(Old Post) Beginnings

This is an old post I made on a site I was managing myself, but I've decided to move it here. It makes more sense to keep it all in one place.

There’s always something about new things. For example, I always love something new. Like this site. I made it brand new. Isn’t it lovely? But there’s more to it than just it being new, that makes it so amazing.

I could go on and on about how I love the feelings I get when I interact with something I haven’t used before. However, that has nothing to do with this particular subject. I want to say that, just as something new is the beginning of me trying to understand it for the first time, it is also a beginning of many things to come. This is my humble beginning at trying to explain things in the ways that I see them. This is my beginning, so that you may have your own beginning.



It doesn’t make sense, does it? Well, I’ll explain further. Everyone has their own image of everything, even if they’ve never heard or seen it before. Prime examples would be God, the president of any nation, or even as simple as a computer. Sometimes we all get caught up in our own images of things. Or, we get caught up in the “beginning” of getting a thought on how we feel about something. If this is the case, why think of anything like that at all? This is where it becomes amusing. We get wrapped up in it because of the “newness” of it all.

I’ll take this further. When you asked your parents (if you even asked) what there was outside of the world, what may be the determining thing that made things move, when there was something “bad or scary” and something was supposed to stop it, what did they tell you? Did they say it was God? Was it yourself? Karma? The Goddess of the Moon? Regardless of what, think back to the times you had those talks. Remember the “newness” of it all, and how you just fell right into the understanding, simply because it was just that new to you. We all had something that we believed in, whether it was God or yourself, so it was only even easier to fall for the “beginning” but never really think about “after the beginning.” We never thought about what came after our understanding. We didn’t do any real thought just after that, we were too young and accepting. We didn’t think, we just believed. This was the beginning of a thought process that centered around our own beliefs, understanding, and interpretation. This created our paradigm, the view we currently have on the world.

As a spiritualist, it is VERY hard and troubling to silence your paradigm when you are seeking answers to questions that are completely outside of it. Because of this, we often have trouble in answering the simplest of questions within spirituality, because people get it all confused with religion. However, all three of these are completely different. Your paradigm is what your view is of the world, and anything within it. It is the basis of your morals and ethics. It can be based off of religion or spirituality as well, but it is still its own thing. Religion and spirituality are seen as very close in common, but both couldn’t be further from harmony. Spirituality is the basis of what creates a religion, in all aspects. It’s always said that in order to believe in anything, you must have faith. Well, that doesn’t apply to spirituality. It does not need faith, or belief, in the traditional sense. It works off of knowledge and interpretation. The knowledge usually comes from within yourself, and excludes almost anything external. It is what you, as a living entity, can see within yourself, in order to apply outside of yourself.

Religion is a separate interpretation of spirituality, which attempts to harness everything representing spirituality in the belief in something external of yourself. Look at any major religion. All of them have their own morals, ethics, and definitions of “right and wrong.” They try to explain, in simplistic ways, what we should believe in, and it’s always external of ourselves. It always demands that we do not have the power to look within, that no answers are within us, and that it’s all separate. It screams that our choices can never come from us unless they are evil, twisted, and distorted. It also says that, in order to bring something good to ourselves, we have to look outside of ourselves for understanding.

This philosophy is but an illusion to many things. Religion says everything good is found in a separate entity (usually God, or some variation) and that everything evil is from your corrupt choices (either you are corrupt or something you have done forces you to be as such). This philosophy is simply wrong. I’m not saying all religions are wrong, but I am saying that certain parts and representations will always, undoubtedly conflict with spirituality. Not everything conflicts, and it’s not inherently bad, but depending on what you observe from a religion, it isn’t exactly close to spirituality.

Now, I am not going to sound like a preacher, for that is not really my style. I will say, however, that you should be careful with what you take away from any kind of information presented to you. In other words, you must separate yourself, if only briefly, from your paradigm, in order to see past the illusion of good and evil, and look at things from an unbiased perspective. This will help you forge your own beginning into spirituality, while still understanding at least some pieces of other religions.

So, what was your beginning? Did you begin somewhere else? Or is this your new beginning? Maybe I can help you begin your own spiritual path. Maybe this helped, or maybe not. It’s not my choice to force you into anything. But this is what I am presenting to you. Just give me a little of your time, if only for a little while. If this all doesn’t feel right to you, so be it. You may go on your merry little way, and ignore what you read entirely. But if this sounds interesting to you and you want to keep learning, then by all means stay. Just don’t make a decision until you’ve read at least a few of these little things. This one was a bit rocky, but I hope I got some of what I wanted across.

Hope this helps,

–Wasdramer