My Journey - Part Four

So what conclusions have I drawn in this journey? Some time over the last few years I decided to get honest with myself. Anyone who has spent any time around me knows how skeptically I view prayer. People pray for things to happen (or for hurricanes to pass them by) and sometimes things turn out as prayed for and sometimes they don't. People who believe in prayer tend to magnify the times when "prayer works" and ignore or explain away the times that it doesn't turn out according to their prayers. What about magic? What about spells? Witches and pagans perform various rituals in order to get things to turn out the way that they want. Moon magic, astrology, candles etc. But don't witches and pagans do the same thing that Christians do when it comes to prayer? Don't they tend to magnify the positive results and ignore or rationalize the negative? And do you know what? What I think are rationalizations could very well be the "correct" answer. Maybe the gods are capricious, maybe you just didn't do the ritual correctly, maybe it was the wrong phase of the moon. Who knows? I'm reminded of something I've heard said about moon magic more than once. If you need to receive something in your life, do the ritual during the waxing moon. But what if it's the waning moon and you can't wait? Easy! Just do a ritual to remove whatever it is that's preventing you from receiving what you need? To me that thinking sounds a bit ridiculous, in this scenario the phase of the moon is irrelevant as long as you phrase your intention correctly.

So do I believe that there is any reason to do rituals, burn candles, read tarot cards, etc? I do, but mainly as a way to focus the mind and to stir natural intuition. I think that, to a certain extent we can see the future. Not in a science fiction way. The future, from our point of view, hasn't happened yet, but we can ascertain patterns in the present, assemble possible paths based on the current trends and come up with a personal path to reach the desired result. Might there be supernatural intervention involved in this exercise? Perhaps, but it doesn't require supernatural intervention.

What about the existence of gods? Are they real? I guess it depends on your definition of "real". One of my spiritual practices involves meditation through shamanic journeying. The short version of what this is, is that I get into a state of altered consciousness, usually through the use of rhythmic drumming and see things in what feels like a waking dream state. Are the things that I see "merely" dreams, or do they have an objective reality? Are they parts of my subconscious that I am accessing? My contention is that it makes no difference. Since I'm not going to go out and try to fly from a high building, or murder someone because I'm "hearing voices", it doesn't really matter. One thing that I am clear about is that the various gods and goddesses, if they exist objectively and independently, do not account for natural phenomena. The god of storms doesn't make it rain, the goddess of the harvest doesn't cause the crops to grow. I look at the pantheon as personifications of natural forces, not individuals who are actively controlling their "areas of responsibility".

Although in some ways I act like an atheist, in that I do not make decisions based on what I think spiritual forces want me to do, and I think that natural events are just that: natural, I haven't ruled out the existence of spirits, I just don't see much evidence that they are very reliable.  

My Journey - Part Three

Having jettisoned Christianity, I still held to the prevailing view that there was some kind of spiritual otherworld, and that in some fashion gods, spirits and the like existed. I hadn't rejected the very idea of a god, or influencing events supernaturally, I had just come to the conclusion that Christianity had no more claim on being right than any other religion; that other religions were just as likely or unlikely to be true or effective. Being predominately Irish in ancestry, I began to examine and study what I could find out about pre-Christian Irish (Celtic) religion. Due to the fact that very little was written down regarding Irish religion before its displacement by Christianity, there isn't a lot of hard information about it. What is written was written by outsiders (Julius Caesar) and by Christians writing many years after the fact. Although there are modern people who claim to know what it was that the Druids did and the functions of the pantheon and day-to-day religious practices,  it's almost all speculation. How much truth there is in the speculation is the subject for another blog post, but due to this lack of hard information, my quest for information about my ancestral religion wasn't particularly fruitful. However, there are people who claim to be following the "old religion", and those people can largely be found within the various Wiccan and Neo-Pagan groups. The books that I found were mostly books about Magic and rituals, and some that promulgated a kind of pan-Pagan outlook, mixed with divination, meditation and influencing events by magic. It was around this time that I met my future wife who was involved in a local eclectic pagan group. I too became involved in this group and considered myself a Pagan.

I should point out that one of things that I did not want to do when shopping around for a new religion, was to get involved in another dogmatic faith. In addition to my doubts about the Bible, as a result of my bad experiences with The Way, I had also developed a strong aversion to groups, especially to anyone who claimed to have all the answers. For a few years I attended local gatherings and even learned to read tarot cards, but I mainly continued to read, study and form opinions on my own. I anted a spiritual worldview that I could call my own and which worked for me.

I'm going to digress for a moment on the subject of "personal religion". Those who follow a religion with a central authority, especially for those who use the Bible (or some other "holy" book) as their standard often deride those who construct their own systems of belief as "made-up" religious and ethical systems. But isn't that what most people do, even when part of a religion? How many Christians really know what the Bible says about their God, or what behavior their Bible encourages? How many people believe that God acts in a certain way when there is no evidence from the Bible to support their belief? Many of these people use personal experience to validate what they think and believe. They "know" God exists because they "experienced" him, or things worked out according to their wishes after praying. This is not any different, in my opinion, than those who construct their own spiritual system.

Part of my personal study involved a course called "The Temple of Witchcraft", a series of books by author Christopher Penczak. The series broke up "Wiccan" spirituality (Penczak's version anyway) into five segments: 1. The Inner Temple: meditation and other practices on a personal level; 2. The Outer Temple: ritual and outward expressions of spirituality; 3. Shamanic Temple: incorporating practices of shamanism 4. Temple of High Witchcraft: ceremonial magic, including the Kabbalah; 5. Living Temple: basically leadership in the pagan community. The information was presented in a non-dogmatic way, which I liked, and constantly emphasized that this was just one path among many possible. We traveled to St. Louis and to Colorado to hear Penczak speak and to participate in weekend seminars. I used a lot of his material to organize my thoughts and beliefs into a system that worked well for me, however, I decided against participating in online apprenticeships or further involvement because I didn't want to get involved in another group and I didn't want to lock myself into one particular spiritual worldview.

It was time to get clear on what it was that I actually believed.