From Religious To Agnostic To Spiritual Seeker

By Author: Julius Givens
Total Articles: 10
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In the second grade my relationship with God took a turn for the worse. I was critically injured in a bicycle accident, and in order to save my life the doctors amputated my right arm. After a while my grief turned to anger, and I confronted Him, Why me, God? What did I do to deserve this? It wasn't fair. Eventually, God and I patched things up, and I went back to loving Him.

I went to Seattle Prep, a Jesuit high school for boys, where my father had gone before me. Overall, I received an excellent education there, but I became at odds with the religious dogma and its contradictions. How an all-knowing and all-loving God could send people's souls to hell for eternity for doing things like eating meat on Friday was beyond me. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s when Catholic dogma was very rigid and archaic. I am aware that the Church has loosened up quite a bit from those days.

After I graduated from Seattle University, I took a summer job in Alaska to earn money so I could travel in Europe. Growing up I had always loved nature. Where I worked was a vast expanse of land, water and mountains with very few people. ...
... I began to see that I was like all the living things—the plants, fish, birds, insects and other mammals—being born, living and dying. I was not greater or lesser than any other living thing. I gave up the notion of an afterlife. I concluded that God did not create man, but that man created God as an idea or concept and heaven as a strategy to overcome mortality. Atheism wasn't acceptable to me because the nonexistence of God was not provable. I concluded that I was an agnostic. I became quite comfortable with this and attained a level of peace that I had not experienced before. My agnosticism lasted seventeen years. During this time I had no interest in anything even remotely related to spiritual awakening or enlightenment.

When I was thirty-six I began having extrasensory experiences. At work the phone would ring, I would think of a person's name, and that person would be on the line. On two other occasions at home I started thinking about a person that I seldom thought about, and several minutes later the person was knocking at my door. I could no longer limit existence to the physical. I went to Tower Books and purchased some mainstream books on ESP. I soon became convinced that life was not limited to the five senses. I immersed myself in learning about spiritual awakening and enlightenment. I had this incredible hunger to know about existence, particularly my existence.

I continued to devour spiritual books about enlightenment and spiritual awakening. I began meditating daily. I knew that I was capable of attaining a greater level of peace and happiness, and I yearned for this. My earliest teachers were channeled entities whose love and wisdom were inspirational to me. I became immersed in the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda. I wanted to attain enlightenment. I also became very interested in spiritual healing and did work in this regard, especially around the pain I experienced in my family of origin. A friend who taught me in a meditation class introduced me to advaita vendanta, which I embraced. Spiritual awakening and enlightenment were foremost in my mind.