Dark Spirituality

It's one of those days I have too much to do I'm so overwhelmed and I'm getting nothing done at all, although I am feeling better.

My thoughts have been on dark spirituality and how much I think about this. I decided to hash through it yesterday and this is what I came up with:

Everything else. That's what I concern myself with. I refer to everything other than what is commonly considered good. I'm not going to say good vs evil because that is primitive juvenile thinking perpetuated by dogma and fiction. I say 'why do people 'want' to be good and try to be good? To do good things to try to be a better person? To be enlightened even?' I've never understood it and I've never understood the concept of wanting to become enlightened so one does not have to return to the realm of human existence. This is pretty much the highest aspiration for all Buddhists. Why wouldn't I want to return to life here on earth? I like it here. In fact I embrace the here and now here and now. I don't know what else there is so I'm not going to bank on it. I like to flirt with the unknown, which should explain my fascination with death, but I actually really like living and being human. I love human things, like emotions. Even the nasty ones... they make me feel alive. No emotion = not alive... this is not cool. Death is cool and I love to peer into its inky blackness and create from it, or just revel, but not for one minute is death on my wish list of 'states' I'd like to be in here and now.
Is this desire to do good to be good yadda yadda yadda a need for some kind of acceptance? Is it buying into the Christian doctrine that we are sinners and must strive to escape a hellish fate? And as for enlightenment, is that the pursuit of escape as well?
Recently I've been wondering why I don't have too many friends. I'm sure it has to do with my lack of presence on the path to goodness. That and/or my unrealizable goal of trying to sink everyone else into the mire of things 'not necessarily good' and to do it for the pure pleasure of it. Meh,.. I'm (semi)alone in my thinking and I'm unfazed by the view others have of me. Evil is a fiction in a polarized mind. I'll just leave that to them and concern myself with everything else.

After reading Nocturnal Witchcraft Magick After Dark by Konstantinos which was suggested to me by the talented bard Christopher Courtley, poet of dark fantasy fiction rendered in the Gothic persuasion (to appease my troubled mind he offered a simple idealogy suggested in Konstantino's book for framing an understanding of dark spirituality which he himself finds useful. I did too. Thank you Christopher.), what struck me most importantly in that book was the idea, and importance placed on connecting to a spiritual dimension outside oneself. I know that in the past I have flirted with the idea of this, but found nothing personally satisfying to connect to. I realized there might be some sort of trend out there having to do with dark spirituality so I typed 'dark paganism' into Google and lo and behold there is an actual book about that written by John J. Coughlin called Out of the Shadows: An Exploration of Dark Paganism and Magick. Well I'm not so interested in magick per se, but the dark paganism part as it pertains to talking care of my spiritual health does interest me. And while we are on the subject of dark spirituality, if you are also interested in this sort of thing have a look at Adventures Of A Spooky Old City Fox, a blog of interest with an open-minded agnostic skeptic (his words) of an author who also writes about these kinds of dark explorations of the spirit, albeit much more articulately and in depth than I do. I'm just a hack in a forest of dark souls intent on destroying themselves with an overdose of denial... oops, I mean goodness.

Lots is happening for me and I've wasted another several hours writing this and finding all the proper links et al so now I'm heading back to my work on the children's book I'm trying to finish before year's end. Working title is Darkling Child. I'm writing and illustrating it. I'll post about it when it's nearer to being finished.