Some thoughts on topics

[Aley]

Alex Noble suggested I come up with some topics we may wish to ponder.

What drew you to your current spiritual quest? Did you have a crisis or was it a natural progression?

What do you think of the ideas of free will and destiny?

Is it difficult for you to speak your truth at times? What kind of resistance do you meet?

And for my friends from outside the US...what kind of things do you find either difficult or frustrating when conversing/discussing topics with Americans? Is the cultural difference a barrier to true understanding?

[Ricky]

I think these are all great discussions to have, but before everyone starts to try and put their responses on each of these within this one topic, maybe you can start a topic for each of these question. That way it doesn't get to confusing trying to talk about all the different topics all at once...hehe....remember I'm having simple minded moments here lately...therefore easily confused...HAHAHA!

[Aley]

Of course, you are correct..But instead of putting too much out there, I'll start with one and if someone else wants to do another, go for it!

So, I'll start with #1. What drew you to your current spiritual quest? Did you have a crisis or was it a natural progression?

My current revisit to my spirituality came with lonliness and feeling isolated. I hav always been a seeker. But in seeking, I have spent time in isolation and witha group. The most growth came in 1990 when living in Panama City, Florida. There I met some wise people and we formed a rather eclectic group. We spent time teaching each other about dreams, subtle energies and Native American spirituality. Having been a northern "Congregational" protestant, I was unfamilliar with this information and wanted more and more information. I learned a great deal and was able to attend a medicine wheel celebration in Alabama in 1992 with my daughter.

In the mid 1990's I was despondent due to living in Houston TX and having no ties to anyone interested in spirituality, only fundamental chrisitanity. Curiously enough, I attended a Baptist college to get my Masters. While attending, I took Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam classes, and was able to visit a Hindu church and readd the spiritual text. Upanishads, Bhagavad-Gita, Buddhist Scriptures and Koran. This opened my world in a different way.

From about 1999-recently, I fed myself with many spiritual writing, most recently the works of Hindi mystic Osho. I also found myself interested in Buddhism and the works of the Dalai Lama and Lama surya Das. But, there was no community connection, no place to feed my soul collectively. Finding a spiritual nwtwork of like minded souls at Zaadz helped me release a floodgate of energy and creativity that I did not know existed stifled within me!

Then, as things change constantly, I found a friend who told me of this place, and I felt drawn to come and open a community here. One with no hierarchy, one where people learn from and teach each other and one where there is no ego judgment. It is my hope this place can bring people together to learn and grow. And I hope people feel free to express their creativity through writing any type of medium they resonate with.

Chaos= crisis meets opportunity.

Blessings to all of you my friends.

Aley

[David Hale]

Hey Aley -
There's room for chaos.

Just meandering around and back through this wonderful community you've seeded and tended.
Thanks & Blessings, David

[Gary Val Tenuta]

The road to my spiritual quest was a natural progression beginning way back when I was just a young kid in Sunday school. I hated Sunday school, really, and didn't like going to church. Nevertheless, something about the whole thing - all that "God" stuff - struck a chord in me. Then later, as a teenager, I began asking questions. Oh oh! LOL! That's pretty much when it all begins, isn't it! All those pesky questions that the "ones who are supposed to know" don't want you to ask. Then, much later, when I was in my 20s and on a ship in the Navy, I had a very weird experience. I was alone in a room and actually heard a male voice (sounded like it came from just behind me). It said, "You will be a minister." That was it. Short and sweet. The thing is, by that time my "spiritual quest" (so to speak) was really just beginning and it had nothing to do with conventional Christianity. The whole idea of me being a minister made no sense. But that little message - whatever the source was, I don't know - stuck with me, haunted me, actually - for many years afterward. No, I never did become a minister. Especially not after it occurred to me that the object Ezekiel saw and described in the Bible was so very much like a "machine", a mechanical conveyance of some sort, and more likely than not, an extraterrestial craft. That notion changed everything. Well, there was more than just that but - as they say - that's another story. Then, many years later, in the 90s, when I began working with the Engish alphabet and the intriguing results that were coming from it, I decided to put it up on a website. Before I knew it, I was getting emails from people telling me how much that work meant to them (for various reasons). It was the last thing I ever expected to hear from anyone. Now, some ten years later, I can't count the number of people I've heard from who have visitied the site and have somehow incorporated the work into their own personal life experiences and apparently something about it has taken them down new roads on their own personal quests. That still boggles my mind. But my life partner/soulmate/best-friend/lover, Julie, insists that it's the answer to the voice that I heard all those many years ago. Maybe. I dunno. I just do what I do. I had no intention of leading anyone down any kind of road. Well, maybe one road. The road to thinking outside the box. I guess maybe that's what's been happening. In any case, there ya go. Life is weird. But what an adventure. :-)

[Marty Mooneyham]

I would have to say that I have always been on some sort of spiritual path as long as I can remember. When I was just a young lad, I use to wake up early on Sunday mornings and walk down the street by myself to sunday school. I really didn't care what religion it was, I just like going to sunday school. And when summer came around. I was in my own little heaven. This meant vacation bible school. I was the only one in my family that (besides my Mom) that cared for any kind of spirituality. Even though she didn't attend church, she always told me that all beliefs lead to the same direction, finding God.
That time period faded fast as I got older and more involved with school. But I have always felt a special closeness with God. In my pre-teen and teen years I got heavyly invoved with the Jesus movement. I 'm pretty sure that this was because everbody else I knew was in it and I wanted to belong. But this just turned out to be a fad at the time. I even use to write "One Way" with a picture of the index finger pointing up all ove by pee-chees. But even after this faze, I still felt the closeness with God.
In my adult life, I stared to go to a fundamental christian church, Christ Chapel, here in Long Beach, CA. It is a gay gathering of people with a sprinkle of straight people. Here I felt warmth and welcomed. But I still wanted more. With all the love that was there, I felt lost and wanted more than just what Jesus and God wanted me to do.
At a coffee house I frequent alot, I became friends with a seer, who is always there giving readings for the customers.
I told her about my lost feeling and I wanted more. Then she told that I would probally be interested in The Church of Religious Science. So off to the web I went to do research on Science of Mind, and bam... I found home.
That was four years ago since I have guided to this new ( to me) way of thinking. Now I am going into my second year of Practitioners training ( as a matter of fact, tonight is the first class). This journey has led me back to what my mom use to say to me when I was younger, " All beliefs lead to the same direction, finding God."

[Burt Kempner]

I can't help indulging in a small smile when I encounter the phrase "spiritual path." It sounds so neat and orderly -- a straight line with nice shrubbery on either side. If viewed from above, my so-called path would resemble the claw tracks of a flock of demented roosters.

I grew up in a traditional Jewish household in New York, then Philadelphia. I had a habit of asking annoying questions that culminated in my being expelled from Hebrew school at age 13. A Jewish juvenile delinquent -- who knew there were such things? (Although my trespasses were against complacency, not property or propriety.)

Still, I convinced myself that I had no grudge against the substance of organized religion, just the marketing. But then, in a two-year period, I lost both my parents and one of my closest friends, none of them easy deaths. Do you remember seeing that old black-and-white footage of A-bomb tests from the 1950s? They would always show a little shack that literally was atomized from the force of the blast. The same thing happened to my belief system. I wondered if perhaps my particular faith had failed me, so I pored over every sacred text I could find -- Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Christian, Isalmic, Native American, wiccan, you name it. I found much that delighted and comforted me, but nothing that felt like home. So I had to find my way by myself, armed with a few books and a burning desire to experience the ineffable. It has not been a walk in the woods, but I wouldn't have had it any other way. Will my hard-won belief system blow up like that accursed shack under the right conditions? Perhaps. But then I'll get up, dust myself off and start over again. This is the only game in town, and I'm so happy to see that others want to play it.

[Aley]

I just love the postings you all have made in answer to this query. And I agree Burt it is no tidy path...except when we view it in hindsight, it all makes some sense! I love your claw track of demented roosters! That is priceless imagry.

What a colorful array of experiences leading you on the way to insightful understandings...we are all fortunate to have landed right here...and I appreciate all the wisdom and joy shared in the telling of your stories...we all need to be able to tell our stories...and to listen and be heard.

What a testimony to survival.

love, Aley

[CG Walters]

I am sorry for the way you were directed to the path, Burt, but it seems that the results have paid off.
Cheers to all the ones that ask uncomfortable questions that get them kicked out of the well-worn paths.

[CG Walters]

I remember virtually nothing of my childhood prior to about 11....most of what I do 'remember' is more like things that I have heard my younger siblings repeat enough times that I have formed associated pictures for convenience.
Around 12, I remember having a sense that one moment I had been in a blissful existence and the next moment I had awaken in this place and situation that made absolutely no sense to me! I remember ranting at a storm, swearing at the sky asking why, and what was I to do with this?

A couple of years later, I made the "mistake" of responding to a small town school assignment by a speculative venture on the metaphysical nature of love. It came from 'nowhere', not at all compatible with an experience/environment that expressed belief in nothing but work on the farm until one was senseless.
The teacher loved the essay and asked me if she could try to place it in some teaching magazine. Knowing the flack such writing would cause at home, I freaked out. She meant to help, but I saw it as a violation of trust for having expressed part of myself that I had never let be known before.
Being helpful, she called my folks to get them to give me the support that I needed to make me comfortable with having the work published. What I got was basically, 'you think weird. You should try to stop that. Maybe you should work harder so those things would not bother you."
I went back to class and tore the work up in front of the teacher. After that, I kept that part of myself further locked away. However, that one casual opening of the flow of what would come if I sat to write sent me down a path that I would never be able to (or want to...in later years) reverse…though it was very uncomfortable for a long time.

"Many of us have a bad habit of not moving along our way
Until someone disturbs our hiding place."

Quiet in my hiding, near the end of high school a tv show came out, Kung Fu. My friends were charmed by the action. Though I enjoyed the flowing movement of kung fu, it was the Taoist philosophy clips that fascinated me. “There,” I thought, “I want to know that kind of information!”
And so a tv show forced it out of remission.

[Aley]

Time tunnel came out in 1966 or 1967 and I was hooked! Kung Fu later hooked me too and I took karate at age 30! But I remember in 1967, in 7th grade, entering a poetry contest and winning with my poem "Heavens Ocean"...it was "channeled" through me during an English class...and it was awesome for a young person to write...wish i could find it!

Anyway...thanks for tapping this memory in me...long buried....in the young Aley that was me.

[Ricky]

I completely understand not being able to remember your childhood, I'm the same way. I can only remember about 7 years back....everything after that gets fuzzy, with the exceptions of the stories that I have been told by family....but they don't even seem like real memories, just something I was told.

[Gary Val Tenuta]

Ah, yes! Kung Fu! That show had a profound affect on me. At the time I was going through some emotional turmoil. But the calm, inner-directed manner in which the main character (can't recall his name other than "Grasshopper"!) handled all of the various situations that confronted him somehow spoke to me on a deep level and I began practicing a sort of self-invented "imitation" of that Kung Fu mindset as I perceived it from the show, including the breathing and body movements. I was amazed at the results. Thanks, CG, for bringing back that memory!