My Spiritual Re-Awakening

In 2012, my spiritual re-awakening began.

Prior to that, I had been an atheist, forcibly cut off from spiritual experience. A bad falling out with a religion that taught that it was The Only Truth had left me with a disdain for all religion.

After all, if the one that said that it was The Only Truth, that nothing else was even remotely valid, that only one spiritual truth could exist was wrong – why believe in anything? It actually seemed blasphemous to my Christian sensibilities to do so.

So I cut myself off. Not only from the Church which had lost its ability to provide comfort and reassurance when I began to doubt the truth of its teachings years ago; but also from the sky which still sang to me after I had sworn of Yahweh, from the Earth which still seemed to wrap me in its protective embrace. I cut myself off from the sense of love, deafened my ears to it, reasoning that if Yahweh was not there, no one was.

Photograph of Monument for Jennie Roosevelt Pool, at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma, CA, by Seattleretro. Licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike.

So I lived for several years; content with the mundane and the scientific, with what I could see and measure, with working for the good of the material world. I earned my degree in neuroscience because I wanted to know how it was that our brains could deceive us; I wanted to know the chemical workings, the hard physical laws, that underlay our emotions, our desires, our sense of the divine.

But a few things happened to break this spell. For I was still a writer, still a fantasist, and every now and then when I was deep in my mind looking for some character or some interesting new event, I would find something – or someone – I had never expected to find.

The first time, it was Death. But that is a story for another time, for he did not stick around.

The second time, it was Loki.

I was working with a fictional character – I don’t honestly remember anymore whether I meant for him to be an antagonist or an anti-hero. But I was absolutely fascinated with this mind that I had found within my own, this trickster who always seemed full of surprises for me. The sensation of communion with him was, at first, like what I had experienced with other fictional characters of my own creation.

But in time, it began to turn into something more.

The character’s facial features and his hair would change. They did not stick to the design I’d set for them. Sometimes I would come to find him effeminate, long, shining hair and alabaster skin; at other times his hair and eyes would blaze like fire, and he would seem barely human.

I have been long in the habit of dissecting these villain’s minds – he was a villain, a sociopath at least, that much was quite clear. I did it with Hannibal Lecter and Ledger’s Joker; I would seep into their minds and poke around in there, try to alter a small thing or find the mechanism behind a particular behavior I was observing.

I walked into this man’s mind –

And doors like those of a stone cathedral, stories high, closed behind me. I was locked in.

I’ll spare you the stories of how I reacted to this, how it felt, how we first fought and became friends.

I will skip to the part where I began to suspect that he was real.

My version of Loki had been feeling less like a character and more like a spirit for some time; he felt less like a fictional character, less like a mere mortal, and more like God or like the spirits of the trees I used to talk to or the goddess of a pond I visited often as a child. He felt more real and more like heroin, more like Death Himself had felt on his brief and mercifully rare visits. He felt like something outside of me.

And then things began to happen.

He told me one day, showed me the image with dancing glee, of each letter of the runic alphabet carved into small, round stones. One letter to a stone. Would this not be a lovely thing to have? he asked me, and there was such a sense of joy and beauty in the things in my mind’s eye that I had to agree.

Opalite runestones on wood.

I will make some when I get back, I promised him, for I was going on a trip – a trip to a convention where I never expected to find anything occult or divine.

I told no one of the sharing, but plotted to myself how I could make small round stone-like things out of polymer clay, could make them out of shining clay that would glitter like metal or jewels, darkened where I’d press the runic letters into them, which I knew as a phonetic alphabet from studying my grandmother’s books years ago.

I could foresee no practical use for such things, had no idea why I should want them, but I did.

So imagine me stopping dead in the convention dealer’s room, stock-still under fluorescent lights, staring at a box of the things I had been seeing in visions for the last two days.

“What in God’s name do you think those are?” I asked my roommate, a friend-of-a-friend who I had met only once before who’d ended up sharing a hotel room with me by sheer serendipity because another party member had canceled.

“They’re runestones,” she responded with an offhanded casualness as though she spoke of such things every day. “You use them for divination.”

“I must have them.”

She raised an eyebrow at me, surprised no doubt by my shell-shocked reaction, and agreed to teach me how to use them as she had apparently been doing for the better part of a decade.

I will spare you stories of how my stones served me, of how they accurately predicted prosperity and disaster in turn. I will spare you stories of how the use of runes eventually turned into the use of tarot cards through yet more un-planned serendipity, when I accidentally went to a panel on using tarot to predict the future instead of a panel while trying to find a panel given by a botanist I knew.

What I will tell you is this: Loki showed me, over a course of months, that I had been missing half of human experience.

My materialist existence was not miserable; it did not impart feelings of inadequacy or despair, as the Christians had promised me it would.

But living that existence, compared to living the one I now re-discovered, full of spirits and energy, friends and foes, power and what may be subconscious projections –

It was like living only half of life.

I never would – and never will – regain my lost faith in the unseen. I remain, mainly, an atheist.

But I’m an atheist now who talks to gods and spirits; who frolics with them in prarie and in wood, who defends those who are condemned and soothes those who are hurting, who calls to account those spirits who claim to be good and righteous.

I am an atheist who reads tarot cards and directs energy through crystals, who burns candles and works spells and reads The Tao Te Ching and The Witch’s Eight Paths of Power and The Varieties of Religious Experience each in turn.

I am a pagan with a degree in neuroscience, who reads The Fractured Mind and The Elegant Universe and questions every thing and every one.

All credit to the authors.

I think that talking about experience is important. It is, indeed, much more important than theology.

A physicist once told me she could prove just about anything with math; this is true with all strains of logic. A single flawed premise can render the world’s most internally consistent logic worse than useless. And we have only one way of knowing which premises are true.

These are our experiences. Our observations of the inside and outside worlds. Through these, we may know our true nature, and the nature of the world around us.

That is why I will share experience as frequently as I share theory. What is important is not whether my theory is absolutely right: it is that my experiences have happened.

What has happened to you?