April 6, 2007

• How I Think

  I do think, really I do.  Sometimes I even slow my thoughts down sufficiently to do a quick job of translating and put them into words — or, to be accurate, to put some of my thoughts into words.  I do not always think in words, and I often think thoughts for which I have no verbal referents.  I have been working my entire life to develop as broad a vocabulary as possible, have even added a few original words of my own to the lexicon, but still do not have enough words.

  (Of course, if you’re a sensitive telepath and have been paying attention to me, you already knew that about me.)  If I limited myself to the verbal level of thinking, nobody ever would have accused me of being, “psychic,” and I might never have found my vocation in this life.  …Hmmm… maybe there’s something in that thought, something that I can generalize.  Perhaps it is in the process of becoming verbal that most people’s nonverbal intuition becomes suppressed in childhood…??  That will bear more thought.

  And that’s how I think:  from one thought to the next, branching out, usually in a coherent chain that I can stop and trace back, but not always.  Sometimes new thoughts pop into my mind, and sometimes I don’t know where they come from.  My mentor, Dick Sutphen, says, “There is no little red light that goes off in your brain to tell you when you are receiving psychic impressions.”  It took years for me even to become aware that not all my thoughts were my own. 

  Then, it took more years for me to get used to that idea, and develop a habit of checking my thoughts and feelings (sort of a mental form of feeling around checking for injuries after taking a serious fall) to determine if they’re actually my own feelings if, for example, I start feeling unaccountably fearful or tense.  People tend to project strong emotions most forcefully.  My job is (and I really owe it to myself and those close to me) to understand whether a given emotional response was triggered by a life event, electrochemical states in my body, or somebody else’s thoughts impinging on my own.

  As Dick said, there isn’t any little red light to alert me when I’m receiving, but there is a definite and discernible, “Aha! Yes.” sensation or reaction when, at some point in that checkup process, I figure out what’s going on in my mind.  Fun with neuroelectrochemistry… and that’s how I think.

  This chain of thought about thinking was started this morning by this comment on yesterday’s shamans-and-witches entry:

  interesting! What got you interested in paganism?

  Posted 4/6/2007 12:20 AM by adifferentkindofbeautiful

  My immediate response when I read that:  “Oh, shit!  *cringe*  Not again.”  Okay, maybe I overreacted, but yesterday’s entry had not mentioned the word, “paganism”, and there’s a backstory that explains that reaction of mine.

  The next thought after the cringe was, “I’m not interested in paganism.”  Then came, “Wait a bit–I’m interested in everything, and especially in metaphysics, religion, spirituality and all that jazz.”  Then I took a moment to sort out my reactions, recall that backstory that explains my reaction to unwarranted references to paganism, and revise that hasty, “…not interested…” thought into something more accurate.

  Paganism simply means all religion not of the BIG 3:  Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.  Despite centuries of missionary efforts in Asia, Africa, the Americas and elsewhere, I think the majority of the world’s believers are pagan by the dictionary definition.  Pagans with a small p are not to be confused with the Neo-Pagans, who almost universally tend to drop the “neo” and call themselves Pagans wit a capital P.

  Despite all my best efforts to transcend every little knee-jerk bit of my own intolerance, I am far more tolerant of any pagan believer in an aboriginal religion than I am of the believers in the Big 3, or of the Neo-Pagans.  My intolerance is not a matter of conflicting beliefs.  By that, I mean that I am not intolerant of them because I hold beliefs that are different from theirs.  It is because I find it easier to understand how, for example, Buddhists, Taoists and other religious adherents can accept the tenets of their religions as truth.  I find it relatively difficult to believe that anyone can blindly swallow the internally-inconsistent dogmas inscribed in the holy books of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths, dogmas based on fear and denial.

  Most difficult of all for me to understand is how Neo-Pagans manage to overlook or deny the all too evident twentieth century origins of their religion and persist in calling it the Old Religion.  I am totally unlikely to let my lack of understanding lead to any sort of overt persecution, but I appear to be simply incapable of stifling all the incredulity I feel.  Sometimes my incredulity seems, to those who hold Neo-Pagan beliefs, indistinguishable from ridicule.  So be it.  There it is.

  But that doesn’t explain why I cringe when someone suggests that I’m interested in paganism, does it?  It’s really a long story, but it boils down to this:  I have been unjustly accused of being a pagan.  During the years that I publicly advertised my psychic services and then while I was helping Greyfox edit his newsletter The Shaman Papers, on numerous occasions pagans would mistake my psychic counseling and/or my shamanic practice for evidence of pagan beliefs.

  It is nonsense, I know.  My counseling practice has nothing to do with religion.  It has everything to do with psychology, even though the majority of mainstream psychologists deny that.  Likewise, shamanic practice is not a religious act, even though many pagan religious practices involve a shamanic altered state of consciousness.  The latter half of this lifetime of mine has been spent in freeing myself of dogmas, transcending religious belief and all other false and limiting beliefs.

  For a time, I used to resent it when someone would mistakenly assume that I shared his or her belief system (BS, for short), but over the past few years I have succeeded in liberating myself from resentment.  I’m still working on some of those old knee-jerk reactions, though.

  So, in answer to that question from adifferentkindofbeautiful, I guess I’ll just say, “How did you know I was interested in paganism?  I hadn’t mentioned it.  You must be psychic.”

  By the way, if I hadn’t already noticed that I’ve been on a blogroll here lately, it would have been obvious yesterday when I got two messages from separate Xangans suggesting topics for me to address.  I have added druidry and global conspiracies to my list of proposed topics.  I can handle about two more topics before I’ll need to find another scrap of paper on which to note them.

  Stumble It!
  

  • 3:16 pm
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