity was never something I could achieve. It's only been a few years since I've formally taken the mantle of "atheist," and engaged in long philosophical discussions about "gods" and the human experience. Even then, though, there was a discomfort that could neither be resolved nor fully realized. I understand this now to be my own pretensions toward a greater "meaning." Toward that end, I had read books like "The Holographic Universe," and experimented with "mind machines," astral projection, skrying, ESP, etc., in an attempt to commune with a broader consciousness. Aside from some interesting results in my astral projection experiments, there were few interesting products for my efforts.

Throughout my life, I never had much use for religious people. Clerics, in particular, seemed like useless, superfluous attention whores with nothing of value to say. I could never stand the way Catholic priests bandy about their gold cups and wafers, or how they expect everyone to be blown back by the windy platitudes. I've always thought new age people were air-heads. Experiences have confirmed their disconnect with, and stubborn disregard for, reality and all its inconveniences. They believe what they want to, how they want to, in whatever bastardized combination suits their ad hoc philosophies. What's been very interesting to me is having to confront the problems of my own ill-defined philosophical outlook. I've managed to hold on to ideas of a universal continuum of consciousness; bastardized lay quantum physics, applied haphazardly to an oversimplified model of the universe. What's been hard is experiencing ideas I once sort of believed in for a long time, articulated in their badly reasoned way, and desperately defended, and realizing it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.