Years ago, I participated in a spiritual discussion group where we considered a series of books that were channeled from a spirit known as White Eagle. The class was led by a very gentle soul who had that twinkle in his eye, the one that suggests he knew just a little more than he let on. It was that feeling you get from a teacher when they supply you with a line of bread crumbs and allow you to follow it in your own way and in your own time. His name was Gary and he gave us a single guideline to follow at the very beginning of our first class.
"This is channeled material," he began. "You can't simply take it at face value. What you have to remember is that each and every one of us has our own prejudices and our own experiences that we filter such information through. The author of this book was not immune to that, no matter how much we would like to pretend otherwise. We can't blindly accept these words as the author presents them. Instead, we have to do our best to understand the author's perspective and remove the author's fingerprints from the words before us."
Of all of the instruction that I've been offered over the years, this small morsel has been more consistently useful to me than any other. Any sort of spiritual - whether it's a recognized holy text, channeled material, or information gleaned from our own interaction with the spirit world - cannot be accepted wholly at face value. We have to remove the taint of the perspective and prejudice that the material was filtered through. This concept has applications, not just when approaching channeled material, but in accepting instruction from any teacher (incarnated or otherwise), and when engaging in meditative or shamanic journeying.
Riding a Wild Horse
The key behind this concept is pretty simple. To access material from the Elsewhere, whether we're contacting an entity our embarking on a shamanic journey, we have to achieve a certain state of consciousness, similar in many ways to how we experience the Dreamtime. In this state, symbolism becomes a critical component of the communication between our conscious mind, our subconscious, our spirit, and the spirit world. Our conscious mind often takes a passive role in journeying, becoming an observer and a recorder. It's our spirit that leads the way, teaming with our subconscious mind to paint the landscape we experience in our journeying.
You can think of journeying in a manner similar to riding a wild horse. Our conscious mind is little more than a video camera, capturing the experience for playback at a later date. For the most part, it is not in control of the experience. In fact, if we engage our conscious mind to too great of an extent, it tends to ground us and pull us out of the journey. While we interact with the spirit world and it is this level of reality that we learn from and experience in our journeying, the entire process is made more difficult by the fact that it is not our spirit that takes the role of our steed. Our spirit is the rider and our subconscious, with all of its prejudices and preconceived ideas, is the wild horse we're trying to steer toward the spiritual truths we seek.
Imagine that you're on the back of a spirited, nearly unbroken stallion, trying to ride toward a specific destination or attempting to study or observe something on the path right in front of you. But instead of the rearing, skittering horse constantly turning so that you see other landscapes around you instead of what should be right in front of you nose, the horse actually changes the symbolism that you interact with.
The Challenge of Our Past
For example, let's imagine that you had an encounter with a vicious canine somewhere in your childhood. Not only did the creature bite you, but ever since you've harbored a deeply rooted fear of dogs.
In the midst of your journeying, you're approached by Wolf, a spirit often associated with teaching energy. However, because your subconscious has such a prominent role in journeying and you have previously established feelings where dogs are concerned, one of two things will generally happen. Either your subconscious mind masks the form of Wolf, creating new symbolism (perhaps turning Wolf into an old wise woman or even another animal) and you risk losing the full meaning behind the encounter - or your fears manifest and Wolf is seen as a huge, menacing creature and the entire message is heavily influenced by your prejudices where canines are concerned.
This is an obvious example of how this process works. But imagine that you enter the encounter with a strong opinion on how the divine manifests. Or that you believe in a battle between darkness and light and everything must be framed as either a threat or an ally. Perhaps you have very low self-esteem and a nurturing and compassionate manifestation of the Goddess is turned demanding and emotionally distant by your subconscious mind.
The Benefit of Breaking Free
If you've spent any amount of time in the pages of Old Ways, you've heard me talking a lot about spiritual growth and the importance of learning to let go of fear and fully embracing love. There are a handful of key reasons to do so, reasons that immediately and concretely impact or ability to work magick and interact with the spirit realm. With a typical student, the first mystical benefit that is gained by embracing this process is the ability to see clearly.
This is a lesson that I learned firsthand and one that I still strive to promote in my own practice. Before I am anything else, I am a simple student myself. There is always something more to learn, some other challenge to overcome, another shadow to let go and allow love to fill that once darkened space. From time to time, I still find my own prejudices influencing a journeying and, when I re-center and let them go, I have literally watched the entire landscape of the journey change before my eyes.
There is a concept, similar to what we interpret as The Threefold Law, that comes into play in our own spiritual growth. At its heart is the simple principle that the more we learn and grow, the more opportunity we're given. What begins as a process of learning to clearly see in our journeying, becomes a process of accepting the full potential of spiritual reality. And accepting that on one level of reality will open up doors on other levels of reality.
In late 1998, I was collecting sea salt for use in ritual work on a secluded beach outside of San Francisco when I found myself being shadowed by a spirit. I stopped and addressed it and it introduced itself to me, offering to teach me what secrets she knew and aid in my spiritual growth. What's more is that she gave me a name to use whenever I chose to call her to my side. In the lore of our family, she became known as "the goddess of the sea," and I called upon her and worked with her on numerous occasions.
Several years later, having grown a considerable amount and having reached the point where I'd let go of many of my own prejudices, I called upon "the goddess of the sea" while doing some shamanic work on the Oregon Coast. I had no preconceived ideas of how the encounter would unfold, but was simply open to whatever work we might do together that day as I'd been receiving lessons from her for some time.
"I am not the goddess of the sea, but her handmaiden," she said. "Would you like to meet the one that I serve?"
I was given a name to use when calling upon this goddess, its form ancient and sing-song, not a single name but one layered in three parts, almost like a primitive poem. As I stood there on the shoreline, I uttered the threefold name, not knowing what to expect and doing my best to simply be open to whatever might happen. The "goddess" materialized, not in the surf before me, but upon the horizon, "her" form dominating the expanse of ocean that lay before my eyes. She was ancient. Primal. Elemental. There was no need to anthropomorphize her, to try to fit her into human form, because there was nothing even remotely human about her. To put it simply, she was awe-inspiring.
That encounter not only enabled me to let go of more of my preconceived ideas, but opened other doors for me. And that's how magick works. Each step forward on our path presents us with new landscapes, with new challenges, and opens us to experiences (and please consider both the irony and truth of this statement) that we never believed possible.
We Already Have The Tools
At first glance, letting go of our prejudices and preconceived ideas may seem like a daunting task - even more so when we attempt to apply it to words, wisdom, or insight channeled through another's psyche. The good news is that we already have the necessary framework in place to do the work.
First, we need an ethical structure to guide us, such as the spiritual paths we already embrace. More than replacing one set of preconceived ideas with a new set of the same, a series of ethical guidelines and standards provide us with a mirror to gaze into, something in which we find our challenges reflected. By striving to become more than we are, we slowly begin to let go of those things that prevent us from seeing clearly.
Second, we need a detection system in place, something that will notify us when we are filtering the information we receive. Thankfully, we already have that too. Whenever we have an emotional response to an experience, regardless of whether we label that experience positive or negative, we're filtering what is present in that moment. All we have to do is notice that we're having an emotional response, step back and ask ourselves, "Why do I feel this way?"
When we find the source, whether it's a fear, an insecurity, or a wound that we suffered along the way, all we have to do is heal the wound - and the easiest way to do so is to forgive those involved, including ourselves, and learn to love those involved in the situation. By learning to love, we disarm the prejudice and let it go. And with the prejudice out of the way, we can see clearly and our path continues to open up before us.
Much like everything else on our path, it all comes down to one simple concept. Love.
Even when we work with second hand materials, we need to look for patterns and measure them against an ethical framework. The easiest rule of thumb is to look at it in the light of the core of the divine - love. The absence of love creates fear. Fear creates limitations. Limitations create boundaries. We slowly see where an author begins to say, "You must do this" or "You cannot do that" and realize that they are placing restrictions on the divine. Each path, each voice, contains a bit of truth, a tiny fragment of the whole. These voices overlap in a chorus, not where they draw lines, but where they are allowed the freedom to merge and flow. It's in these places where we can begin to gain a glimpse of the sacred - and using that glimpse as a mirror, we can slowly whittle away at our own prejudices and preconceived ideas and begin to see more clearly.
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