MaW’s Blog

Now in all his occasional wonderful eloquence, Alex made a blog entry in which he discussed an experience he had at church. You can find that here. Then in further eloquence, Carl posted a blog entry in response to that which you can find here. He keeps saying it doesn’t make any sense, but it does. Trust me Carl, it does.

As those who know me will most likely know, Alex and I don’t share a common set of religious beliefs, which is another way of saying he’s one of Them, and I’m Not (but if you want to get right to the nitty gritty of it, he’s a Christian and I’m a Pagan Witch). So perhaps it is moderately imprudent to comment on Alex’s accounts of his religious experiences. Well tough, I don’t care, because there’s something that has to be said about Alex’s recent experience, Carl’s comments on said experience, and my own experiences.

In a comment on Alex’s post I mentioned that his description of the feeling he experienced in church at the weekend — the pressure all over, the sense of emotion — was similar in many ways to that which I experience at such times when I’m close to the Goddess and God. I’m not really sure where I’m going with this explanation but bear with me if you will.

Inside the magic circle, a Witch exists in a space which is often described as being ‘between the worlds’. We cast the circle to create a space which we can ‘lift’ out of the material world we spend most of our lives in, and place it closer to the world inhabited by the Gods. Once there, we can call the Goddess and the God into the circle, and work with them to bend our will to a purpose, or merely to acknowledge them and gain from time spent in their presence. In covens, it is not uncommon for the High Priestess and the High Priest to invoke the Goddess and God into themselves, becoming temporary hosts for the deities involved. These things are much easier within the circle, as it lies closer to the realm of the Gods, and is free of the distractions and noise of the material world.

This is not to say that it is impossible to communicate with the Goddess or God from the material world. It is still entirely possible and happens quite often. After certain experiences I’ve had I have no doubts about that whatsoever. This is where I start to crawl laboriously back towards Alex’s experience and what I want to say about it.

In my experience, an encounter with a Divine being is something which is absolutely unmistakable. You do not come away from a meeting with Ceridwen or Brigid wondering if they were actually a Goddess, you know it beyond all doubt. The Gods exert an identical certainty. A common thread in the divine presence.

This presence would seem to be characterised by a number of physical symptoms. One is a feeling of pressure across the body. Another is a pulsing roar in the ears. Another is a feeling of warmth. Strong emotion is easy to come by under these conditions. Sounding mildly familiar?

It would seem that the Christian God exerts similar physical effects on those He chooses to come close to as the Pagan Gods and Goddesses do on those Witches who come close to Them. This is something I find very interesting. How can any argument about one God being real and all the others not being real hold water when the followers of different, at least partially exclusive religions are having similar experiences when they are close to their God(s)?

Now there is a scientific explanation for these physical effects, at least ones similar to what I’m describing, and the mental effects as well. Stimulation of the temporal lobes in the brain causes a sense of presence, feelings of emotion and all the things usually identified with a Divine presence. Curiously enough, not everybody appears to be susceptible to these particular sensations — perhaps atheism is, in some cases at least, hard-wired.

The question does still remain of course as to how the temporal lobes get stimulated. It is possible that it could be unconscious activity by the brain, but you could start hunting for causes of that and causes of those causes and causes to cause the causes of the first set of causes. I don’t really like getting into things like that because ultimately it points to what seems to be going on here.

People have a button, or similar such device, which a God may trigger when they get near. It might not be a button, it might just be a proximity detector, but it seems that all Gods are fundamentally similar in that they set the thing off. So really, what are people arguing about?

Now in reference to the title of this entry. The sermon Alex was at when he had the particular experience which triggered this load of entries from other people concerned the concept that all people are fundamentally broken in some way. This is something I find interesting. Christianity teaches something which is not accepted by Paganism — the story of the creation, the Garden of Eden, the Fall of mankind, and the concept of original sin. That’s about as fundamentally broken as you can get, but despite every human being a dirty stinking slimeball scumbag, God can still find it in His heart to love everyone. That’s pretty impressive.

Back to Paganism. As I understand the general viewpoint, the Gods are beings connected to us at a fundamental level, since we all have some part of the essence of life which they are also made of inside us, forming a universal whole where all things are connected at some level. Quantum mechanics is a weird enough branch of science that it does actually strongly suggest that the entire Universe is connected and there is some sort of instantaneous means of communication between fundamental particles no matter how far away they may be, so there’s some backing for this theory that doesn’t come from the naked people with the broomsticks.

What makes people different to Gods, though, is our lack of understanding and perception. We can’t see what they can see, and we can’t understand what they can, because we’re limited. This lack of understanding and awareness leads us to make mistakes, to hurt others even unintentionally, to lack foresight and to have self-doubt. Really, we’re kind of broken.

Ah! We’re broken! People are all broken. It does have a good sound to it, not because it’s something we want to be true but because it’s something we know to be true. Think about it and you might even agree with me. I know for sure that I’m broken — it’s about the only thing I do know for sure, in fact. Absolutely I know that what’s broken in me can’t all be fixed, ever, but life is a journey aimed at doing as much of that as possible, and if you get close enough… well, what happens next? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try to find out, isn’t it?

What it says about the similarity between Christianity and Paganism may be something I just pulled out of nowhere, but it’s enough for me to look at Alex’s religion and say ‘yeah, that’s okay’, which is important to me because so many of my friends are Christians. So yeah, Alex, it’s okay to write about things like that because everybody needs to know them. It doesn’t matter what religion they are (if any) because we can all learn from each other’s experiences. As Carl said in his entry, no need to apologise for posting about such things. They are important to you, and thus by extension they’re important for us, because the concerns of one person are in some sense the concerns of the entire human race, especially those elements of the human race who like to think of themselves as your friends.

This blog entry is brought to you by long and rambling blog entries ltd. If it didn’t make any sense, well, I’m not very good at writing about things like this.