In the “About” section I mentioned that I could rattle off a laundry list of things that have influenced my spiritual development, but thought at the time it would have been beyond the scope of a simple bio. Well, I’m gonna do that now. Like to he’ it? He’ it go.
I was born into a roman catholic family, balanced precariously somewhere between fire & brimstone and EULA (scroll to the bottom and click “I agree”). For a long time I had a mental image of God as some belligerent old man in the clouds watching my every move with a lightning bolt at the ready waiting for me to do something wrong. Something in me knew that there was something very wrong with these teachings. Being as how I was raised with the understanding that the Bible was the literal word of the One True God and anything else was of the Devil, I began to explore the only alternative I had available.
I was …”lucky” that at the time I began my studies it was a simple matter to head to the nearest ‘hip’ bookstore/cafe and purchase the works of Anton LaVey. It fed and fed on my resentment in a metaphysical feedback loop. Turned me into a weapon against the church. I also got my hands on the Lost Books of the Bible, and researched the history of the Crusades and the Witch Burnings. Anything to help poke logistical holes in the holy manuscript and lay blame at the feet of the church. For a while that was enough. Many can understand the lure of vengeance sated. But it is a point of pride for me that I do not have a great deal of what might be called emotional stamina. Holding a grudge takes energy, and can be very tiring. From there it was a stone’s throw to learning of Aleistair Crowley and the Order of the Golden Dawn. I learned much of the science of magic and the way energy and willpower interact.
It was about that time that I also began studying philosophy and psychology. Some of the big names from that era of my studies were Socrates/Plato, Nietzsche, and Descartes.
Eventually I became aware of the more “traditional” forms of witchcraft, wicca, paganism, and druidry, and much later animistic shamanism. I adopted several deities of death and night as representatives of Daddy and his Shadow Envoy, but mostly focused on Hades due to a fascination with Greek Mythology and the Hellenic Pantheon. Note that my relationship with Daddy goes much further back, to blurry memories of early childhood. Pagan Gods only gave more form and definition to his features and traits. I have even begun likening him with Uriel the Archangel of Death and the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, but that didn’t come until much later when I began making peace with my christian origins.
Then, my mother shared the book Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch with me. This was the single most definitive turning point in my spiritual development. When I was growing up in church I would sometimes see people overcome with the joy of divine communion, raising their hands to create a receptacle for divine energy, dancing and shaking in ecstasy. I wanted that feeling, and I was envious that I could not achieve it through the religion of my upbringing. In Conversations with God, I found that feeling. In that book I had found a reflection of my personal truth, my resonating frequency. I consumed the entire book over the course of a sleepless weekend, read and reread, examined from all angles. I Grokked in Fullness, though it would be a couple more years before I learned that term. This was a person who had a literal relationship with God, what everyone from catholics, to protestants, to born agains always preached about, but always in the vague, unfathomable, “beyond human comprehension” sense. What’s more, when he described the method by which he accessed the “divine channel”, I came to the realization that God had been singing to me all my life, because that’s how I write songs.
A lot of people who I told informed me that it sounded a lot like eastern mysticism or new age spirituality, so those became my next research projects, and I found much more resonance with Zen Buddhism and Taoism. I also started experimenting heavily with lucid dreaming and astral projection, and psychic phenomena. I had been familiar with the concepts and had some experiences in my teen years, but that era saw a dramatic increase, and a more focused and intentional approach, which culminated with The Free Soul Method by Pete Sanders.
Finally, more recently, I have begun extrapolating Universal Truth by studying Quantum Mechanics, Astrophysics, Thermodynamics, and Biology, and cross referencing them with spiritual principles, which I believe, and hope, to be the future of our spiritual culture.
Random Moments of Epiphany 