My spiritual awakening part 4

I forgot to mention two of important things in the previous post. One of those was that I cannot really remember my thought processes at this time, except for what I’ve just mentioned. But one thing that I do remember, is the other one. You see, I took out one week’s vacation from the post terminal that I was working at when this happened. I just wanted to take a week to myself and think things through. 

The first day of my vacation I was in central Gothenburg and I wanted to find a book to read. I went into the bookstore and my eyes immediately fell on Tomorrow’s God by Neale Donals Walsh. I did have a feeling that I was guided to it, but then I knew next to nothing about what I know today, so I didn’t think much of it. After a while, I didn’t think much of it, even though the book gave me some real food for thought and seemed like just the book I needed to read. Today I don’t believe that everything that is said in it comes from God. Because now I have some experience of hearing the voice of God myself, and I know that it’s often hard to distinguish from one’s own thoughts. 

Now I have lots of experience of being guided to books, movies and documentaries. I believe that God speaks to us all the time. We are just too occupied with thoughts about the past or the future to notice it. So for most of us, myself included, it’s just when God hits us in the face with a message that we actually take notice. I think that the robbery that I told you about in the first post in this series was such a message.

My spiritual awakening part 3

Just because I found meaning didn’t mean that my old patterns were gone of course. And among other things, I had developed the habit of lying to myself and others. Even though I wanted to be a force for good in the world, I was excellent at making myself believe my justifications for bad, destructive behaviour. But even then, I started to remove the worst stuff from my life.

I went back and forth for a bit, basically between living quite clean and partying quite hard. I tried some yoga and picked up a meditation practice. I don’t remember the exact times for everything. But somewhere around 26 I stopped smoking, started working out and went to the university. 

It’s interesting to look back at these things now. To see where I’ve made major decisions that have affected my life in a positive manner. And you can say what you want about the university (you learn a lot of nonsense there), but my time there taught me how to think in a different manner, to understand texts better and to sharpen my speech. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to get into the debt that I am in to get these skills. But I had fun and it changed me quite a lot in a positive way. It was an experience that both boosted my confidence and humbled me. It boosted my confidence to see that I did quite well in an academic setting and humbled me because I was constantly around loads of people that were smarter than me. And again it boosted my confidence, because I got to see how these same smart people could come to really stupid conclusions, when these conclusions were too shaped by their opinions. 

A little further down the road, I realized that my own opinions often skewed my perceptions of the world. It’s always easier to see these things in others than in oneself. 

An important lesson here, is that accurate thinking is very dependent on one’s ability to free oneself from one’s subjective opinions and views of the world. 

My spiritual awakening part 2

Before this event that set me off on my spiritual journey, I was a nihilist. I was into Laveyean satanism (basically ego-affirming atheism, at least on the surface) and I believed that life was completely pointless. You live and you die and when you die nothing matters anymore. I didn’t really care if I died tomorrow or in a hundred years and basically felt that I might as well grab hold of whatever little pleasure that came my way while I was still alive. Not that it was right or wrong. It just seemed like the thing that came most naturally when I just let myself go.

When I went through this back in 2006, I had very few to talk to about it and no one that knew exactly what was going on. And even though I never lost my faith in God, I slipped back into many of my old patterns after a while. But from this point, my life was less chaotic. I would say that meaningfulness was the big thing here. I cared whether I lived or died because I believed that there was a purpose with my life. Looking back on this now, I think that this is actually very significant. Because our attitudes towards life affect how we think, feel and act in pretty profound ways. I know that this could be considered speculation, but at the same time it’s undeniable. When you suddenly feel like there is meaning to your existence, you care if you live or die and then you start caring about your actions. It follows logically that this will have an effect on your actions.

My spiritual awakening part 1

I’ve written a lot about my awakening here on the Blog. But I wanted to collect the essentials under one heading.

For me it started way back in 2006. Basically I had started to question my former atheism a while back, when I got robbed as a direct consequence of the life that I was living. The same day I had had a hunch that something was going to happen, but since I didn’t believe in intuition and only a very vague openness to anything that went outside of the five sense reality, I ignored it and soon forgot it. In the evening it knocked on the door. I opened and four guys that I didn’t know stood outside. You can fill in the rest.

Afterwards I got a very strong feeling that this was God telling me something about the life. Had I known what I know now about religious psychology, I might have been more skeptical. The psychological literature says that traumatic events and rough periods can trigger sudden changes in religious beliefs. But I’m glad that I didn’t know this, because today I know that even though I trust the research on this, nothing happens by accident. Today I know that everything is in God’s hands and that God talks to us through every single little moment in our lives.