reply to post by somerandomuser
It's really hard to explain how I "woke up" per se, without going into a little bit of back story about myself.
I come from a pretty odd family. Adopted by my grandparents, never knew my real father, to this day I've never spoken to the man or met him. I view
my grandparents as my parents, always have, always will. Anyhow, me and my younger brother(full-blooded, both adopted), were not raised religiously,
we did not attend church, however, my mom would say the occasional prayer, and sometimes she referred to seeing angels as the last thing she'd see
before she went to sleep, and she claimed to never dream. When I asked my parents what happens when we die, they told me nothing, life is over, it's
a dreamless sleep you never wake from. Those ideas took hold at a very young age with me. I spent many nights up late crying myself to sleep silently
over the idea that one day, I would die, my parents would die, everyone I knew would, and nothingness, non-existence, awaited us, for all eternity,
unable to think, unable to feel, not even aware. Forever. Stop to think about that for a split second. It's a chilling thought, and to a kid, it eats
at you. You're fearful. Over time this did pass, in fact, it was this fear that led me to care more about everyone and everything around me. We live
finite lives, and who are we as human beings to stand in the way of another's happiness?
I never had any trouble believing anything when it came to the occult, conspiracy, etc etc, always perceived myself as the weird kid. I was diagnosed
with ADHD in kindergarten, my parents refused to have me medicated, they never liked taking me or my brother to doctors. I've literally been in
hospitals less than 5 or 6 times in my life to personally have an appointment, or for a medical emergency for that matter.
We moved when I was 8 to a different area of the state. Central PA, land of all things Christian and God-fearing. I heard the word bible for the first
time, the name Jesus. Other kids made fun of me for not knowing anything about what was considered everyone's religion. What they told me didn't
really make sense at the time, and after clarification over the years and study, I came to my own personal conclusion that mainstream religions,
mostly the monotheistic ones, did not make sense. It just didn't feel correct, felt like it was missing many parts, and I ALWAYS felt that the way
religious salvation was structured, at least with the Christian dogma of seeking a relationship with God through Jesus, was horribly wrong. The God
preached by every religion, if a being of pure love and light, would not allow a being with free will and good intentions be turned to the darkness
and cast away in hellfire. It's a basic principal of the "good guy" in that regard, you never leave someone behind. Christians preach you can only
find salvation through Jesus, however, if God is love and light, he would offer salvation to everyone, therefore, religion was wrong on God, so maybe
there was no God at all. That was the general logic I used to become anti-religious by Jr. High.
This changed when I hit high school, lived in the library, and began reading a massive amount of books about Astrology, Freemasonry, and Alchemy. Why
you ask? My mother always followed astrology, I always had an interest in secret societies, and we were taught about how important Freemasonry was to
the US while I was in 9th Grade (side note: My American Cultures teacher was a very angry old Jewish woman, who loved to tell us how things worked in
her religion, and also claimed to have been a sniper for Israel's Armed Forces while she lived in Israel. I disliked her). The Alchemy thing really
started with an obsession over the Philosophers Stone and whether it really existed or not, and how to obtain one with the goal of making an elixir of
life for me and people I cared for(this may have been a jump back to that fear of death).
Through my latter half of high school, with the unintentional goading of my 10th grade world studies teacher, I became obsessed with learning about
other cultures and spiritual beliefs. He was the first to tell me how Freemasonry was a cover for something bigger. (He claimed to have worked for the
UN doing some work in the USSR in the 80s. he had pics, documents, and IDs to prove it) He also encouraged my research into polytheistic religions and
Islam, a religion I always bypassed reading about due to the stigma in my area about Muslims, but did so anyways this time around. I continued this,
along with reading about advanced physics and chemistry (I could go on for a long time about my chem teacher, he also had a very...interesting
background, so to speak, for being a teacher, he worked for a major chemical company testing water, claimed that the county we lived in had the most
pure in the country, dunno if its true.