First, let's be clear: I'm not religious in the slightest.
Despite being baptized, having received communion, and then confirmation, I dropped it all around the age of twelve and the years have only consolidated my rejection of all organized religion.
When asked, I answer that I'm agnostic and atheist—which may seem contradictory. Agnostic because I haven't toured the universe and there could well be something, for all I know. A meaning, an equation, a metaphysics that we might choose to personalize and call God. Why not. But fundamentally, I think we cannot know and we might as well not worry about it—which constitutes the strong version of agnosticism.
But—and here's my atheist side—even if there is indeed something up there, I'm convinced it has nothing to do with what religions, past or present, have been trying to sell us for centuries. For me, the Bible, Torah, Quran and their ilk are bad fiction used to maintain a form of control.
That's where we're starting from.
Yet, in recent years, I've discovered a certain spirituality in myself.
Spirituality would be for me the connection with something greater than oneself—without it necessarily being a god.
It could be a connection with nature, for example.
I'm speaking of nature in the extended sense: that great whole that has existed since the big bang, probably before, which gave birth to galaxies, stars, planets, which allowed the emergence of life in all its forms: bacteria, plants, animals. This gigantic soup in perpetual transformation which, through laws we're only beginning to understand, is at the origin of everything we know. That certain parts of this whole develop their own consciousness and are capable of experiencing themselves and the world, that this physico-chemical-biological complexity gives birth to such simplicity of experience ("I am") which allows each being to unroll the thread of its life without needing to understand the underlying mechanisms, I find there's a magic in that. A mystery, at the very least. A beauty, certainly.
But above all: this small bit of spirituality is enough to define a boundary between the profane and the sacred.
The profane vision of the world would be to see down here only an accumulation of matter and physical laws from which we should seize to make our fortune. There would be no mystery anywhere, no question, no wonder and from there, no respect to cultivate toward anything. Only resources to exploit. Life would then be just another fuel in service of our vision of comfort and progress.
The antithesis of this idea, so well defended by Bernard Stiegler in this video I recently discovered, also brings me back to what Alan Watts said on the subject.
Namely that humanity's relationship to nature is built on a double misconception. The first: that our role would be to dominate nature. Fight and master the elements to impose our will. The second: that we would be in a position to save it. That the planet—or certain parts of the planet—would need us to continue to be. These two options, far from being equivalent in their effects, stem at their source from the omission of the same fundamental truth:
We are nature.
We, human beings, are as much nature as cows, trees, ants, or dolphins. We're made of the same matter, born from the same evolution—physical and biological—and are destined to disappear under similar conditions. (For example: by transforming our ecosystem beyond the limits of our own survival—which, in the history of species, is nothing new.)
This doesn't mean there's no difference between humans and other species. Of course there is. But when we return to the fundamentals—living, surviving, finding meaning—it seems to me that our belonging to life is a better analytical lens than what separates us from it.
Because if we are nature, nothing we do can be against nature.
We are part of the great whole. The difficulties we encounter are part of the great game. And the mystery and magic at work in the universe are also expressed through us.