This may be the hardest piece of writing I’ve ever done, because after all this time, court has been adjourned and I’ve been found guilty.

Hundreds of thousands of years have led us here. Airplanes, computers, the internet. All of the things built by man have left all of us searching for greater meaning. Now that the goal is no longer purely survival, we’ve been opened up to new problems. Identity, connection, and purpose are the new food, water, and shelter.

In this new world, the battle is in the mind. Advertising tells us that the solutions to our problems lie in purchasing new things to help us achieve belonging, acceptance, and identity. We all know that this isn’t really how it works, even though material things can help to some degree.

But there’s a greater battle happening. Because of this new territory of conceptual thinking as a means of obtaining conceptual comfort, there is a race of ideas between freeform living vs. logical dictatorship over one’s life.

It’s a kind of Luciferian idea, if you don’t mind the term, about believing that the logical mind can solve all of the world’s problems, or even personal ones. When a person becomes too oriented toward logic and only logic, they can end up allowing their mind (and in extension, the sources that they receive their information) to dictate their lives for them.

This really sells yourself short, along with the rest of the biological world, and reduces evolution and the universe at large to that of machines.

Whether you want to call it God, creation, nature, the Universe, or whatever else, you’re talking about something greater than just the basic cause-and-effect nature of the cosmos. You’re talking about the unknown; the relationship between the desire and purpose of evolution, biology, and creation, and the unknown future that is largely left up to the imagination.

This intentionality and imagination that is really only found in humans is the driving force of some of the best and most interesting parts of evolution. It was these traits that led us to create poetry, art, machines, and achieve all of our greatest feats throughout history.

Machines do not have these traits.

Computers are only logical.

They run the processes which were programmed into them, nothing more, nothing less.

Thus, the problem with reducing all of the universe into only digits on a screen, atoms in a molecule, chemical reactions, etc. If there is no God, no greater future than simply fulfilling work obligations so we can reproduce and keep enough dopamine and serotonin in our brains to stay productive in our remedial tasks, then what is the point of living? When machines become better at doing this than we are, why even be alive at all?

This is why I am so adamant about the importance of belief in some form of spirituality and why I’m not a big fan of atheism. They sell all of creation short, and all of life. You can obviously believe whatever you want, but it really is a crime against our potential as humans not to see the power and purpose of human ingenuity, passion, imagination, and intent.

Because it is that connection with God, spirit, and nature, that sets us apart from the basic processes that govern the purely material world. I can feel it very clearly, even though I’ve lived much of my life as a criminal against it, choosing to allow my life to be dictated by my own idea of logic, rather than the truth I know instinctively, brought about by many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and a connection to that dragon energy that, albeit largely indescribable, I can feel is there.

No one knows what lies beyond the purely physical, but to believe in nothing is to really sell yourself short.

So, this is my guilty plea to the arrogance of my own mind against Creation. The jury can go home, because I’ve already done my time.

This article (My Life of Crime) originally appeared at phillipschneider.com and may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author credit, and this copyright statement.