The Return To Innocence

http://www.upworthy.com/best-explanation-of-religion-i-have-ever-heard-and-im-practically-an-atheist

Dear every religious person: Listen to this. This guy is a bishop, and he's better at explaining organized religion as separate from the godhead than almost anyone I have ever heard. Dear every nonreligious person: You will be nodding vigorously and appreciating people like this man so much you'll wish every religious person was like him.

This is why I'm pagan. This is why I have no religion. The godhead - a single god, many gods, a source of energy, the higher self, nature, the universe, however you want to identify with it - has nothing to do with praise, fear, love, hate, organization, community, or what each person does in life. It just exists. It hangs around in its own dimension, formless, genderless, minding its own business, occasionally feeding off the soma of belief from living beings who find it pretty and comforting. It lets those beings shape it into whatever form they can recognize most. And since it is so pretty and comforting, people look to it and embrace it. If it makes them feel good, hooray! But to invent controlling concepts like Heaven and Hell just to scare people into running like children to your arms - born again, as it were, as this man says - is not a good way to explain your belief systems.
I'll say it again, but I believe Neil Gaiman did it best with "American Gods" - the idea that all gods are a sort of Mobius strip, circling back to creating themselves out of the minds of humans until they become real incarnations and sustain themselves on human worship... Except I like to think they originate in dimensions both outside our worlds and within our minds. Not quite panentheism... more like the universe being our own selves.
See? I'm so eclectic I don't want anyone else to "convert" to my belief system. I don't even know how to explain it. This is what happens when I'm raised by an atheist and agnostic both with very open minds.

"Some say the gods are just a myth. But guess who I've been dancing with? The great god Pan is alive!"
-"The Return Of Pan", Mike Scott and the Waterboys

Well, today still isn't going well, but who's counting? Love you epilepsy! Love you, hypertonia! Love you, sciatica! Love you, fibrom- wait, I just took pills for you. Love you, sinus pressure!

If you can't destroy them, dance with them?

I apologize in advance if I start snapping and snarling.
Depression, anxiety, moving in and out of realities, and extreme pains are causing me to have very low patience. So, let's just say that I will be in no mood to tolerate any good-natured teasing, obsessive attempts to ask me about my hobbies, armchair doctoring, or backhanded compliments about my disabilities. In short, if you can't tell my emotions from my typing, here they are: No empathy, no patience, needing to focus on my self.
I will have no time or patience for debates, questions needing immediate answers, or deep discussions requiring emotional investments. Did you do something wrong? No. But I am also feeling less empathetic than usual.
Laugh with me. Joke with me. Make me smile. Make me feel entertained. Don't make me feel as if I need to make you feel better. You can do that on your own today. I will be better tomorrow, and I will help you tomorrow after I take care of myself.
I will be dancing with things that seek to destroy me in order to soothe them.
It takes great energy and power to dance between destruction and creation.
See you tomorrow, loved ones.

Erin Gloria Ryan said it best: "I have given this all of my fucks, and the fucks I have given are still not enough fucks. So many more fucks need to be given, and I have exhausted my fuck supply. The fucks are on backorder. Employees are working overtime to restock my fucks, but in the meantime, please accept this 10% off coupon while we wait for the fucks to arrive via FedEx. I'll be over here, drinking wine from a Pac Man mug and watching cartoons."

I am watching cartoons and drinking various superfruit caffeinated juices from bottles with dragons on. With a goodly splash of Bombay Sapphire Gin.

Supportive likes and hugs are awesome. I'm just completely out of fucks to give and I haven't focused just on myself for so long that it's all finally boiled over. People have been asking if they did something wrong and this is the most polite way of saying "Look, I just need you to not pile things on me for a while. I'll be over there with my tea and my cartoons."

Let's see...
Spastic cerebral palsy with hemiparesis and hypertonia.
Temporal lobe epilepsy with complex partial seizures.
Fibromyalgia with full body flares and fatigue.
Sciatica in both legs.
Raynaud's Disease in fingers and toes.
Joint and nerve pains everywhere.
Major depression, general anxiety, OCD, ADHD without hyperactivity.
Disintegrating memory with dysphasia.

Yes, indeed, it is all here. Let's have a party and dance like the universe is watching.

And if the gods goddesses of destruction and creation can join me, I welcome it. When it comes to incredibly powerful gods goddesses like that, I get extremely cautious. I don't say their names lightly. If I really want to call Kali, I need a damn good reason. Many people do not really understand how old, powerful, and intense these deities are. The Christian god Yahweh may be the youngest and most popular deity in history, but there are gods who are so old that time doesn't matter to them.
And so, if I ask an old god to dance with me, I need to ask in a very, very respectful, gentle way.

I see color everywhere. I taste color everywhere. I hear, sense, feel, and connect with color. I cannot imagine a world, any world, without color, even in my dreams, even without my eyes. I speak in color. Everything I touch makes me explode in color.

People ask me why I can't use my mild psychic skills to 'heal' myself. I still have trouble explaining exactly why that is not possible. I can only pull, manifest, and manipulate elemental colors and cosmic colors so much.
I do not expect people to know what I mean. My perceptions are my own. However, I know many people who understand what I mean.

"It's something about the color..."
It's always something about the color.

Often, I dream in octarine, the color of magic. Everything is magic, and everything is color, and color shows me the depths of the universe that I cannot fully reach, not until I join that cosmic wave, full of indescribable colors that define what it means to exist.

This is why religion will never work for me. Not enough color. Not enough expansion. Too much external force. I need more color. I need more inside. I need my whole brain, which cannot happen unless the dead white matter and the damaged neurons somehow move again.

I am my own connection to whatever forces move existence. I am responsible for my own existence. My Higher Brain, my Subconscious, my Quantum Psychic Brain, and my Self are working together to create the most intense positive energy I have ever realized.

My transformation will come only from within myself. I am waiting. I am moving in directions that feel so right to me, no matter what external forces claim. I am opening myself to every past hurt, every negative feeling, and shifting them into the light. It it is a constant cycle, and it hurts so much that sometimes I cannot handle it. Meditative techniques are like lifelines.

The important thing is that I keep going. I keep growing. That is what matters. I am following the colors. I am the colors. I am made of light.

Bright eyed, bushy haired, bright colors, babbling due to painkillers and happy muscle relaxants and healing gemstones and all that weird pseudoscience silliness that I believe in despite my atheist agnostic upbringing.

I've been pagan since I was a teenager, so hah. Polyagnostic polytheist pantheist eclectic witch who will believe even if proven completely wrong. Even when my atheist skeptic parents insist that it's just my brain and that psychic powers don't exist, I will agree because that is true, too. There are so many truths out there. I love quantum everything.
See, I follow the Discworld concept: Even if a deity manifests in front of be and insists it is a great god, I will tell it "That's nice. Just because you exist doesn't mean I believe in you. I believe in my Higher Brain smushed with my Subconscious, which you possibly came from. But since you are here, let's party anyway. Red wine?"

I also follow the concept laid out by Neil Gaiman in "American Gods." I firmly believe that Man created God, and the Universe created both Man and God, and all gods everywhere sprang fully formed from Man's brain because Man's brain is more complex and extreme than we can ever conceive. The universe is bigger than everything. And we are all made of bits of the universe, and if we create a belief system with gods and spirits and entities, the cosmic consciousness of the Universe will go, "Huh, they really want this stuff, don't they? Well, shit, why not?" And the bits of our brains connected to the Universe will make our gods and entities real to those of us who truly want and desire the realities of those gods and entities. Like, our Higher Brains and our Subconscious Brains smash together to create a whole knew kind of brainpower, with psychic knowledge and spiritual knowledge and such.

So. I believe that humans can be psychic. I have had psychic experiences myself.
But I am actually skeptical whenever someone says they can easily predict the future. Time is always moving, see. The future is extremely fluid and rather non-Newtonian, simultaneously. No one person can consistently know the exact future without fail, because every possible future is slippery and plastic (not the polymer plastic, the physics type of plasticity: "In physics and materials science, plasticity describes the deformation of a material undergoing non-reversible changes of shape in response to applied forces. For example, a solid piece of metal being bent or pounded into a new shape displays plasticity as permanent changes occur within the material itself. In engineering, the transition from elastic behavior to plastic behavior is called yield.").
So, precognitives can see several futures at once, but it's all flexible. Like, predicting lottery numbers would be rather implausible. Knowing a precise fixed group of numbers at an exact time in a specific future is really hard to nail down. That's why the classic skeptic question "Well, why haven't any psychics won a big lottery?" is essentially technically correct. It's hard to nail down such a small, specific thing. And then there is seeing a changeable future: Seeing bits of a future that can be prevented or altered. Is that actually predicting the future? Which future is it predicting if the predicted future was changed? I do believe in forms of precognition. It's just that precognition in general is so hard to pin down all the time.
See how complex it all is? It's like quantum physics. Psionics really is no different from deep quantum physics. Can we truly prove what we cannot see or measure? I completely believe in clairvoyance, telepathy, retrocognition, psychometry, communication with the dead, and other such powers. It's all quantum, and the human brain is quantum and insanely complicated.

And I have also always believed in All The Gods, so whenever someone asks me if I believe in God, I always ask "Which one?" which leads to confusion and people thinking I'm, like, evil or something and must be saved or whatever that means. *shrug* I don't care. I like what I like and I don't want to push it on anyone because my faith is mine and your faith is yours.

I just ask that you please please do not attempt to convert me to Christianity, because nope nope nope. I am fully Pagan, as I have said. But I am also Jewish on my mother's side, which makes me fully Jewish*... and I know that Christianity is a Jewish heresay: Yeshua (that Jesus guy) was just a highly intelligent Jewish man who explored various belief systems, including paganism and Buddhism and Hinduism and such, and then returned to talk about it all, since he was never part god, he was just a very good human orator with mild psychic abilities.
*(I should add that my heritage is also Russian/Romanian/Hungarian on Mom's side, with Sicilian/Greek on Dad's side. So I would say that I'm Jewish with Sicilian, Greek, Russian, Romanian, and Hungarian heritage. I choose to have no part in the Jewish religion or culture, but I have deep respect for said culture.)

So, no. I am who I am and if you leave me alone I will not roll my eyes and facepalm at you. I love you all, I always will... but I can love everyone without being bothered by proselytizing. Love is love is love is love. There is no wrong or right, there is only love. Also books. Books are love. Stories create us the way we create stories.

Oooh... I finally found the perfume I really really want:
http://www.ascentiallyalchemy.com/goddess_essences.htm
Scroll down to Kuan Yin. That's mine. (I adore clementine, too)
Funny, because the last four days I have been dreaming quite often about Kuan Yin... and Tara. I may have two more matron goddesses.