Why Do You or Did You Believe?

[Angrboda]

This is from a PM I wrote to someone, explaining why I was a Hindu. Perhaps it expresses it as well as anything.

In my world, both pre and post Taoism and Shaktism, the twin suns that ruled my sky were truth, and virtue or morality. So much so that by the age of 6 I had decided that my parents were corrupt and immoral, and I would only look to myself for answers to questions of right and wrong, good and bad. (It might also help to know that by about the age of 4, I was possessed of paranoid and messianic delusions. [Which probably won't make much sense to you, so take it on faith.]) Looking back that far, it's hard to definitively place things ... I converted to Taoism overnight in high school, after reading the Tao Te Ching cover to cover in one night. I first discovered [the goddess] Kali in college, in the form of art depicting the goddess in words or images. At the time, the same thing that converted me to Taoism, affected me in the visage of the goddess. In short, it rang true. Given my obsessions with truth and virtue, it "ringing true" was likely the most important facet, but it's not that I became a sudden Hindu, as I had a Taoist. I was struggling with some deep Taoist questions at that time, including spending 12-13 years as an apostatic Taoist, pondering a single question. The long and short of it, I guess, is that I perceive the reflection of truth in Shaktism and more loosely, the Hindu firmament. The more I tease and pull at the underlying fabric of Hinduism and India, the more I am rewarded with practical truths, and a deep sense that I am headed in the right direction. I make it sound rather dry, but it's not; I feel a deep intimate connection to the transcendant Shakti ... In some ways, I feel we have been speaking to each other since the age of 4, when my world was so radically fragmented and shattered. It was just my conscious mind that took many decades to come up to speed. I am, fundamentally, someone who is guided by intuition, rather than reason. You might say I have been hearing her voice from childhood, but I didn't actually catch sight of her footprints until my 20s and 30s.

In a nutshell, it's largely an enduring intuition that the Shakti and the path of dharma is the right path for me to be on. I can't explain it in terms of logical reasons. I don't believe that logical reasons strongly inform belief or disbelief, it's our biases and inertia that shape our path more than anything. My path has been thusly shaped, and there is no other guide for me but that strong intuition that this path is the right one. If that should change, I could easily see myself becoming a skeptic of theism, as I am of a skeptical bent about things in general. However, until now, the trend has always been to go deeper into religious belief. Perhaps that's inertia. Perhaps that's sense. For me, there is only "the path" and wherever that might lead. I can't step outside of myself to use something different as a guide.