Secret Teachings

Very often, the seeker of spirituality is lured in by promises of secret knowledge, secret power.  Seekers come from all walks of life, but there are commonalities.  The empty, hollow feeling; the need for connection and meaning; the desire to know that there is more to life; the need for everlasting peace; the desire to control the direction of their lives; and upon the cold, wine-dark sea, they will grasp at whatever driftwood seems to promise those things to them.

Some seekers believe they have found what they were seeking after.  They gather knowledge.  They gather rituals.  They gather secret names, motions, and symbols.  Some begin to feel a bit special for all of this; Indeed, not many wouldn't.  As special beings, is it not up to them, therefore, to make sure the "lineage stays pure"?  Is it not up to them to make sure that those to whom they pass on this hard-won knowledge (i.e. usually the price of a few books of new age and/or acedemic provenance) are worthy of such?  So, make sure you stroke their egos.  Make sure you pay your dues, or your seminar fees, or your initiation fees, or your church tithes.  If you don't...maybe you'll find that you by chance aren't worthy of the secrets, of the rituals, the initiations, names and symbols.  You poor, spiritually undeveloped soul, you.  Maybe by next incarnation you'll have learned enough to be ready for the SECRETS....

It should be apparent from what I've written above that I most certainly believe that the knowledge should be available to all, and certainly not suppressed and yet, I suppose I'm in the camp that some would call "exclusionary" or even "elitist", but by observation, not by choice, decision, or mere opinion.  If everyone were meant to do it, it would work for everyone, but it doesn't.  How many people pick up some aspect of the occult, any aspect, and stick with it?  How many does it work for?  Those factors are just as much a part of the mechanism that keeps these things "secret" as them being deliberately kept secret, if not more so. In China, businesses have never *stopped* consulting a feng shui expert.  That doesn't mean everyone *practices* feng shui any more than taking communion makes every Catholic a priest.  Is the occult more accepted in the West today?  Sure.

But we don't have to keep secrets.  The secrets keep themselves.

The only real secrets aren't secrets at all, because they can be neither withheld nor doled out by any human. They are, and have always been, spirit-taught. The first shaman knew this, and so does anyone else with *actual* spiritual attainment.  Knowledge, power, peace and all the rest don't come from a book, or a seminar, or a teacher, or a church, or a secret society or mystery cult.  Anything else purported to be a "secret" is nothing more than culturally developed window dressing.  A good teacher can give you methods to get to the door leading to the experience.  A great teacher then gets out of your way so you can walk through the door.

But will you walk through it?  And once through it, will you stay on the path?  Or will you keep yourself from the secret?...

Advice and Counseling

The other day I was having a conversation with my wife about giving advice to friends, and the bewilderment, exasperation and even sometimes anger that can arise within us when our friend refuses to follow the advice we give. Then also today another friend expressed a similar bewilderment, so I thought that possibly others might benefit from what I told them. Take from this what you may.

I used to get upset when I'd give advice about what I say I would do (assuming when actually faced with that exact same situation that I would actually do that) and people didn't follow it.

Then I realized two things. First, it isn't about me. It's about them. A person can only ever do what they are capable of at the very moment of every decision they are faced with, and they will only ever choose the option that they are capable of choosing given the person they are at that very moment. A person will never "choose" otherwise because events in their lives have shaped them into the person that makes the choice they make, and no other. Speaking the truth as you see it isn't enough. You must also speak it without judgement, and without attachment to the outcome. To do otherwise creates suffering.

The second thing I realized was that, as much as I think I might understand another's life, situation and motivations, I really don't, because I didn't have their experiences exactly the way they did, and that furthermore, believing that I knew better was an illusion at best.

Now, when someone tells me about their problem, I listen first, and sometimes that is really all a person wants, to be heard not "fixed".

Then if I have an idea of how they might better their situation I will ask if they need advice first before giving it. Then, even if they say yes, I always assume that they might not have the will or desire to follow that advice because they feel they know their situation and capabilities better than I do...because they are correct. To do otherwise would mean that when someone else tells me to do something I feel will not work, that I should still do it and ignore my own warning bells.

The best advice I was ever given when dealing with *any* situation I got from a shamanic seminar I attended once, and can be summed up as follows:

1. Be present in the moment. Distress over the past and worry about the future do nothing but cripple our ability to live an authentic life of fullness and wholeness.

2. Know yourself. Your own experiences, prejudices and emotions play a larger role in how you relate to people and situations than you may realize.

3. Speak your truth without blame, judgement or criticism. Nothing destroys communication faster than a willful disregard for another's "placement".  Everyone fights their own battles.

4. Have no attachment to the outcome. Be open to the possibilities. Doing so will avoid worry over the future, as well as avoid suffering caused by too great a desire for specific outcomes.

The Purpose of Myth

Myths are truth spoken of by allegory, metaphor, and symbolism. Myths are illustrations of spiritual principles. They are not the principles themselves. They were created by those who had an insight to demonstrate those principles which such people already had some understanding of, not to become dogma themselves. 

I prefer to take the tack that what is, is. I enjoy reading the myths and folklore, but if they do not sync with my actual spiritual experiences well then, I am going to take my own personal experiences over anything else, because the sun is right there and it's the sun, and the ground is right here beneath my feet and it is what is.

I think the Gaelic and Brythonic myths of my ancestors as we have them are valuable, but I would never trust them enough to believe that they are automatically more correct than my own personal experiences, especially considering that they were still written down by Christian monks, and although the Bible is at least 1700 years old, I think it is pretty much wrong on most things of consequence to me, so appeals to written authority don't really hold as much weight with me.

I would rather study the myths of my ancestors, but translate into modern English words every thing or being my experience by using modern English to create epithets, etc. If I feel that my experience of a being coincides with the mythological descriptions of particular deities, etc. then great.

I think if more people would actually translate the names of the gods as much as possible into modern English so that we can really understand what the epithet meant, and use that modern English phrase instead of the deity's "name", then we might come to a better understanding of what our ancestors thought about them, because they were not for the most part using foreign language to describe their deities. They were using the everyday language that they intimately understood and were raised with. I certainly agree with the value of studying Celtic languages, I study Finnish, Norwegian, Old Norse, Old English, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic myself and have even studied at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, but we should never forget that it was our ancestors' actual experience with their own present that we are reading about. As a language teacher I can tell you it certainly can get in the way, especially a foreign and romanticized one.

Some may wonder what happens when one's personal experience is at great odds with a detail of the myths, and I suppose the answer would be complex and would depend on the specific discrepancy and it's degree, whether or not the discrepancy were covered by another related people to show a possible other interpretation that existed but didn't get attested, whether we know enough about that topic that there is absolutely no debate at all among scholars of the subject for there to be a "correct" interpretation or answer, etc.  I think though, that the fact that learned scholars can't agree on some things means in and of itself that no one view can be authoritative regarding those topics, and in a way would make every belief a kind of personally favored myth-inspired UPG. 

The Celtic and Germanic tribes are but two groups of many tribes descended from whom scholars typically name the Indo-Europeans and that their language, which all European languages but four descend from, is called by them Proto-Indo-European, and that many deity names are co-arisen from common PIE root names. I fully agree that different peoples came to understand the gods in their own unique ways, but no matter how long the centuries and the miles and the language slang innovations that turned into dialects and then separate languages, the sun each generation looked upon was the same, and they only ever taught their children a combination of what their parents taught them coupled with their own experience.

I also try to think about the individual and small community life experiences back then. I don't think most people's considerations of the gods extended beyond their experienced world.

If they had a concept of a deity that was everywhere and represented a certain set of powers, experiences, or what-have-you's, and they moved to a new area already populated, did that god come with them? Are they more intuitive than the indigenous population to detect a deity that was already there that the indigenous inhabitants didn't notice? Would they have said "oh, you call her that? Well, we call him this"? 

If they moved to an area where there used to be a people who worshipped a certain deity, but those people were long gone without a trace, would that deity cease to exist because the new people worshipped their version or whatever instead? Would they intuit that god there as different even though each culture considered their own deity present everywhere they were and used different names?

I'm one who believes there are many gods, but only so many, not a soft polytheist who believes that all gods are one god, and not a hard polytheist who believes that every mention of every single god name*has* to represent a completely separate being. You might say that I am an "al dente" polytheist, just soft enough, just hard enough, for my taste anyway. I think all things have their individual spirit, but that the gods are omnipresent in all things in the way that they are, that there is no part of anything that is not "of the gods".

I'm not 100% pure hard polytheist because then I'd have internal conflict trying to decide if Odin only created the first Germanic people while Zeus and Prometheus made the first Greeks. That's why I say that my experience weighs just as heavily for me as the myths, because for me the gods are so much more vast than any people in any time could have defined completely. The All Father is the All Father, not the Some Father.

If the creation myths can be assumed to be metaphorical without specifically telling us so, then how is it so easy to say that all people aren't talking about the same great powers as manifested through their own story telling and understanding?  Why would we feel free to take the myths as definitively saying that all the father gods of all the pantheons are different beings, but then be wary of taking the rest too literally?  In my opinion, it is simply better to take it all as metaphor, speaking a truth symbolically, rather than literally.

I am the same person, acting always from my same core, and yet my wife and my mother know me differently by the very nature of my interaction with them and their perception of my actions. If they didn't know each other, and described me to each other in the checkout line, would they possibly think they were talking about different people who happened to have *some* commonalities?

Myths are the lived experiences of a spiritual reality, not an objective observation of a spiritually lifeless universe. 

Myths may be the bricks and tiles comprising the walls and roof, the shape of which define a way or culture, but the principles that inform those myths are the same ground and foundation for everyone, and from which everything is born equally. 

The Truth of The Deathless and the Sacrifice of Life to Life

Life is a web, forever weaving and dynamic, not a mountain with a peak. Consciousness is a sphere, with all points equidistant to the center, not allotted more to some and less to others like some cosmic pyramid scheme. All things are alive, because all things are conscious. All things are conscious because consciousness pervades all things, and does so equally. All things are beings.

In all of Nature, life is taken to preserve life, all life is sacred, and all life is equal. All life is equally precious. All. From the largest of animals, to every person, down to every blade of grass and pebble and grain of sand, all life yearns to live. So should we all conceive of it. Such should be our perception as well.

This speaks to a great responsibility placed upon what we choose to birth into existence. Does that idea benefit life, or does it encourage needless death or suffering? Does that organization promote the good for all of life, not just for some individuals? Does that piece of plastic really need to be created?

When you can feel the loss, and the awe of the sacred immensity resounding in the depths of your soul, at the death of the tiniest green growing thing as much as you feel it for a human life or that of an animal, and when you can feel the certainty of the debt to life thus created, then you will only have begun to perceive the truth of the oneness of things, and the sacred equality of which I speak.

Understood this way, every moment becomes a sacred moment, with no escape into the "ordinary" to be possible, no escape to the belief that this-and-such a moment is profane and only that-and-such a moment is sacred, and every death becomes a sacred sacrifice and a promise to return a gift fully given. What will that sacrifice call forth for you?

Do the implications of this make you uncomfortable? Does your discomfort make it less true, just to make you feel better?

Core Animist Values

These values, which I have adapted from Tom Cowan, are core values, found in many societies and practices, worldwide.

§  The animist knows all things are alive and spirit-filled, and related to her through the divine structure of creation. All things are, therefore, responsive to heartfelt prayer, petition, and pleasing.

§  The animist asks animals, plants, and natural features to help her live more respectfully of their lives and the life of the earth itself. She meets some of these fellow creatures in her dreams, visions, and daily life, and they have become friends.

§  The animist does not look “out there” for the Sacred. She finds its presence and the highest of spiritual values upon the Earth, beneath the shining stars, in the cycles of the sun, moon and seasons, in the woods behind her house, in the creeks and streams, lakes and rivers just outside, in the birds at the feeders in the backyard, in the shadowy movements in the forest.

§  The animist does what the seasons are doing and lives in harmony with each moon and season’s unique rhythms of light, weather, temperature, growth, movement, decay, stillness, and darkness.

§  The animist uses gifts from nature, such as feathers, antlers, bone, stones, branches, flowers, leaves, firelight, water, clay, soil, the wind, and shadows for spiritual work and play.

§  The animist loves the land that birthed her and nurtured her and continues to hold part of her soul, calling her to return now and then to walk it, hear its voices, and breath its many fragrances. She also knows and loves the land where she currently lives, and she honors and respects its features, wildlife, and spirits with whom she shares this land.

§  The animist stands humbly at the end of a long line of ancestors who have gone before her and without whom she would not be here. She has met some of them. They take an interest in what she is doing with her life, for it is also theirs. It is a sacred trust.