My Spiritual Journey

My Spiritual Journey

Seeing as this is my first attempt at blogging, it would seem logical to first introduce myself and give you a brief personal biography. Don’t worry, not the whole thing, just in as much as it relates to the subject.

I will start with the first inklings had that gave me the clue that something more than my personal experience on this earth wasn’t all and everything that there was to experience.

Back in the mid 2000s I was an arch sceptic about these things, I was a vehement atheist and would happily have told anybody who would listen that they were talking twaddle when they started on the spiritual stuff. I couldn’t see it or perceive it, therefore it didn’t happen.

It all started when a trusted friend of mine recommended me to read the book “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne. I thought “Well if she thinks that it is worth reading then I probably better have a go. I found that I couldn’t put it down and I read it through…..twice. This is unheard of for me, I never had read a book twice in my life, let alone back to back. It started something; an awareness if you like, that there was more to life than I could see.

It was at this time that the relatively new innovation of an e-book fell in to my hands. The fact that I found it very easy to read helped immensely. I started to read around the subject and then around related subjects until in the space of less than a year I had read 47 books. That was more than I had read, ever, through the whole of my life up to that point.

During this time other things started to happen that either hadn’t happened before, or maybe I just hadn’t noticed them. It appears that my blinkers (or blinders as America would have it) had started to melt away. Suddenly things that had happened in my childhood started to make sense. I’m thinking of the numerous times that I thought that my mother was calling me because I had distinctly heard my name called. She never had and I just blew it off as only a child can, thinking that I just imagined it. In more recent years I have had some interesting experiences; one comes to my mind when I was a coach driver:

I had gone in to the office at the coach yard and had been accosted by the dog that belonged to the boss. He was a soppy creature that always tried his hardest to get you to play fetch with him, and this day was no different. I wasn’t willing to get involved in this game because time was short and eventually he picked up his stick and went to work on somebody else. That day’s job entailed fetching and carrying people from a car park that had been set up on an old WW2 airfield in Oxfordshire (UK). The moment I stopped there I could smell what I could only describe as damp German Shepherd Dog. I looked around the bus, inside and out, and underneath to find this dog just in case I had picked it up somewhere on the route, and found nothing. I could smell this dog all day and I could still smell it when I got back to the yard. I walked into the office and the bosses usually benign soppy dog started to growl and snarl in my direction. Everybody was very perplexed about this, he’d never done this before…to anybody. It seems this spirit dog, if you can call it that, was still around me. It stayed with me for a couple of days before disappearing. I suspect that it was a dog that had belonged to a pilot that never came back and it was still waiting for him.

Other small things of this nature started to happen and have kept happening and at first I was a bit freaked out by it, but now I find it quite comforting that things do go on when your body stops. I don’t have any religious affiliations, I am described as “spiritual but not religious” which I believe is becoming more and more common lately. Not that I could have ever been described as being in with the trends of course. I always somewhat envied the religiously inclined amongst us, their certainties but I could never bring myself to subscribe to the doctrines that went with it. Now I am reasonably content that I have found my own path and now have my own certainties. I do view those of a religious nature as being happy to be what they are and contented with their beliefs. As the Dali Lama has said: “Everybody has their own path to the top of the mountain, just because they are not on yours does not mean that they are lost”.

At the beginning of this blog I said that I would not go on too long. As it appears, (quite unexpectedly) that I have a lot more to say, it will have to wait until the next episode, or Blog #2 as I’m sure that’s what it will be called.

TTFN