Tully's · blathering.

I've just come from reading this. For all that the author apologises in advance for rambling, it's a very articulate and sensitive exposition of one man's journey to his current personal spiritual awareness. It, and something else in the same genre, have inspired me to tell the story of my own journey so far.

It's going to be shorter than the other two, partly because I have a tendency to lose confidence in my blog posts, and partly because the two men concerned are each further along the road than I, in one sense, if not more, and so I simply have less to tell.

Chris Byrne's post, linked above, filled in the missing piece of the puzzle that has allowed me to kick this post off. I often call myself a lapsed Catholic, but I've now realised that that's a disingenuous description. In truth, I was never really a Catholic at all.

I was baptised Catholic, certainly, I went to a Catholic school and I took communion, but, as is a recurring theme in my life, I never became part of the community whose rituals I was engaged in. My parents, who are both very secular in their own ways, agreed to have me baptised and educated in the Catholic tradition, but it didn't take hold for two reasons:

1. They were happy to let me make my own choice, after the first couple of times, over going to church or not. I quite resoundingly chose 'not'.


2. My natural social reticence meant I never formed particularly strong ties with the people my limited exposure to the community brought me in contact with.

I found out later that even if my parents had been the sort of people who might have wanted me
to inherit a religious tradition from them, that tradition would be very unlikely to have been
Catholicism (my father's family are all Anglicans, and he has since apologised to me for not fighting my mother's family harder when they insisted I should be baptised; as for my mother, she hasn't been welcome in Catholic circles since my parents divorced, a fact that I find sickeningly un-Christian but never mind.)

That's the background. My current 'spiritual' state can be described quite simply: I have never had a 'primary mystical experience', and I don't really think I ever want to. You see, what Eric calls 'the drunken monkey of the mind' is the only part of my awareness that I trust. For whatever reason, I equate my concept of self so very strongly with my rational inner monologue - I can't trust any of my thoughts until I've expressed them in words I can evaluate later - that concepts that come from any other part of my psyche hold no appeal.

The experiences people who've made a personal religious journey describe sound to me indistinguishable from the experiences of people who indulge in LSD, nitrous and other recreational pharmaceuticals; the only difference is that Darwin very kindly provides the chemicals for free.

Let me go on to say that I don't think people should be restrained from inducing theophanies in themselves or any consenting other, any more than I think people should be restrained from enjoying any drug they fancy. Altered states of awareness are fine, as far as I'm concerned: get there however you like, don't mind me if I don't join you.

So far, I don't think I'm missing out on anything particularly important.