The Curious Hermitage

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.

Devotional polytheist living a monastic lifestyle centered on curiosity, simplicity, and joy.  Exploring the intersection of technology and spirituality.

why are you a self-vowed hermit nun devoted to a made up deity?

writing at: https://paragraph.xyz/@thearcadia || curating vibes over at /football || bringing football onchain at /thefalsenine

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.

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.

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?