Pancake Brain is a free weekly newsletter by award-winning and - losing writer Lauren Duca.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on God. The atheist’s answers have stuck with me — so thoughtful and strangely “spiritual,” I think you’ve tipped the scales. I’ve been obsessed with “God” for eight years now, but I think I’m finally giving up on some sad hope for the big idea. The burden of backstory laced throughout the brutality of human history, forget childhood trauma, means “God” can only ever weigh down even the most basic conversation, never mind a conversation about why we’re even alive to begin with, or whether we have the capacity to expand our consciousness.
Raised Roman Catholic, I was a devout atheist until I smoked Bufo out of a crack pipe on a rooftop in Tulum. Bufo is a sacred psychedelic medicine also known as the “God” molecule, and that’s roughly what happened. I didn’t just see the light, I became the light. Infinite energy with no beginning or end — it’s impossible to describe infinity in terms of linear time, but they said I was screaming for three minutes. Back in my body, I could barely catch my breath, panting, What did I just see? Was that the center of the universe? Is that what people mean when they say God? And they said, Please stop talking.
It didn’t take long for me to go full God. At first, I aggressively qualified my position: “God,” Great Spirit, Source, what advanced theoretical physics calls “the field.” Less than a year later, I’d dropped the air quotes. I would tell anyone who’d listen, and people who were barely even pretending to listen, I am God, you are God, we are God, and my friends would say, Oh my God, why are you so annoying now?
Mostly, I was furious that I had brainwashed by weird old men in a Long Island dungeon. The Catholic church I grew up in was a gray stone tower with gargoyles, and inside, Jesus bleeding to death in his underwear. Not to mention, for all the trans panic, there have always been men in shiny dresses raping children, but I grew up calling them priests. Not all priests are pedophiles, but they are definitely dumb. You don’t even have to read The Bible to understand that Jesus’s favorite thing on Earth was treating everyone the same, but surely only boring old men in giant hats and gold kaftans are the ones who have anything to say about that.
In my craze of personal religiosity, taking “God” back meant everything and everyone with no separation, but the word only ever seemed to cause the problem. Simply saying “God” in conversation tends to make people uncomfortable, even if they identify as “spiritual.” Still, because I’d rejected the Roman Catholic “God” as something like the supervisor to Santa, the concept became a wide open space in which to see the light of pure being. Still, the poetry of the incandescent glow can’t do anything when you are stuck in the shit — and the shittiness of the life is the space where modern “spirituality” hasn’t even remotely begun to have a conversation. From Instagram manifestation techniques to Eckhart Tolle, the Western hologram of present moment awareness papers over the part where it takes fucking years to even begin to cultivate really consistent inner peace (and that sucks, too).
For me, the greatest separation has come not so much from “God,” as the ridiculous proposition that life is simple and therefore easy. People say “just be present” as if they have never had anxiety, depression, or too much bread at dinner. The term “spiritual” might even be more annoying than “God,” if only because it’s too many syllables. Ego has so much Freudian jizz on it, and then they want you to get rid of it, as if you don’t need to know where your asshole is in order to parallel park. These conversations, about “God,” presence, and spirituality, can become profoundly confusing, especially when definitions turn into pretend solutions. Giving up altogether, what if the answer is to drop all the big ideas as we learn to talk about the thing we all know: the time it takes to learn how to feel better. Heart open. Connected. “The light” (or whatever it is) shining from within.
If you are enjoying Pancake Brain, please spread the word — reccommend on Substack, FWD to your trippy friends… or just tell a rich person to send me money. Thanks for being here. :)
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