A Question for my Pagan Friends.......?

Question

Please share with me what led you to this path?
When i discovered my Path, I found all of the things i had believed in my whole life, had always been Pagan beliefs.....
I believe our higher purpose here on Earth will be Magnified in the not too distant future....
My friends are you doing all you can to learn and grow spiritually, so that we are "up"for the challenge?
Please share with me your thoughts on the two of mine above?
Blessed Be Everyone!

Answer 1

I was raised in a Christian (Presbyterian/Protestant) family. When I hit puberty (around 12) I began to seriously question my religion and did a lot of research into alternative faiths. At that time the best 'conclusion' I had arrived at was Taoism. I really liked the idea of simplicity being the key to life. For the next 6 years of my life or so I bounced back and forth between feeling guilty for abandoning Christianity and 'saving' myself again and questioning. When I was 18 my religion/spirituality found me. I happened upon a book about Wicca an (of all places) my in-laws house. (They are all Methodist.) I began reading it and the rest is history! I did a LOT of reading on Paganism, Wicca, and witchcraft. And for a long time I labeled myself as Wicca or as a Witch, but I don't even do that anymore. My beliefs are far too eclectic to really be put into a box that small so I just refer to myself as an Eclectic Pagan, which means that I draw my beliefs from a variety of different places and belief systems including Wicca, Witchcraft, Native American Spirituality, Buddhism, Taoism, etc.

I believe that my 'higher purpose' has already been made apparent to me. Perhaps how exactly it fits into the 'big picture' may be magnified in the "not too distant future", LOL. There is a big transition coming.

I am doing so much to learn, myself. I found a teacher not too long ago and I am learning and growing exponentially at this point in my life. I am learning about Shamanism and I have been led to understand that this is my primary path and 'destiny', if you will. I can help many people and learn many things on this journey. I am a healer and I am still becoming a healer. I am a seer and still becoming a seer. (Constantly growing.) I know that somewhere in the storehouses of my mind (so to speak) are volumes of information about the nature of the Universe. (Because of past life experiences I have had and knowledge gained within them.)

I know that I am guided on my path and that I will ready and up for the challenge when the time comes because I am being guided to do so. If we all follow the paths laid out for us we will be ready.

Answer 2

I had backed into it. I faith tested belief systems to see which ones seem most true to me and set up a set of beliefs and found out what those beliefs were later.

I was floored when a fellow pagan told me that I was a pagan too, and after I researched determined she was right.

I had somehow chose my own path mostly without knowing where I was going or what I was doing.

I am continuing to grow, especially now that I realized there is so much more to the basic beliefs had faith tested, As I faith test more beliefs in wicca and paganism, I adopt a few and leave a few. Heres one I adopted most recently ending emails to fellow pagans with...

Blessed Be.

Answer 3

My sister actually introduced me. She was studying and told me about it. I decided that I should check into it and make sure she wasn't getting into anything bad. The more I read the more I thought this is it! This is what I have always believed! So I started following the path. As the years have rolled by I went further in my beliefs. I've not stopped becoming more spiritual with time.

Answer 4

I was born Pagan and I got to see the world from the other side. My parents stated that we could be anything that we wanted when we grew up, but I was quite happy with what I already believed. The other mainstream religions were so restrictive and condesending that I had no trouble staying right where I was.

Answer 5

I always felt a connection with the universe in a more naturalistic way than Christianity had described in my childhood. I happened upon Wicca in college and started to research it. It struck a chord within me and though further research I found that Wicca isn't exactly me, but Celtic Paganism (CR) just fits.

Answer 6

Merry meet, I was born into Wicca, my parents are Wicca, my grandparents are Wicca. I am growing spiritually on a daily basis, there is no finate knowledge just infinate. Continue on your path my friend for it is a long journey for all of us. At the crossroads we shall meet and continue together be it here on earth or in spirit...Blessed be.

Answer 7

I am a Lloydist. There is only one of me.. so i am the most pagan of all... my beliefs are a combination of multitudes of different religions, most of them pagan. I was led to my path because none of the others fit.

Answer 8

My friends who have read this before will forgive me, I hope, for repeating myself.

****

I'm a Preacher's kid. I grew up in church. I had bible stories read to me daily, and attended Sunday School, and sang in the youth choir, etc. Although my Dad left the ministry when I was fairly young, we remained a *very* religious family.

But my sense of sacredness didn't live in the churches I attended or in the words that I read in scripture, or in the sermons I heard.

My sense of the sacred lived outside those buildings, in wordless awe. And my understanding of the world was, I knew early, far different from what I was being taught in Sunday School.

The best part of church for me was always the music. But when I listened to that music, I didn't hear angels singing, I SAW forests, and mountains with clouds pouring down their sides like liquid cotton.

I recall telling my Dad (the ex-Evangelical minister) at around ten years of age that he had it wrong - that 'God' hadn't made everything, but had BECOME everything, had taken on material substance not only in the person of Jesus, but in every plant and animal and mineral and element that was.

I also began to think seriously about the process of thought, and how thinking affects what we experience, and wondering if how and what we thought could make material changes in the world around us. I started reading about the different levels of consciousness, and where the creative part of the brain is and what language it speaks (symbols and sensations) and about creating reality, which we do all the time, even when we don't do it with intent.

And I began to leave votary offerings to the nature spirits, and to call elementals (I started with calling Fire/Light), asking for direct illumination.

I read voraciously, and was lucky enough in 1971 to find, "by accident", a used copy of 'The White Goddess" which I devoured (and then the other Graves' books on mythology) , and "The Golden Bough", which led me to Margaret Murray...but I never saw a book on "modern Witchcraft" until I was in my late twenties, YEARS after I had been inventing and using rituals of my own.

I thought that Paganism was completely and utterly dead, and that I alone felt this pull to it. It was something I could not NOT do.

I don't want to turn this into a novel, but suffice it to say that for years I felt that I was the only person in the world who thought or felt the way I did. My family told me I was crazy - and not in a teasing way. After a while I just shut up about my thoughts. But I never stopped trying to find out the limits of what focused thought could do. And I never stopped knowing that ' God' couldn't be contained in one religion, or one gender, or one substance.

Years later, at a party (around 1985, I think), I was listening to a conversation between two women and it was eerily familiar. After a while I joined in and the three of us talked late into the night. At one point, one of the women asked me about some book or other on witchcraft (!), which I had never heard of, and then about some other books I had never heard of. She shook her head after a while and asked me where I had learned what I knew, and I told her and the other woman about this way of being that I thought I had made up completely on my own, and about the difficulty in being around people who treated me as if I were insane...and how lonely it was.

Both of the women smiled at me, and one said, "But you're not alone, and there's a name for what you are. You're a Witch". And they invited me to come to a "meet up" with their coven.

That moment was one of joy so profound that I wept.

I am a Pagan and a Witch, and I always have been.

Answer 9

A feeling of being part of nature and finding my place in it.

Answer 10

well the virgin mary is my ***** and i worship her