Seeking a Syncretism

02 Aug, 2026

[ A WORK IN PROGRESS ]

I'm seeking a religion or a philosophy. Something to guide my understanding of reality, but also to guide how I live. Several cultures have belief systems that offer a lot in each regard, but neither one fully satisfies.

THE NEGATIVE

My culture is a post-Christian society, which in turn is post-pagan. Sometimes the concept of God appeals to me because of the unifying factor. Surely all these things are emanations from The One. There's something that binds it all together. But questions remain, and I don't accept the literal history of the Bible, or its ethics. Sometimes I want to reach for the pagan gods. I wonder if the Celtic or Norse gods were ever relevant to my ancestors. But do they speak to me? Maybe it's an unfair question since I haven't tried to speak to them.

We are capitalist and secular. But that doesn't satisfy me because there's more to social life than money, and there's more to reality than secularism can (or even tries to) explain.

We are materialist. Materialism doesn't satisfy me because it essentially rejects my experience, the mind.

Buddhism and Shinto appeal to me. Somebody said that Western philosophers took centuries to painstakingly calculate their way to the conclusions which were the foundations of Eastern religions. There's probably some Zen haiku that could fully explain Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Japanese Shinto is animist in a way that appeals to me. I like the idea of personifying aspects of reality as gods (or kami) for whom I could construct a shrine and perform some ritual to try to align myself with those aspects of reality. I'd like to combine this with some new-age magic practices like sigil-making. But this is not my culture. Would it be a betrayal to my ancestors if I jumped ship to another religion? Probably not. But there's a kind of opportunity cost here which I think is not worth it. Or rather, my situation requires something different from me.

I do have a vague idea of what I'm writing towards here. I want a piece of each of these. And it's not just a grab-bag of ideas, not just a mish-mash. My real culture is emerging, and it can't be reduced to any of the systems above.

THE POSITIVE AND THE SYNTHESIS

We are Faustian by Spengler's framework. Our world is not a finite body or cavern. Our world is an infinite space filled with infinitely small points, layered by infinite dimensions. It can only be represented mathematically and abstractly. Our lust for discovery, and the accumulation of wealth, are driven by this. We don't accept limitations or leaving stones unturned. Many of my books are about this. Specifically The Adventure Poem of Julius Cinnamon, and Terranomicon. We want more. We break through boundaries and we travel to new lands. We're nomads. While I long for Newfoundland, and I consider it my ancestral home, I know that my ancestry is one of nomadism. John Payne went from Jersey Island all the way to Rocky Harbour. Who knows when the Paynes first landed in Jersey?

So while Western philosophy may have led us to the foundations of Eastern religion, we cannot accept our limitations in the way Shinto and Buddhism suggest. I'd be fooling myself if I tried. Betraying myself. I am inside this machine, but it ignores our humanity. Buddhism and Shintoism hold truths and ethics that are relevant to my orientation within the machine, which is itself within reality. Maybe acceptance starts with accepting the machine.