Unverified Personal Gnosis - UPG 

 We're now living in a culture where relativism has reached absurdity. Our deeply held principals about the value of difference of opinion have been twisted out of recognition into a thuggery that declares the supremacy of popular lies. This makes our discussion tricky, because faith is personal, and spiritual growth needs to be unencumbered. 

As a community we value freedom of conscience.  We can tend to value personal experience over any "official" source of reference. Most of us refuse the idea of an official "source of truth" in spiritual matters. We've seen the damage. We're not interested. 

But there's something unsettling about having absolutely no source of reference, no known points on the map. Equally, it's unsettling when a personal notion that seems whimsical when held by one person appears to have harmful consequences when it sweeps through a larger population. 

And sometimes its just annoying, or disrespectful. If you've spent weeks, months, or years studying a particular path or deity and someone pops into your mentions making declarations about that well-studied path that are well outside of what you have cherished and learned it is at least stressful. 

But it's spiritual...so it can't be wrong? Right? 

And what about our own intuition? What about our own personal experiences of the Divine? How do we protect them, and how do we evaluate them? Where is the balance?

I can tell you that my own judgement about my experience took a while to develop. The clues were there, but a fish doesn't really see the water she swims in... I finally realized why the world that seemed dark and sad before lunch was so much brighter in the afternoon. Of course it was blood sugar! It didn't feel like it though. I'm embarrassed to measure how much time it took before I realized that I "fell in love" every 28 to 30 days like clockwork. It was clockwork, the clock was my ovaries. From the inside of this physical experience there were a lot of sensations that felt like feelings, conclusions, or philosophies but turned out to be less portentous. In case you're wondering, I was in my late twenties long before I sorted most of that out, perhaps this happened a lot earlier for you, but all of us can be fooled by our own existence. It may be clarifying to mention that parental authority in my early years was complicated and challenging. People in a parental role in my later teens and early adulthood had no idea I was missing so much foundational information.

But I had other experiences as well, moments when I desperately needed help and followed what seemed to be ridiculous thought that saved my life, or asked who or whatever might be listening to help with a problem and had the solution materialize in a surprisingly unexpected way. I've been asked for input on a matter that I didn't really understand and passed along a phrase that mentally demanded to be said, only to have the person in front of me declare that it was the perfect answer. These experiences are real, almost all of us have had them. They are deeply meaningful to us. 

We crave a personal connection to the Divine. It seems we are nearly hardwired for that. It can be a force for good in our lives. 

And in areas that are entirely personal to us, no one else can be our expert, no one else can be our source of truth. We can choose to have relationships that balance us, that offer us sounding boards, or insight. That's healthy. But we are the experts on our lived experience. 

Beyond being an expert on ourselves, we are limited in what we know about the world. We expand our horizons through education, relationships, travel, and curiosity but there will always be areas of knowledge outside of our reach. There are plenty of things that feel familiar, or known to me, that turn out to be very different than what I thought. My interpretation was through the limited lens of my own experience and that was not enough. 

As a creative child I staged my own interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, based on a single line from Shakespeare's play. "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo." I built an entire drama around that. If memory serves it looked a lot like an American western, or sci-fi, or rom-com as seen by the adults doubled over in laughter on the sofa. It felt right, though. I created a language, my very own! It followed the word order patterns of Spanish and had nouns and adjectives that were based on the names of people in my life and the characteristics that defined those people to me. These imaginative experiences were wonderful and fulfilling and they were very much limited by what I had already been exposed to. 

It is curiosity, hard work, and personal discomfort that provides new influences and knowledge for me to imagine from. When it comes to working with deities from specific cultures and times, it is that hard work that provides me with the spiritual vocabulary with which to receive and interpret new spiritual experiences. Sometimes that hard work isn't mine. I have greatly benefitted from the research and study of people who have written and published their work. 

I am passionately curious about the faith of my predecessors in the tens of thousands of years of the pre-Christian world. I am ready to learn from and experience religious expressions that arose naturally before the global sweep of the radical monotheistic insistence on one-truth. But I know that my lived context of artificial light and store-bought food, instant communication, and the written word, have so shaped my thinking and language that I will always fall short of deeply understanding that experience. 

My joy is in the journey. My grounding humility is in what I discover I don't understand. 

I love the music of Padraigín Ní Uallacháin, it's not hard to sing and a lot of the songs express what I've wanted to sing! She's not just a singer though, she's a native Irish speaker who has spent years researching Irish music and folksong traditions. Her latest post on social media painfully exposed what so many were overlooking. There's a very popular song called MNÁ na hÉIREANN (Women of Ireland), that is set to a beautiful, evocative melody. Many gifted women singers have performed the song and it naturally makes the rounds on International Women's Day. The problem is that it is a violently, cynically misogynistic song. Verse after verse is completely demeaning and callous. But it's in Irish and very few people outside of Ireland, indeed not enough in Ireland, really understand the words. And, I must mention again, the melody is compelling. It "feels" as though you understand it. But if you can't read the words and understand them, you don't. 

I have chosen to follow a path of Irish polytheism, where the inspirational culture is still in existence, the native language is one of the hardest for an English speaker to understand, and the pre-Christian lived experience was an oral culture, so the written record was made by monks, not by the Druids. 

It's challenging. 

And I teach a path that values the immediate experience of life and place, which is here and now, not in Ireland and not in the Iron Age. It's a balance. 

I am always surprised by the very real way I experience my Gods, and in return I express my desire to understand Them better and to respect Their histories through study and practice. 

Just as taboos in Irish lore tend to be personal rather than global, I keep my personal gnosis personal and try to avoid making broad declarations about any one-true experience or "received" wisdom. This has the benefit of not appropriating culture, misinterpreting source materials carelessly, or closing down discussions with people who may have some research that will interest me! 

Unverified personal gnosis is an important part of Pagan culture. In the current moment where science and documentation are being reviled, I choose to balance an intuitive life with a religious path of education and research. My own personal experience has shown me that more than I currently think I know will be revealed. 

Peace of the mountains to you, 

Paulie Rainbow