This is the third year in a row now that I’ve given up God for Lent as part of Theologian Peter Rollin’s Atheism for Lent de-centering practice: a seven week course traversing through the impossibility of theism without atheism. The course uses the idea of dialectics, starting with an affirmation of God, only to negate that position, and continue to negate what remains each week. This process descends into the minds of some of the greatest thinkers to ever live, attempting to understand their perspective rather than dismiss it. I have yet to find a spiritual activity that is more fulfilling of the true intent of religion. Below is the journey as I experienced it.

The first week starts with the traditional theistic arguments for the existence of God. In this first position, existence is seen as obviously better than non-existence, and as one steps back, this supreme Superbeing very quickly resembles something like One God prevailing from a long list of deities: someone larger than us who made the world and exists beyond it, and watches us, listens to our prayers but has a plan for us, and is good, and is all powerful and happens to be so much like us that He even has a gender. He becomes the answer that bridges the deep contradictions of the world, the points at which science has yet to discover (like the mysteries of the beginning of the universe).

Now, this is where traditional atheism comes in the second week, denying the existence of God as first naively described. This week pulls back the curtain and exposes that God as a Deus Ex Machina / Elilim, described through finite words that are organized in a book which religion uses to provide the answers to the universe through belief. An invisible being, suppressing questioning. A supernatural entity that allows evil, calling into question His goodness and power. A God that must be continuously qualified to justify things like the extermination of those who don’t believe in the same definition of this God. Beyond evil, a God who seemingly allows the senseless death of millions of children under the age of five each year through famine and sickness, yet answers prayers to win football games, or bends the laws of physics to save you from slipping on ice. It is important to note that this type of atheism always requires a shape of God to deny. This leads us to the next week.

The third week follows the Christian mystics (Dionysis, Eckhart, Maimonides, and others) who ignite the apophatic tradition, which doesn’t simply disregard atheists but recognizes the theological importance of the atheistic turn. They claim that any of the conceptual framings of a Superbeing God are always less than God, and are therefore surely idolatrous. Resultingly, they honor atheism as a type of spiritual purification process, to rid one of their fetishistic perceptions. They claim that true interaction with God happens only as part of a saturating, numinous, sensory experience which we are lucky to encounter. It is an experience that comes to us the more we’re able to rid ourselves of finite images of God. Religion, in this sense, is an emptying process. It is this group that says that one can’t deny that if God exists, He certainly exists as a Hyperbeing; something that is otherwise than existence as we know it, and greater than we can conceive.

The fourth week takes a functional turn and involves studying theologians and philosophers like Feuerbach who claim that if God is, in fact, greater than we can conceive, then the material religious dogmas and doctrines and words we use to describe this indescribable entity don’t actually tell us about God, but are what tell us the most about ourselves as human beings in the current epoch. In short, theology is anthropology, and in struggling to describe the indescribable divine perfection, we learn the basis of the ideologies of our current systems. God, in this shift, is revealed as a Projection; a greater version of our own beliefs which reflects the “oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind,” as Freud claimed, and not the characteristics of a deity. If, for example, the powerful people in the current system happen to be oppressive, then campaigns of death become God’s will, the fear of God is used to repress revolt, and religion is built to justify that sanctified order rather than critique it. In Marx’s view, it’s the opium of the people.

If the fourth week anchored the mystical experience of God to a projection screen where we place our own ideas, then the fifth week lowers the idea of God further, into the earth. It is in this week that Paul TIllich shines by describing God as the Ground of Being. God becomes what everything arises from and shifts from the object of a question to the basis of it, preceding the subject/object relation. This God connects to the prior week in the agreement that our understanding of God is intimately tied to us and what we do, but describes God as the depth dimension of our acts. We know, against societal and instinctual common sense, that there are things more important than our own self interest or pleasure, and by engaging in the work of selfless things like justice, love, mercy, and care for the other we are affirming something that’s not reducible to the material world. Art, for example, is inspired by beauty, but the point of the artist isn’t to ever capture beauty, but in a sense to continue to fail to capture beauty, and the act of continuing to pursue amidst this failure, they testify to it as something ultimate. In this role, doubt and failure aren’t something to avoid but become our most important attributes. When we doubt we most fully affirm truth, because doubting presupposes that there is an underlying truth that is unconditional. In this interpretation, God is not found in the privileged mystical experience that only happens to a few lucky individuals, but indirectly witnessed by anyone who is grasped by something unconditionally: in the act of being ultimately concerned.

If the fifth week grounded the mystical experience back to the earth, then the sixth week pulls the floor out from under us to reveal God as a Groundless Ground of Being. In comes my subtle fascination with Simone Weil (and the initial inspiration of my book Klobberland). Through this dialectic deep dive we can begin to understand the ultimate power of Nothingness. Not nothingness interpreted as insignificant or worthless, but as the most influential and true aspect of reality. Nothingness doesn’t exist, it insists, and it is foundational to every human being. At this stage we start interpreting the unconditional ground from the prior stage as something more like a primordial lack. We are all driven by that which we don’t have. We all became subjects from a fundamental separation with our primary care giver. We all learned about life through mirroring. We were all initially intrigued by the same questions: What does my primary care giver desire? What do they want from me? But this was the one thing that we couldn’t mirror: the unknown desire of the other. So we create fantasies and beliefs to fill this gap of unknowing and live by them to protect ourselves from experiencing this unknowing. In this week we start to see how the Unknown dimension of the world is the only thing that’s “real,” as it is the only thing uninfluenced by others, but that it’s also the one thing that we can never know. In that sense, everything we experience and do is true to the degree in which we attempt to descend into the unknown. Religion then becomes an invitation to encounter something unknowable. Belief is eradicated and unnecessary and replaced with love, for love is the ultimate openness to the unknowability of the other. Religion also begins, at this stage, to lose its distance from science, biology, philosophy, politics, and such. My next book explores this concept of the unknown in the business / program management world. In summary, if we are all determined by our fantasies of what the other wants, then the sum total of these fantasies shapes society, placing all of us in a social play of control. Freedom is in the ability to see the system for what it is, and to understand the paradoxical / kenotic directionality required for health. Understanding this is a step to enlightenment.

If we stopped at the sixth week we could still subtly hold belief that there is an endstate of wholeness and complete nothingness which is the answer to achive. This can turn to nihilism quickly. So this last week helps clarify that the Absolute (true enlightenment) is actually a Hegelian claim: that Absolute isn’t that which bridges the contradictions, but the Contradiction itself between Nothingness and Somethingness. Contradiction binds us all. This is the deepest meaning of Yin/Yang. This is the deepest meaning of Tat Tvam Asi. This is the deepest meaning of Christ Crucified - the human/god atheistically/theistically crying out on the cross; the immortal God that dies. This week reinforces that there is something that we do know, and our faith is the degree to which we embrace it, and it is that we don’t know. The more we live in that space, the fuller our life becomes.

​If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com

I recently went through my ten-year ritual of buying a car. The anticipation was exciting; the search was stressful but enjoyable. Like most large purchases, we decided on a reasonable price range, browsed within it, and inevitably fell in love with something at the upper limit. We sat with the salesman, negotiated, and shook hands. You would think that spending so much money on something I genuinely wanted would make me the happiest guy in Rhode Island. But, if I’m honest, I didn’t feel much different.

Someone might say it just wasn’t the right car—that the right object would have changed everything. But most of us know that’s not true. We may feel a brief spark of pleasure, but not any sustained joy. Why? Because the fantasy surrounding the object disappears the moment we possess it.
What can sustain real contentment, however, is understanding the structure of desire—learning how it deceives us. Once we grasp this structure deeply, we gain the ability to enjoy the present rather than being manipulated by promises of future satisfaction. The one who inherently understands this structure can ever-sustain their enjoyment.

So I begin with a warning: satisfaction does not come from gaining things.
Everyone knows this. And yet we all behave as if buying the house, the car, or the jewelry will finally fulfill us. Every time. Why? Because we misunderstand how enjoyment works. We don’t see the structure of Desire, and we confuse it with something far simpler: Demand.
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Some things we “desire” are actually Demands—needs tied to survival, like food and drink. Demand can be satisfied by obtaining an object. A hungry baby gulps, burps, and smiles—that’s Demand fulfilled. But the moment a need moves beyond necessity, it enters the realm of Desire, and if we don’t understand Desire’s structure, dissatisfaction sets in, even when it appears we get what we want. This is the moment where others—especially those who understand Desire—gain power over us.

Because some objects satisfy Demand, we imagine an object must also exist that can satisfy Desire. We are promised this everywhere. But Desire is more complicated: it points not to a real object, but to an imaginary, idealized object shaped by what we imagine others desire. A useful name for this is the Sacred Object.

The Sacred Object is built by what we imagine other’s wanting—cars, houses, jewelry, status, beauty, youth, success. The greater the sacrifice required to obtain it, the more valuable it seems. And our culture exploits this structure relentlessly. Advertising is one of its most sophisticated tools. It is no coincidence that the father of public relations, Edward Bernays—Sigmund Freud’s nephew—used psychology to engineer mass desire. As he famously said: “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”

The Sacred Object promises to fill an inner lack that began when we first became separate subjects—when the “oceanic oneness” with the mother ended. That lack stays with us for life, taking the shape of frustration, alienation, brokenness, or incompleteness. We seek to heal it. The Sacred Object promises to heal it. It never does. This is because in order to be a subject, in order to participate in the world, a gap is required, we must be a part and apart from it. And, therefore, the Sacred Object does not exist.

To understand how Desire traps us, in the non-existence of and inability to obtain the Sacred Object, we must explore how its two main components– Object of Desire (OoD) and the Object Cause of Desire (OCoD) – work together. Desire requires something we want (OoD) and a barrier that keeps it out of reach (OCoD). The barrier can be money, distance, wrapping paper—anything that maintains the “gap” between us and the object. Once the object is obtained, that gap collapses, and Desire collapses with it—leaving eventual boredom or melancholy.

This is why the “cures” for this alienation like commodities, self-help, drugs, and endless novelty fail us. They exploit the structure of Desire without revealing it. Two other “solutions” have been created which seem to escape the Desire trap, but they are tricks as well – my book Klobberland talks of a third option:

Option 1: Openly Position the Object of Desire as Unreachable.
This creates an infinite gap and an eternal Desire. Hedonistic Western religions often rely on this strategy—promising heaven, utopia, or salvation always “later,” always out of reach. This sustains Desire but hides its structure. It creates dependence on doctrine, priests, rituals, and “enemies” that must be defeated to preserve the promised future. It is a structure that has fueled everything from proselytization to genocides.

Option 2: Eliminate Desire Altogether.
This is the nihilistic approach associated with many Eastern traditions. It seeks to extinguish Desire by extinguishing the OoD. But Desire is essential to human life—it drives passion, purpose, and meaning. And the pursuit of “no desire” is its own Desire: Desiring not to desire. The OoD and OCoD remain intact. This path often turns violence inward through asceticism, bodily domination, or ego-annihilation; in some cases, it spills outward, as in those who use spiritual belief to justify self-destruction or harm to others.

Option 3: A third way — the path that Klobberland explores.
This approach teaches the structure of Desire openly. It refuses superstition and rejects fantasies of heaven or nirvana. Instead, it makes an object of desire out of the lack itself. It shows how “Nothing” can be desirable—not as nihilism, but as liberation from being controlled by illusions of completeness.

This is not defeatism. It is the only stance that dissolves external control and restores genuine freedom. It accepts brokenness rather than fleeing from it. Its byproduct is kindness: to ourselves, to others, and even to our own anxiety.

In this third option, the OoD and OCoD collapse into one another. We no longer chase a final “Something” as though it will fill some hole within us, because we understand that once the object is obtained, the obstacle disappears and Desire evaporates. Instead, we set our sights on the gap itself—on the “not having”—and discover enjoyment there.

Love is a perfect illustration:
In love, the other is an object of desire whose endless mystery always maintains a distance. That distance sustains Desire.
In lust, the person is reduced to a simple object; Desire ends the moment they are “gotten.” 

The process of meditation also exposes this entire structure. We often assume that suffering belongs only to those who fail to get what they want. But even in the best of times—when I do get what I want—I immediately feel the impulse to gorge on it, and in that very indulgence discover that this isn’t what I wanted after all. Satisfaction folds quickly into dissatisfaction, and it is the belief that we can escape this cycle that produces suffering.
 
Meditation reveals this truth directly. The moment we attempt to sit still—even for five minutes—discomfort rushes in. With no distractions, we become acutely aware of the restless dissatisfaction built into us. This is the point: not to flee the frustration, but to encounter it. Meditation’s purpose is to expose the contradiction rather than to dissolve it. And in that exposure lies a quiet liberation.

This is enlightenment—not escape, but finding joy in the very contradiction that makes us who we are.
 
This is why meditation aligns naturally with the third option that Klobberland explores: embracing the structure of desire rather than masking it, fighting it, or elevating it into fantasy.
 
Klobberland does not say we cannot passionately pursue objects; only that achieving them will not complete us. It teaches that not-fully-getting – that getting Nothingness – is essential to Desire and the true path to enjoyment.

​If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com

I would be remiss if I didn’t write about the Dodgers second World Series win in as many years. With the highest payroll in baseball ($95M/year more than the Blue Jays) much of the buzz leading up to the World Series was on the topic of the underdog, and so in this blog post I wanted to take the opportunity to explore this concept in greater detail. The idea of the underdog is complex. When we think about famous underdog stories like David and Goliath, it’s natural for most of us—aside from those with a personal stake in the outcome, like Goliath’s friends or family—to sympathize with the one who’s clearly outmatched. Especially if, in a match of intended fair play, one side appears to be equipped to a greater degree than another. Why is this?

​Well, my take is that it comes down to the idea of justice. Justice is what is called a “master signifier.” This means that although you can look up the word in the dictionary, it has no definite meaning. It is a purely visionary concept which one always strives to achieve but can never grasp. You can think of it as something that brings meaning to the world rather than has its own definite meaning. Other examples of master signifiers are truth and love. Poets will forever seek to describe their elusive nature, but luckily, never will. The law is the current distillation of the rules of justice, but this is exactly why the law changes, because, over time, we come to realize where the law, although seeming just, was not just. And so, we arrive at the underdog. The underdog appears when the Libra scale of justice has clearly become unbalanced  - when one side has the upper hand in some way. Using this image, justice always appears on the lower side of the scale - the side of the oppressed. And the oppressor can never be just unless the scales swing and they become the oppressed. This is why Simone Weil claimed that “justice flees from the camp of conquerors,” because if the oppressed happened to overtake the oppressor, they would become the oppressor, and the scale would shift the other way. This is precisely why everyone prefers to think of themselves as the underdog (I mean, I watched the Patriots claim to be the underdog for 20 years while they won 6 super bowls) because, as Camus said, “the king is always evil.” The king lacks a just purpose. The underdog is the only one with the valiant task of removing the boot from their neck, but the master only seeks to hold it there. This gives the underdog a strong purpose, and why the master, although appearing to be happy, or releasing an ecstatic burst upon winning, is typically, in their moment of triumph, more lost of purpose than the underdog. 

We see this in action during Freddy Freeman's interview after winning the greatest prize in baseball. He was asked how it felt to win back-to-back championships. He immediately reframed the answer in the guise of the underdog and referenced the Yankees as three-peat champions, maintaining his status as lower than the Evil Empire.

So, what does the Blue Jays manager, John Schneider, still have on his side after the World Series loss? My claim. Justice. And that's not a bad side to be on. For as MLK said, the universe "bends towards justice."

If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com

With a new book, Klobberland, coming out in October, I describe the trajectory of my work.

Book 1: A book of meditations on baseball, a game that says something deep about the fundamental nature of reality.
Book 2: The story of one man’s uncensored encounter with that fundamental reality, and the suffering that can result from a lack of awareness of one’s relationship to it.
Book 3: An attempt to describe that fundamental reality directly through a creation myth. What it turned into was a critique of the prevailing myths and stories of our culture, which do everything they can to hide this fundamental reality from the world.
 
Book 1: The Art of War and Baseball – in the words of the commissioner A. Bartlet Giamatti (late 80s) “baseball breaks your heart. It’s designed to break your heart.” – And so is life. This can discourage the best of us. We believe we find no pleasure in the all-too-frequent valleys of the game. We become easily disinterested in the vicissitudes of sport. We can’t buy-in to the struggle, the habitual failure of a .250 batting average. But this brokenness of heart can also have the opposite effect, keeping us in an endless illusion of belief, that tomorrow will finally bring the win that will make one a champion, and end the need to continue the game at all. Both of these responses betray the game. One runs while another wishes its end. And then there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. And it’s only when we live well with that “nothing” that we find the eternal, we see “nothing,” not as worthless, but like the Rubin’s Vase, coming into focus before our eyes. Although this nothingness is the ungraspable component of the universe, when we have the courage to reduce ourselves towards it, we can see it uniquely cloaked in the state of being a game. Not in endless wins or losses, not in belief or disbelief, but in that joy of suspended disbelief, the state where we know it’s all a game, and we know it’s here to break our heart, but we choose to participate anyway. Through cold or intense heat, and sometimes, in a warm green field, in the sun.

Book 2: Hologram Heroes – Johnny is affected by a physical brokenness. The most prominent actor in the play of Johnny’s life is his amputated hand, a phantom, a present absence that can fulfill or destroy. “Hologram heroes” is his reference to hologram baseball cards – reflecting the power that the stories we tell ourselves have to create the prevailing myths and heroes which outline the enjoyment or despair of our current state.

Book 3: Klobberland, is a mythic journey beyond belief and identity that reveals what emerges when the stories fall away and the brokenness that remains paves the way for the mystery of the self to break through.