March 14, 2022
When you deconstruct your faith and deconvert from your fundamentalist religion, what is actually happening in this process? Are you growing? Developing? Getting smarter? Getting stronger? Thinking more clearly?
Perhaps it’s a mix of all of those things, which is why deconstruction is such a difficult process for most to go through.
In my opinion, though, the act of deconstructing your faith and leaving your religion—or really when you’re deconstructing anything in your life—is a process of raising your consciousness.
Many may tune out after hearing me drop that term. It’s often associated with spirituality, which makes some recent deconverts cringe. But I don’t think this is something to turn your nose up at.
For the longest time, I thought the process of leaving religion was me just “getting smarter.” The reason it felt that way was because of the process I went through to deconstruct my faith:
- I read a lot of books written by people who were critical of the Bible.
- I read books about science.
- I read books about the history of the Church.
Overall, I consumed a lot of left-brain, fact-based content that essentially disproved many of my prior religious beliefs.
That is a good thing and I’m glad I took that route. Not everyone takes that route, but as a big thinker, this was the approach that resonated with me (that’s the beauty of deconstruction; people can go through it in a number of ways).
But after it was all said and done, considering myself as merely having “gotten smarter” seemed incomplete. After all, I know many Christians who are far more intelligent than me. As I wrote here, intelligence isn’t really a factor in whether or not someone believes in God or religion.
So what happened? Years later, I came to understand that I’d raised my consciousness. But what does it mean to raise your consciousness?
As with most spiritual terms and concepts, it’s difficult to pinpoint a clear definition. In my opinion, this doesn’t dampen the potency of such spiritual terms but rather expands them, allowing people to approach the spiritual path in a myriad of different ways (similar to how deconstruction can be approached in many different ways). It’s accessible to all.
But here’s my working definition that I’m sure will change in the future as I further raise my consciousness: raising your consciousness is a combination of increasing your awareness and pairing it with taking action.
I’ll explain.
You can become conscious of something you weren’t conscious of before, but take no action regarding it. For example, say you visit the doctor and become aware that your health isn’t very good. Before, you didn’t know, but since you’ve spoken to a physician, now you do. You can now choose whether to take action or not. You can begin taking steps to better your health or you can ignore it and do nothing. While you may have increased your knowledge by learning about your health issue, you didn’t necessarily raise your consciousness because you made a conscious decision to not do anything about it. You shrugged your shoulders and said, “It is what it is, I’ll die when it’s my time.” Which, by the way, sounds very similar to what many Christians often say since they think God has predetermined the date and time of their death.
Here’s another example: Say you become aware of the negative effects that driving your vehicle has on the environment. As a result of this awareness, you start biking to work. In my opinion, you have raised your consciousness; you have become a more conscious individual. Once you became aware of something, you then acted upon that new awareness to make a change for the better.
This process is also known as “alignment.” To learn more about my take on what it means to be alignment, read this article: What It Means to Be in Alignment.
Going back to religion, there are many Christians who hear all the compelling evidence as to why the Bible isn’t literal, or that the Resurrection couldn’t possibly be a historical fact, and who constantly make excuses for the megachurches and celebrity pastors who get caught in scandal after scandal (after scandal). But what do they do with all this information? They don’t take action. They choose to completely ignore it. They never thoroughly and honestly investigate it. They explain it away and just continue on as if nothing’s wrong.
Those who deconstruct, however, take action and go through the deconstruction process, as hard as it might be. Raising your consciousness is often hard. Following the example above, there’s nothing easy or convenient about biking to work instead of driving, but there’s hardly any denying that after you do, you can’t help but feel better.
If this is still sounding a bit “woo-woo” then we can also approach this idea of consciousness from a more linear perspective. Have you ever had a surgical procedure where they put you out with anesthesia? If you’ve been through it, then you know how weird of an experience it can be. One minute, you’re laying in a bed in the prep room, then a doctor injects you with medicine and puts a mask over your face. The very next thing you know, you’re awake and the surgery is done. It doesn’t matter if the procedure was twenty minutes long or a seven-hour ordeal. It was all the same to you—it lasted for less than a split second.
Why? Because you were not conscious during this time. You were not asleep, either. When you’re asleep, you dream, and when you wake up, you’re sometimes vaguely aware that time has passed. But when you’re medically induced to lose consciousness, it’s completely different. If you haven’t experienced it, simply try to imagine what it felt like before you were born—it’s the same exact feeling going under for surgery.
Consider this consciousness level to be 0. You felt the same before you were born and likely will feel the same way after you die. So if that’s 0, what’s next? Well, imagine a newborn baby who is obviously above 0, but still lacks awareness and cannot take action on their own. As they grow, their awareness increases (not just their intelligence; their awareness—they come to know about how the world works, even the unspoken aspects such as social cues, giving and receiving love, etc).
Also as they age, they’re able to take more and more action on their own. Not only that, they are more and more able to make conscious decisions as to what kinds of actions they will take and not take. This doesn’t always work out; they will make mistakes, as everyone does. If they do make a mistake, then hopefully that will spur them to take a different action in the future. The mistake helps them raise their consciousness.
Viewed like this, the act of raising your consciousness is therefore something that never ends. It lasts until the day they die, provided you’re interested in improving yourself throughout the course of your life (and I hope that you are).
As I always say on this blog and in my book, you can deconstruct everything in your life, not only religion. That means you have not reached your peak now that you are out of religion. Sadly, so many Deconverted Men falsely assume this, and then spend a great deal of time shitting on others who have not yet reached their level of awareness and action-taking.
Instead, when you’re at this point, you would hopefully seek to further raise your consciousness, as you’ve already tasted the great rewards that come from raising your consciousness and leaving religion. That would ideally mean you would turn to deconstructing other things in your life besides religion, which can (and should) be done. For more information on that, read this: If You Can Deconstruct Religion, You can Deconstruct Everything Else.