When I begin working with a student, regardless of whether they're an experienced practitioner or spreading their spiritual wings for the very first time, one of the first things we do is test their boundaries. In physical endeavors, such as coaching Sparrow or Bear in one of their little league sports, you test boundaries by determining what a person can do. How well do they throw and catch a ball? Can they dribble a basketball and make a basket? How is their swing from the plate and can they consistently hit a baseball?
Abilities such as these are one of the methods we employ to measure the world around us. For instance, I know that I can throw a ball a certain distance or I can hit a baseball with a bat when the pitch is thrown below a certain speed and over a specific part of the plate. Measuring these abilities gives me an idea of the student's strengths and weaknesses, indicating where we need to focus our work and where I can offer sincere praise. Spirituality, even that which is integrated into a mystical path, requires a different approach. It's not important to me how deep of a trance state a person can reach or how well they can move energy. Each of us has talents and abilities that are unique to us as individuals and I don't believe that there is a certain skill set necessary to becoming a witch or a shaman or being able to work magick. What I'm looking for are the boundaries that say, "My universe exists this far, but no farther" or "I believe I'm capable of achieving this mystical result, but not that one."
Almost without exception, our first lesson together is designed to tear those boundaries down. It's not a clean process, not a situation where you can push a button, the student's walls disappear, and they're left standing in awe as they look in wonder at the vastness of reality. But I can stretch out my hand and offer them a seed. It's up to each student whether they take that seed and what they do with it. Some will politely accept it and toss it aside as the ravings of a slightly unbalanced shaman. Some will tuck it away in a drawer or a back pocket, meaning to consider it later, but quickly forgetting that they were offered a seed at all. It's actually quite rare that a student will take the seed, plant it in soil, and carefully nurture it. There is no telling what the seed will grow into. Each harvest is as unique as the person who reaps it. But they will find a harvest. Perhaps it will manifest as a single flower. Perhaps it will become an apple tree ripe with fruit. But those who plant the seed will find the path before them and, their eyes open, will have the opportunity to see that path stretching to the horizon.
The seed that I offer them looks something like this.
"We know absolutely nothing - and we know everything." You'll hear spiritual teachers utter phrases like that all the time without explaining what they mean. While they mean well, intending for the student to discover the meaning of the statement for themselves on the path to enlightenment, well, I'm enough of a spiritual rebel that I prefer to hand out the teacher's edition of the books. I made a promise to you that I'm going to teach the entire scope of magick and spirituality as I know it and I take my word very seriously.
We know that we experience life. At this point in the process, it doesn't matter whether you're a fan of reincarnation or an adherent to the "we only live one lifetime" philosophy. (By the way, both are true, something that we'll look at in later materials.) All that's truly important is that we can agree on that single point, that we experience life. (If you're having trouble coming to terms with the concept, pinch yourself. Feel that? Then you're experiencing life. It's really that simple.) Understanding that we experience life is our first milepost on this particular journey.
The second milepost is that our experiences tend to fall into one of two categories - things we enjoy and things that we don't. Unless you've been seriously wounded at some point in your journey, to the point where there is a need for some deep healing to take place, you will find yourself drawn toward experiences that are pleasant rather than those that are unpleasant. The very act of experiencing, of dividing experiences into categories, is a process of learning. We learn that eating chocolate is a pleasant experience, one we'd like to repeat and that biting our tongue is an experience we'd like to avoid. In the same manner, we learn that comfort is pleasant and fear is unpleasant. That compassion is pleasant and rejection unpleasant. That love is pleasant and that hate is unpleasant. And, as we've considered at numerous points on our journey together, at its heart, spirituality is about love.
To truly experience love, we must first learn to love ourselves - and that can take some work. Perhaps we've eaten too much chocolate and don't like our reflection or the size of our clothes. Maybe we weren't given enough chocolate as a child and feel unworthy to receive it when it's offered to us as adults. We learn to heal, learn to forgive, and ultimately, learn to love. These are lessons that not only draw us closer to a life we find as pleasant (as opposed to unpleasant) but are lessons that are universally lauded by those we recognize as holy men.
So now we know two things. First of all, we're here to experience life. Second, those experiences, led by nothing more than our choice of experiencing the pleasant qualities of life, ultimately lead us to a spiritual path. One of the first boundaries that we have to let go of is usually found right here. Students will chime in with the observation that not everyone adopts a religion or even a defined faith. And those students are absolutely right. However, it isn't the definition of a path that makes it spiritual, it's what's in a person's heart. You don't have to consider yourself Christian or Muslim or Pagan or a follower of any path to be on one. It's what you feel, how you've learned to respond rather than react, and how you put your own needs aside to honor a loved one's needs that defines a spiritual path.
The mother who holds a screaming child in her arms, rocking the infant back and forth, gently cooing words of love and comfort until the baby quiets down? She's the same woman who couldn't stand the sound of other babies crying before she discovered the love she felt for her own infant. That's a transformative process, one where annoyance and reaction are replaced with love and response. The teacher who gives her all to her class year after year and is paid a fraction of what she could make in another career? The customer in a busy store who makes a point of smiling and offering compassion to a frazzled sales clerk? The driver who stops to help a stranded motorist change a tire in the rain? All of those people are on a spiritual path.
The third milepost takes us beyond what we can measure, but is a reflection of a concept that many of us hold up as a simple truth - the existence of an afterlife. Nearly every religion believes in a place where our soul or spirit goes or returns to after our mortal life has drawn to an end. Many of us were born into this lifetime remembering glimpses of another place, a somewhere where we existed before we came here. Young children will often speak of this place and the truth of its existence resonates in almost all of us.
For those who believe the single lifetime model, the "Elsewhere" is somewhere to spend the remainder of eternity once this lifetime has drawn to a close. To those who believe in reincarnation, it's a place where we not only came from, but where we return to between lifetimes. In both models, the "Elsewhere" is a place where we have a clearer picture of reality than we do here. Christians often believe that it's there where they'll find the answers to all of their questions. Pagans generally hold that we choose to limit what we know and remember when we incarnate into this lifetime, implying that there's a larger pool of knowledge that we have access to in the Elsewhere.
By both definitions, the Elsewhere is the dominant partner between here and there. It's there where we have access to a greater amount of information that we have readily at our fingertips during a single incarnation. The single lifetime model believes that the Elsewhere is everlasting; after all, by that definition it's where we'll spend eternity. In reincarnation, the Elsewhere is our source and the destination of our return ticket; in other words, it's home while this lifetime is merely an extended trip.
Let's make sure that we let that concept sink in. The Elsewhere is home. Our spirits are timeless; our bodies, in a best case scenario, last no more than a century. Those of us on a pagan path tend to understand that not only is this true, but we tend to wear our mortal bodies like costumes in an epic play. Physical reality is our theater and the spirit world not only our director and crew, but the audience as well. Just like actors leaving a stage, when the curtains close on our play, we don't come to an end - we simply go home.
The Elsewhere is our home.
Being the dominant partner in the equation of reality, the Elsewhere has to be a clearer reflection of the nature of reality than what we experience in this lifetime. The source simply has "more" - more time, more knowledge, more whatever - than the product. Think of our reality as a video of a landscape and the Elsewhere being the landscape itself. One is a limited existence; the other is limited only by our imagination. If we allow ourselves to simply sit before a screen and watch the documentary of the landscape, we slowly become disconnected with who we are and what we can do. Our sphere of influence becomes the cosmic couch, the screen on which the video plays, and the remote we use to tune in and out. We forget that this is our world, that we can go outside and interact with the landscape firsthand, that we can study it, learn from it, and learn to live in harmony with it. When we strive to perceive things in this manner, we can begin to see the nature of reality slowly taking shape in the relationship between this lifetime and the place where we're referring to as the Elsewhere.
We're here to experience life. These experiences lead us to a spiritual path. Our bodies change, age, and die and yet the essence of who we are, whether you refer to it as a soul or a spirit or something else, carries on. This spirit returns to the Elsewhere, either for eternity or for a short time before returning here. If we choose to incarnate again, we continue to grow, evolving spiritually as we continue on our spiritual path.
And it's here that the path forks. One direction leads us to consider the Elsewhere, the other to look more closely at the nature of our own mortal coil.
If we come from an Elsewhere, a place that is truly our home, and only come here to learn and spiritually evolve, then we're led to agree that the Elsewhere is a closer reflection of reality than our own mortal reality. After all, there are limitations here. We can't fly. We can't remember all of our past lives. We can't work magick.
And, given the nature of mortal reality as a reflection of the Elsewhere, there's a key reason why we can't.
Because we don't believe that we can.
If this reality is a training ground for the spirit, then, it is by its very definition, an extension of the spirit realm. We are quite literally spiritual beings who have chosen to experience life from a limited physical perspective.
What no one considers is that, if it's a choice we freely made, then we're also free to change our minds. We can remove the limitations we've agreed to accept. We can wield energy, work magick and miracles, and we can interact with the spirit world and learn from teachers that aren't currently incarnated in this mortal lifetime. If all we do is truly accept who and what we are and begin to release the boundaries that we put in place, we leave the nature of reality in this lifetime wide open.
When Sparrow was a toddler, we used to go on long hikes up at Opal Creek, a stretch of old growth forest with wide trails that hug the side of a mountain here in my native Oregon. Sparrow would announce, "Look at that black dog!" and, five minutes later, from around the bend in a trail, would come a family with a black Labrador retriever on a leash, their party previously hidden from us by the folds of the mountain. I have pagan friends who will simply stop and focus when they need a loved one to call them - and almost without fail, the loved one will shortly call them. I've been given visions on more than one occasion that immediately saved Sparrow and Bear from serious injury and certain death, visions that I couldn't have pieced together from the elements in my immediate environment.
Magick works, not because we precisely follow some intricate pattern of ritual, but because we believe it will work. A majority of the rituals, the incantations, the tools we employ not only help us focus, but they encourage us to believe. In very real ways, they act as a boost to our faith. There are those that bridge the gap between our understanding and the result we hope to achieve, but bit by bit, as we grow comfortable with the processes and begin to understand the mystical landscape, these parts of ritual can naturally fall away. What is key is our belief.
While it is often a stretch for us to accept that this reality is simply as we define it - and that we can define it any way we choose - it's often more challenging to consider the other fork in the path. The first fork we explored led us to consider the nature of our mortal experience; the other fork invites us to consider the nature of the Elsewhere.
The question we need to consider is, if we already have a home in the Elsewhere, why would we come into this incarnation with the intention of experiencing life and growing through a process of spiritual evolution? Why would we need to grow if we'd already reached the place where we'll spend all of eternity? Why would we need to change at all if we've already succeeded in our goal?
Viewed from this perspective, there is only one answer that makes sense.
The Elsewhere isn't our final destination.
If we've already reached paradise, the afterlife, Heaven, or, as we've referred to it in this article, the Elsewhere, if it were the end of the line, there would be no reason whatsoever for us to go through a process of growth and evolution. Evolution is a process of change, of honing traits that enable us to succeed in a particular environment. If we're leaving paradise to learn, to grow, to change into something more, then there has to be a place to apply those changes.
Some of us believe in the concept of angels or spirit guides or whatever you want to call the beings that watch over us and assist us from beyond the edge of our mortal senses. It can be argued that the reason we come here to learn and grow is to evolve into that role, to help others who choose to live this mortal lifetime. However, if this were the case, you'd eventually reach critical mass, where a Heaven filled with spirit guides would be assisting a handful of mortals who still hadn't spiritually evolved to a certain point. Mathematically, that simply doesn't work. And even if that were the case, it still raises the question, "Why become mortal at all?"
Those of us who have embraced the deeper portions of a spiritual path for a time realize that much of it isn't a process of collecting new spiritual tools as it is a journey of letting go. We let go of anger, we let go of fear, and ultimately, we let go of self.
There isn't one of us who, standing in the midst of a spiritual paradise, is capable of letting go of our place in that nearly perfect afterlife, knowing that we may never return and having no idea what awaits beyond that place. We don't possess the tools or perspective needed to move on to the next step in our spiritual evolution, so we come here, to the mortal experience, in order to learn how to do exactly that - let go and move on. We limit our perspective so we don't see hope, we don't see love, and we're overwhelmed with anger and fear. And with the bar raised so high, we begin to learn how to let go of our self, to release our vulnerabilities in the midst of difficult situations, honing skills that will serve us well when we're ready to let go of the Elsewhere and all we know to take the next step in our spiritual journey.
But what we here in this lifetime forget is that we created this reality. After all, just as we have unique traits and skills, so the needs of our personal growth are unique to each of us. It's why we're given exactly what we need. Why the teacher appears when the student is ready and not a moment before. However, if we believe that we truly created this reality, it also means that we have the power of creation at our fingertips. Magick works. We can reach the spirit world. And our limitations are only those which we choose to set in place for ourselves.
Will we achieve the fullness of that understanding in this lifetime? It's doubtful, but not impossible. It's rare that we have the opportunity to watch someone reach that portion of their path while we're walking the mortal plane. There have been stories throughout the ages of holy men and women who were capable of working what we, with our limited perspectives, perceive as miracles.
And we, if we would only let go of our boundaries and believe, are truly capable of doing even more.
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