In a recent letter to my friend, science writer John Horgan, I described a dream I had had that morning:
I was going to join some kind of a religion, thinking it wouldn’t be that big of a deal: I broadly agreed with its principles, its culture was native to me, and it didn’t seem constraining in any meaningful way. I’d just go through the rite of initiation—a nice little ritual—and then another dimension would be added to my identity. Nothing to overthink, since I try to not get very attached to identities anyway.
However, when I got to the temple and was reminded of what the ritual was, I realized I had been in this exact situation before, and, just like then, I couldn’t possibly go through with it.
The ritual involved me making a promise.
There were several concepts, similar in nature to forces in physics, each represented by a different Latin letter. The initiate was to promise to let go of control when it comes to this set of concepts. So the decision to join the religion was a decis…
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