Chapter 2: The Architecture of Truth: From the Enclosure of the Cathedral’s Dogma to the Unlimited Bandwidth of the Universe
The pursuit of truth is, fundamentally, an act of excavation. We dig through the strata of culture, upbringing, and inherited belief in hopes of finding the bedrock of existence. For a significant portion of my life, I operated under the assumption that the Christian church was the shovel with which I was meant to dig. It was the institution that promised answers to the relentless questions of the soul. Yet, as I matured and my spiritual peripheral vision widened—aided by the harsh crucible of addiction, the quiet revelations of nature, and traveling new paths of consciousness—I came to a stark and transformative realization: the church was not the vehicle for truth I needed. In fact, it had become an enclosure, walling me off from the very infinitude I sought to explore.
The Fragility of Dogma and the Moral Dissonance
My divergence began not with rebellion but with observation. Even as a kid, the reasoning offered by the faithful seemed shaky, built on pseudo-historical tales, questionable dogma, and, more often than not, plain superstition rather than true spiritual depth. In 4th grade, my friend—later my brother in the electrical trade decades down the line—Layton W. told me that if I ever called someone a fool, I’d go to hell. My early Sunday school teachers warned that unless we followed Jesus and claimed freedom from judgment through his crucifixion, we’d never see heaven. The cosmology they painted—a strict split between heaven and hell—felt empty, more like a transaction meant to control behavior than a real guide to the mysteries of existence.
The phrase
The idea that “You are a sinner, and unless you accept Jesus Christ as your savior, you will spend an eternity in hell” never resonated with me. When I first heard it at seven years old, I couldn’t imagine anything I might think or do that would cause a universal spirit to punish me forever. Adding Jesus into the picture, even as a kid, I could see big gaps in how adults understood God’s love and how to truly experience it. I was just a child, and to me, true religion should be simple enough for children to grasp—Christian dogma felt far too heavy for my innocent mind.
Furthermore, as I moved into adulthood, the anthropomorphism of the Divine became a barrier I could not surmount. To assign gender to the Infinite, to bind the Source of All Being to the structures of human patriarchy, seemed to shrink the Divine into something manageable, understandable, and ultimately, false. I was seeking the ocean; the church was offering me a cup of water and telling me it was the sea.
In the 1980s, my theological frustration was matched by a deep moral conflict. The church’s belief that animals lacked souls clashed completely with my sense of life’s interconnectedness. Even more troubling was its lack of compassion during the AIDS crisis. I saw an institution that spoke of love but acted with homophobia, judgment, and exclusion, showing fear toward anyone outside its cultural comfort zone. The gap between its message of grace and its practice of judgment became impossible to ignore.
The Dark Night and the Mountain Top
This spiritual disillusionment coincided with a personal descent into the hell of addiction. My search for Truth had taken me through the darkest regions of the human experience. Despite stints in recovery units, such as the Physicians and Surgeons Hospital Care Unit in 1984, Cedar Hills Hospital in 1985, and attempts to reintegrate into church life at Hinson Baptist in both 1984 and 1987, I remained fractured. I realized that no psychiatrist, psychologist, or priest could do my work for me. There was no “Jesus” or other prophet who was going to bring salvation or healing to me from the outside.
The pivotal shift occurred not in a pew or a recovery hospital, but on the road to a friend’s house. I saw a vision of the divine mother holding a baby, and I felt the love of this universe for the first time in my life. It was absolutely beautiful and overpowering experience, with the vision remaining in my field of awareness for nearly a week.
In that transcendent period, I had no need for any more mediation between me and God’s love, or God’s truth. I realized that a conscious contact with the real God could bring healing, sobriety, and balance back into my life. I realized that the ceremony of baptism I had undergone was a symbol pointing toward a reality, but the church had mistaken the symbol for the reality itself. I tasted the water of life directly; I no longer needed religion’s cup.
Dismantling the Mediator
The foundation for this shift was built on a series of transformative spiritual experiences and insights I began having in 1987. My ongoing awakening was nurtured by Jack Boland’s paradigm-changing take on the Twelve Steps, the mystical teachings of Joel Goldsmith through Marie Schmidt, study of A Course in Miracles, and the wisdom of Jiddu Krishnamurti. Boland taught that we don’t need an intermediary to speak for us before the ever-present spirit of truth, as the Divine is not some separate being to appease but a reality to realize. Goldsmith reminded all that to be a human being is to be hypnotized by the human mind and its often-erroneous conceptualizations. A Course In Miracles offered a different way to look at life, where the insight into our limiting perceptions of the other can lead to transformative experience. Krishnamurti suggested there’s no God to believe in, for God is the very path we walk once we’re free from the grip of conceptual addictions.
These understandings dismantled the hierarchy of the church. If the spirit of truth is accessible, immediate, and internal, then the ecclesiastical structure of priests, mediators, and intercessors is not just unnecessary; it is an impediment. I realized that true spiritual healing is not about conforming to a set of prescribed behaviors or dogmas but about embarking on an inward journey to unravel the mysteries of existence. It demands a holistic approach that integrates the mind, body, and soul—a connection to the Universe that transcends the material world.
Through my interactions with Marie Schmidt, who would look at me and declare, “More perfect than you are, you could never be,” I began to understand that God was not a distant judge, but my innate capacity for change and evolution, and the very nature of all being. I recognized that I needed to create new paths of consciousness for myself and stop following the rutted roads created by others.
Perception and the Direct Path
We perceive the world through two fundamental lenses: the mind, a matrix of infinite conceptualization and its fraying tapestry of conditioning and historical wounding, and the state of divine union. The church often operates within the former, dissecting the world into the known and the alien, the sacred and the profane. I left because I desired the direct path of the latter—a perception of reality where the observer and the observed are joined in an eternal dance.
The church offers community and moral guidance, which are valuable. We all need companions on our journey to truth, to find those who resonate with us. But for someone seeking the raw, unfiltered truth of existence, organized religion alone may fall short. Attending Sunday and Wednesday services to hear a priest, minister, or rabbi can bring comfort and reassurance, but comfort isn’t the goal—clarity is. I sought a relationship with the Infinite free from fear, dogma, or the need for a mediator.
My departure was not a rejection of the spiritual life, but an embrace of it. It was a step out of the sanctuary and into the vast, terrifying, and beautiful cathedral of the universe itself. To experience more of the infinity of our cosmos means that we must step outside of the familiar bandwidths of existence, and courageously follow new paths of consciousness, with an ever-expanding access to wider frequencies of being.
I invite you to consider: are the walls you worship within protecting your spirit, or are they hiding the horizon?
I am about to break down those walls and reveal the life that is lived upon the universe’s unlimited bandwidth!
