relevant to this community's interests

[bohemianeditor]

This Witchvox article has been making the rounds:

The Pagan Secret

... it has been bothering me for a long time that pagans have this idea that nearly anything you can conceive of as being a pseudo-religious experience is real and irrefutable as long as the person claims they believe it happened.

[...]

I'm talking about the New Age, fantastical world in which every animal, rock, dragon, Otherkin, and anything else JRR Tolkien could come up with lives on some astral plane and they've all got super magical secrets to tell you and treasures to share. It's not true, and it's time we called people on it.

Me, I like some woo in my spirituality and some spirituality in my woo, but it does help to keep them separate. One doesn't necessarily follow the other.

I also think it's helpful to look critically at the woo-woo bits, rather than do what this writer is railing aganst: uncritically accepting the least sparkly thing as a Profound Religious Experience.

What do y'all think about the intersection of woo and [your spiritual path here]?

Comments

[jenett]

I'm somewhere in the middle. I think everything on the planet has its own mysteries (in the religious sense) and wonders. But I also don't think they're super-secret-magical things, but differences of experience, perspective, approach, strengths, weaknesses, that are absolutely fascinating to take seriously and use as a way to look at actions and interactions from different perspectives.

But at the same time, it's 'This is a really cool library to draw on', not 'This is what decides how to run my life'. Because just like they all have experiences and perspectives, so do I, and I'm the one who lives in my body and lives with the consequences.

I'll give a really simple example: I'm a school librarian. People *think* they know what my job is like all the time, and they're almost always missing important pieces or just plain wrong about some significant part.

That's not a big deal - but it doesn't mean I'm going to decide what to do in my workday based on their perspective of my life, either. I may, however, take those conversations and understand a bit more about what I could explain better, demonstrate, focus on in my own choices, or use what they say about what *they* do and care about to better interact with them.

I see the woo the same way: I pay attention to it, because it can be useful input and I work better with data, but I don't run my life solely by it, either.