We must have a winner and loser. We want it. You can’t have the biggest boat without someone having a smaller boat. You can’t have the most knowledge without someone else having less knowledge. You don’t win a poker game without the other hands at the table folding. Your country can’t win the World Cup without the other 31 countries going home defeated.

What a shock it can be then to find out that there is a way to live where keeping score doesn’t matter. The game is over. Your money, health, possessions, experience, and knowledge are useless and meaningless to your salvation. You don’t win or lose. Someone has already won by taking the onslaught of all of the world’s problems and competition upon himself for us.

When I turned away from belief, I needed a winner and a loser. Only by turning back could I see what exactly it was that I had turned away from. In many cases, I never really examined God in the first place, because it appeared boring. This problem of boredom was one of the worst blockers to my turning back. An extreme dumbing down of instruction caused this, as I failed to understand why religion has lasted. The misunderstanding of the big picture and the details left me with a caricature, a grotesque version of religion as painted by a secular media and entertainment industry that so clearly loathes religion and religious people.

But I can’t blame cultural steering nearly as much as I can blame myself, because lacking all conviction I let the wind move me, the mood of the hour, and failed to grasp the need for both reason and faith, thinking one had all the answers and the other was nothing more than a complex child’s fantasy. As the saying goes, reason and faith are the two wings that help you to fly, and I attempted to fly with a single wing, and crashed into the mountain, struggling to maintain direction, exhausted from so much one-sided flapping.

I realized that there were three planes or points that my life careened between when I used only one of those wings. These 3 points made a triangle and each day my location on that triangle moved, and the walls were formed by connections between one of these three states:

1.) self-hatred

2.) self-righteousness

3.) indifference

These three blockers form walls, making a triangular pyramid. Like a video game character, I was stuck on this pyramid and the object of the game was to find equilibrium in the center, at the top. But that was the problem: I could never get to the center. I could only pass over the apex now and then, and then slide down one of the three sides again. I thought this triangle was a flat two-dimensional shape where I could just plant myself wherever I liked, but with enough experience I came to realize this triangle had a shape to it, a peak. The center was elevated.

I think of this triangle or pyramid as a curved surface. The game, I thought, was to get to dead center, to balance in that place where I didn’t despise myself, didn’t worship myself, and wasn’t indifferent about life. This is difficult because the triangle exterior is made of teflon, so that getting to the top and balancing in the middle, could never last for long, as I would roll down to one of the sides again. Gravity pulled me downward to the edges.

To remain in the middle, I had to be perfect, or to have the perfect circumstances to generate enough energy to get there. But being imperfect, I could never get there, or if I did, never stay there for more than an instant. I strived to get to the top of this warped shape, but the gravity of my instincts pulled me back down the incline.

When I reached the peak, that centered state, when my aim was occasionally on target, I was able to feel a brief sense of peace. But I couldn’t stay there. So I wanted to get it back again. Once you know there is a center, and that the center offers goodness and beauty and truth, the urge to return to that place becomes the goal. The only problem is the means you use to get there once, often stop working on subsequent attempts. The peace in that center is what I wanted, so I would attempt to take steps that had worked before, only to find out that the action plan didn’t work the second time around. But stubbornly, I would keep trying that worn out method, the recipe that worked once but never again. Those methods I’m talking about are a variety of avenues to the same conclusions: drinking, endurance sports, woodworking, studying, writing, and career accolades. All of these things are good in themselves, but cannot keep and hold the peace since they are finite actions and goals attempting to replace and fill an infinite desire.

People are always trying to find the center of this warped triangle, and they use various kinds of fuel to get there. This is why drugs and violence and sex ad gossip and fitness seem like the way to get to the center, because those activities they make us feel alive, and these things summon energy in us, so that we can create enough force to can roll ourselves uphill on the side of this pyramid, and maybe temporarily reach and roll over the glorious peak. When feeling high, or when doing something new for the first time, you pass over this mountaintop. There is a sense of transcendence, for a moment, for a minute, for an hour. After you slide away, you know the peak is still there, so close to you, but so far away again. The nearness of it summons you to seek, yet the place can never be held when attempting to climb the pyramid in this way.

Getting to the top, the center, appears to be the goal of the game of life. We strive and try to self-actualize in the middle of this curved shape. I can see people I know struggling to get to this center, scrambling and grasping and charging up that slippery hill. Millions of people today are playing this game, clawing and scrapping toward it, somewhere between despair, superiority, and indifference, and there are millions who have settled into the edges, stuck on the walls, who have stopped trying to climb, miserably accepting a default state of self-love, self-hatred, or most commonly now, indifference. Many have just stopped trying.

But there is a cheat code to this game.

You can turn this pyramid over.

We are foolishly climbing on the outside, when we can be reclining on the inside.

When you see the world differently, this hill-climbing goes away. Instead of a hill in the middle, this triangle shape becomes a bowl. When it is no longer a hill, it becomes a nest. The center is no longer a place you struggle toward, but a place of rest you gladly occupy, through no merit or effort. I realized, slowly, that I’d been looking at the wrong side of this shape all along.

The turn toward God is the cheat code. It flips this triangle over. The difficulty of navigating this curved triangle changes when you change your perspective. The Stoic idea of “the obstacle is the way” no longer makes sense, because you come to realize that there is no obstacle. Now it becomes easy to get to the center. You no longer fight gravity, you come to rest in gravity and you only oscillate from the center when the world shakes you up, and then you get jostled about, but with surrender you easily slide back into the center, restfully. You give control over to God and put your trust, a radical trust, in his guidance and direction, and the struggle ends because you no longer need anything else.

The world tells you that you need to climb the hill, that getting to the top is where you need to be. When you are trying to get to the top, trying to get to the center the hard way, you can experience that fleeting joy only briefly as you miss the mark and roll away. You know the center, the sweet spot is there, but you can’t reach it, or if you do reach it, you cannot stay there. You know there is a euphoric state in the middle of this triangle but the effort required to get there exhausts you and is unsustainable for a lifetime, which is why those of the worldly view end up settling into the edges, standing about like wallflowers, until they realize, if they are lucky, that they have been looking at the world the wrong way, and after trying everything else arrive at the secret code that turns the world upside down.

In my younger days, days of high energy, I would roll from the wall of indifference toward the wall of sin without remorse, and on that day’s journey I could pass near the center. Charging uphill took immense energy. For me, I would confuse the experienced high of the center with the power of myself to willfully create peace and contentment. Note: you cannot truly “will” peace into existence, into your heart. You cannot will it but you can pray for it. And then, with continued effort, peace happens. Contentment happens. Neither of those two things can be willed or forced or created. Peace and contentment require rest and letting go, not doing or acting.

I recently saw a bumper sticker that said, “There is no God, so stop praying and DO SOMETHING.” A better example of the problem could not be crafted. This sticker summed up the main problem of living, but not at all in the way that the owner of the car imagined. The entire problem is this idea to “DO SOMETHING” instead of surrendering. I could not have articulated my former problems better than that bumper sticker’s imperative, because that encapsulated my worldview. In a godless world, we must act, we must do, we must run around experiencing everything. An imagined utopia with no problems at all awaits just around the corner, if only we would “do something.” The distracted and agitated state means we cannot sit still. However, in that same godless world, once you run around long enough “doing something” to better yourself and justify your life you realize that it doesn’t matter what you do, so you might as well eat, drink, and be merry, and after you “do something” long enough, you realize that pleasure also isn’t the way to live, as all pleasures become dull once enjoyed too many times, and eventually the conscience comes calling, as the still small voice in your head knows that something is lacking. When you run out of energy “doing something” you fall to the wall of indifference, out of energy, cynical and pessimistic. In a godless world, where nothing matters but what we imagine, the wall of indifference or the wall of despair is the final resting place. The problem of a world without God, once you’ve convinced yourself that we are but a speck on a speck in the universe, that we are so small that we do not matter, and that there is no purpose to life, the problem is this: now you have to live in that universe.

That universe of meaninglessness is the one where you absolutely must “DO SOMETHING” to keep from going insane. Drinking certainly fooled me with the sensation that it could transcend the problem, but this problem cannot be escaped so easily. I would start from indifference and disappointment, become intoxicated, and careen past a brief state of temporary tipsy joy, until I fell back down between the walls of self-righteousness and self-hatred. In my peripheral vision, as I pinballed between the triangle of sin and self-righteousness and indifference, I knew there was something better, something more, an elusive state of peace and joy. There was something in that middle, in the center, so I wanted to get back to it. But I could never stay there with this approach, because the physics was all wrong.

But when you flip the triangle over and change it from a hill into a valley, from an uphill to a downhill, you need very little effort to get back to the place of joy. Humility lets you roll right down into the center, to the nest, where you are no longer restless and striving, you are no longer tired and angry. As St. Augustine said, “My heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” He knew that he had found the bowl, the cup, the nest, the place of rest. Once he flipped this triangle over, he passed through the plane to the other side, then suddenly he no longer needed to struggle to get to the center.

In fact, one of St. Augustine’s great realizations was when he saw a drunkard on the street who seemed happy. The drunk appeared to be at rest in his excess, and Augustine actually envied the drunk. In all his success, Augustine was miserable, while the drunk seemed content. But Augustine forgot to realize that the drunkard would wake up the next day and be miserable, back in one of those corners of indifference or self-hatred. Augustine was bouncing back and forth between the corners or self-righteousness and self-hatred, until he flipped the triangle over and came to rest in the center for good, once and for all.

Finally, there is one more level to this change of worldview. This triangle shape is like an escape room. Once you flip the triangle over, once you see the triangle differently, and once you come to rest in the bottom, in that center you can experience a lasting peace. But there is one more hidden treasure to this shape.

Once you are stable and steady, once you bask in the comfort of not struggling. You can turn and can see further because it’s not just a 2-dimensional curved surface after all. Along this curved triangle, there is a spot that reveals a z-scale, a third dimension. This is the spot that the millions are looking for and don’t know it. This is where Jesus left his guidepost, a sign for us. He points us to where the wholeness of God is, to where he is seated next to God. This turn is difficult to see, but we can sense this dimension. He called it the “narrow gate”. “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com