>>619311
My parents were non-practicing Christians. Or at least had been raised that way. They had me baptized to placate my dad's parents, but never took us to church or did anything religious.
I ended up becoming an atheist as a teenager pretty much by default. The whole time, I was looking for answers, but really just digging deeper into philosophy never provided them. I got deep into Nietzsche, then Schopenhauer.
My last year of college, I picked up a copy of Reign of Quantity by Rene Guenon. That changed everything. It's hard to explain, but before that, I assumed that materialism and empiricism was the only legitimate way of explaining reality. Physics and metaphysics were the same thing. After, the concept of metaphysics made sense to me.
I read everything I could from Guenon, and later the other Perennial Traditionalists. Evola's Doctrine of Awakening convinced me that inspired me to find esoteric knowledge for myself.
I'm not entirely sure why I ended up going from there to Buddhism. Initially I got involved in both Raja Yoga, which is a meditation practice tied to the Advaita tradition of Hinduism, and simultaneously became involved in Tibetan Buddhism. I guess Guenon’s dismissal of Christianity initially made me think there wasn’t much there. And I had zero intention of going Sufi like he did. So it was Eastern woo or bust.
Lots of Westerners think (wrongly) that Buddhism is non theistic navel gazing. It really isn’t, but that’s another matter. Tibetan Buddhism is emphatically different. The Buddha’s philosophy was grafted on to the native religion, Bön. So there’s a layer of shamanism that underlies a lot of the practices. Meditation often involves mantras dedicated to particular deities, or hours long offering sessions to the same. The tradition holds that the mantras become efficacious when they’re empowered by a lama who provides them to a student.
I was involved in that for about two years. I think there are two issues that came up more than anything else. First, it’s hard for Westerners, me included, to really grasp some of the underlying concepts. We have too strong of a sense of self to really think the self is illusory like Buddhism contends. And don’t even get me started with an idea like Sunyata. Even if you’re coming to it with a blank slate and take it seriously (which 90% of White Buddhists really don’t), it’s hard to wrap your mind around it.
The second is that it’s really uncomfortable from a moral standpoint. I tend to assume that good and evil are ontologically real. Not really the case with Buddhism. Good action matters of course, but only on a personal level. And because there’s not really a good sense of what is evil, some really dark stuff gets mixed in. So you eventually realize that the most powerful deities are wrathful beings like Yamantaka or Palden Lhamo. I got increasingly uncomfortable the deeper I got in to it.
I came across Nihilism by Seraphim Rose’s books on accident. He had been mentioned as close to the Perennial Traditionalists and I thought he might be able to provide an alternative path. So I decided, why not try Orthodoxy?
I think the first Divine Liturgy I went to at an Orthodox church was the first time I realized that I was not searching for *a* truth, but *the* truth. It was as powerful of a spiritual experience as I had seen with the Buddhists, but the feeling was totally different. No sense of discomfort or unease. When I came home that day, I prayed to God for the first time in my entire life. I didn’t immediately decide to convert, but from that point, I came to the realization that Christianity was true. After considering Catholicism and studying the theology, I settled on Orthodoxy.