S2 E6: He Hated the Catholic Church Then Wanted to Be Baptized at 30

Because, like, I'd never say that I've been a, I've never been an atheist.

I wouldn't even go as far as to say I was agnostic.

There was always, ever since I was a child, I always knew God existed.

I didn't know who God was or what God was, but I knew there was a God.

It was just, I call it pure intuition.

Yeah.

I knew there was something, a higher power.

What that was, I don't know.

I didn't know at the time.

I was very susceptible to a lot of ideologies.

A lot of ideologies out there sound very sweet.

They sound really good.

I've always had a hunger for knowledge and wisdom.

And in my early teens, I did look into Eastern systems like Hinduism and New Age-y kind of movements.

Didn't spend too long on those, but After that episode of getting arrested, I really moved towards the Confucian ideology, which is essentially natural virtue or virtue ethics, cultivating good virtues, making effort to form good habits to override vices.

Rather than focusing on the vice, how do I get rid of the vice, you focus on the virtue, and the more you cultivate virtue, the more virtue you... you gain, I guess you could say, the less hold the vices tend to have, because you're filling your life with goodness, and then that drives out the darkness.

That's an interesting period.

How many years was this, whether you were jumping between New Age practices or spiritualities, Hinduism, and then ultimately to, is it called Confucianism?

Yeah, I guess you could say that.

It doesn't really have a formal name.

It was quite a syncretic movement that I was a part of, so I became involved with them when I was about 16, so before that from the ages of about 13, 14, 15 I was looking into eastern systems and new age stuff.

Really at that age you were already looking yourself?

Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure.

Far out.

You must have had a special grace in that sense of you were quite young to be already thinking about the existential side of your existence.