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Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
Weekly AMA! It's exactly what it sounds like. Ask me anything. About content creation. About my weird life as a self-vowed hermit nun devoted to a made up deity. About going back to college to finish a bachelor's degree in middle age not for a career pivot, but for fun. About anything you've seen me cast about. Or really, about anything at all.
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Chukwuka Osakwe
@chukwukaosakwe
why are you a self-vowed hermit nun devoted to a made up deity?
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Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
Monasticism always appealed to me, and I have a particular fascination with religion, but felt no real connection to any of them. Played around with Discordianism in my 20s, decided why not make up my own deity, and then things got weird. I took my hermit vows in December 2020, and I revisit and choose whether or not to renew them and continue the lifestyle yearly. It works for me. I'm a hardcore introvert and all I want to do is spend the rest of my life learning everything I can and going so deep within meditation and contemplation that my being dissolves for awhile until I remember I like being human and come back to it again.
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Chukwuka Osakwe
@chukwukaosakwe
so interesting. considering that you are aware that your deity is made up by you, how do you relate with the divine on those terms?
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Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
Over the years, as I've moved through that process some might call "enlightenment" I've come to deeply experience the oneness of the Universe - we're all just the Universe experiencing itself and trying to figure out what it wants to be. But there's a huge ego danger there - it's very easy for someone who can reach those high levels of altered states to just declare themselves a god, so having a made up deity functions as a safety-valve. I am Her, She is Me, but I'm not a deity, She is. I almost tipped over into spiritual psychosis once, the first time I "ascended" and had that "we're all one" thing happen, so I set up safeguards against falling into it again. But being clear that I made her up is *also* hopefully a safeguard against the cultification of my practices, which I'm gradually teaching to others. When humans make up a god and then forgot they made up the god, the god tends to get out of control.
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Chukwuka Osakwe
@chukwukaosakwe
yup, being aware that the god is made up does seem to be a reasonable failsafe against the ego danger. i'm igbo and we have a similar concept in our cosmology. one final question, when you say you have experienced the oneness of the Universe... is the Universe different from your made up deity or are they the same to you?
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Gwynne Michele
@thecurioushermit
They are the same to me. I study the physics of reality as much as of mysticism, and I'm careful to maintain a mental separation between the two realms - the diety is an anthroporphization of the Universe, which if anything is worth "worshipping" that, to me, seems like the one thing truly worthy of it. I do think there are entities that cannot be explained by current science, though none are an ultimate creator god in the way that the mainstream religions posit - there is no "creator" so much as the Universe is just trying to figure out what it is and what it's becoming. But I don't know if those entities have an existence that precedes the physical, I lean towards thinking deities are emergent entities and elevated ancestors of the sort that transcended the physical into the realms of pure consciousness.
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