A Story of Disillusionment: My Personal Spiritual Journey
I’ve spent the past few weeks writing about the history of spirituality, uncovering the psychological, spiritual need we all have within us, and explaining why religion is failing to meet that need.
Truthfully, when I began the ‘De Estorica’ blog, I thought I’d be starting with lessons on the basics of Tarot or Astrology. My mission is to help people learn to use these tools of mysticism for exploring their inner-selves and fostering personal growth.
I quickly realized that to adequately show the real value of spirituality and the tools I use to approach it, I had to start from where I myself had spiritually begun.
I had to rediscover the roots of my own spiritual practice, and finally, after over a decade, put them to paper.
This quest into our shared spiritual origins, the modern problem with religion, and the value of spirituality was one that was born out of my personal disillusionment from the church. Through my experience, I’ve learned the importance of exploring other spiritual philosophies to establish a belief system that makes sense, and works to facilitate our personal development.
My Disillusionment from Christianity
“Saturday School”
My parents raised me in an unremarkable Seventh Day Adventist Church. We worshipped together on Saturdays, contrary to the norm of Sundays, but the rest of the service felt just like any other church.
Most of my childhood and adolescence were spent attending church every week, sitting in the uncomfortable wooden pew and trying to pay attention to the sermon. I had heard all the bible stories told in “Saturday school”. I sang all the hymns with the rest of the congregation.
Even so, I never felt a connection with Christianity. There was always this sense of something missing. Whenever I prayed, the only voice I could hear was my own, that of my conscience, not god.
Even as a child, I could never get on board with how these biblical stories with obviously fantastical elements were being treated as literal. As big of a fan of mythology as I was, even I could draw the line between fantasy and reality.
Finding God(s)
I loved mythology. Captivated by how ancient people viewed the world, I took to mythology more easily than I ever had Christianity.
Stories of the Greek gods and goddesses enchanted me at an early age; how they each represented the elements of nature, the varied domains of life, and the complexity of the human experience. Intuitively, their gods made much more sense to me than just one God that ruled over all of creation.
As my curiosity grew, I explored the shared elements between the pantheons of greek, egyptian, roman, and norse gods. Their similarities enthralled me.
“How could these disparate cultures all have similar deities?”
The connection the ancient people must have had to a more nature-based form of spirituality intrigued me.
Eventually I thought:
“How could anyone refuse to recognize the hundreds of other gods found throughout human history, except for this specific one, from this specific book, from this specific culture, time, and place?”
I saw no evidence of this “God”. I could see no miracles. I could not bring myself to have faith in something I had no evidence of.
It was around thirteen years old when I went through a personal disillusionment from my religious upbringing.
The Nail in the Coffin of my Christianity
Though there was nothing wrong with my childhood church in particular, my eyes had opened to how religion was being used to justify racism and homophobia.
Witnessing the extreme bigotry of religious hate groups like the Westboro Baptist Church, and watching politicians create legislation that to threaten and deny the equal rights of my fellow humans was the nail in the coffin of my Christianity.
I ran as far away from Christianity as I could. I was spiritually adrift, and I found my solace in researching different religions and beliefs. The internet opened my eyes to a whole new world of spirituality to explore.
I fell in love with spiritual philosophies from all around the globe. The duality of yin and yang from Daoism, the concept of past lives from Buddhism, the reverence for nature found in paganism, and the mythological stories of gods found throughout the ancient world.
How could I justify subscribing to only one fraction of the entire spectrum of human spirituality and religion?
Yet despite my intrigue, I treated these philosophies with the same hard skepticism as I did Christianity.
I could not bring myself to have faith in something I had no evidence of.
I had decided I was an atheist. I believed in no god; I became hypercritical of religion, and devoid of any form of spirituality or faith.
That all changed when I discovered the Tarot. Something that demanded an explanation for which I had none.
Tarot became my portal back into the spiritual.
Discovering the Tarot: A Portal back to the Spiritual
During my freshman year of highschool, I remember my friend proudly displaying her new deck of “tarot cards” in class one day. The vibrant colors, the enigmatic symbolism, and the unique art style mesmerized me.
Never having heard of the “tarot” before, they piqued my curiosity. I wanted to know more about what tarot was, and how they could possibly tell one’s future, so I asked to hold them.
Flipping through the cards completely enraptured me. There was something about the tarot that captivated me. In my first interaction with them, I felt a sense of profound awe and wonder that I had never experienced before. It was as though a piece of me I had never known I was searching for had suddenly been thrust into my very own two hands.
Spiritual ecstasy, a moment of past life connection, a divine calling, whatever that feeling was, whatever those cards were, a burning hunger possessed me to learn all that I could about the tarot.
After school that day, I took off to the public library and pulled every book they had on the tarot, on divination, and on psychic phenomena.
I wanted to learn all I could. I spent hours on the computer researching different decks, realizing how many art styles and versions of the cards there were. Eventually, I found the deck that resonated with me. A far cry from the basic Rider-Waite-Smith deck I had held just hours ago, I had found my Shadowscapes tarot.
Being fourteen, I had little in the way of cash, and I certainly couldn’t ask my parents to go drive me to a metaphysical shop to get a tarot deck, so I had to get creative.
Over the course of a few weeks, to not draw suspicion, I printed the images of the Shadowscapes Tarot out on the family computer, and glued them onto index cards.
That was my first tarot deck.
I spent the coming weeks and months learning all about the meanings of the cards. I practiced reading for myself in secret, and to my amazement, the cards always held a message that pertained to my question.
The readings I performed were always somehow pertinent. They highlighted aspects of situations that I hadn’t considered. They helped me cope with my depression and anxiety, and became a powerful tool of introspection and meditation for me.
The accuracy of the tarot demanded an explanation. The thought of me being psychic or having some mystic powers, though attractive to my Harry Potter obsessed self, wasn’t a valid answer. Instead, I sought a more grounded, rational explanation.
This search sparked my passion for psychology: a passion that would later turn into a college degree in Personality Psychology.
My quest for answers revealed the mystic nature of not only the tarot, but of our very psyches. It led me to rediscover my spiritual side and put me back on the path of spirituality.
Jungian Psychology: Contextualizing the Mystical through the Psychological
Searching for an answer to how the Tarot worked led me to the field of psychology.
I read about Rorschach tests, and how a person’s interpretation of an inkblot could reveal unconscious information.
I learned about thematic apperception, and how psychologists would show different people the same ambiguous scene, and they would project entirely different meanings onto it.
“Could someone explain simply Tarot as a phenomenon of psychological projection?”
Eventually, I found the writings of classical psychologist Carl Jung.
One of his fundamental theories was that of the collective unconscious. He defined this as a level of consciousness shared between all of humanity. A container for all of our myths, stories, and religions to be seen as archetypes: universal images, and patterns of thought and behavior that organize our psychological experience.
This reframed the Tarot for me. It was not a deck of mystical pictures with magical fortune telling ability. It was a picture book of archetypes. Archetypes that, though collective, had subjective personal meaning for each individual.
The cards that I pulled from the deck weren’t just drawn by chance. They were a product of ‘synchronicity’ — a meaningful coincidence with no discernable cause. Reading the tarot created a container for synchronicity to take place. That’s why the cards were always so accurate.
The images of the major arcana of tarot depicted the process Jung called Individuation. natural process of psychological development and growth by which we embrace our incomparable uniqueness, and divest ourselves of external sources of authority, returning instead to the wholeness of Self. Furthermore I could use the Tarot as a tool to facilitate this process by bringing the unconscious into one’s sphere of awareness.
Jungian psychology reframed the concept of gods for me and allowed me to revisit the spiritual concepts I had once dismissed.
Myths and deities around the world were all unique expressions of the same core archetypes. That’s why there were so many similarities between the mythologies of different cultures.
“God” was a manifestation of the archetypal self, our striving towards wholeness, the inner ‘god-image’ which guides us towards our own self-godhood.
When I learned to view spirituality, the tarot, religion, and myth all as archetypal, it completely reframed the concept of spirituality for me.
It invited me back into the world of the spiritual with the grounded understanding I had always been searching for.
Conclusion
Let my story be an allegory for you:
Don’t close yourself off to the spiritual. It’s those experiences that lift us up from mundanity and show us that the world, and that we, are special. It’s those spiritual, mystic experiences that connect us with our ancestors and with the rest of humanity. They remind us of some greater purpose and meaning; of some thread of commonality we all share.
I’ve spent over a decade now learning the tarot, re-inviting the spiritual back into my life, and seeking to understanding it through the lens of psychology.
Tarot was my portal, and my hope for “De Esoterica” is to share how rich a tool the tarot is when we divest ourselves of the notion that it is only for psychics and fortune tellers, and instead understand that the tarot is a tool of individuation.
Individuation is our true spiritual goal. However, to understand how tarot, or astrology, or even mysticism can facilitate it, we must first understand the psychology itself. That is why the next series of “De Esoterica” posts will be a foray into Jungian Psychology.
Until then remember that now, more than ever, we need to return to our spiritual roots, and remember just how important a part spirituality plays. We each need a method of seeking the spiritual that is focused on personal choice, and self-actualization. A spiritual modality that is rooted in psychology, and informed by the history and mythology of our ancestors.
If the tarot, astrology, nature worship, and mysticism sound like modalities you’d like to use, stick around. There is so much more to come.
