Maybe 2-3 weeks ago I went to the supermarket to get lunch during a weekday. I felt very good because I had meditated for an hour and prayed.
Perhaps because of some mild autism I have always been able to viscerally “feel” ideas. And I have always sort of had this persistent belief that my thoughts are sort of “out there” outside my head and in some kind of intersubjective reality. It’s caused me profound social anxiety over the years and has made fitting in incredibly difficult – but it’s also my unique gift because it’s like a reality distortion field.
Anyway, I was purchasing my lunch and the attendant there seemed to looked deep within me with utmost contempt. I just had this strong perception that she was judging me because I was not muslim.
This was the first time I felt truly judged for my faith and that my culture was at risk of being colonised. As a result I felt the need to build internal defence systems – and went through various stages.
- I tried firmly holding eye contact with muslims – and they would just struggle back and do it even more.
- I tried holding onto a mental set of arguments – they seemed to just hold onto their own counter-arguments.
- I tried learning about their beliefs – they seemed to just try to learn about my beliefs (as if their’s was the dominant paradigm).
- I tried temporarily worshipping Allah – they seemed to approve of me the next day.
In the end I just sort of got too frustrated and felt like Islam was too strong to struggle with within my own mind and the thing to do was try to colonise the Islamic world back by opening meetup chapters in Islamic countries – that seemed to give me the mental breathing room that I needed to feel at ease.
This experience has been quite frustrating because I don’t really like to feel like the culture I grew up in now has to defend itself within its own borders to a antagonistic group that seems to have a wholly alternative paradigm with the view to subsume my own.
Anyway, in the end I realised that trying to bully them as a majority isn’t really going to work because that seems to energise them – and that they probably have a more cogent creed that Christianity.
In the end what seems to work best is just focusing on one’s own faith and not getting roped into struggling for dominance in everyday life. One must operate from the Christian paradigm to maintain one’s centre – this is fundamentally about deifying Jesus and his mythos, embracing the Holy Spirit and reconciling oneself with God in earnest.