I've been discussing consciousness on that thread Mercutio linked to, but I'm glad to be asked specifically about how I came to give up the idea. I was into Eastern mysticism from being a teenager. Rewind - I rejected most of the Christian stuff I had preached at me half-heartedly at school on a Monday morning, because there were so many inconsistencies in it, and so many apparently arbitrary ideas. Consistency would seem to be a good principle in looking at the world and trying to work out the truth, and so things like God deciding at some historical point to come to earth in a human body, suffer and die to teach people something about their freedom or freedom from sin or whatnot, it all just raised obvious questions: why? Why did God not just leave us enjoying the garden of eden, enlighten us about good and evil, and not mess us about so much? The Old Testament God is a jealous, genocidal maniac who shouldn't be let loose with a trowel, let alone a universe.
I thought Eastern mysticism would satisfy something - which actually just turned out to be my desire to keep believing in wonderful nothings, in response to the fear you mention, and I spent the next 20 years or more flipping back and forth between sceptical materialism and religion - I picked and chose bits that I thought made sense from Hinduism, Vedanta, Buddhism, etc., without discriminating, and felt for a lot of that time that my truth-seeking was finding underlying truths behind the allegorical stuff. This is one of the hooks of religion, it usually confesses that it has to be allegorical or metaphorical: the Absolute cannot be described perfectly; all we can do is create pointers towards it. Christ's parables is an example. That could be a valid philosophical position - it could point to something real, or it could just be one of the ways that unreal things come into cultural being.
I settled more and more on Buddhism, as satisfying my belief that there was 'something more to life than this' (and, unconsciously, my desire to be immortal, even in contradiction of a Buddhist tenet - at least to gain Enlightenment, whatever that was). I've always been fairly lazy, and my meditation practice and study of Buddhism was half-hearted. Until some months ago, when that faith all fell apart for me. About 18 months ago I started a much more rigorous search, reading different psiritual philosophies and writing my own critiques of them in a journal. I genuinely thought I would focus things down and find out what I could trust, which would be some version of Buddhism or something, and genuinely kept in mind that I might not, too. Everything I read was very hard to believe much of, and most of it had glaring stupidities and gaps. Emminent scientists turned gurus were clearly morons. Swamis and gurus clearly had no grasp of simple logic, while they appeared to argue logical points. I traced most of their reasoning back to assumptions that truth was to be found in the Baghavad Gita, or some other personal bias. One possible exception is certain limited parts of Buddhist philosophy, although I may still be working from wishful thinking. A writer on Zen impressed me by the rigorous consistency of his philosophy...but things can be consistent and wrong, too. Anyway, there was no soul.
More recently, I turned from studing books and decided I wanted to 'go for it'. I had messed about thinking that there was this thing called Enlightenment for long enough, I wasn't getting any younger, and it was time to get a teacher and meditate every day. I approached a few online Buddhist communities. One (or the representative I had email discussions with) was helpful and kind, but I began to doubt the philosophy more at that point. Here is my problem. I know with quite a fair bit of conviction that we can program ourselves to believe things. I've worked in psychotherapy, and I know that if you start to imagine things, those things take on a reality of their own. This is the basis of placebo, hypnosis, etc., and ghosts and souls and all manner of woo. I was concerned that in meditation, rather than finding the truth, I might simply be subtly programming myself with whatever assumptions underlay the work. Was there a kind of meditation that had no assumptions - well, I'm still thinking there might be, but the one being recommended was far from it. I was to do certain exercises every day, but there was a philosophy behind that. One exercise was to label my experiences nama or rupa, which means subjective impressions or obejcts, respectively. To cut a long story shorter, that just showed the mentality I wanted to avoid: the question of whether there was an objective reality, or whether I could distinguish between these things was something I didn't want to answer first, since it was part of the discovery I was hoping to make. There were a few other problems I discussed with this patient woman. I'm told that the goal is enlightenment, I said, but do not know if it is a real goal worth working towards. Are you enlightened, or is your guru, or any person you know? I asked her. No clear answer there. If the state of Enlightenment is the lack of desire, should I desire it and work towards it, or go with the flow of life - or, in other words, is Enlightenment fulfilled when you stop chasing it? I asked. At least a reasonable answer, if still paradoxical - you have to work to get there, and desire can help along the way, and laziness isn't going to get you there. I was losing faith, but said I would contact her if I wanted to sign up to the support she offered through her organisation - free support and advice over 3 months.
Other experiences of Buddhist sangha (community) impressed me with how two-faced, closed-minded, dismissive, hurtful and ignorant Buddists could be. With respect to those who are not, of course, but some of those I talked to showed a staggering ability to talk the talk and walk all over you in hob-nailed boots. In particular, one Buddhist monk was so defensive in response to my criticism (polite, but challenging some of the inconsistencies I saw in their texts, and questioning some of the philosophical arguments ascribed to the Alleged Historical Buddha) that he simply and completely censored me from his forum - as far as I can tell, and I have no other explanation. Although he didn't actually ban me, my post vanished. I posted again asking what had happened to my first post, and postulating that it might have been deleted to censor my questions, and that disappeared. I wrote an accusative PM, which he ignored (probably deleted it from his inbox). I really hadn't expected that of Buddhists; Catholic Priests, yes, Buddhists, no. I did some reading, and noticed that the rules for these monks, on their way to 'liberation', were so numerous and detailed that they spanned six volumes.
My discussions here have been a positive influence, and reinforced that realisation that my thinking was rather sloppy when it came to these background hopes of salvation of some kind. The desire was just driving me to search and search for something to believe in, and now I'm trying materialism on for size. Also, the materialist arguments here have been quite inspiring. For a long time I couldn't get the idea of emergent consciousness, and it's still a 'hard problem' for me, but I have overcome a delusion that I see people still repeating over and over in that other thread, that there must be some subjective 'thing', a witness of my life other than those bits of matter making up my body. I don't see it fully, but I can see that insisting doesn't make real, and the evidence doesn't seem to support the idea.
I stay on the fence or within reach of it - that to me is being a sceptic - it may turn out that there is a spiritual dimension, and science just hasn't had the tools or focus to notice it, but the overwhelming reason I doubt it is because I know more about how life could do without it, and how human life probably did better, from an evolutionary point of view, by constructing the delusion, at least historically - we might need to overcome it in future. I'm also surprised to find that I don't feel all the dread meaninglessness I thought I might. I'm not living in a cold dead universe. I'm still living in a warm alive one. Presents still exist after we discover the truth about Santa Claus. In many ways, life seems more wonderful.
