I grew up in a mixed bag of religion - catholicism, anglicism, buddhism, atheism, all under the one roof. My personal attraction to religion was an attraction to religious texts. Bible stories were exciting! The Torah was beautiful to listen to! Koans are puzzling! It was later in life that I learned of two illusions - temporal linearity, and free will. Temporal linearity is a trick of the mind - of course cause and effect exists, but motion and movement is a progression of infinitely small static states, equally our perception of time appears fluid but is in fact, like a series of still images tied together. As for free will, physics denies. We must live with the illusion of it, but make no mistake that we are infinitely complex systems on set paths bouncing off of one another inside an infinitely complex system. These troubled me, so I began to study narrative and language as a metaphor for this. Of how experience becomes vocalised sound, sounds becomes printed letters, letters become words, words become sentences, sentences become paragraphs etc etc. Then something extraordinary happened. I was walking one day, bright sunny day, when a freak rainstorm appeared in the space of about ten minutes. I looked where I was when I ducked for cover. It was an interesting place to be, a place that made me think, and a place that ultimately lead to the total upheaval of my life and began a journey towards an acceptance of spirituality, and enlightenment. From this moment on my life was pearled with synchronicity. If I was in danger, sirens would sound. If I was safe, bells. I dreamed often of stillness, of laying in fields where spirit animals would approach me just to be near me and found, when I sought out this stillness, animals in real life would do the same - possums climbing onto my lap, grasshoppers on my nose, ducks congregating and sitting with me. It was, joyfully, a return to my childhood when this would happen often. I began to think that determinism was pre-determinism, that there was a genuinely conceived and written narrative out there somewhere. This path lead me to rereading the texts I would read as a kid, and seeking out new texts, and reinvigorated my desire to learn philosophy and spirituality. I am not settled by any means. I think it would be unwise to settle at any point. But I still believe in narrative - the bible as ethical conundrums, koans as indicators, philosophy as practice - and I am getting closer to stillness every day.