kamya said:
morrowrd said:
mattsmom said:
Just curious - I will be 43 on Sunday, and really have never felt like I fit in entirely anywhere. However, my relationship with God is top-notch (in the spiritual, not religious sense). I think of God constantly, in a free-form, esoteric way.
Have you read the books "conversations with God?"
And to answer the question, my connection to my spiritual side goes up and down, depending on what's going on in my life. Lately it's been on the lower side, distractions tend to get in the way but like you, I think about it every day.
By the way, happy belated birthday.
I bought the set of those books a few years ago because they were so highly rated on amazon. I wasn't able to finish the first book. Wasn't my cup of tea at all. :O It just felt so clumsy and thrown together. It felt like something I would be able to throw together if I was given the same premise and forced to write a book.
Maybe I didn't read it right =p Can you share how it helped you or what you were able to get out of it?
I didn't read all the books either, not even the entire first one. Years ago, like the 90's my mom introduced me to them, she had the whole series and I flipped through them. The author wrote about how he was tired of religion complicating spirituality, mainly with ritual and he began a relationship with God by having "conversations" - in other words, speaking and allowing thoughts to come into his mind as an answer. This was similar to some of the ways I spiritually connect, with my own "higher power/s." I won't deny, I've been in that world, as a christian growing up in a christian home, I was involved in all of that. My parents started a church, I spent a few years at bible school, in the army I was heavily involved in church and religion. And as much as I had alot of head knowledge, nothing moved from there to my heart. I had alot of personal issues, social dysfunction, and personality disorders that made me an outcast. Praying and crying about it did nothing. So in the early 90's I began to integrate what I had been learning from teachings from Gerald Gardner, Anton LeVey, Paul Huson, with teachings from childhood, and merismos teachings I went through in the mid-late 80's from Randy Shankle ministries (School of the Prophets, Marshall TX).
Meditation techniques to clear your mind, brought answers much like the conversations with God books. When I began reading them, I saw a parallel and allowed for a brief time in between estrangements with my mom, to talk about spiritual things. That was 20 years ago...and my spirituality has not really evolved, as much as I would say matured. It's gone down a road where the conversations happen daily. And without getting too deep, anyone that has a real spirituality - will understand why we keep it to ourselves. Unlike as a christian where we tell "the whole world" - you get all caught up with proselytizing pressure, (like the mormons going door to door) you lose that personal connection to real spiritual power.
Power is the ability to make changes to a status quo, because you can. We are Spirit, Soul, and Body, most people are not connected to their spiritual side, only the soulish.... lacking "spirit" so the saying goes. A bridge between soul and spirit is what merismos is about, (the 80's teachings I was referring too.) A step in the right direction, if anyone was asking me, would be to learn some meditation techniques, clear the clutter out of your mind, and seek some real wisdom. Life isn't as complicated as it seems, nothing is as bad as it seems, and one of the primary pieces of valuable information witchcraft provides is in the charge of the goddess. A long drawn out essay with alot of thees and the's - but the short version of the moral of the story goes.... all the answers your seek, lie within. I worked on myself for 10 years, because I wasn't happy with the man I was in my 20's, ashamed of myself because of all my "problems" - that 10 years of work, one of the things I learned was about power. Some of that information did not come from books, but "conversations with God" - only a different way.