For a long time this space has been In Secret Knots.
In Secret Knots was mostly focused around a specific brand of spirituality, specifically from a pragmatic Buddhist lens. Alas, all things change (including me!) and while I’m still highly involved and in love with pragmatic Buddhism, I’ve also branched out in a million ways, with so many new insights and spiritual ideas that no longer fit in the container of Pragmatic Buddhism (or anything really).
The Good Heretic is an idea I’ve been thinking about for quite some time.
And so – please allow me to re-introduce myself –
I’m an ex-evangelical, ex-pagan, ex-newage, ex-SBNR, ex-tradbuddhist. I’m a dash of everything – a little pragmatic buddhist, a little jungian analyst, a little magical, a bit gnostic, a bit thelemic, a bit theosophical, a touch sufi, with a sprinkle of christian mystic and a casual background in psychological attachment theory.
Recently I’ve realized that I might be religious – without a religion?
More on that later.
On the crazy experiential end of things – I’ve sat in meditation for hundreds of hours at this point, sometimes for five or six hours straight – and have had every wild meditation experience you can imagine (and some you probably can’t!). I’ve mapped my experiences onto various traditional maps, and sit in reverent awe at the lineage of mystics who have visited these depths over the last thousand years of human history.
My experiences pushed me out of traditional religion and more contemporary new age circles. Today I find myself crying at the profound mystery at the source of every tradition. Just yesterday I was crying about the beauty of the Trinity, and tomorrow maybe I’ll shed a tear for the ineffability of the classical Anima Mundi again.
If you throw the deep end of every tradition and philosophy out there into a box of pickup sticks and shake them all up, I’m the weird one that falls out the back all by herself.
I’m nothing and I’m everything.
I’m just a damn good heretic.
the Good Heretic 