All Paths Are Walked Alone

The path that the spiritual side of my life has taken me upon has been long and winding and full of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys.  I hesitate to call myself a "pagan" but I cannot say that it is an inaccurate label.
  Allow me to explain some of the ways in which my perspective has changed over the years as my understanding of paganism, or, at least, my personal paganism, has evolved.  It has mostly been a journey backwards in time.

I was baptized Catholic and raised Lutheran, mostly.  I have always been an avid reader and so I, of course, read many Bible stories and two different versions of the Bible from cover to cover.  For some reason, this always left me feeling like there was something missing.  Like there was an element that I wasn't finding but could feel the vacuum caused by it's absence.  Over time, I've come to understand that the absence I was feeling was lack of internal consistency.  In my opinion, if a philosophy or religion or spiritual path, whatever you want to call it, is going to work for me, it has to have internal consistency and be coherent.  Hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance give me migraines.  And so, upon reaching the age of reason, I left Christianity behind.

After that, I was swimming in an ocean of "alternative" spiritual options.  I read widely.  Possibly because it was just getting some exposure in popular culture at the time, I latched onto Wicca at first.  I grew up in the middle of rural farmland where the chances of me randomly meeting a pagan on the street was just slightly above zero.  So, I turned to the wide wonderful world of the interwebs.  After stumbling my way through some absolutely horrid Geocities websites, I finally found a couple useful online forums such as Witchvox and MeetUp.  Through these, I found myself chatting with people from around the nation and sometimes around the world.  Eventually, I made a couple of real life contacts and started attending a Pagan MeetUp that met near me on a monthly basis.  From here, my pagan social circle expanded quickly.  I was attending fireside rituals on the full moon and coffeehouse meetings whenever I could.  I went to pagan special events (costume balls, Halloween parties, etc.) that I never knew existed a year before.  I even met my first wife at a camping retreat for a pagan spring holiday known as Beltaine.

Things still didn't feel quite right to me so I continued my exploratory journey.  I read extensively about shamanism and most of the eastern philosophies.  I explored the martial arts that were considered internal (meaning, mostly dealing with the cultivation of and manipulation of bodily energies as opposed to repetitively practicing martial movements so that your punch is more powerful, for example).  There are three main internal martial arts and I took classes in two of them.  You may have heard of Taijiquan, commonly called Tai Chi in the US.  This is one of them.  I began to practice meditation and even attended a twelve day meditation retreat.  (It was the hardest thing I've ever done, by the way, if you ever want to try it.)

Everything I experienced and thought led me to believe, more and more strongly, that the physical world that we all perceive and interact with every second is not the totality of existence.  There is something more laying behind it.  That there is an invisible world that lays just kitty-corner out of the reach of our five senses.  However, the good news is that we have more than five senses.  In fact, researchers now think that we may have twenty-one or more senses (look here or here).

Extrapolating from this idea of an underlying dimension to reality, I came to embrace a very old viewpoint.  In fact, based on the following picture, it's possibly the oldest perspective I could have found:

Animism.  To me, animism is simply the knowledge that every bit of reality has more depth to it than we can observe.  Everything is more than we think it is.  Every action, every thought, every word.  I find, then, that the only way to proceed with life is to pay attention.  To everything.  In our current technophilic culture, this is much harder than it seems.  We are encouraged to waste our attention on everything around us.  The advertisements on the billboard; the latest celebrity gossip magazine; the sports game this weekend; the addicting little game on your smart phone; the latest episode of Game of Thrones; the current drama at work involving so-and-so.  It's hard to not give into that kind of constant pressure.  I think that the first step to reclaiming your mind is to pay attention to what you pay attention to.  Only when you see what direction you're pointed in do you have a chance to change it.  Where you go from there is up to you.

I've learned so many things in the course of my life that I can talk about philosophy for days, but I'd like to leave you with a couple of things that I've come to believe.  I hope that, regardless of your belief system, we can probably agree that putting these suggestions into practice would help everyone.

1.  Don't be a Dick - Is getting your way all the time or being oppressive to others really THAT important to you?  People can disagree with you without it threatening you.  If you expect others to respect your opinion as valid then you have to do the same. (i.e. Do Unto Others)
2.  Think (twice) before you Act - Any action, be it a word or a deed, has consequences both foreseen and unforeseen, both apparent and invisible.  So be sure that you want to act.
3.  Figure out what is Important and give your attention to THAT - Whatever it is, for you, that fully engages both your mind AND your body is something that deserves your attention.  Whether it's sports or business or family or cultivating friendships, it's not the activity itself that's important; it's the way it activates you.  So if it activates you, do it.  And, one day, if you find it doesn't activate you any more......move on down the road.  There will always be something new.

I don't care what your spiritual background is or what your current beliefs are.  But I would like you all to know this: I wish you all the best.  You deserve it.