How did you come to terms with your religious/spiritual beliefs or non-beliefs? Are you still coming to terms with them?

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For me it was a long road. In my teenage years I realized I never believed in religion and so considered myself an atheist. Religion was very interesting to me though, and during a phase in my life where I was willing to try all kinds of new things, I joined a Wicca coven. There I learned how to meditate, and also was introduced to a bunch of new age spiritual concepts such as the 4 classical elements, astrology, hermetics. We did group rituals and went on a few retreats. I read a lot of and about Osho during this time.

I left the coven when my life situation changed and I moved to Atlanta. I looked for a suitable group in Atlanta but never found one that I clicked with. I didn’t look that hard, because I was still really on the fence about this whole belief thing. One thing I always hated about atheism is how dead sure they are about everything. But due to lack of anything I really could sink my teeth into, my spiritual journey languished for a few years. I shifted most of my energy into philosophy.

I’ve participated in quite a few webforums over the years. One of them was the Steve Pavlina message boards. Steve used to be married to a psychic, and so the message board had a thriving community of spiritualists, and so I sorta fell back into spiritual inquiry. I started meditating again, and used a lot of the ideas people were trading around. I experimented with chakras, Intention-Manifestation, breathing exercises. I learned about the concept of the Higher Self and contacted it, along with other types of beings such as angels and demons.

Where everything started changing for me was when I discovered Dr. David Hawkins. Here was the “missing link” I was subconsciously looking for, a way to incorporate my thinking, scientific mind with the one that was interested in higher inquiry. I read Power vs. Force and worked my way through his various books. The idea of a spiritual “ladder” that one could climb made a lot of sense to me, lots of his ideas made intrinsic sense.

Hawkins’ ideas made sense but I wanted to be able to do my own research. Hawkins uses a technique called muscle testing to do his research with. It’s traditionally done with two people but I found a way to do it by oneself buried in the back of the book. Once I got the trick of it I started calibrating everything according to Hawkins’ scale of consciousness. For awhile the test behaved consistently, but at some point it started behaving erratically. I got the sense that there was something on the other end of the test.

So I asked the test, point blank, whether it was sentient or not. It responded ‘yes’. There started my most intense spiritual experience I ever had and probably ever will until I finally get around to trying out psychedelics. For a period of a few months, I would communicate with this thing and try to get a feel for what it was. I quickly established that whatever it was could read my mind and plant thoughts there, so I would focus on whatever I thought and ask whether I was getting it right through the test.

I worked on a lot of stuff during this time. I developed ‘psychic’ senses, dabbled in possession, telekinesis, channeling.

It was around this time my life started falling apart. I was spending so much time with spiritual stuff I couldn’t bring myself to find a job or anything. I took screen acting classes but couldn’t apply myself seriously to it. I thought I’d try to solve my life problems through the spiritual stuff I was doing. I made a bet with the thing at the other end of the test, by this time it was identifying as my Higher Self, that it couldn’t figure a way for me out of the hold I’d dug myself into. It promised me that it would. We set a date for the end of my acting class. I’d find a job or an acting gig or something interesting to focus on, or I’d stop testing and stop being spiritual.

Well, nothing happened and I ended up having to move out of state to live with my father for awhile. I was dejected for a few days but the extreme lack of anything interesting to do in small-town Alabama without a social group and nobody I wanted to be social with drove me back to spirituality. I started testing again, at first to try to understand what happened. This time, I started developing my own ideas rather than work with other peoples’.

I’d seen enough spiritual things to be able to come to a rough understanding of just what spirituality is, and what’s really ‘out there’. So I developed a form of logic that I call ‘contextual logic’. I used to try to articulate it to others, but it’s entirely too esoteric for even the most hardcore spiritual practitioners I’ve met. It would probably appeal more to a spiritually-minded programmer, maybe one day I’ll take another stab at describing it.

I eventually got back on my feet and started a career as a web developer. I stopped muscle testing, not because I thought it was bunk or anything, but because I simply grew out of it. For awhile I was feeling the answer to my inquiry strongly in my head even before I performed the test, and so was able to ‘wean’ myself off of it.

I shifted my focus away from spirituality and back onto the real world. I’d answered all the questions I’d had regarding spirituality, and synthesized my own approach to spirituality, and even was finally able to answer the question, “what am I, what is my purpose?”

Without any big questions left to answer, I am now free of the intense inquiry phase of my life and can move on to making my mark on the world. I turned my techniques toward my career and am just refining my approach to everything. I am still learning and growing, but without all the distractions. I use the logic I developed to help me understand really tricky human dynamics.

So, no, I am no longer “coming to terms” with my spirituality, if I ever really was. I am neither an atheist nor a theist nor agnostic. My understandings are far more subtle than the concepts that are thrown around could possibly capture. I do enjoy trying to articulate them, which is why I participate on forums like this one. The articulation helps me to clarify my concepts internally and helps keep me honest.