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Bowie, David - Quotes from interviews with the NYTimes
Identifier
019614
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
On his fascination with extraterrestrials: “An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic. As a kid, I wondered where I fit in. Do I actually even believe in Christianity? It was sometimes traumatic, but now I don't mind the hunt. I know that I won't find the answer, and that's all right. The search for certainty is definitely a road to insanity.”
On religion: “I feel more drawn to agnosticism or Buddhism (than Christianity). I'm probably an agnostic troubadour. It's in everything I write. … We are so suspicious of organized religion, both the morality of it and the question of whether the medieval hierarchy of the church actually functions in this era. It's been suggested by various philosophers that the passionate thing to do is to kill God and reinvent him. Maybe we're in the process of doing that.”
On why he swore off drugs in the ‘80s: "To stay alive, as mundane a reason as that. I wasn't getting any joy out of my life, so I changed it. … I was destroying myself very rapidly."