Finally, getting back to my original point, what turns me off about pretty much every organized spirituality, including R's, is that there is a Higher Power, a Creator, a God, a Goddess, someone or something that oversees it all, made it all happen, and is basically running the show. I believe that in the spirit realm, we are all one, we are all equal, nobody is better than anyone else, and there is no need for any power of any kind. There is no need for a hierarchy because there is no personal conflict. It is serenity. It is Being.
Oddly enough, this is something I could have said about my own spiritual belief. so, I guess we're both freaks. No gods or goddesses, just spirit everywhere, in everything, sharing a mutual ongoing act of Being. No One makes it happen, it simply Is.
I call myself an animist rather than a theist or an atheist. For me, the spirit/life energy/whatever is everything - what we see, touch, sense is the manifestation of spirit in this way of being in time and space.
I know that some of my beliefs come from reading - everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Seth book by Jane Roberts - but I did a lot of that reading because I was looking for ways to understand a host of involuntary and spontaneous experiences with altered states and perceptions that I had as a child - everything from seeing auras to having precognitive dreams and moments of apparent egolessness and unity with everything. Strange stuff for a kid to deal with when there are no shamans hanging out in the neighbourhood to explain what's happening.
Of course, years of meditation have made these states more-or-less controllable, to be entered into at will rather than involuntarily, but it was the need to find out what was happening to me and build a spiritual framework for myself that would allow me to integrate these experiences that led to both the reading, and to the beliefs.
no subject
Oddly enough, this is something I could have said about my own spiritual belief. so, I guess we're both freaks. No gods or goddesses, just spirit everywhere, in everything, sharing a mutual ongoing act of Being. No One makes it happen, it simply Is.
I call myself an animist rather than a theist or an atheist. For me, the spirit/life energy/whatever is everything - what we see, touch, sense is the manifestation of spirit in this way of being in time and space.
I know that some of my beliefs come from reading - everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Seth book by Jane Roberts - but I did a lot of that reading because I was looking for ways to understand a host of involuntary and spontaneous experiences with altered states and perceptions that I had as a child - everything from seeing auras to having precognitive dreams and moments of apparent egolessness and unity with everything. Strange stuff for a kid to deal with when there are no shamans hanging out in the neighbourhood to explain what's happening.
Of course, years of meditation have made these states more-or-less controllable, to be entered into at will rather than involuntarily, but it was the need to find out what was happening to me and build a spiritual framework for myself that would allow me to integrate these experiences that led to both the reading, and to the beliefs.