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Choosing A Spiritual Path - The Hows and Whys.

  
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
13:28 / 23.03.04
Spun off from the 'Is Religion Useful' thread, I am interested to know how Barbeloids came to choose the spiritual path they are on, or if atheistic, why this appeals more than the many faith based beliefs or alternative belief systems around.

I would be particularly interested to hear the experiences of those who began on one path and swithced to another later on in life, and the reasons for the switch. How did you come to reject one over the other, and what was the impetus for the switch? Was it a geographical move, cultural shift, family move, 'Road to Damascus' type experience, disenchantment, etc...
 
 
Aertho
19:58 / 23.03.04
Hmmm... fairy tales evolved into greek myth then into norse/egypt/etc... then into comic books, then into Stephen King and Anne Rice, then into paranormal studies, then into actual religous practices from around the world, then cultural semiotics, then French philosophy and social theory, then back into comic books, and then BLAM! Promethea.

And I've been a comic-book kabbalist since.

I still feel stupid bringng tarot cards places... but shit! they're cool!
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
08:37 / 24.03.04
Mmmmkay.
 
 
Information in formation
10:04 / 24.03.04
Baptised Catholic, brought up in the United Church, went Agnostic with Neopagan leanings, Did WAY too many hallucinogens, went crazy, had a number of logically inexplicable events that lead me to the Catholic Church. Due to a fundamental lack of satisfactory answers to many of the questions I was asking myself and my confessor (as well as all the infighting and sectarianism), started researching esoteric Christianity/Gnosticism, lead me to QBL, lead me to G:.D:. ritual magick, lead me to Crowley, lead to Thelema, lead to further dissatisfaction, lead back to Gnostic Christianity and Core Shamanism. My spiritual experience has been a constant evolution consisting mainly of a pattern of Ideological romance to dissatisfaction and back again, but with a little more objectivity (I hope). However I have never really left anything completely. Sometimes I envy people (like my father) who have managed to maintain their faith in a particular system/path their whole lives. But when I think about all the different forms of spirituality/religion/politics that I've investigated and, at times, espoused, as well as all the perspective they have given me. I am glad that I have taken the journey. At times it frustrates me that I havn't exactly "chosen a path" but I have yet to find one that completely or even mostly jives with my beliefs. up to this point I have mainly been picking and chosing the things that seem to ring true to me from just about anywhere and creating with them my own theorys on the way things work. My personal philosophy is, however rooted in esoteric Christianity but branches out into a large number of different areas. maybe this sounds stupid but I think of it as an evolution. I have waxed philosophical on some of the finer points of my personal theology in that increasingly annoying "is Christianity hollow?" thread.
 
 
Jub
10:19 / 24.03.04
Mmmmkay. you did ask MS!!

I'm an atheist. I suppose I'm a fairly stereotypical in this. I'm technically CofE (even went to Church school), but haven't believed in Jesus since I was about 12. Went through an agnostic phase, and then I slid into atheism.

I guess this is a result of challenging my held beliefs during various courses at college. In the end I realised that for me at least, the religious part of my upbringing, whilst familiar and comforting, ceased being spiritual, and spirituality per se was beyond my understanding. I remember reading Kierkegaard and his "leap of faith" bit, and really connecting to that.

Ultimately I think people's beliefs are just an attempt to make sense of the world, where sense does not necessarily exist.

What about you MS? Are you going through a crisis of faith/ epiphany?
 
 
ajm
12:00 / 24.03.04
I was brought up in a Catholic home and for most of the time was force to go to church on Sundays, although there were a few periods when I liked going and became fond of the whole spectacle. I got roped into playing guitar in the band at church and kept going long after I lost faith. A few of the reasons I lost faith were (1) After first realizing how many religions there are out there and not being able to figure out why ours was special. 2) Not understanding the significance of all the prayers symbols and things I was supposed to believe. 3) Witnessing and learning about all the religious violence in the bible, in history, and in the media. 4) Seeing that you can be a very religious follower and still be very shallow/intolerant. 5) Became very interested in science, math and logic and saw none of it in the bible.

Never became an atheist as this always seemed to require just as much faith as any other religion, despite my interest in science and the belief of my friends, but I could no longer identify myself with a religion, just as I couldn't ever identify myself with my country or my family tree. (I would never sing the national anthem at school, and learning about where I came from seemed trivial) so I started calling myself an agnostic, believing that there was still a mystery out there and that I was still searching for it. I wanted a religion that was free of dogma and was a psychology for the mind and a philosophy for the heart.

Things that opened up things inside me...
*I think the first experiences that showed me the wow-ness of life is my use of drugs, particularly LSD, mushrooms and marijuana (never liked alcohol as I felt it made me slow and stupid).

*I got heavy into music and believe this is where I began meditating without realizing it. I went from liking rap and nothing else, to liking punk/alternative music and nothing else, and then to classic rock and nothing else and slowly came to love jazz. Looking back it made me realize how trivial my own tastes and opinions are and how easily I can change my mind, which made me think of the emptiness of human personality. I decided to love all music (had an unforgettable experience listening to Coltrane's A Love Supreme - Coltrane's prayer to God)

Studied science and math in university and was excited the way some writers made connections to god through these subjects. Also, through studies in classical and jazz music I was encouraged to meditate to improve concentration. Many musicians, the older/elderly ones had an interest in Buddhism and Taoism without calling themselves members of these religions, which made an impression on me. Started reading much on Buddhism and philosophy. Tried to figure out if Buddhism was right for me (wasn't, although I kept meditating and reading) I realized how people could find god anywhere/everywhere and nowhere. As I was always asking 'why' I realized that I would never be able to have faith in stories or people of the past.

Had a revelation watching the movie 'Waking Life' (watched it ten or more times). Got turned on to Krishnamurti and the art of self-awareness through some friends (here's their web-site, kind of looks crappy but has good links http://www.geocities.com/halifax_evolution ) Was impressed by the wisdom of Krishnamurti and his knowledge, his attitude, his dialogues with important physicists like David Bohm, and the respect he held through people like Gandhi and the Dali Lama. He made me realize that the thing that holds people (me) back from a connection with truth/spirit/god is the mind. "The observer is the observed", holds true for quantum physics as it does for life.
 
 
Tom Coates
12:08 / 24.03.04
I'm an atheist. I don't consider it a belief system. The burden of proof, as far as I'm concerned, should lie with the people who hold the blatantly counter-factual beliefs. I'm prepared to be persuaded, but in the meantime I'm an atheist. I'm also an adivinebadgerist, an aspacegluenaziist and an aelvisonthemoonist because I don't believe - in order - in divine badgers that live behind me, space glue nazis in my hair and elvis on the moon. Again - I don't consider these belief systems because as far as I'm concerned the burden of proof lies with the people who hold the blatantly counter-factual beliefs.

I do not consider myself to be an agnostic, even though I do not have proof of the existence of God. I do not think it's a rational position to state that if you cannot disprove any randomly undisprovable notion that you're somehow unable to decide whether it's even vaguely within the bounds of reason. I am not agnostic about divine badgers that live behind me, I am not agnostic about space glue nazis in my hair. In fact I do not know whether they exist or not, but their existence is so profoundly ridiculous and unlikely and I'd have to engage in such stretches of logic, evidence and rationality to even conceive of them as being plausible that I think I can stand up with my hand on my heart and say without question that there are no space glue nazis that are living in my hair. I hope no one thinks that I'm dismissing them out of hand. If you believe in space glue nazis that live in your hair, I hope very much that your belief system helps you through the night. I do - however - kind of think you're nuts.

I came to my position on God by dint of living in the world for a few years. It became clear to me quite quickly that the bible stories I was told did not have any relationship to the gradually establishing criteria of truth that I was starting to use to evaluate whether the front door would still be there when I went home, whether air would remain air or turn into chocolate or whether brie would spontaneously fly out of my arse. It also became clear to me quite quickly that individuals will convince themselves of counter-factual things for a whole range of reasons - because it makes them feel better, because they've been told things by other people who they trust, because they don't know any alternatives or because they're ill-informed, or because they're desperately looking for meaning where there may not be any. As a result, I came to the conclusion around my fourteenth birthday that the whole issue was kind of vaguely ridiculous and that I was living in a world populated, in large part, by absolute bloody lunatics who were able to so compartmentalise their viewpoints that they would quite cheerfully talk and rationally about how plausible it was that Jesus brought someone back from the dead but would totally freak out and be incredibly confused and alarmed and even terrified by the idea that two men could want to snog.
 
 
Ariadne
13:08 / 24.03.04

Tom, can I worship you instead of god? Your whole post very nicely encapsulates how I feel, much better than I could explain it myself.

I grew up Scottish Presbyterian, went to church every Sunday, but stopped at about 12 because I stopped believing in it and my parents weren't that bothered one way or the other.

It's just blatantly obvious to me that there's no god, and any attempts I've made over the years to convince myself otherwise (flirtations with various religions, at what I now recognise as low points in my life) foundered on what I see as the basic absurdity of the idea.
 
 
illmatic
13:37 / 24.03.04
Tom, what’s that in your hair?

Interesting thread this. Glad it’s in Headshop as well, seems to eliciting a more interesting range of responses, though not much discussion and I’m not going to differ. Myself, I never had a bit of religion in my upbringing – lucky me, I think - apart form the odd foray into Boys Brigade, and I always tried to avoid the Sunday School/Church bit. My old man was a hardcore atheist but not of a very sophisticated variety. I do remember being terrified of my own mortality when I became conscious of it at the age of about 7, and having that knaw away it me for years (…and still it knaws)

In my late teens, I had a range of correspondents from all over the place, based on the old fanzine network, pre the days of the net, showing my age there, some of whom were in TOPY (Thee Temple of Psychick Youth) and had an interest in magick. I had an experience which freaked me out a bit staring into a mirror one night, and I mentioned this to one of these correspondents and he said “that’s reminiscent of Austin Spare’s “Death Posture” See his “Book of Pleasure” or Pete Caroll’s “Liber Null and Psychonaut” So off I toddled to Atlantis Books, picked up a copy of LN/P and it completely fascinated me. I’d read bits and pieces of esoterica, John Symond’s Crowley bio for one thing, and was already taking a interest in my dreams – been having odd hypnagogic experiences since my mid-teens and had got quite adept at manipulating them, thereby being fascinated with Out of Body Experiences. Caroll’s book was the first thing I’d read that seemed to lay it out clearly, and contrary to what I was expecting, he wasn’t a fruitcake. Everything seemed to hold together in a (relatively) rational system… and of course, the only way to test it was to try it, so I did. Had a few failures, some success at meditation, then some freaky experiences with energy manipulation and a couple of sigils hitting the mark, which convinced me to stick at it.

After bouncing around for a few years, trying things more or less at random, I decided to join an organised group and buckled down for a years solid practice of ritual and meditative work. Which yielded some astonishing results. I don’t think it really addressed what needed addressing ie. some of my hang-ups, but it showed me there was a lot more to myself and my psyche than met the eye. Around this time I took up Tarot and then the I Ching and the latter in particular was another revelation, which got me more and more interested in Taoism, and build more seriously on an interest in Tantrism my earlier work had put me in touch with. Throughout all this I’ve been lucky enough to meet some really amazing people, who’ve been a great inspiration to me, which is miraculous in itself considering the amount of wallies there are on the occult scene…. And then there’s this place….

The idea of belief in God, or disbelief, doesn't really come into it for me. I think that the world doesn't always function along the paths laid out by scientific rationality, and that's enough for me. If God means anything to me, it's not as some kind of external creator or rulekeper, it's some kind of celebration of whatever-all-this is, this weird mystery that we're living in. Nailing it down, defining or anthromorphising whatever it is doesn't really cut it for me...."The Tao that can be named.." and all that.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:49 / 24.03.04
I was brought up an atheist and never really believed in God and actually found the whole notion rather deplorable on the grounds that God was a man and I was not and how could a man alone have made me? I mean really if you're going to have a religion you can at least mirror reality and have a man and a woman up there in the hallowed heights of deitydom. Anyway these thoughts naturally led me to witchcraft but my upbringing means that I can't quite consolidate the idea of some being somewhere we can't see as real so I generally play a game of let's pretend with myself and imagine that I'm worshipping the world if and when I can bring myself to suspend disbelief that far (and I only do that because I quite like this idea of a world beyond the world). I don't think there's any harm in the idea of committing yourself to a representation as long as you maintain the idea that the representation is only that.
 
 
grant
14:52 / 24.03.04
Actually, that's pretty much mainstream Catholicism, right there. Catholics are big on symbols and allegories.

American fundamentalists, significantly less so.
 
 
Lurid Archive
15:37 / 24.03.04
Tom's brief justification of atheism above is pretty standard. Not that Tom doesn't express it well, but I think the most interesting thing about it is how surprised people are by it generally. In a technological age, an argument that stems naturally from minimal, rational and empirical principles is still not part of people's thinking. I suppose that those things haven't been with us nearly as long as religions and that there is a deep scepticism with regards to rationality, consistency and other mislabelled Western ideas.
 
 
Prego the Werlf
15:48 / 24.03.04
I remember asking my Mum what religion I was when I was a kid and getting the reply, "er, Christian I suppose". As this was about all the religious teaching I got as a youth, I heartilly embraced Atheism and embarked on a fun filled life of ripping the piss out of Christians at every opportunity. However, before my Dad died he got really into his childhood faith(methodism)again and I saw first hand the comfort that it brought him. While my Atheistic training would never permit me to embrace any thing too specific, all religions having surely been founded for various pollitical reasons, this experince did make me realize that maybe something was up. I never liked the whole, "if there is a god then why does he let such bad things happen" perspective so I started looking. Looking however, has the drawback that you can only look for what is already there, and pretty much all faiths seemed to have at least one major drawback, usually involving attitudes to sex and war. All this has lead to the point where I honestly don't know how to describe my beleifs. I feel that there is something that could be describrd as 'divine' but see problems when it elevated above the level of 'human'.
There is a line somewhere in the Invisibles about the Matter being the Divine at it's most condensed. I now take this as my starting point from which my spritual adventures take off. All religions, incuding science, have great insights into the mysteries of existence, and while I appreciate that it is probably sacriligeous, not to say flipant, I think a kind of 'Pick and Mix' attitude might help.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
16:23 / 24.03.04
Interesting, interesting.

I was baptised as a baby, but my folks were just steenking hypocrites, 'cos two more secular people you'd be hard pushed to find. They briefly encouraged my sister and I to attend a CofE Sunday school, for, ooh, two whole weeks, but when we showed little interest, largely mirroring their own, they just dropped the whole affair. I guess I prayed some when I was really wee, but stopped believing in god probably even before by early teens...By the time music and drugs became major factors in my mid-teens, I was a committed atheist.

Some rather hairy happenstance with pharmaceuticals in the late 80's early 90's, throughout which I imbibed far more than I should, and failed to heed the warnings of my increasingly frazzled brain, I had what I consider to be some fantastically hideous freakouts, which I subsequently look upon as the most spectacularly useful event in my adolescence...I lost the plot quite severely for a while, though wasn't hospitalized, or noticeably fucked up to strangers, even...however, frequent travel down Bad Acid Alley, in retrospect, did wonders for my view of the mutable nature of mind....and the chronic introspection throughout this time, coupled with an insatiable appetite for RAW, Phil Dick, Terence Mckenna, Castenada, Jung, and traditional psychology and philosophy in general, killed any last traces of a desire to cling on to anything much in the way of dogma or ideology.

Am I still an atheist? Since the term means 'without God', yes I absolutely am, but prefer the Wilson term 'model agnostic'...i.e a sense that all descriptions of the Universe are just that - descriptions, and useful only according to context. Adult and more sensible-bound forays into mushrooms and ayahuasca with a group of crazy ayahuasceros from Brazil (regular dame's still going on, though i haven't been for ages) have supported my feeling that the brain is spectacularly adept at creating an infinite variety of models and metaphors for explaining sensory expereince, and to literally believe them is absolutely batshit crazy. So, I can happily state that after ingesting Mexican psilocybin my nervous system was hijacked by an entity which rode around in my body and CNS, symbiotically enjoying the opportunity to strut around and talk and eat and drink and have a whale of a time, cos some of those thoughts were not 'mine'...very alien...but I wouldn't say it was 'true', or expect anyone else to hear it and do anything but look and me sideways and edge away. It made perfect sense at the time, and I really felt no need to go any further with it at all. That's what happened. It's the best explanation I have for the experience, which was fantastic. I love the game of 'explaining it all' when the peak has subsided, as I feel it gives great insight into the nature of ordinary consciousness, and noting it and refusing to take part is something that can be carried from the experience for weeks afterwards. Living in the moment,if you like, rather than maintaining a constant interior babble of labelling and description and proselytising bullshit.

Ayahuasca is a marvellous mirror, and involves chants and songs and dancing in a group, from my limited experience of it...no other way to do it, since the guys that get hold of it insist on participation in the dame (dah-may)...it is, for me, a fantastic tool for stripping out bullshit and bringing the conscious attention of the mind to all the baggage that may well have been horribly suppressed or ignored...it seems to reveal a path of action which feels absolutely 'right' regarding relationships with others, stuff that needs to be dealt with which may have been long forgotten, and does it a gentle and beautiful way. Entities galore, but no God, ever. I've looked, but there always seems to be a large committee, no Big Boss.

Some of my family are deeply religious, on my partners side. Church of Yahweh, which is scarily cult-like, or has been co-opted by some scary cult figures at least. We have great discussions about all this stuff, and it fascinates me to see such incredible dedication to someone elses models and metaphors...such dedicated literalism...try discussing religion with someone who laughs when you mention the Dinosaurs, and shakes their head with disbelief that you could entertain such crazy notions...then comes round eventually to the conclusion that Noah didn't manage to save every species on the Ark, and that's what the Dinosaurs were. Certainly does wonders for my passionate lack of conviction. On the other hand, they are genuinely kind and lovely people, if a little aloof sometimes. I suspect they would be lovely anyway, religious convictions apart, but the aloofness is a direct result of their privileged 'saved' status. Heck, we can all be aloof, though, I was pulled on it by Flyboy in the Does Religion Help Us thread, for being dismissive, so there you go...

I find, as the Discordians like to say, that convictions create convicts, and certainty generally entails cessation of mental activity, followed soon after by a desire to hurt people. It seems to me that the inner emptiness of the modern human condition tends to lead one of two ways, either towards firm belief in something in or other, or towards zealous doubt about everything. I'm of the latter school of thought, in case anyone missed it.
 
 
ajm
16:29 / 24.03.04
In response to the scientific thinkers (atheists):
Sure the scientific/rational/skeptical views are important for technological development, but how do they relate to having a healthy relationship with the mind (the complexity of thoughts and emotions, which science denies). It merely reduces the human to a machine. And actually this paradigm was overthrown and now we live in the age of quantum mechanics. The rational isn't so rational anymore. The new world is full of uncertainness, indeterminism and states that our knowledge is limited. There is no reality independent of observation.

Cause and effect classical physics (which once governed everything) has been thrown on its head. History is going to show (and has shown) that one paradigm replaces another paradigm, truths will be modified and thrown away. Truth is relative. The more theoretical and rational people become the more divided they become with themselves.

Atheists seem (to me that is) to be bitter agnostics who believe the mysteries of life are not really mysteries, and have lost a sense of the grandness of life. Also it may be possible, that through their experience with religion, they think that the only form of God is how these religions define him, as a god in 'mans' own image. "Energy/mass is God, do you believe in energy/Mass? It can't be destroyed or created." This is one of thousands of views of what god 'could' be. But don't limit yourself (or God).

"I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy." - Max Born
 
 
ajm
16:44 / 24.03.04
I didn't see your post before mine MS. I thought is was great and I second it. Who was this Wilson guy (first name) that termed 'model agnostic'?

I somewhat agree with your last statement but would take it futher and say that the feeling that you must doubt everything is just another belief and you may be in the first camp more than you think.
In the present moment you can either know what you see/hear is the truth, know it is false, or know that you can't know either. In this sense you can have perfect knowledge of the moment.

But I'm a little aloof
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
16:56 / 24.03.04
Wilson : Robert Anton.

Model Agnostic being an attempt to apply the Copenhagen Interpretation, of which you are clearly aware, to macroscopic experience.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
17:42 / 24.03.04
I was baptized a Roman Catholic, but by the time I was fifteen I had come to realize that organized religion wasn't going to do it for me. I tried being an atheist, but it was too lonely. So I started studying philosophy and religion.

I have heard plenty of reasons why one should keep ideas but not beliefs, so I've got millions of ideas about what's going on in the world (spiritually speaking). Really, I got tons of 'em. All kinds of gods and buddhas and great spirits and sentient universes are chilling in my head as we speak.

But I do have one belief that sort of ties all the ideas together in a loose network. I believe in love, big L or little L. I believe it's the only real thing I've ever experienced in my life. To me, All is God and He is Love. There is no reality but Love. "God", "Tao", and "love" are all interchangable to me. God is love. The Way is love. Illusions abound, though, so it may not seem like it at times.

Sappy or not, it's useful. I can follow plenty of religions, if I so choose, and never betray this one single belief. All the ideas I've gained from studying work very well alongside this one belief. Plus it gives me a direction to move in if I don't know where I am or what I'm doing, spiritually speaking.
 
 
.
19:01 / 24.03.04
Hmm, very interesting thread. I know this sort of testimonial thing is out of character for a Headshop thread, but this one seems particularly worthwhile. It strikes me that these sort of threads should be encouraged in here, not to replace the usual standard of argument, but as a charming and illuminating non-confrontation side order to the meaty main course.

So... Myself. I'd call myself a nihilist. I've always tried to be archly rational, and having indulged in studying philosophy, I ended up with all the tools to negate any belief I might have in life. By that I mean that it's not so much as I believe in nothing, it's just that I'm the perfect skeptic, and believe that virtually all my beliefs are arbitrary and the opposite could equally be true. And any beliefs that I don't think are arbitrary concern the nature of the self or things like that, nothing one could base a faith on. So yes, essentially I am a nihilist.

Yet this isn't a particularly good thing to be. On a day to day basis things need to have value, we need to have faith, otherwise there's no way to make decisions, and no point in continued existence. So on a day to day basis I'm a kinda hedonist-humanist-taoist. I believe that there is something um... "divine" for want of a better word, in human interaction, and aesthetic experience. I tend to call it "joy", ie. not necessarily as simple as pleasure, but a similar sort of thing. Something that is manifested in love, nostalgia, christmas, trance'n'lasers. Probably not entirely unlike Johnny O's "love". It's a fluffy and generally harmless faith, but it does the job.

Is it hypocritical to have faith, yet concede that it is an utterly arbitrary faith? Probably, but I don't really know what else to do.
 
 
Lurid Archive
19:13 / 24.03.04
I'm not aware that science denies the complexity of thoughts and emotions. I think scientists can have complex thoughts and emotions themselves, even. However, maybe "complexity" means invisible gremlins pulling the levers of the soul - science is sceptical about those, though ultimately agnostic.

As for atheists being bitter, I'm sure that some are of course. But if you can really listen to the wondrous naturalistic explanations of the world around us and say that they are without grandness, then you truly have no soul. There is much that is unknown and I think it is only human nature to try to make that more comprehensible through religion or reference to a "God", whatever she may look like. Like Tom, I have certain objections to that, despite having a great deal of respect for those who are engaged with it. Your insistence that those who see the world differently from you are necessarily impoverished marks you out as the blinkered one, to my mind.

Also, Quantum Mechanics is part of Physics. It was developed by physicists doing physics. Rather than a wacky challenge to scientific orthdoxy, it *is* scientific orthdoxy. ajm, I think your mechanistic caricature of science and atheism went out of fashion almost a hundred years ago, except for those who need a convenient straw man.
 
 
Hieronymus
21:59 / 24.03.04
I was raised by parents who tried to indoctrinate my sister and I in some semblance of a Protestant Christian faith, but who failed pretty miserably. My mother shuffled us around, as kids, to various Southern Baptist and Methodist churches, with little or no sustained involvement. My parents are too liberal and secular and enjoyed their Sundays at home far too much to have raised my sister and I in the same fashion they were. So our 'church-going' was eventually relegated to occasional Easters at my grandparent's church and funerals.

And the rare times I went to church, I was defnitely not a fan. Even when I was little I resented the rigid rigamarole of dressing up for 'Church on Sunday', cringed at what I felt was bullying by the Moral Majority (having been blessed with my fair dose of bullying growing up) and learned quickly the hypocrisy of the televangelist movement in the mid 80s. Eventually my 'Christian upbringing' fell to the wayside. Of which I'm very grateful as it allowed me the room to ask pertinent questions outside of the doctrine and the means to find the answers myself.

When it comes to the divine, I dunno, I've always been a bit skeptical of God and/or divinity. It's been the excuse for countless mad and selfish acts in my experience and while I understand that divinity is an attempt to describe the poetically ineffable (and have grown to appreciate person whose humanity very much reflected their religious life), the menu often gets confused for the meal, the map for the road. Sometimes with disastrous results. Early in my life I knew, that was something I never wanted to be a part of.

For a lot of time I was just simply agnostic. But four years ago I discovered Buddhism by way of Gnostic comparisons and I've been a consummate Western Buddhist ever since. My Buddhist outlook and spiritual life is very much rooted in my father's live-and-let-live country wisdom, my Southern roots, Zen instruction and what I feel is the Dharma at the heart of Western/Jeffersonian liberalism.
 
 
Tom Coates
22:05 / 24.03.04
AJM - first things first - your idea of 'scientific thinkers' is kind of ridiculous. All scientists do is try to generalise hypotheses from evidence and then attempt to test them in future. Just like when you were a child and you played with a bee and then the bee stung you and you didn't play with bees any more (or one of hundreds of other analogous situations), or when you saw some of your friends stand on a chair and you deduced that you too could stand on that chair and then you stood on the chair and it didn't break. All science is is an extension of that kind of process.

Sure the scientific/rational/skeptical views are important for technological development, but how do they relate to having a healthy relationship with the mind (the complexity of thoughts and emotions, which science denies). It merely reduces the human to a machine

Again - I don't even understand the terms you're using. Christianity and most other religions or mysticisms compartmentalise or bracket off parts of the human being. Christian's believe in a 'soul' that somehow interacts with the biology of human beings. These are still parts with attributes, things that interact with one another. How is it reasonable to describe a neurochemist or behavioural psychologist's work as any more mechanistic than that? In fact, in terms of 'reducing' the human, I would have thought that their models were infinitely more complex, nuanced and intriguing than a purely religious one, and as such enhance our humanity - reveal us for the amazing complex creatures that we are. What in fact you seem to be saying is that the very act of explanation turns things into machines where the mystery about them made them something more than that. If you believe that not attempting to understand something is somehow spiritual then I'm afraid you've completely lost me.

And actually this paradigm was overthrown and now we live in the age of quantum mechanics. The rational isn't so rational anymore. The new world is full of uncertainness, indeterminism and states that our knowledge is limited. There is no reality independent of observation. Cause and effect classical physics (which once governed everything) has been thrown on its head.

Well it has and it hasn't. I mean it's not like the science that got us onto the moon has been proven not too work any more. What has happened is that we have a better understanding of the complexities of the incredibly tiny - and know that particles at the size of the photon don't operate in the same way as we'd expected. That's hardly the same as throwing all our chairs in the air and saying we're no further down the line than we were in the middle ages.

History is going to show (and has shown) that one paradigm replaces another paradigm, truths will be modified and thrown away. Truth is relative. The more theoretical and rational people become the more divided they become with themselves.

You say history is going to show and has shown that one paradigm replaces another paradigm, but you don't seem to have any sense that any of those paradigms are improvements on previous ones - that truths get dismantled and replaced with truths that fit the evidence more effectively. What we believe today is almost certainly wrong, but the aspiration surely is that it's less wrong than it was fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, two thousand years ago. Or maybe 'less wrong' is the wrong way to put it - maybe instead that we have a model now that is more useful for us in predicting what will happen when we do certain things, or in explaining to us why certain things happened in the past.

Again - we can do a pretty simple test of this. The child that believes that bees cannot hurt him is operating with a paradigm, with an understanding, with a sense of the truth of the world. When he is stung, he replaces that paradigm with one in which he knows that a bee could sting him. The first truth was thrown away in favour of the second. But the second one has more utility than the first.

In fact five hundred years ago, the religious beliefs that you were expounding were the dominant truth of the age, but they are not any more - and the reason for that isn't just that people's taste's changed, but that the evidence fitted other models of the world better, that there were less logical flaws in the arguments, that simpler and less fantastic anthropocentric views of the world also seemed to have more predictive value. And before you start on logic, please god don't - at base you make all of your day-to-day decisions based upon some pretty basic fundamental logical decision-making processes ("it is dark, the light is off, i shall turn the light on") and think nothing of it.

Atheists seem (to me that is) to be bitter agnostics who believe the mysteries of life are not really mysteries, and have lost a sense of the grandness of life. Also it may be possible, that through their experience with religion, they think that the only form of God is how these religions define him, as a god in 'mans' own image. "Energy/mass is God, do you believe in energy/Mass? It can't be destroyed or created." This is one of thousands of views of what god 'could' be. But don't limit yourself (or God).

Well I'm an atheist and I don't believe for a moment that we've uncovered and revealled all the truths of the universe. No respectable scientist would tell you that either! And I see enormous grandness in life! I also see enormous grandness in the scale of the universe and in the nuclear fusion at the heart of stars and the complex strands of DNA that encode every aspect of our biology and in the epic struggle over billions of years that has seen me descended directly from some of the first creatures ever to exist on this earth, from single-celled organism through to insects and lizards and mammals and man. I see more grandeur in that - I see a greater place for humanity in that - than in a world made for us or in which the only meaning is that which is imposed on us from outside. That would be a slave's life!

And I'm sorry but if you're extending the meaning of god to refer to all matter in the universe or making it directly synonymous with air or something randomly abstract like "Hope" or "Love" then you're basically completely debasing the concept completely. If God is no more than matter then why not use the world "Matter". We understand a bit about matter, how it works and why it exists. It doesn't have motives or spiritual objectives as far as we can tell. It's not a benevolent creator, nor is it our judge or emotional centre. If God is energy then, to be honest, we know a bit about that too. Is energy sentient? Is that what you're saying? Because if so, I've seen precious little evidence for that either. The word "God" referring to something physical without any sense of agency means pretty much nothing...
 
 
unheimlich manoeuvre
12:18 / 25.03.04
fascinating thread.

...

yes, like many of the above I am a lapsed Christian. neither my mother or father were into the established Church but they are both very moral people in that tradition. my elder brother and sister were coerced into attending Sunday school but that was never forced on me.

I spent most of my teenage years as a diehard atheist basically regurgitating what my brother, who was studying philosophy, was saying to me. Now in my late twenties, I find my atheism wavering although regarding spirituality I agree with Nietzsche.

Misunderstanding dreams. In ages of crude, primordial cultures, man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams: this is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams man would have found no occasion to divide the world. The separation into body and soul is also connected to the oldest views about dreams, as is the assumption of a spiritual apparition5 that is, the origin of all belief in ghosts, and probably also in gods. "The dead man lives on, because he appears to the living man in dreams." So man concluded formerly, throughout many thousands of years.

Human, All Too Human SECTION ONE Of First and Last Things #5

Like Jub (i think>) i am intrigued by Kierkegaard and reading Fear and Trembling at the moment. I am scared by God and find the desire for the afterlife somehow anti-humanist and inhumane. Heaven/Utopia *should* be realised on Earth and may be attainable though technology.
 
 
diz
13:51 / 25.03.04
Sure the scientific/rational/skeptical views are important for technological development, but how do they relate to having a healthy relationship with the mind (the complexity of thoughts and emotions, which science denies). It merely reduces the human to a machine.

i don't think that's a problem unless you have some sort of value judgement as to what machines are, what they're capable of and no capable of, and some emotional baggage bound up in perceived conflicts between quantum physics and Newtonian physics.

to be frank, i think that your position seems to trap humanity to to some sort of romanticized anti-rationality and reduce it to one half of a series of oppositional dualities (organic vs mechanical, spiritual vs rational, etc) in ways that i find troubling, since i tend to see most of those dichotomies as generally false and overly simplistic.
 
 
diz
13:52 / 25.03.04
oh, and not to double-post, but why is this in the Head Shop? perhaps Magick or Conversation would be more appropriate?
 
 
Lurid Archive
13:57 / 25.03.04
Sure. Shall I propose to move this to the Magick?
 
 
diz
15:45 / 25.03.04
Sure. Shall I propose to move this to the Magick?

i think it's more appropriate for Conversation, personally, especially considering cusm's suggested guidelines here, which i think are just the bee's knees and which argue that discussions in the Magick forum should be grounded in the specifics of practice. this is more of an open-ended sharing of feelings and experiences, which is more Conversational.
 
 
cusm
16:23 / 25.03.04
Eh. Let it attract attention here for a bit, then move on to convo. Roaming threads are fun, no? And this one is pretty juicy.

In Magick now, the question includes your magickal practice, as really, magick is a form of spirituality, when you get down to it. And that's not even touching neo-paganism.

I started out Roman Catholic, but felt that adhering to one set of beliefs was too limiting. I had this idea that there was more to be learned, that no one religion could possibly have all the answers. And I wanted all the answers. Fascination with all things magickal and spooky led me to tarot, experiments with psychic stuff, exposure to neo-paganism, and finally a focused study of assorted mystical traditions and magick beginning with my head breaking into little bits by Liber Null and the Invisibles. I've always had a determination that what I follow is my path, and my path alone. This only became more so once I got into magick in a big way. As example, I wear, as one would a symbol of faith, my personal sigel. I feel that I can not belong fully to any one tradition, that my personal relationship with the divine is of my own business and above all other involvements. Though through magick and pagan stuff I've come to the Norse as a primary focus of late, and some actual relationships with some of the dieties in that pantheon. So, I seem to be swinging around to the religious side again somewhat, though my cosmology and such remains something of my own creation.

As for how I came to believe what I believe in, the short version is I trapped myself in a logical proof. In attempting to understand the nature of human cognition, I realized that if I extended the model upwards it included all magickal and psychic phenemonon, at its highest manifestation resulting basicly in the New Age philosophy of God as creation itself (which I'm amused to find existing among Muslim interpretations of Allah as well), immanence leading to justification of ethical relativism. So, I sort of accidently proved to myself that God exists, while looking for something else. *shrugs* I'm happy with the results, though.
 
 
Z. deScathach
20:12 / 25.03.04
Was brought up a Catholic, but since my father was a drunk and my mother an abusive whacko, I never bought that. First book on the occult was "Magick: An Occult Primer", by David Conway.My mother tore it up. Thank goodness that she did that, it piqued my curiosity. Began sort of kinda practicing ceremonial magick, (I was young and lazy, as well as living in a tiny out of the way town). Got into taking 9 tons of acid, and practicing the LBRP, which..... errrr....opened me up. A side effect of the acid, however, was that I had trouble hitting ash-trays for a year. Unfortunately I got into a quasi-religious organization that subtly taught me that power was dangerous and sinful,(damn them for that....). Got into meditation, and decided to try to take that experience to it's limit. Things got kind of strange, causing me to wonder about the nature of reality. Got into the new age movement, all that light and love stuff. Read Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualization, which, when I look back at it, was practicing magick in the sneakiest way possible. The problem was that I still had that stuff in my head that power was dangerous and sinful, so I wound up vascillating between seeking it, and getting hideously scared. Began to study Crowley..... became EVEN MORE hideously scared. Then.... BIGDISTRACTIONBIGDISTRACTIONBIGDISTRACTIONBIGDISTRACTION! Otherwise known as "having a goal and being too stupid to realize that it is eating up your life". After the Big Distraction, I decided to heal myself by becoming enlightened and beaming love and peace out into the world, (hey, the Big Distraction had eaten up my life, I was desparate). It was while trying to do this that I got my first taste of the "Shadow Concept". Basically, the more I tried to love everything, the crappier the world seemed to get. Finally, it culminated in my standing next to a young man who was talking about his desire to be the most prolific murderer the world has ever seen. So much for light and love in the total sense. I came across Wicca, which appealed to me because it seemed to get into the face of male deity, and at the time, I was all for that. I practiced witchcraft for 8 years. After some time, I began to question some of the ethical precepts of "The Craft", and also began to note that it's rigid good and evil stance was to much like the beliefs I held before. Not only that, but I began to get put off by what I saw as a growing intolerance within the religion. This was very sucky, as that was the reason that I had gotten into Wicca in the first place. Then one day I was 'net surfing and came across the TOPY site, and realized that I liked what they were saying, and while I never became a member, it got me into an investigation of magick as practiced in it's own right. I left Wicca and began to practice chaos magick as it's own path, which is pretty much what I've been doing for the last 5 or 6 years. To me, magick and spirituality are inseperable, as spirituality has simply come to mean "life". What I would describe as my present philosophy is the use of magick to participate more fully in that life. What practicing chaos magick gave me that is truly priceless is the realization that there is nothing wrong with my darkside. I found out that the demons inside of me weren't really all that bad, as long as they are told to not trash the place, (they really love to do that, as anyone who's been to my place can attest). I try to avoid "belief" like the plague. I did finally settle down on a belief that basically says that all possibilities exist simulataneously. I find that this keeps me honest. As far as "beliefs in the Truth", I'm sure that I still have them, they live in the back forty with the Divine Badgers previously mentioned. Frequently I get my rifle and go a-huntin'.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
20:58 / 25.03.04
I was brought up with very little religion around me, my parents go to church for weddings, christenings and funerals and that's it. I think I was pretty lucky in a lot of ways because it's allowed me to approach 'religion' as something fresh and on it's own terms.

I won't bore you with a potted history of my occult beliefs, just where I'm at now. For me, 'The Religion' means worship of the ancestors, the mysteries, and God.

I currently like to think of ancestor worship in terms of the time tree model (espoused by Vonnegut, Morrison, Moore, et al) which suggests that we are quite literally a part of the same organism as those who have gone before us, when viewed from a position outside of time. We are one physical being snaking backwards into our mothersm and our mother into her mother, and so on. We're just the current living and breathing end-product of a process that has been going on for thousands of years, stretching back through generations of family, all the way to monkeys and amoeba. Worship of the ancestors is worship of this great chain of being. Acknowledgement of it. Acceptance of everything that it entails.

Worship of The Mysteries is the process of building relationships with the various Gods and Spirits that we are able to communicate and commune with. This can manifest as making offerings to the Lwa, lighting candles to the Saints, offering puja to the Tantric dieties, raising a glass to the Norse Gods, connecting to the Sephiroth of the Quabbala, or whatever expression of The Mysteries you feel the most in tune with.

Worship of God is an acknowledgement of the divinity of all of that. It's worship of the self, the ancestors, the mysteries, the universe, and all of reality as a single interdependent divine process that is indistinguishable from what you might call 'God'. This notion of God is non-gendered, unknowable, and absolute. It's the Quabbalistic Ain - Ain Soph - Ain Soph Aur. The divine essence that pours through the Sephiroth from Kether to Malkuth, to make the world that we live in and experience day to day.

That's what religion means to me, and I try to make it as inclusive as I can.
 
  
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