Thread: What was your Spiritual Journey?

Most of us, if we're lucky, were not born with the same beliefs we have now. We came to change our outlook on the world over time and grow and evolve. So rather than try to offer up some label of yourself as if you were some static being, describe how you got to where you are now.

Spoiler for My Story:

I started out Christian, raised with Christian traditions by an agnostic family who sent me to Sunday school and sold me the whole lie about Santa Claus. We only went to church once a year, on Christmas Eve, and my mom would consider herself Episcopal even though she doesn't know what that word means. I would consider her a secularist because she followed the traditions she was raised with but never contemplated their deeper meanings. My father was always an agnostic and I converted to agnosticism the first time I ever talked to him about God.

I remember being more religious than the rest of my family as a child because I had an acute understanding of the rapid passage of time and with it, knowledge of my own mortality. I clung to religion in order to escape death, and even tried converting some of my friends to secure my future in Heaven. One particular atheist friend had trouble with my reconciliation of God working his miracles through physical manifestations and said if I believed that, I wasn't a Christian. Troubled by this I talked to my father and reassessed my view on God, switching to what I called an Intuitive Believer, which I would now articulate as being dedicated to the vertical aspect of religion rather than caught up in all the details and mythology. I was adapting a more empirical view on life, but one where I acknowledged a great mystery.

It was only a matter of time before my fear of mortality re-emerged and I struggled deeply with this, once again, at age 13. I struggled to reconcile my uncertainty about the world with this fear and in one particular night I converted to what I suppose could be called Existential Humanism. I understood then that whatever happens to my consciousness after I die was up to the mystery, but I found comfort in the thought of dedicating myself to very positive change on Earth, and leaving a very beneficial legacy behind could amount to an after-life.

Over time, facing those who held the religious convictions I once clung to, I became a stronger and stronger atheist. Eventually I converted to LeVayan Satanism after a friend convinced me to read the Satanic Bible. I found the philosophy compelling at first but someone online pointed me to a website showing all the hypocritical aspects of Anton LeVay and eventually I went back to Atheism because I felt like more balance was required and Satanism was thrust into one particular polarity. I would continue to be an atheist until I went to college.

My aunt and uncle, who were sufis, gave me several books which I sincerely wish I still had, but they got lost at some point. One was called the Secret Teachings of All Ages. I also had a copy of Snowboarding to Nirvana but I think my dad gave me that one. I didn't read any of these books until someone stole my laptop. It's funny how a misfortune can be exactly what you need sometimes. The Secret Teachings of All Ages reintroduced a lot of esoteric concepts from an empirical attitude that I found inviting.

While I became a dedicated existentialist at 13, reveling in the uncertainty of the universe, which is a worldview I'll always have, I could no longer dismiss the metaphysical and esoteric concepts that sounded so ridiculous when they came from blind followers of organized religion. I was finding commonalities in the beliefs of societies that never met, and even finding archetypes. After having read hundreds of pages of this book with an addictive appetite, I picked up Snowboarding to Nirvana and the missing piece fell into place. I looked up Buddhist Cosmology and saw a complete picture of everything that the Scholars of Ancient Mysteries could only accumulate fragments of. It was like looking at the notes of blind men describing the various parts of the elephant, then finding the complete summary written by the men with sight. I no longer had any problem believing in an afterlife, because now the possibility was more likely than not. While the book itself, Snowboarding to Nirvana, contained many inaccuracies and was doubtlessly written by a charlatan, the window to Buddhism could not be closed once opened. While at heart I was still an existentialist, I was now one able to revel in spirituality rather than ridicule it. I was free from cynicism. That is why I believe that Dogmatists haven't thought enough, but Atheists haven't read enough.

I began to meditate and practice mindfulness with immense initial success. I was also able to Astral Project without difficulty. I'm not sure if it was the particular, spiritually magnetic town I was living in or simply beginner's luck, but even now, several years later, I'm still prying open the window to climb back to my initial experience. I understood how to see the world free from prejudice and how to see the essence of life in the present moment. I became more charismatic overnight and the quiet, dissembled thinker with poor speaking abilities became a vibrant socialite with a joke up every sleeve. This ended when summer came to a close and the dean of my school told me it would be best if I did not come back until I stopped smoking pot. I moved back in with my Mom and lost my ability to meditate effectively. I went to work for a ski resort, met the love of my life and followed her to Argentina where I consequently had my heart smashed to little pieces but then later had them put back together during a road trip through Northern Argentina. This experience came with it relentless coincidences one after another to the point where I could not fathom how they could possibly be simple coincidences. It was like I had a Guardian Angel on my back the whole time delivering me everything I desired.

This would mark the transition from Existential Buddhism to what I suppose would be considered New Age Philosophy. I read the Celestine Prophecy and discovered what I experienced were Synchronicities, and the reason I had so many at once was because I experienced a spiritual peak which would naturally be followed by a spiritual trough. This, along with some study of astrology, enabled me to understand why that particular peak had been so profound.

When I got back to the States, it was time to either go back to school or carve out a living. I got banned from Dream Views (This was before Alex took over and I was dissatisfied with the lack of respect the Admins had for the community at the time, especially after being temp banned for something I didn't do, so I took to trolling); My mother was being impossible so I moved to Utah with my father and went to school part time while looking for work. I succeeded at school but when I found a job I had to work 60 hours a week, luckily I had already completed all the work for the semester and merely needed to stay awake during class so I could pass the tests. I decided not to go back until my job ended but when it did a couple months later I started up at a new job and just never found the motivation to return to school.

After a year, realizing I could feel myself aging, working in a place I gained no satisfaction from, and also dealing with another heartbreak regarding a particular coworker, I probably should have gone back to school but instead of seeing the job as the problem I saw the whole state as a problem and didn't want to be there anymore. I had a ticket to Burning Man and my sister wanted me to meet her in California to prepare, meanwhile a friend of mine had moved to California and had been trying to convince me to move back, and another friend had been talking about moving to Oregon. I figured I would migrate back West and just find my place, so I quit my job and began preparing another roadtrip.

It was during this time I did a lot of acid and tried DMT. I had already tried pretty much every drug that you can name, but never in higher quantities. This time was different, after several sessions of smoking DMT I did 6 doses of some very strong acid and it was like on the DMT I blasted off into space, then on the Acid I was able to climb to the edge of the cliff and peer off into the place I had gone to. I texted a friend of mine who had tried to DMT with me earlier. I sent him dozens and dozens of texts trying to relate my new profound understanding on life, and he was at work not reading any of it but the fact that I needed to communicate intelligibly to a sober mind helped solidify the revelations I had. I had been taking an online course in Human Behavioral Biology and began to have revelations about the nature of evolution. I also began to see the deeper meaning from symbols that surrounded us in art. Last week I watched The Mindscape of Alan Moore and discovered many commonalities between these revelations and what Alan Moore talks about with the Idea World. This would mark the transition into my most current worldview, which I would later learn is known as Chaos Magic though I was not merely a practitioner of Chaos Magic, I was a philosopher of the Mana-based Universe.

Burning Man was an incredible experience, and one I hope to repeat every year that I'm able to, but it pales in comparison to the experience I just described. Or rather, perhaps this experience enabled me to enjoy Burning Man at a different level than I would have. It was not just a party, it's the Ladder between Heaven and Hell. And So is Earth.

I asked to have my ban on DV lifted to I could relate these experiences, and the rest is history.