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“Everything that exists is subject to limits arising from its own nature, the nature of the whole system of which it is a part, and the nature of existence itself. These limits are as necessary as they are inescapable, and they provide the foundation for all the beauty and power each existing thing is capable of manifesting.”*
Though it’s not good New Age gospel to admit it, we’re faced with limits and boundaries all the time, and more to the point, that’s a good thing, for the reason Greer points out, and for others. Limits are the counterweight, the resistance for our training, the sparring partner to keep us in fighting trim. Rules change on other planes of existence, but to manifest power and beauty here, limits are absolutely essential. They’re the valve that allows us to build up pressure in the boiler, the enclosure that intensifies the heat of the fire, the focus for the laser — or the conscious, persistent human intention that manifests a goal.
Physical limits allow us to give shape to things, and to have a reasonable expectation they’ll stay in that shape, usefully, predictably. These rules don’t apply in the same way elsewhere. All of us have had experience on, and of, at least one other plane, the astral, where most dreams occur. You know how fluid and changeable the forms and shapes are there. The dog chasing you morphs into a car you’re riding in with the person who bullied you in high school. You look closely and that person’s hands aren’t holding the steering wheel any longer, but clutching a bouquet of flowers instead, two of which turn into ropes that winch you so tight you can’t breathe. You struggle, wake up gasping, and — thank God! — you’re in your bed. It’s the same bed as last night, last week, last month, the bed which someone made years ago, and it stays put, reassuringly solid and unchanging beneath you, obeying the laws of this physical world. You slowly come back from the feeling-sensation of your dream on the astral plane, welcoming the heaviness of your physical body around you, touching a few of the things here, pillows and sheets, your partner, a pet curled against your thigh or your face, the nightstand or wall beside your bed. Familiar, stubbornly solid objects and beings, responding to gravity and inertia. Yes, things mostly stay put here, in this world. Though we all have stories about the car keys …
The image at the top comes from a site with its own take on freedom and limits. What I find interesting is the image of flight presented as one of limitless freedom. Yet flight depends on air, resistance, lift, momentum, wing span and area, an appropriate center of gravity, and so on. Not everything stays aloft after you fling it into the air, and flight in a vacuum like in space follows different rules than flight in an atmosphere. It can seem paradoxical that freedom increases the better we understand and work within limits.
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*Greer, John Michael. Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. Weiser, 2012.
Image: glider.
A Druid Way 