The various falsehoods in which I have believed over my life were convincing not despite their falsehood but precisely because they echoed an actual truth that was being perceived dimly through my fog of ignorance.
Firstly, the perception of myself as being in the thrall of great forces, particularly great sources or loci of wickedness in the universe, initially the dumb forces of genetics, accident of birth, the geopolitical situation, the class system, and later an array of -archies, -archists, -isms, -ists, -phobias, and -phobics. Not content with merely observing these, I was preoccupied with them, hunted them out, and monitored them, mesmerised, wherever I found them, sleeping, as it were, with one eye open just in case I were caught napping. The truth that was fuelling this was the realisation that there is something beyond the self, something real, something significant, and something utterly overriding, overwhelming, which can sweep the pieces from the chessboard. The ego's perception of this is threat: God is literally a threat to the ego, because God's existence is literally a denial of the microgods set up in opposition to God, both in me and others. This is why no psychological efforts can solve the above neurosis: recognise God as the ultimate, originating force, however, and the 'threats' of the world become paper tigers; they cease to threaten; they now seem laughable spooks evaporated by the great tide of God's light that sweeps over the world.
Secondly, the construal of myself as the centre of the universe, the prime mover, the controller behind the console, the operator of the crane, the fool behind the joystick of my own computer-generated world that judders and swivels around me as I stay perfectly still but for the spasmodic stuttering of my trigger finger. The utter solipsism, the continual return to myself as if drawn back by pulled elastic to the resting point of the centred ego. The truth that was fuelling this was likewise the realisation that that there is a centre, there is an origin, there is a point from which all originates and to which all returns, and that something deep inside me glowed with this prehistoric and posthistoric nature. My mistake was to believe that that internal point within me was the endpoint rather than a peephole to eternity, an intimation of immortality.
The sense of senselessness of the material world can be blotted out with busyness, triviality, selfish concerns and preoccupations, tinsel and glitter, active addiction, and the cataract of words that flow from the unattended mind like the the innards of a slaughtered pig. The attempt to find sense in it tends to take one of the two above forms, firstly the construal of assertedly malign forces (religion, capitalism, atheism, colonialism, imperialism, wokism, ismism), which, if suppressed by revolution or education, will yield to a brave new world, and secondly the assertion of self as the purpose and objective of one's own life, the materialism of a career, or even the materialism of seeking peace by spiritual means, as if God is simply the butler yielding up the peeled grapes of self-satisfaction, the downstairs staff to the upstairs Lord, yours truly (but never, as I address God, Yours).
The problem is that neither of these two approaches is satisfying, either intellectually or psychologically. There is no real rest with either, and the explanations of the world these philosophies are built on elicit more questions than they answer. Occam's razor fatally wounds both.
Unfathomable complexity demands an explanation, and in the sciences the explanations provided are convincing precisely because they sweep up infinite variations and apparent randomnesses into explanatory systems. These explanatory systems may themselves be symbols or abstractions from an ultimate truth that lies beyond the event horizon of one's own perception, but they are a major step in the right direction.
An example: each of the Slavic languages has a different vocabulary, a different inventory of sounds, different arrays of letters that represent those sounds orthographically. Have a look at some Croatian, then have a look at some Polish. You'll seem some similarities, but there are patternings that are distinct to one or other language. Correlating the two seems impossible, however, and it might seem that one can be mapped onto the other only by arbitrary correlation, word by word. There is an underlying system, however. Linguistics describes the phenomenon of palatalisation, which is a process that results in certain consonants, through their proximity to certain vowels, altering through the tongue articulating the sound by touching a different part of the mouth or touching it in a different way. We see this in Standard Southern (British) English: note how the word tissue, which historically had an s sound (imagine an old, posh Englishman saying the word with a clear s sound: tiss-you), is now often pronounced tishoo. This change has come about because of the y sound of the ue sequence (with y representing the y in you). Once one learns about the three, or in some Slavic languages, four ways in which this palatalisation has taken place, huge swathes of apparently random variation and different are explained in one, fell swoop; thousands of correlations are explained and become manifestations of a single cause. A single change wrought by a single vowel affects a score of consonants and changes the entire language.
The existence of God, and the nature of God, learned of by forming a relationship with God, is just such an underlying law, which makes sense of the world and one's place in it in the most satisfactory way of all of the ways available. The spirit settles down as one's true place is adopted. The music on the music stand is playable with the instrument one is holding. The material universe is contextualised, and the threads on the back of the tapestry make sense when the tapestry is turned the right way round and the picture becomes apparent.
Why are millions of people sober? Millions of individual reasons? Or one reason?