God isn't dead, God is the universe. Explaining the universe and God doesn't help me a bit though. I was still sad. The Dharma helped me understand myself. Now, The Buddha, God's corpse, The universe and I are all quite happy.

Atheism

God is not dead as the phrase "God is dead" implies. Of course, Nietzsche was speaking of God within his sociocultural context. IMO, Atheism was an exit for me. An exit from the protestant-fundamentalist expectations I grew up with. It was my way of overcoming my past and evolving into what I perceived as Ubermensch. 

At that time I saw belief in God as a source of internal-struggle. I went from being fairly well adjusted living at home and going to church at 15 to living away from home. To reconcile my need for self-actualization , it was important that I change my definition of a "Good Man" to something I could perceive as more progressed or evolved. If I hadn't then I would have had to hold myself personally responsible for some of the terrible choices I made. Rather than deal with the emotional conflicts that lead to me moving out, I chose to change my perception of reality by experimenting with substances. 

Experimenting with substances allowed me to perceive the world in a new way which I could confidently say was more well thought out than my previous system of belief. My atheism was a denial of God explained through evolution. I said that God did not create man, Man created God because faith in the unknown and inconcrete was an evolutionary necessity. Faith was a sufficient adaptation, but not necessarily an adaptation that produced rational concepts. Faith is a product of natural selection. Just like all patterns that persist, they are to at least some degree results of selection on some dimension of complexity. 

Gestalt Organicism

After years of this atheism, I began to change my mind. I considered the nature of living things and came up with a theory that closely resembled Organicism and Kurt Goldstein's work on Gestalt Theory. If the behavior of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Then the nature of the universe in terms of dimensional complexity must be greater than the sum of each part. Considering the nature of human cognition and consciousness, I then determined that aggregate behavioral structure of the universe is at least in part composed of our own human consciousness. Just like neurons in our brain exhibit their individual characteristics which together make up our consciousness. So to do our consciousnesses together up the higher consciousnesses. 

Atheism lead to a degree of emotional detachment and an unrealistic expectation of self-initiated deterministic outcomes. Organicism allowed me to consider that emotions had a purpose that shouldn't be counted out simply because the were remnants of adaptations necessary for survival. Organicism allowed me to consider that there were higher "meta" emotions experienced by the higher consciousness. It was during this time I came up with the idea that our purpose in life was to  reciprocate the compassion and consideration the higher consciousness has extended to us. 

Dharmachakra

I discovered the Dharma in 2008. I found this video by the Dalai Llama explaining the basics and became very curious. If it were not for the Dharma, I would have not been likely to have as easily discovered the roots of my own inner emotional turmoil. Up until then, I was so busy explaining my reality that I could not consider myself critically. I was simply reacting my whole life to everything. I never considered that what I do not need to explain is the metaphysical context of my existence. Explaining the world around me allowed my to objectively consider my environment, but it didn't really help me to evolve my being. My being was not really evolving in practice, because I was only re-organizing my perception of the world outside of me. I wasn't fixing myself, I was changing how I saw the world. 

I learned about attachment and anatta. The concepts of samsara and the upside-down views of reality people accept to feel better about themselves. In attachment, one of 2 things can happen: Either what you are attached to will disappear, or you will disappear. I realized that I was attached to people's reaction's to me. I was attached to positive reactions to my presence and suffered when I was not validated at the right time by the right people. I held myself personally responsible for the way people didn't react like I had hoped they would react to me. Its why throughout high school I was so hard on myself, because I took things personally when I couldn't get the response from my classmates that I had hoped for. When their perception of me went out of control, I suffered more and more. 

My first girlfriend Katrina didn't like a few things about me, I changed them and she must have seen me as passive and too insecure to be with long term and she broke up with me. I did drugs for years as an entry into social circles and a way to initiate drug-dependent relationships to fuel my need for social validation. I took this so far it went out of control. I used drugs to gain acceptance in situations where no acceptance was possible by being perceived as a drug user. I guess I was hoping that only the un-enlightened would see me as cool and eventually everyone would see the light of drugs. I was pretty wrong about that one.

When I left Drury and started working, I was attached to my suggestions and initiatives. Those suggestions of others, were less valuable to me because they had less potential to feed my attachment to validating responses and encouragement. This hurt me for years in business.

In my relationships. I was attached to a need for me to be someone awesome for the other. I was attached to myself being needed to help the other person. Understandably of course, I was also attached to being loved. This savior complex proved to be a terrible premise for a relationship . 

When I realized that I have no control over others, their behaviors, their responses, the way they feel about me, and then accepted it, I began to find freedom from my turmoil. I cannot save the world. I cannot get people to accept me or like me. I simply have very little influence in those chains of dependent origination. What I can do is act to benefit others altruisticly. Escape my attachment to self-concept and self-view. Escape the tomorrow and the yesterday and consider the instant. Exist without consideration or reactionary analysis to every concept that pops in my head. See what is seen, Hear what is heard and make our spirits like a clear mirror reflecting the universe harmoniously.