Devoured by Flame

Spiritual and “mundane” life are not two separate things. If this is not apparent, it tends to become an escape mechanism rather than something that is found to be real and palpable.

If it’s an escape, you can use it to justify why you do certain things that are harmful to you. You might believe your Gods support you in whatever you do no matter what even if it’s used to destroy yourself and your sanity.

You may have already started to think “oh, this isn’t me” but take a look closer.

Do you hold the Gods away from your life? Is there stuff you don’t like Them to see? Did stuff happen to you that made you feel like there is no purpose in life or that you’re scared to trust in the beyond? If the answer is “yes” you could be using spirituality as an escape. And here’s why:

The Gods are real.

If you’re stuck in the same cycle of overburdening yourself with the reality of the Gods, it tends to create this version of reality that depends solely on whether or not you believe in it. Ultimately, you of course have a choice in the matter. You either do or do not believe in the reality of the Gods.

Their presence, if you were truly to decipher it, is commonplace and palpable. It is real and understandable. The problem most people have in this day and age is the ability to lean your senses into a place where you see it – which takes a lot of undoing and unwinding in order to discern what you need to do to get to this place and also arrive at the understanding that, even if you are wrong, you are still experiencing something that is real and it ultimately doesn’t matter what you believe or who you believe it is. The most important part is understanding that the Gods are there and knowing that They are real because your experiences dictate as such. 

People think all science needs to be irrefutable fact or have an origin in a material existence when experiential evidence is key to determining the makeup of your environment. How do you think the ancient peoples determined how the earth moves around the sun or the origin of most sciences that we study today? They didn’t just look it up in a textbook or on ancient Google and depended on other people to figure it out – they experienced it, put it into a hypothesis, and then let the experiences dictate their further understanding so it no longer becomes hypothetical but rather the experience of existing altogether. They formed their conclusions based on human instinct rather than having the evidence that we do today. We somehow forgot that during our quest to know more about the universe but basing it only on the observable part of nature that you can touch rather than the things that are more complex that you don’t already have a textbook basis for.

We do, though, have a groundwork for mysticism that is practiced heavily elsewhere. Eastern cultures continue to use it in their daily life where the spiritual is seamlessly tied into their “normal” such that it is apparent that what they are doing doesn’t need to depend on an ancient book or text to arrive at the conclusions they do. Their Gods and spirits and ancestors are there whether they imagined it first themselves or not. It doesn’t ultimately matter in the long run – it has enough depth that people go into these things logically enough that it doesn’t need to depend solely on belief but rather the fact that it is real.

As a result of the increase of colonialism, white supremacy, and Christian nationalism, we have all, at some time, believed these ideas are fantastical and an illusion in lieu of actually understanding how they arrived on these practices of mysticism in the first place. Even Catholic mysticism is being wiped out exponentially to make way for things that can only be grasped in the hands of the modern Westernized religious person rather than trying to understand how the religion even started. 

At the end of the day, the Gods don’t care what you think is real and what you do already believe – the experience of the Gods is not separate from the reality that humans – for millennia – have all agreed as “real.” The only differences being cultural context and interpretation thus creating thousands of Deities and entities that cling to that particular sect of humanity.

The mundane and the metaphysical are not mutually exclusive 

To explain further that, if you are already questioning my logic, you likely still function on the belief that these two things are mutually exclusive. You can have the reality of the Gods being a real and actually perceivable experience – we just don’t live in a society that is conducive to that perception and therefore we don’t think it’s “real.” 

The result of this process is escapism and it is far more prevalent in spiritual spaces than we give it credit for. Why do you think so many people go out of their way to seem edgy? Why do you think people put on elaborate costume and then do ritual? Why is it such a priority of reconstructionists to depend on a broken culture and history to create something meaningful to the Gods? 

We want to employ the escapism of the historical and fantastical nature of paganism as a means to get away from what is the “mundane” because it no longer supports what we believe to be spiritual. This isn’t necessarily an issue until it becomes your full identity of what your spirituality is and it no longer affects the choices you make in your mundane life. 

The Gods are not going to be found in this fantastic world you created in your head about what needs to happen in order for it to be real. They are found here – grounded in the now and the daily experience. They are grounded in the present moment and not what happened before or what will happen after. That is the basis of all mysticism regardless of cultural context – being present and grounded. You cannot leap into the metaphysical if you don’t even know where your footing was to begin with. If you don’t know where your footing on the ground was, you won’t be able to distinguish the two and then you won’t know the differences.

This type of thinking causes psychosis, mental breaks, anxiety, depression, and all sorts of issues that are affecting the pagan community as a whole. They use paganism as an escape – an extravagant reality which they would rather be a part of than the mundane. Once they get out of the ritual space or leave the group of people they were with, and go on their way to their mundane life, they get depressed which then doubles down on the narrative that reality needs to be “fixed” in order for them to continue. They then spiral down into problematic beliefs, dogma, and cult-like behaviors which are also a huge problem in paganism today.

Mental health issues, distorted reality and perception, and the impact on spirituality

Now, we are especially faced with more and more people wanting to escape their real world for the comforts of fantasy whether it is through AI, doubling down on social media, employing escapism tactics that can somehow fit into their “normal” life, fandoms, cosplay, and all sorts of things that cause people to lose their focus on what is their present circumstances. The issue being, of course, the Gods aren’t created through fantasy or delusion – They are real and extraordinary based on the reality of existence. 

I am not saying this is 100% a problem. I, too, enjoy a good renaissance faire and putting on a fun costume. I enjoy being able to imagine and create fantasy worlds. However, it had to pause when I realized that the fantastical was creating a desire that filled the void I had in my life. Like an addiction, the void that this escapism needs to fill becomes bigger and bigger until it becomes unmanageable because it hit the dopamine levels I craved in lieu of true intimacy and personal connection I wanted desperately with the Divine.

What came after this realization was that I had to make my real life enjoyable enough and connected enough that I no longer felt that need and difference between what is mundane versus what is spiritual. This eventually cleared away a lot of the depression I was feeling – it also cleared away a lot of problematic beliefs I had about the Gods that drove a wedge even further to separate Them from me. I grew into a whole different person – one who is fulfilled by both the metaphysical and the physical at the same time. My real life is part of the work that I do for the Gods – heck, what I get paid to do as my mundane career is part of the work I do for the Gods. I no longer live with people who drain me and I no longer spend my time with those who drag me further into the dopamine-starved lifestyle they live in where social media, cosplay, elaborate rituals, and excessive fantasy is employed to leave the “real” behind. 

Escapism is an excellent coping mechanism when the world becomes too much to deal with – the issue is when it becomes an absolute crutch and interferes with your perception and you cannot crawl out of the need for more and more such that your entire life gets swallowed up by something that is no longer real to you as a whole person. You cannot find balance in a black hole nor can you discover who you are when your life is centered in a fantasy. The Gods are not going to meet you there or anywhere else that is not grounded in reality or your present moment. They aren’t going to be found in your made up historical practices. 

The Gods are here, in present day, waiting for you to notice that your life is being eaten up by a fairy tale so that you can then notice Them for who They really are.