My Journey to Zoroastrianism, Part I:
Hello followers! My aim with this blog is to introduce Zoroastrianism to all those who are interested with a unique twist- my own journey, step by step, into the faith of my ancestors in the context of a post-COVID modernity. In this blog I share my insights, translate events into a Zoroastrian framework, discuss the faith and philosophy of Zoroastrianism, and my own personal journey and struggles in adopting this faith and allowing me to understand the world around me. It is my hope that followers can find themselves in my experiences and hopefully derive some benefit from learning about the world through the Mazdayasna lens.
In a world largely dominated by Abrahamic traditions, Greco-Roman philosophy, existentialism and continental philosophy, and of course secular ideologies like liberalism and Marxism, it can be difficult to view phenomena outside of these lenses. For many, the realities of modernity had led to a loss of meaning and purpose, and an unfulfilling life. In helping you all understand the Mazdaean philosophy, it is my hope to help people find this meaning and order. It is not meant for everyone, but for those who find this journey worthwhile, I offer my respect and share my joy. And while many see no validity to the metaphysical and spiritual in the age of machines and code, there is still something to be learned from Zoroastrian as a way of life and a philosophy- even if one does not want to believe in the cosmological. For me, I found this most helpful.
My journey to Zoroastrianism has imbued my life with a sense of purpose and an ethical basis by which to understand the problems of humankind and today's confusion as well as my own inner struggles. As they say in the Zoroastrian tradition, the cosmic battle between Asha and Druj occur not only in the world of Getig, our material reality- they also occur in our inner psyche. The cosmic battle between order and chaos, truth and the lie, righteousness and evil, is just ass much in our hearts and minds as it is all around us. And we are tasked to make meaning of this and partake on both fronts. Throughout this journey I will refer to Zoroastrian phenomena and concepts in both symbolic form, tying them to real-world phenomena, and in lore-form, respecting the faith as-is.
A turning point in my life was in the years of 2020-2024. Much happened here that made me reach a limit of sorts. The best way I can describe it is that my soul and mind were worn out. I was raised a Christian, but had a falling out with the faith in my late teens and into my twenties. I became an atheist in the era of the New Atheist movement, voraciously reading Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris. I found that divorcing myself of my juvenile understanding of God and the Cosmos was liberating, and though surrendering to an unknown void was terrifying at the time, I slowly felt less of a need for faith, belief in an afterlife, or deity in my life. I still, during that time, was not acutely acquainted with mortality, and I was surrounded by negative influences that imbued me with a sense of despair and pessimism. I saw that without this guiding light, I could continue to live on an ethical basis of humanism, but as I got to know humans more- our psyches, our systems, our motivations, and the true nature of history- I realized humanity as a species is deeply flawed and in many ways not redeemable. I found myself seeing the point in Christianity's concept of sin and repentance. My foundation of humanism was challenged when I learned to challenge my inner narratives that I was a good person, I learned that much evil occurs when people believe they are right and others are wrong. I realized our minds lie to us, they protect us with defense mechanisms designed to justify our selfish interests while convincing us we are inherently good and those that are antithetical to us are wrong.
I believed in naive notions of progress, fostered by Enlightenment thinking. Deep down I believed in progress not just historically, but personally. I believed as long as I kept trying to perfect myself, rid myself of trauma and flaws, process emotions and develop a sense of worldly maturity, that the world will accept me, that I'll finally fit in. I had this wrong-headed belief in experts and authorities, believing that the world was just, had an order and expectation to it, a rhythm of propriety, and if I just brought myself up to par, the world would be easier. I was dead wrong in this as events of the past several years taught me our world is anything but just and ordered in its current form, that experts are often pushing angles and just as imperfect as we are, that the true nature of the human application of justice and law is deeply biased and imperfectible, and that blind belief in progress makes us unthinking followers. I also saw society going in many directions that I felt were puzzling, and ultimately saw that society as a whole had no answer to global injustice, and that we are all partaking in it. This stirred something in me. I could no longer use humanism as an ethical basis to live my life. It placed too much faith and hope in our imperfect species and world, and it masked raw self-interest, political motivations and prejudices. I realized then that what I needed was to find something rooted in an ideal we ought to aspire to.