firecat: red panda, winking (Default)
firecat (attention machine in need of calibration) ([personal profile] firecat) wrote2002-11-01 09:06 am

Religious/spiritual labels

Initially posted as a comment in [livejournal.com profile] elynne's journal.

If asked to label my religious/spiritual leanings, I call myself:
shamanistic Buddhist pagan or pagan shamanistic Buddhist.

Shamanistic: I talk to entities who help me heal myself and others.
Buddhist: I believe that focusing on the extent to which things (and the contents of my mind) are illusory and transitory helps me understand the right way to live and act.
Pagan: Some of the entities I talk to are pagan deities; I like learning about various deities and thinking about their traits and abilities; and I find that doing candle-work and other kinds of "spells" helps me.

I don't include "agnostic" because I think that's covered by "Buddhist." (In this I am influenced by an excellent book called Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor, which also discusses the background of the concept of agnosticism.)