First off, I'd like to point out the
belief-o-matic. According to it, I'm a Universal Unitarian. But since just about anybody could be one, I suppose I should elaborate.
I call myself a zen solipsist. The solipsist bit because zen isn't exactly a religion, and the zen bit because I'm not exactly a solipsist.
I believe the only way to understand the universe is to understand yourself, and vice versa.
I believe in paradox in everything.
I believe in absolute free will and absolute determinism. Not because they conflict, but because they are both equal expressions of the nature of reality; either one works, but not both.
I believe that there is no god, that the universe is god, that as a part of the universe we all are god, and that I am the only god whose existence I can rationalize.
I believe that Jesus was just a man, but I believe he was mankind's savior and even died for my sins. (truly explaining this would take a lot of time, and for most people, would be considered a stretch... perhaps even blasphemous. You are Jesus, and so am I.)
I don't believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, but I do believe that the being who resides in me will reside in everyone and everything else or already has. I don't consider this being separate from myself.
I know I've told this story elsewhere and maybe even here, but I'll tell it again. I was raised Mormon. I found myself unable to believe in God as I was taught around the age of 16. I started looking into a lot of other religions, eastern philosophy - zen, buddhism, and some taoism - the only things that really struck a cord with me. I got heavily into Zen, probably just because it sounded so cool (where is the hole when the cheese is gone?). I gathered a loose set of quasi-theological beliefs I called Frostism. It wasn't anything I really believed, but at least it was something. Believing myself an atheist was deeply disturbing for me.
A couple years later, while studying in Monterey at the Defense Language Institute, a girl I knew jokingly asked me why I was so weird. I told her it would take some time to give her an answer thorough enough to truly explain me. So later that night I'm sitting in my barracks room, trying to write it down on paper.
My first answer was that I wasn't weird. It's just that other people's point of view was too far removed from my own to be able to make sense of it. The problem with that answer was that it gave me too much credit, placed my view above others.
So I had to argue the other side. If all other points of view see me as weird, what difference does my own point of view make? It might as well not exist. I am weird.
I couldn't find a way to make both ideas work, and I couldn't say one of them was wrong. That's when it hit me. I solved my own koan and had, what I thought at the time, an enlightenment (I've come to realize it was an awakening). Everything was clear to me. I understood my own nature, that of the universe, and my place within it. I knew how it all works and what it all meant. Everything I had read on zen suddenly made sense in the most simple way possible. It wasn't cryptic for the sake of being cryptic, but because every thing in the universe contradicted itself because nothing is independant. The truth is so simple that most of us look past it without even seeing it.
Imagine the universe is a tennis ball. If you cut all the pieces up, it would still be a tennis ball. Each piece is still made of tennis ball stuff, so tennis-ballness runs through everything, so everything is the same, even if all the pieces aren't alike.
So take the tennis ball and stick a needle in it. The point at which the needle intersects the surface of the ball can be considered your unique point of view. For all intents and purposes, the tennis ball looks at least subtly different from every possible point of view (infinite points of view, infinite universes).
So if the tennis ball moves what happens to the point with the needle through it? It has to move. I consider this an explanation of determinism.
The opposite is true, though, isn't it? If the needle moves, the whole ball has to move with it. The effects of one person's actions, no matter how minute, change the universe. Absolute free will.
The only viewpoint I can comprehend is my own (though I can reasonably guess at others), and living with the philosphy that nothing I do matters didn't seem like a very good way of going through life. So for simplicity's sake, I chose the path of the solipsist. You can understand yourself to know the universe, or you can understand the universe to know yourself. They both work because in the end, they're the same thing.
