a system of personal beliefs

Over the years I slowly put into words and context the things that I believed, that I felt to be true, that I had really never questioned my whole life. These were the things that just were. With or without my belief.

I sorted them out, expressed them out loud and acknowledged them. By doing so I built a 'belief system' for lack of a better description that stopped being random thoughts and became a foundation.

Some of these were/are:

Mother Earth is not a cute expression, Mother Earth (now I call her Goddess) is as real as the earth, older than the earth and would like to communicate with us.

There is something that binds all of the universe together, something sentient. Energy, an energy source, the source, the force, now I call it Akasha.

There is a spirit of life in all things, living or not, that is part of that network of energy.

Magick is real. Black, white or grey, mystical or practical, I have always felt that it was as real as the earth itself. There are also lots of tricks and cons and crap floating around labeled magic so it is hard to know when you stumble across the real thing if you are not aware.

There are spirits, entities, ghosts, wraiths, life forces....whatever the label...all around us. Some are aware of us, some interact with us and some are oblivious, possibly even malevolent (the jury is still out on that one), ie, the four 'saints' that I used to appeal to a lot as a child, still do on occasion, who always answered me.

If you can conceive of it, it can be. Telepathy, telekinesis, psychic abilities, shape shifting....you name it, someone has done it, others have tried, some will succeed in the future. Again, like magic....lots of stories, myths, cons, tricks and games appear to be the same thing. But this doesn't mean that the phenomenon are not real, just rare.

I also totally believe in science, in the scientific method, in research and questioning and proving and disproving and that a huge dose of skepticism is a good thing.

I do not believe in creationism, in most miracles, in taking any 'sacred text' literally. I recognize a good myth when I read one. Storytelling has always been a much prized art form for our species and continues to be so. The kernels of truths hidden in the myths, the directions pointed to by the myths, those are the real truths hidden for only those who truly want to find them.

All of these things tied together in a way that made sense to me. My firm belief is that most if not all of what I believe will someday move from the realm of faith and myth into the realm of proven science. The recent discovery of what physicists call dark matter and I call Akasha is reassuring to me along that line of thought.

So I came up with my own set of beliefs, my private dogma. I assumed that others who had grown up in a similar fashion had probably also found their own foundations, individually, privately, like myself.