There is an old Chinese proverb about the journey of one thousand miles starting with a single step. It's true and the older that I get the more wisdom that I see in these sorts of ancient philosophies.
Everyone in this world is trying to sell you something. Sometimes they are trying to sell a good, sometimes they are trying to sell an image, sometimes they are trying to sell themselves, and the list goes on ad infinitum. What is jedijawa trying to sell? Well, that's a tough question ... I don't know. This has been envisioned as my own spiritual growth tracker and if anyone enjoys reading it or participating then that works too.
I had an earlier couple of blogs that I started back in 2005. I hadn't posted to them for more than a year when I took them down last month. Only one person noticed but he asked me about it. I thought about keeping it around but decided that I was no longer the person who I was when I wrote that blog. I enjoyed the many hours that I put into the 1500+ posts that were there and some of them may be recycled some day in some form or another. However, the biggest thing is that I was in a different part of my journey then. I was more prone to outburst and outrage. These are things that I've been working to control and limit within myself over these last two years. So here is the new thing.
Each day I try to investigate and examine myself and where I'm going in my life. I seek spiritual advice from a number of places: from friends, from podcasts, from books, and from attending Unity with my girlfriend where I find that the spiritual environment is open enough to be comfortable for someone who has largely abandoned the idea of organized religion. My friend Sky's tagline for Unity is "disorganized religion" and that has been a comfort zone in a world that is largely divided, at least in America between Christians and everyone else. Then there is a larger divide within the Christian camp of whether or not you are the "right kind" of Christian. So I gave all that up. In my former blog I was bitter about that process so I have sought to temper those feelings and expressions except for breakthrough moments of which I'm not proud.
Hence, I consider myself to be some sort of Buddhist who has fled from Christianity and all of the things that I didn't appreciate about it. I've considered myself a deist until the last year or so where I now see myself as mostly Buddhist with a pantheist outlook (though my church tends to be more panentheistic). Yes, words and categories tend to bug me but people ask so I tell them and then get a blank look. "You mean you don't believe in God." And I say, "that's not what I said ... buy a dictionary or use wikipedia in a pinch." I don't actually say that. If someone wants to know I tell them and then they are usually sorry they asked because it seems foreign to them and I feel bad for making them uncomfortable ... while feeling a tang of enjoyment as well. I think that it's important to think about, understand, and be able to explain your beliefs ... but that's just me.
Well, that's long enough for an introductory post. I will return from time to time with other musings, struggles, breakthroughs, and history of how I got from there to here and where I hope to go. Read if you must, comment please so I can see how I sound, and email me if you wanna.
