It's a natural desire on the part of the followers of any spiritual path to have a structured system of spiritual rules and guidelines for its adherents to follow, a map that will guide them through the challenges that face them on their daily path and will facilitate their spiritual growth and evolution. Christianity has the concept of, "Love the LORD your God with all your heart, mind soul and strength" and "Love your neighbor as yourself" as well as an extensive list of rules and commandments. Mainstream Wicca embraces the concept of, "An it harm none, do what you will," which leaves the concept of "harm none" open to the individual practitioner and the framework of their personal theology and philosophy.
Shamanic witchcraft has similar concepts integrated into it's path. While individualism is encouraged to the point that adhering to any formalized structure is frowned upon, it's still useful to have a set of guidelines, a template we can compare ourselves and our spiritual growth against to determine if we're reaching our goals. The key is that, since both shamanism and intuitive witchcraft are so open-ended and tend to evolve with the individual practitioner, it's imperative that the set of guidelines is flexible enough to accommodate that growth without unnecessary restrictions.
If we accept the concept that we are spiritual beings who have chosen to limit our perspective to embrace a physical existence, then the flip side of that idea is that we are more than the physical incarnation that we believe we are limited to. There are levels to our being and our interaction with both the "physical" and "spiritual" worlds that we often ignore or are simply unaware of their existence.
These aspects of ourselves function at a level beyond the acceptance of mundane reality. They are closer to the core of who we are and are often immune to the temptations and struggles that we face on our daily paths. The simplest example of this is the concept of intuition. Let's pretend, for instance, that our mind, the part of our mental being that is easiest for us to connect with, decides that we are going to eat one more slice of pizza - even though we've long passed the point of our hunger being satiated. That portion of us (our mind) controls our hand (which isn't hungry in the slightest) to reach for another slice. In commands our mouth, which has had its fill of the experience of chewing, swallowing and tasting to open once more. But somewhere from within us, a still, small voice offers a dissenting opinion. Sometimes it's just a sense. Sometimes it's an almost-heard voice that simply whispers, "No."
The idea to consider isn't that this voice comes from outside of us, even though it disagrees with our conscious choice and our intended course of action, but that it is part of us. We often think of ourselves as concise, fully contained, unified beings, but to truly appreciate the process of our spiritual growth and evolution, we need to expand our awareness of ourselves and look beyond the limitations of that concept. If we are truly spiritual beings living a physical existence, then by that very definition we must be composed of spiritual matter. As we considered at the very beginning of this journey together, all spiritual matter can only emanate from one source - the divine, the individual concept that we place upon "God" as seen from a perspective that embraces all possibilities, all outcomes, every emotion and event.
What is key in considering this approach is that reality is truly woven for our benefit. It is what we make of it. However, to fully embrace the potential power of our spiritual nature, a truly limitless source of power, we have to open ourselves to the concept that life is good and that the things that happen in our lives don't happen as the result of random and meaningless process of cause and effect, but that they are a conscious process that is leading us to fully embrace our higher selves and live to our highest calling. This means that the person who cut you off in traffic, the romance that failed to live up to your dreams, the abuse you suffered as a child, the co-worker who backstabbed you, the spouse that cheated on you, your automobile that broke down when your money was the tightest, aren't simply a series of horrible occurrences that life uses to beat you down. Each has a flip side. Each holds a lesson. Our challenge, as students of spirit, is to see those lessons and the goodness they hold and learn from them.
The key, however, is to remember that because we are spiritual beings, our intuitive responses to situations are ethical. Not from a perspective that they always make sense. Not because they don't violate any cultural codes of conduct. But because they, for lack of a better definition, more closely resonate with spirit than what we perceive from our mundane vantage point.
For instance, in nearly every culture throughout human history, it is wrong to take another life. However, it is almost always acceptable to kill in the name of self-defense. Both approaches end a life. Both approaches end with death being meted out by our hands. Yet one course of action is acceptable and one is not. If we look at the scenario through the cold, hard lens of blind logic, it should be wrong to take a life. Period. If someone threatens ourselves or an innocent, then through that same lens, it could be argued that we should allow ourselves or another to be killed so that our own spirit isn't tainted by the action of taking another life.
Yet the same intuitive, higher sense that clearly tells us that it is wrong to kill another human being, also tells us that, if it is absolutely necessary, we could kill another human being to protect a helpless child or someone who was being attacked that can't protect themselves. We may not be able to logically explain why taking a life is acceptable in one scenario but not another, however we feel, in the core of our intuitive selves, that it is the right choice to make. We know that standing by an allowing a child to be murdered is a worse choice than killing to protect that child, even if the latter action puts the blood on our hands.
The issue in allowing our intuition to be our guide in ethical matters is that its voice can often be lost under the cacophony of our own pain, fear and anger. There is a process that we need to follow, a methodology by which we address our issues, set aside our baggage, forgive those who harmed us, and begin to develop love and compassion for the people in our world. If we can reach this point where our first reaction is not retreat or retribution, but rather a conscious, heartfelt response, then we are well on our way to using our intuition as our key ethical compass.
There's a second aspect to this concept, the idea of increasing returns. Wicca often views this as "the Threefold Law," a concept that whatever energy is behind your intent will return to you three times over. While the very existence of this concept has been hotly debated within magical circles, the concept is absolutely necessary for spiritual growth to exist.
In its simplest form, the concept holds that whatever energy we project into the universe will manifest in our lives in a greater abundance than what we initially extended. Think of this concept not as a rule, but as a process of sewing seeds. Instead of planting flowers or trees or vegetables, we're planting patience, kindness, love, anger, hatred, compassion and the like. Not all of these will take root and produce an immediate crop that we can harvest. For instance, each of us has lost our temper on occasion and haven't been subjected to a string of people doing the same around us. We've also each loved and lost someone and have gone through the process of seeking love and being unable to find it.
While the examples are nearly endless, the concept holds true for each of them. As a general rule of thumb, what we "plant," we will "harvest." The energy that we extend into the universe is the same energy that will manifest into our lives, only that it typically returns to us in a greater amount that what we originally projected. And just as a mundane plant differs from the seed that was entrusted to the care of the earth, so the energy we harvest is often transformed into something new, but the connection to it's original "seed" is usually apparent if we look closely enough.
This process is absolutely necessary for our spiritual growth and evolution. If you think of the process, not as a spiritual principle, but as a mundane concept, it may be easier to understand. For instance, imagine that you're in the gym lifting weights. You lift ten pounds ten times and reach the absolute limit of your strength. If this were a static process, where you received the same return that you projected, you'd never get any stronger, you'd never lift any additional weight or increase the number of repetitions that you are able to lift.
But you do get stronger. The more love you project, the more loving you become - and the more love you attract to you. The more compassion you exhibit, the more compassionate you become - and the more compassion that you attract to you. To continue to grow in a particular area, increasing amounts of energy need to be made available to you. For instance, in order to love more, you need more love within yourself and you need to find more love in your world. You need more than an equal amount returned to you - you have to receive the energy in greater amounts than you gave it.
What we often lose sight of is the simple concept that we often have to prepare ourselves to receive that additional energy. We have to remove the things in our lives that are keeping us from fully experiencing the harvest. Where a gardener has to prepare the soil, water the garden, and pull the weeds to make room for the growing plants, so we too have to turn to the waters that nurture our spirit (whatever they may be for each of us as individuals) and revitalize ourselves. We have to prepare our lives to receive the changes that we're planting, a process that may require ourselves to remove obstacles (much as a gardener would remove stones) or bring portions of ourselves back to life (similar to a gardener fertilizing and revitalizing the soil.)
And this is where the process begins to get messy.
There are very few clear-cut situations in life. Sometimes we hurt other people. Sometimes we hurt ourselves. The path where no one has their feelings stepped on, where no one ever gets hurt, is sometimes the least conducive to anyone's personal growth. Even in the best situations, where we are being consciously kind and responsible with our own energy, we may find ourselves cast in a role where we act as a mirror and reflect another person's weaknesses and insecurities.
We can take comfort in remembering that it is our higher selves, the portion of our being that is more intimately connected to the spiritual realms, that is guiding us. It's this higher self, often expressing itself through our intuition that contradicts us when we're heading down a path that isn't the most beneficial choice for us to make, that is the voice of dissent when we're being stubborn and engulfed by our fears and emotional baggage. Everyone has this voice. Everyone is guided by the higher, spiritual aspects of themselves, even if they consciously choose to ignore that voice. Because we are all guided by Spirit, because we are spiritual beings created from spiritual matter, all of us are guided by the sacred divine, whether we choose to recognize that connection or embrace the illusion of our physical incarnation.
The key is that we're here in this lifetime to learn, to grow, and to work through past karma either by replacing it with positive actions or by participating in the growth of another person. As spiritual beings experiencing life from a physical perspective, our core reason for incarnating into a physical lifetime is because this level of reality presents us with challenges, experiences and sensations that either only exist in this reality or resonate differently here than in other realities, including the afterlife. We are here to learn and grow, a process that requires challenges for us to test ourselves against, areas where we have to stretch beyond our comfort zones, where we have to take risks, be vulnerable, and open ourselves up to being hurt in order to truly grow. In this process, because each of us is equally student and teacher, we will make mistakes. We'll unintentionally harm people that are dear to us. But it is this unintentionally harm that often provides the other person with the challenge that they test themselves against, with the situation that forces them to grow beyond their boundaries, to move beyond their comfort zone. Should we consciously cause harm to another? By no means. But we have to realize that our goal in this incarnation is not to find and maintain a happy status quo, but to challenge ourselves, to forge our weaknesses into strengths, and to spiritually evolve so that we can fully embrace the next level of existence and the next stretch of road in our journey as immortal spiritual beings.
Until we have worked through our fears, until we have turned our weaknesses to strengths, we will regularly find ourselves at the mercy of our lessons. The pain we fear will often be overwhelming, not because it is beyond our capacity to transmute into experience and wisdom, but because it is magnified by our fear. We fear that we'll never find an equal to our previous lover. We fear that we won't find another job when we're fired. We fear with the loss of that thing that we held dear and drew comfort from, that we simply can't move forward and face the challenges that life undoubtedly holds in store for us. People leave our lives all the time, either choosing another path that leads them away from us or moving on to the next level of existence. Our circumstances and the challenges we face literally change every day. When those people or circumstances allow us to hide from our fears or shelter us from the challenges that we need to face, their loss can be overwhelming. However, when we have transmuted the fear into love, when we've changed the weaknesses into strength, while we still feel the loss it is not only no longer overwhelming, but it is accompanied with love, compassion, and joy for the other person or with hope and faith that the next stop on our journey will be better than the last.
When we begin to live life from a perspective where we consciously address our fears and weaknesses, where we seek to grow and honor others, not only on their own journey of growth and spiritual evolution, but as our teachers and challenges in our own growth, when we learn to listen to and trust our intuition and act with love and compassion, the need for rules and laws fall away. The validity of our actions isn't questioned, because each person realizes that they speak to our own need to grow and that we act with love and compassion.
Laws and rules are forged out of a necessity to protect what each of us calls our own. "Thou shall not kill," is restated to, "You shall not take away another's life." "Thou shall not steal," becomes, "You shall not take away another's property." "Thou shall not commit adultery," becomes, "You shall not take away the sanctity where another hides their heart." Are any of these actions justified? Under most conceivable situations, absolutely not. But there is always an exception to every absolute rule. "She was separated from her husband and we're in love, so sleeping together was okay." "I eat meat and need to put food on the table, so I killed an animal to survive." "The bank robber placed his gun on the counter, so I took it away, even though it wasn't mine."
The approach that we need to adopt was told to me by Nukah when I was studying shamanism under her guidance.
Two young men were going out to hunt when the first realized that he didn't have his bow. To save time, the second hunter gave him one of his spare bows and the two went and successfully hunted together.
Upon returning home, the second hunter realized that the first still had his bow. Days passed and it wasn’t returned, so he went to the first hunter's home.
"You still have my spare bow," he explained, "and I would like it back."
"But I really like this bow," the first countered. "It's better than the one that I have and shoots much straighter than any bow I've been able to make. I'm a better hunter when I use it and can better provide for our people when I take it hunting with me."
The second hunter responded, "It's your bow. I apologize for not realizing that. It was only in my keeping until it was time for it to enter your hands."
In this story, the second hunter demonstrated the ability to look beyond protecting what he called his own and, instead, shifted his perspective to the journey that both he and the first hunter were on in this lifetime. The bow become irrelevant and unimportant. What was important was that it provided the first hunter with a tool with which he was better able to engage in his calling. And while the second hunter took great pride in the spare bow he had made and the sentimental value that it held to him, he was able to look beyond the fleeting value of the object and see his role as being able to provide his friend with the ability to better his life and embrace the next portion of his journey.
When you interact with people in the spiritual community, you will begin to hear certain phrases. "This portion of my life was very difficult, but it taught me to really appreciate the daily blessings that I have in my life now." "That was a hard stretch, but I learned so much patience and forgiveness during that time and I'm so appreciative that I went through that." "This is hard for me, but I love you and I want what's best for you - so you have my understanding and support." These aren't simply words, but an understanding learned through letting go of our fears, transmuting our weaknesses into strengths, and placing the value of the experience, not on the trappings of the moment, but on the journey of growth and spiritual evolution that each of us experience in this physical incarnation.
Embracing that perspective alleviates the need for guidelines. It teaches us to follow our intuition, to lead with love, compassion and understanding, and to aid each other in our education and growth, rather than holding onto the things that allow us to hide our fears.