I grew up in a village in Croatia, in a Christian (Catholic) family and community. The rural setting in a socialist country with a single strongly dominant culture and religion made for a perspective on the world that was simple and clear, with little room for ambiguity or indecision.
It was decidedly anti-Communist and pro-Christian, and envious of the economic and political accomplishments of the West that we were exposed to, primarily through television.
This changed when my whole family immigrated to South Africa. It happened in 1989, a year before the Yugoslavian civil war broke out. The culture shock was considerable. We settled in Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, and its economic and financial hub. Schooling took place in English, with Afrikaans (Dutch) as the second language, in a boys-only school with a prefect system, and several subjects that I had never taken before.
This was also the first time that I’d been exposed to people of other races and cultures – members of the several local black tribes, descendants of Chinese, Indian and West European immigrants, fresh immigrants from Eastern Europe and Taiwan, and various others. In an effort to preserve our language and culture, we associated with the local Croatian community, which was centered on the Croatian Catholic church served by two missionaries.
In this new setting, I completed high school and university, got married, and started working as a computer programmer.
The new cultural milieu made a lasting impression on my outlook. Information on competing worldviews was readily available, and visible in the lives of people all around me. This raised numerous questions about my beliefs, questions that I couldn’t answer to my satisfaction.
I remember wondering whether reincarnation was real, what to make of mediumship, and about paranormal research in general. I tried to discuss the growing list of subjects with the Croatian priest, but didn’t get far. It was a no-go area, something that simply couldn’t be true, and could well be dangerous.
Despite my misgivings, I persevered with the belief system that I was raised in for many years. Looking back, I think it was because I saw value in a spiritual life, and this was the only approach to spirituality that I knew. It wasn’t until a chance event in 2003, at 29 years of age, that anything significant changed.
New Awareness Arrives
Dabbling in writing, I was looking to write a book where the roles of heroes and villains were reversed. It was to include a scene where a hero was to receive insights via automatic writing, only these insights originated from a demon and were meant to deceive rather than enlighten. To make the scene believable, I thought it prudent to get my hands on some genuine sample material. I spotted the book Conversations with God in a bookstore. The author claimed to have acquired the material through automatic writing, so I bought it and started reading.
The content was astounding. It made straightforward statements that directly contradicted my beliefs, yet made so much sense that I couldn’t help but agree.
That the proof of God is to be found in inner experience rather than outward manifestation.
That experience is a far more reliable communicator of knowledge than words.
That if there were such a being as Satan, God would heal him through unconditional love rather than smite him and his followers.
That “Who am I?” is the central question of God’s existence.
That a society founded on freedom rather than force can work because of the greatness of the human spirit.
About halfway through the book, I asked myself why I was persisting with my old beliefs when so many of them didn’t make sense to me anymore. I had no good answer. It was nothing more than fear – fear of going against the grain, fear of doing what I was taught not to do. Yet at this point I also understood that suppressing my misgivings was no longer an option for me. What I was reading made too much sense and held too much promise to discard.
I purchased and read the rest of the series. The books gave me the license I needed to craft a worldview that I wanted instead of looking for creative ways to make peace with the worldview that I thought I had to adopt.
It was the beginning of the cocoon phase of my life – a period of intense search for meaning and purpose, as well as knowledge of how the world worked and my place in it.
It was the most difficult, the most confusing, and the most trying time of my life.
Hrvoje Butkovic enters the Cocoon
Outwardly, everything carried on as before. I continued working. My wife and I continued raising our daughter. We all continued going to church every Sunday.
Yet inwardly, my life was in turmoil. Having rejected many of my old beliefs, I no longer knew how to relate to even the most ordinary events. Nor could I talk to anyone about my confusion. My older sister who had parted ways with religion many years earlier was living overseas, as were my high school friends. Everyone else I was close to seemed invested in the belief system I was now rejecting. The one person who would surely have understood – my father – had died three years prior.
As a result, I felt that I couldn’t say anything openly until I had some idea of where I stood. The worldview from the Conversations with God books was sufficiently clear and consistent in the big picture to provide me with the new foundation. It was also sufficiently vague in the details to leave me with plenty of room to explore. Most importantly, it freed me from any obligations to craft a worldview to serve anyone but myself.
The decision to leave the church was slow in coming. I continued going with the intention of gleaning whatever insights I could from the services, only to end up silently disagreeing with the priest more and more frequently. After almost a year, I couldn’t take any more.
My wife didn’t receive the news well. She had grown accustomed to our church-going routine and mingling with the Croatian community, and didn’t like being left to find her own way (she wasn’t Croatian or Catholic). My mother took it far worse. She felt a failure in her efforts to raise me. Ten years on, we still cannot talk about this particular subject.
With the secret out in the open, I started devoting all of my free time to making sense of my life and the world I was living in. I started reading voraciously on numerous topics – religion, spirituality, parapsychology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, economy, politics, medicine, environment, child rearing, media. My father’s book collection provided a suitable starting point. He had accumulated several hundred books while living in South Africa, and there were some that caught my attention. After that, I turned to Internet and Amazon, and resorted to a more focused search for reading material.
An important find for me at this time was Internet discussion forums. The one I spent the most time on was Internet Infidels, later renamed to Free Thought and Rationalism. It had a pretty ruthless member base, one that didn’t hesitate to tear apart any statements and arguments they found holes in. Reading through the discussions gave me a more balanced view of the subjects than what I could acquire from books and articles, which typically push a single point of view. Taking part in the discussions later on forced me to become much more rigorous in my thinking and selection of material to base my views on.
Most of the forum members were atheist. Many grew up in religious homes, usually Christian, only to leave religion behind later in life. Reading about their backgrounds struck a common chord within me. It helped me to form a perspective on my former beliefs from an outside vantage point, one that made it clear that they were a product of indoctrination. The realisation led to an emotional backlash against Christianity that took me a couple of years to work through. My few interactions on the subject during this time were angry and combative.
All this exploration led to many changes in my life. Leaving the church was just the beginning.
I also deprioritised my computer programming career, which used to consume a hefty chunk of my personal time. After finding out about the cruelty of factory farming, I gradually changed from the meat-eating diet that I grew up with to a Jain one. Intensely competitive by nature, I became so immersed in cooperation that I lost interest in sport altogether. I stopped watching television, listening to radio and reading newspapers because I felt saturated by consumerism and negativity that permeated the media. Some of my newly freed time was instead spent composting and tending our new vegetable and herb garden.
Many of my views – on marriage, parenting, etc – were radically altered.
The size and pace of change placed my close relationships under tremendous strain. Friends and family had to get to know me again, and keep getting to know me, just to be able to relate to me. It was a lot to ask of them. I’ve been most fortunate that they were willing to put in the effort to keep the relationships intact.
Freed from the constraints of Christianity, I paid a visit to a medium. I was desperate to discover my life purpose at this point, and this looked like a promising approach. The information that I got – healing people, but with respect to beliefs and values rather than physical ailments – pointed me in the right direction, but it was only a pointer. I had to spend a lot of time in contemplative silence and take the first few tentative steps on this journey before I could refine my understanding of it to where it is today.
Emerging from the Cocoon
About seven years after entering the cocoon, I could feel my interest in exploration beginning to wane. Putting the worldview that I had painstakingly constructed during this period into practice started to look more enticing. I knew that it wasn’t finished – there were still many areas that could use improvement – but that it was complete enough to serve its purpose.
Much to my surprise, I began to realise that the accuracy of many of my beliefs was actually irrelevant. None of my decisions flowed from the metaphysical structure on which my worldview rested, but from self-knowledge rooted in experience. Besides, some of the people I knew held radically different ideas about how the world worked while reaching the same conclusions about how to live in it. It was as if the purpose of engaging the big questions was to find the most empowering worldview rather than the most accurate one.
A related realisation emerged around this time – that my new worldview was just as mythological as my old one. I was aware of this facet of Christianity since stepping outside of it. It came as somewhat of a shock to grasp that it applied to my new worldview as well – that my new beliefs were still basically stories I was telling myself rather than facts. The realisation further prompted me to see beliefs as enablers of action rather than as ends in themselves.
After stepping out of the cocoon, I set about achieving my life purpose as best I knew how.
It has led me to dabble in several fields at once – writing books and articles aimed at personal and social transformation, facilitating courses on the same, running a vegan catering service, designing games – while steering them all towards the common goal, that of creating a new foundation for our society.
Thanks to all these activities, I’ve come to appreciate the role that different experiences from my childhood and adolescence have had to play in preparing me for what has become my life’s work. I understand that the dream I’m chasing is impossible for me to achieve. Still, I’m hoping to use this space to bring it that much closer to reality.
I hope you will join me.
I hope you enjoy the first post by Hrvoje Butkovic for Butterfly Maiden! I might have shed several tears of recognition as I read his words. I’m honored to welcome Hrvoje (pronounced Hr-vo-ye) share his wisdom and perspective with us! ~Janet Louise
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