New dreams

“So the years spin by, and now the boy is twenty.
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true,
there’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty,
before the last revolving years are through.”

These words from a song I sang in high school chorus have been going through my head recently.  We always need a dream to be working on.  We talk about being goal oriented, but maybe it’s more accurate to say we’re (most of us, anyway) process-oriented.  The journey is what keeps us going.  Most of us won’t stick with a goal unless the journey there offers some reward along the way.  Like the old saying, “you’ll get your pie in the sky when you die by and by, but we want ours on the ground while we’re still around.”  The power to go forward must lie in the present moment, or it’s nowhere.  We may begin in uncertainty, but the power to begin at all is what launches us.  Without that, no goal matters.   In fact, a goal is just an arbitrary end-point for what we call one journey to end, and another to begin.  Death is no more than a change of journeys.  Life is the process.  We get tripped up by seeing too small and naming too big.

The Journey

I’m enjoying the ongoing exchanges between Richard and Jack on my Strabo post.  Jack sounds like a somewhat angry person — “combative” is his own word, better than “angry” — he’s channeling the anger constructively from what I can see.  The Hebrew prophets sometimes roar with anger as well; not all anger comes as a bad thing.  We have classes in anger management, but you never hear of classes in joy management, or how to handle an excess of ecstasy.  Are we so unplugged in to joy that few experience it regularly?

Richard and Jack grapple with their faith journeys, as we must if we’re to grow.  We need certainty to know who we are, how to go forward; and doubt to keep us humble and growing.  Rarely does anyone sustain both simultaneously — a challenge.

Worship, pt. 2

In some practices of magic, worship is a merely formal step in acquiring what one wants.  The entity which may be invoked is treated as no more than a sort of holding tank.  Press the right buttons and out pops whatever it is one is seeking.  Offer the right sacrifices, say the right Enochian or Hebrew or Sumerian, etc., and the prize is supposed to drop in one’s lap, unless the stars are off, or one’s will turns out to be insufficiently focused, or adepts at another temple have interfered with one’s workings.  What of communion and enjoyment of the presence of the divine?!  Must all our contact be commerce?  Again, gratitude seems more honest — and enjoyable, too.  For when there is an actual entity that values a relationship with me, and responds to my actions, the link of sympathy between us grows.  Of course, sometimes the entity is simply an egregor, a thoughtform rather than a wholly independent deity, one animated by intense prayer and emotion over time, often by a group of worshippers.  The old Tibetan proverb comes to mind:  “with sufficient veneration, even a dog’s tooth will emit light.”  But this is not the worship I seek. 

Worship, pt. 1

Since recent commenter rjperalta closed his post with the words “worship him in spirit and truth,” I thought I’d consider worship briefly.  I’ve never quite understood who worship is for.  God doesn’t need it, because in traditional Christian conceptions at least, he is a being wholly sufficient without our human existence or action.  It would be odd to claim that God somehow benefits from worship, as if he were dependent on it.  One could argue more reasonably that the worshipper benefits, through attention on something larger than the self, and in the devotion to an ideal, in which case God may tolerate worship.  But to command what the heart can only freely offer is like demanding that someone love you — it doesn’t work that way, from what I’ve seen.  The truest worship I have ever known is gratitude and communion.  But then I’m not worshipping in the sense of offering sacrifices or singing praises, but celebrating and experiencing closeness, or union.  The analogy that occurs to me now is a birthday party.  I don’t “worship” the birthday boy or girl, though I may certainly wish him or her well, but I may opt to join in the good feeling and happiness of celebrating the event by participating in the birthday rituals of gift-giving and well-wishing.  These are accepted ways of showing my affection and interest.  I do them, incidentally, because I wish to.  But other ways work as well.  And for someone I don’t know at all, my presence at his birthday party would be odd, if not downright unwelcome.  But my good wishes and thoughts are never inappropriate.

Proof, religious and otherwise

“No way of doing or thinking, however ancient, can be trusted without proof” (Walden, Henry David Thoreau).  But what will I accept as convincing proof?  Even Jesus gets impatient with those who expect signs and wonders.  Don’t ideas speak for themselves?

Apparently not.  Either we trust words even less nowadays, in which case verbal proofs count for less, or else other kinds of proof carry more weight for us.  And in the end for me it’s often the people themselves of a faith community who offer the most convincing proof.  I read recently that 99% of people who grow up in a Muslim culture remain at least culturally Muslim.  Likewise for Christians.  We are much less free to choose on the basis of proof or conviction than we may like to think, especially in a largely monolithic culture where genuine choice does not exist.  Instead, we erect a posteriori proofs for others about ways of thinking which we ourselves already have found congenial — which we may have adopted for reasons other than the strictly spiritual, or rational, or whatever criteria we announce to the world.

Miracles

Miracles are easy.  It’s the before and after that are difficult.  The miraculous is daily:  life, love, blueberries, sunlight, beauty, clouds, my wife’s face, breath, good questions, the smell of new-mown grass, consciousness, apple cider,  children’s laughter, sunsets – my list runs for pages.  What’s hard is the before, when we’re caught in emotion or pain or doubt or all three, and nothing seems wonderful; everything, to quote Hamlet, seems “stale, flat and unprofitable.”  And the after can be just as difficult.  The sense that the wonderful will never again be as wonderful, the sense of loss, the inevitable let-down from the emotional high that I too often mistake for the miracle itself, but which is only a passing thing, delightful but temporary as one of those miraculous sunsets; the sense that my capacity for wonder is blunted, dulled; the self-disgust that mutes the world and everything in it, that shuts down my alertness to the “daily-ness” of the miraculous.  Then, too, that annoying, cynical voice that says these daily miracles don’t count, that anyone can experience those, as if the miraculous were anything but democratic in its appearance and opportunity.  Miracles for the elite only, the chosen, the blessed, as if blessings do not pour constantly on us all!

So the before and after, paradoxically, serve as excellent indicators that the miraculous has happened, because of my human anticipation and then reaction to it.  Instead of praying for the miraculous, I should pray in the miraculous — acknowledge the gift already given.  “The only true miracle is a changed consciousness.”  Beautiful, but I’m not sure I believe it.  The miraculous is profligate, abundant and running over, spilling out of every single life, too much for any single person, not something I can hold onto.  This is how Spirit seems to work — not just full, but overflowing.  And when the miracle happens, and I acknowledge the presence of the miraculous, the miracles continue.  One powerful key is gratitude — sometimes I think it’s the only prayer we need.

Strabo: the human soul is indestructible

“The druids joined to the study of nature that of moral philosophy, asserting that the human soul is indestructible” — Strabo (63 BCE – 24 CE; Greek historian)

Fear is often the greatest magic we practice against ourselves.  But the soul is not made of perishable stuff; death, age and suffering are unknown to it.  Even our language reflects our fear, for we speak of your soul and my soul, as though our true spiritual identity were a possession of the ego, one more thing the ego will lose at death.  No wonder we fear death.  But I am soul, and you are soul, and each of us has an ego, and a body, and mind, emotions, senses, imagination and memory, which soul uses to gain experiences in many worlds.  The dream worlds we enter each night, and in reverie while awake, are echoes and dim memories of a less physical world.  Sometimes called the astral, in this realm imagination works more freely and rapidly.  The physical world takes longer to respond to the imagination; the work of manifestation faces more numerous constraints.  But the astral, and each successive world beyond it, affords greater scope and ease for this creative faculty of the soul.

We experience immortality each time we forget fear and take on wonder, marveling at beauty, our hearts opening as we give and receive love.  Only when we shut down and close up do we yield our spiritual birthright to fear, and temporarily give away our heritage of wisdom-strength.  Sometimes it takes very little to open up again:  music overheard, the smile of a child, a friendly greeting from a passerby, sudden beauty in a world that before looked gray.  Soul recognizes its own.

Imbolc

Last night the small but active Pagan student group at my school celebrated Imbolc, the festival of the first signs of spring.  The official date of the holiday is February 1st/2nd; it’s one of the “cross-quarter days” midway between the four great holy days of the winter and summer solstices, and the spring and autumn equioxes.  As John Michael Greer notes in The Druidry Handbook, “… the eightfold year makes a perfect seasonal cycle of festivals for a nature-centered spirituality.  Each station of the cycle has a counterpart on the other side of the wheel of time:  winter balances summer, spring balances fall, harvest balances planting, life balances death, all reflecting the balance of the world of nature.  A new festival comes every six and a half weeks on average, far enough apart so that each has its own seasonal character, close enough so that every point in the cycle relates to the others” (76).

The eight of us gathered in Chapel after sunset, the nearly full moon bright overhead.  This time the president proposed that we try a more free-form ritual.  With the smell of sage filling the air, we sang sounds for each of the elements and the circle formed.  Several said they could sense it flowing around us.  At one point when we discovered we needed the circle to be larger, we sang the sound of the south, and almost immediately two students said they felt the circle grow.  We’d planned to extend our Samhain practice of offering up limitations and setbacks by writing them down and burning them in a cauldron, releasing them, but this time with an Imbolc twist of inviting a positive replacement to take birth for what we were giving up.  The god’s candle burnt very low, fitting for the still-young god, while the goddess candle flared up.  In keeping with the lunar aspect that Imbolc also shares (it’s traditionally celebrated four full moons after Samhain–hence the only approximate February date), many of the decorations and foods for the feast which club members ended up purchasing or making were white or yellow–white chrysanthemums, popcorn, drinks, cookies, chips, bananas.  It’s a tradition in parts of Italy:  mangiare in bianco — literally, to “eat in white” during the full moon. 

There is a gentleness in our group, in spite of several very forceful personalities; we unite because ritual matters to us, and though the group often is a social club more than anything else, when we come together in ritual, a different — and I would assert, an equally true — face appears.  In our ongoing quest for connection and meaning, a festival celebrated on the edge of spring, honoring the earth and the power for growth within us all,  makes a good place to start.

Immortality

“They [druids] desire to inculcate as their leading tenet, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from these present to those beyond” — Julius Caesar, The Gallic War, Book 6, section 15.

Chariot of the Soul

“It is a false teaching which bids us eradicate from our natures anything which God has implanted there, as false and foolish as ham-stringing a spirited thorough-bred colt because it is wild and unbroken. … What God’s law forbids is the abuse of these things, not the use for the purposes for which they are intended.  The Path of the Hearth-fire gives a far sounder and more effectual discipline of the instincts than the hermit-caves of Thebes, with their ascetic tortures and self-mutilations, doing violence to Nature and outraging God’s handiwork.  Frightened by the Elemental forces when he meets them unpurified and unprepared, the ascetic flees from what he believes to be temptation.  It is a far sounder policy to equilibrate the warring forces in our own nature until we can handle our unruly team of instincts and make them draw the chariot of soul with the power of their untiring speed” (Dion Fortune, Applied Magic, 3).

I’ve valued the writings of Dion Fortune, born Violet Firth, ever since I ran across them about 15 years ago.  From her one may learn the difference between the dubious seeking after psychic thrills and occult dabbling that characterize much that passes for “magic” today, and the true magnum opus or “great work” which is to make the human soul the fit vessel for the divine forces to individuate and manifest, fulfilling the image of God in which we were created, to use Christian language and imagery. 

Even Fortune’s pen name, based on the Latin motto Deo, non Fortuna (“by God, not by chance”) indicates her aspiration to truth, however much the pursuit and reporting of it runs up against tradition and accepted mores and values.  Magic has certainly suffered from its share of bad press and vilification, but Fortune goes far to correct our understanding.  We often think that because our culture approves or castigates a particular practice or custom, it must be correct and universally true, or completely abhorrent and morally repugnant.  But of course all cultures, as human constructs, are imperfect, nor can they be anything else, after all, and so their received opinions and wisdom deserve investigation and testing.  Many of the ordering principles and practices of a culture are simply arbitrary, such as the appropriate physical distance between two people who are talking.  If you want to see cultural relativity in action, watch an Arab and a Japanese talk, for instance.  The Arab keeps moving closer, toward what is for her a comfortable distance, while the Japanese keeps retreating, toward what for him is a respectful distance.  The Arab seems pushy and intrusive to the Japanese; the Japanese seems distant and cold to the Arab.  Both are ”right,” and “wrong.”  More accurately, neither label is appropriate.  But cultural norms are works in progress, meant to accommodate inevitably conflicting human needs and beliefs and practices.  Like all things human, they’re compromises — and compromise is much of the genius of being human.  Too often we perceive compromise to be weakness, or appeasement, selling out to “the other side.”  But our ability to find a middle, a mean between extremes, rather than to hold out for and insist on an unachievable ideal against all common sense and experience, is the mark of true civilization.  The challenge, of course, is to tell the difference, to distinguish lasting wisdom from the fluid and relative norm that may shift tomorrow.  And in our foolishness, because so much is indeed relative, we proclaim that everything is, and then abandon wisdom altogether.  But as the medieval philosopher Francis Bacon observed, “They are ill discoverers who think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.”