Religion
Over time I have come to think of myself as a Buddhist Christian Pagan. The Buddha taught us to let go, Jesus taught us to forgive, and the pagans taught us to celebrate.
I had my first religious experience in August, 1949. That was a very bad summer, a summer of death and terror, spent mostly at a camp near Santa Cruz. The high point was sitting on a split log bench in a beautiful meadow listening to a minister talking about the most monstrous god you can imagine. The minister talked about a place called Hell, and I recognized it at once!
Suddenly there was another god in the trees by the meadow. And this one was a lot friendlier.
On my birthday I escaped into the woods to spend time with this other god. There isn’t much I remember about the experience, but it did start me on a search that has lasted until now.
The second experience came in March, 2001. It was the first day of Spring, and I had been at a Spirit Rock retreat for about three weeks. At one point, standing on a balcony of the meditation hall, I saw it again. Only this time it was a goddess, and she was just waking up from her Winter nap. I guess the mind can do strange things when you spend all day, every day, just sitting, walking, eating, and doing your chores.
When I came home from the retreat I wrote down my delusion: Pan Intentionalism. On the linked page I call it “belief”, but by thinking of it as a delusion I keep myself safely away from certainty.