I doubt that there are any of us who, at one time or another, hasn't wished that we could work the sort of magick that would make Hollywood proud. You know what I mean. With a wave of our hand we'd violate the laws of physics. Some of us long to fly. Others wish they could turn invisible or transmute gold from lead. Me? When I was much, much younger on my path, I wished that I could sculpt using light. Butterflies and flowers would appear from my outstretched hand, delighting the younger pagans that were entrusted to my care. (Think Gandalf's fireworks from the first Lord of the Rings movie without the associated bang.)
There are reasons why none of this works. Ironically, they aren't physical laws but mystical principles that hold the fabric of reality together. What's more is that, walking a mystical path, we can first learn to utilize those same principles, then bend them, and in time, disregard them altogether.
The thing is, magick really does work. We're just not there yet.
We've discussed at length that we're spiritual beings living life from a physical perspective. We've considered the concept that reality is what we manifest and that it's our own belief in the limitations of what we're capable of accomplishing that keeps our magick within very precise boundaries. What we haven't considered is that there are ways to leave both of these restrictions behind.
To fully embrace this journey, we need to begin to shift our perspective. Much of what we've learned about the structure of reality was through our interaction with the boundaries that we agreed (when we came into this incarnation) would be in place to help us grow. We believe that the walls around us are solid, that gravity holds us to the earth, that if you cut us we will bleed.
However, this is an incomplete understanding of what we're experiencing. What we fail to consider is reality from a shaman's perspective.
In shamanism, everything is alive. We briefly touched on this concept in Tools, one of the lessons in The First Cycle course. In all honesty, it's a very straight forward concept, just one that is difficult for us to wrap our minds around. If all of reality is composed of spiritual energy, then that energy must have a spiritual source. The only source for spiritual energy, by default, is the divine as it transcends all boundaries and limitations. If the monitor you're looking at is composed of the same spiritual energy that you're created from, then by default, the two of you are equally alive as both of you are created from the same living spiritual energy.
That doesn't imply that you're equally sentient - just that you're equally alive.
Think of it in levels of consciousness or, to be more accurate, in the ways that each of us manifests our own reality. You, as a human being, manifest your energy on the world around you in extremely vibrant ways. In a very real sense, you're at the very top of the spiritual food chain. You have an immense variety of tools and perceptions at your disposal. Your ability to deductively think, to imagine, to create art - each and every way that you use to consider reality around you also manifests and changes that reality.
An equal spiritual being, say your family dog or cat, is composed of exactly the same spiritual energy that you are composed of. However, because their energy and cognitive processes are different than yours, they have a lessened ability to manifest on the world around them. Instead, they experience the world around them through senses that we lose touch with under the vibrancy of our logical minds. We're distracted with all of the symbolism and concepts of the world around us while they are experiencing a much more instinctive life, one where they respond rather than deduce. We structure reality with our deductive minds; they experience it. But where we tune into the local weather forecast to discover the storm that's brewing over the horizon, they can feel the energy shift and gather. Where we have taught ourselves to respond to the energy that has manifested before us, they live in a world where they instinctively feel that energy beginning to build.
A step farther down the spiritual food chain (for lack of a better term) would be your house plants, your garden, the trees that many of us pagans work with. They're alive but it could easily be argued that they have a less vibrant interaction with the energy around us than we do. We don't fully understand how they experience reality. But imagine an existence where you are so in tune to the flow of the seasons, to the cycle of the sun and the moon, that it actually defines your perspective of reality. Just like our beloved family pet, the trees and plants in the world around us are created from the same spiritual energy that forms us, it's just that their perspective - and by extension, they're ability to manifest reality - is different from our own.
It's an easy jump for us to make from our existence to that of our faithful animal companion. After all, there are similarities between how they interact with the world and how we do. We both have legs, we both eat, we play together, show each other affection, and we've all watched our pets dream. Our tools for interacting with physical reality have taught us that if it seems similar to us, it probably is similar. If it seems different, it probably is different. However, this is based solely on our ability to perceive the physical manifestation of spiritual energy. It's an ability to see an end product, not the creation of that product. And if we want to truly engage in magick, we need to shift our perception, we need to first understand that process, then allow ourselves to participate.
Our family pet? Yes, it's alive. We can see that with our eyes. The tree that grows in a local park? Well, we grudgingly admit that it must be alive as well, although we often toss out caveats to that concept. The computer mouse we used to navigate to this article? Oh, c'mon... it's a piece of plastic. How in the world can it be alive?
That mouse is composed of spiritual energy, just like our family dog and the herb garden on our apartment windowsill. It's composed of spiritual energy just as we are as human beings. While it seems to completely contradict our logical minds, if everything that is composed of spiritual energy is alive, then even though it obviously experiences reality in a much different way than we do, our food processor, our car, our microwave oven, even the computer that we use to access Old Ways are also alive.
In the movie, The Matrix, one of the characters explained when Neo tried to bend a spoon with his mind, "Do not try to bend the spoon; that's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth: There is no spoon." That's the flip side of the coin we're considering today. What we need to realize is that, if A) everything is created from spiritual energy, B) everything created from spiritual energy is alive, and C) there is only one source (the divine) for spiritual energy, then D) we are not only the spoon, but we are also divine.
The acceptance of this concept is much more important than the applications behind it. Simply allowing ourselves to embrace the reality of our world being alive will open up amazing doorways on its own. There is one part of this concept that applies directly to the concept of why magick doesn't work the way we think it should.
Yet.
It's pretty easy for us as humans who walk a mystical spiritual path to accept the concept that we manifest reality around us. What we often fail to consider is that so does every other person that we interact with. When we gather with our covenmates to do ritual work, it isn't one of us that is solely responsible for manifesting reality - we do so together. However, we do the same thing with our co-workers. With our children. With the family pet. With the tree in our backyard.
With the computer we're sitting at.
We can't magickally turn our dog into a horse or change the color of our car by sheer force of will because these beings are alive and manifesting their own reality. Changing a fir tree into an apple tree would completely subvert the will and experience of the original species. To upgrade our personal computer through force of will would be invalidating the worth and experience of our old PC. To do anything of this sort would be to work incredibly dark magick. We would be completely subverting the will of another to fulfill our own selfish desires.
Magick primarily works in the seams between spheres of manifestation. Think back to the article Spinning in Circles and the concept of spheres. Anything we manifest at this level of our work has to slip between the spheres in our reality, not just around the boundaries of our own sphere, but (as seen within the scope of this article) without violating the boundaries of our family pet, our beloved rose bush, or our new LCD monitor. If you were able to chart those interactions, you would find that your abilities manifest in the open spaces between those spheres, not in the face of the flow of another's reality.
That's one of the core reasons why witches, shamans and the type have traditionally worked magick behind closed doors, in the dead of night, or with the first light of sunrise. First of all, with fewer people watching and aware, there are less spheres to work around. Second, even when there are folks watching, our sense of belief (as opposed to a sense of disbelief) is heightened when it's dark. Without all of the visual stimuli to remind us of physical reality, our own grasp on the world we manifest around us begins to relax a little. And with that grip relaxed, we believe that we're capable of doing more when we're cloaked in darkness, shadows, and candlelight than we believe we're capable of when the sun is in the sky overhead.
The next level of this process (which we're working on here in the pages of Old Ways) is to begin to release your hold on your own limitations. If you can completely manifest a new reality for yourself, as long as it doesn't grossly violate the spheres around you, you can do absolutely amazing things.
In one of my favorite books, Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David-Neel, the author describes people recognizing teachers and students from past lives, routinely surpassing the limitations of the human body, working verifiable magick, and appearing in more than one place at a time. In "Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice," ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin finds a culture in the Amazon jungle where their entire practice of medicine has been learned from consciously interacting with the spirit world. Quoting a village medicine man, the author was instructed to enter the spirit world through use of a certain hallucinogenic herb and seek out a certain spirit. "He wears a red breechcloth. In one hand he carries a war club; in the other, plants. You must drink more of the ku-pe-de-vuh until the demon begins to speak. He will teach you how to cure by singing and by using healing plants. That is all."
The list goes on and on.
At this level of the process, the key is releasing your own expectations and limitations. Both authors listed above speak of transformative experiences that the various practitioners had to undergo in order to accomplish such things. In Ms. David-Neel's book, rituals were undertaken that required a complete surrender of one's sense of self and all attachments to that concept. Using a hallucinogenic short-cut, such as that described in "Shaman's Apprentice," isn't easier - or safer. When asked if he could partake in the ku-pe-de-vuh, the author was simply told, "'No. This is a very dangerous plant. Many apprentices have taken in and some have lost their minds. Some did not survive.' After a moment's consideration, the shaman then told the author. 'If you take it you will die.'"
Releasing expectations and limitations is not a simple process, primarily because we've used both concepts to define our world from a very early age. While it may seem at first glance that it's a simple matter of "just believing," these limitations are intimately tied into our understanding of who we are. In a very real sense, our limitations are us.
Letting go of these limitations is incredibly challenging - and not something that everyone is capable of doing within the course of this incarnation. But on the path ahead we're going to learn methods to do exactly that. Not only will this give us a great deal of personal freedom, but it will allow us to begin working magick and consciously manifesting our own reality in ways that we had previously only dreamed were possible.
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