[Related posts: Shinto & Shrine Druidry 1 | 2 | 3 || Shinto — Way of the Gods || Renewing the Shrine 1 | 2 || Boku no Shinto — My Shinto 1 | 2 ]
Paramahamsa Yogananda
“Its technique will be your guru.” With these words (ch. 11 of his famous Autobiography, online here), a young Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952), founder of Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) and a principal exponent of Kriya Yoga in the West, counsels a peer he has just initiated into the tradition he follows himself. With these words he also points toward a kind of spiritual path that Westerners, rightly wary of super-sized personalities and god-realized con-men, can approach and walk. A flexible and potent technique can be a trustworthy, profound and endlessly patient guide.
Technique as guru: as a practitioner of OBOD Druidry and Eckankar, I know firsthand that a technique responds to practice and devotion as much as any teacher. Religious and spiritual practice will always be as much art as science, because they welcome (and can profoundly benefit from) our subjectivity, even as they also point to their scientific aspect — definite and repeatable results we can achieve from dedication and regular practice. My emotions, my commitment, my ambition and drive, my struggles and dreams can all contribute to my practice — leaven it and enrich it and make it “mine.”
“other” as double: both of us angry at each other
My anger at the driver who cut me off in traffic last week, on my way back from dropping my wife off to stay with her cousin, can help me uncover other unexplored pools of anger I can work to identify, learn from, and transform. Anger by itself need not be bad, only unconscious anger, anger I act from unthinkingly, little different from a live wire I brush against in the dark, unintentionally — or attach to a light fixture and illuminate another step along the way. Without the experience of anger, I might well miss the wire altogether, and forfeit a chance at illumination.
I can, if I listen, come to see that my whole life is laboratory — not only what I close the door on at 4:00 or 5:00 pm each weekday and return home from. The individualistic-narcissistic-tending “MY spirituality” gets whittled down to more beneficial size through ongoing spiritual practice. And paradoxically reveals a personalized curriculum tailored to me, right now and here. Anger? Yup — that’s on my curriculum, though it may not be on yours. And my life is ideally set up to help me work with precisely that curriculum point, just as yours is for your distinct points. Yes — we share a “common core,” too.
compost: just another point along a transition
A practice like Druidry that places me in the natural world immediately begins to slim down ego in concrete ways and immediately accessible ways: merely walk out the door, and at once it’s clear I’m not the center, nor even the “most important” thing in the universe. I constantly meet the “spirit other”: animals, birds, trees, and beings without skin on — or bark, or fur, or scales. I am a paragraph in a chapter, not the whole story. And that’s a good thing, because the world is guru, too. Hard limits of some kind are the only way a world can work (try seriously to imagine one without them), but if I engage them wisely, they build spiritual strength rather than frustration, nihilism and despair. This physical body is eventual compost, like everything else: but not yet. And this interval is all. (Whether it is also “only” is an experiential question, one which only experience can accurately answer, not some dogma to be believed or rejected.)
“My Shinto,” my Way of the Spiritual Order of Things — let’s call it WOTSOOT — begins with the circumstances of my life today. Here I am, a 55 year-old white male, a teacher, a cancer survivor, married, nearsighted, in fair health. The initial details of your personal WOTSOOT naturally vary less or more from mine. They’re also often quite superficial — party chitchat, gossip in my cul-de-sac. Because I am also a point and vector of conscious energy situated in widening networks of energy exchange. I breathe, and chlorophyll all around me gets inputs it needs. Bacteria on my skin and in my gut flourish, and help me flourish too, if I stay alert to their balance. I sweat and crap and piss, and nutrients move where other beings can begin to use them. I consume some of these other beings — not too many, if the system is to remain in equilibrium — just as some them will consume me. New networks arise, as older ones shift or die. And part of my practice is: all praise* to the WOTSOOT!
Such processes of the physical realm are both fairly well understood and all too rarely incorporated into larger networks that spiritual teachings of all kinds tell us glow and ripple and transform and pervade the universe. Scientific insight begins to catch up here and there with spiritual wisdom. Not dogma, not theology, not creeds — that’s merely paparazzi spirituality — but insights into living networks — the shin-to, the “spirit-way.” As I write and you eventually read this, we use an electronic network we’ve crafted that simulates in surprising ways organically occurring ones, and we can acknowledge the remarkable power and potential of such interactive patterns of energy and information flow as analogs to the ones we are born into.
One valuable key to working with the WOTSOOT that I keep reminding myself of is “small steps. ” This works both as a starting point and a successful process, too. Any attempt at change, on any level, meets what we experience as resistance, because of inertia and equilibrium implicit in networks. (Otherwise, without inertia or resistance, they’d never have a chance to grow and develop at all, shifting and falling apart at the least push or pull from outside. They wouldn’t become “things,” which are semi-lasting whorls and eddies in the flow of WOTSOOT.)
We all have heard that “If it works, don’t fix it,” which is fine, except that a corresponding inherent tendency toward change means that even as it’s working, it’s also changing, or accumulating energy toward change. Often the changes are small, and if we model ourselves on this larger pattern, our small changes will accord with the flow around us. (Small ongoing changes help us avoid really disabling larger ones, that can manage to accumulate a staggering wallop of energy if we don’t make those smaller changes.)
“Change your life,” counsels your friendly neighborhood deity of choice. Okay: but do it in manageable chunks, unless a cataclysm conveniently presents itself to you, ready-made. I have a profoundly messy office right now: too much for a single day of cleaning, without a herculean effort. Sometimes I can muster one. But one box today, one shelf tomorrow? That I can manage most days. Thus both my spiritual paths exhort me to daily practice. (With two paths, as long as I get in at one least set of practices, I’m usually ahead of the game. I double my options — and find overlaps and interweave and insight from such doubled options — the paths are no longer nearly so separate, but feed each other and me.)
our local VT electrical utility
In concrete terms of just one network, in one person’s life? — Let’s choose the physical for convenience, since we’ve established and can understand a set of fairly common labels like physical measures. My wife and I have reduced our “garbage” to an average of 8 pounds a week — mostly non-biodegradable packaging and other non-compostables at this point — and I’m working to bring it down from there. (Why? Throw it “away”? Nothing goes “away” — it always ends up somewhere, and the nastier it is, the deeper it usually sinks its fangs in my butt when it returns. Part of my practice, then, is shrinking my “away” — out of pure self-interest, mind you!) Everything else we’re able to compost or recycle, thanks to recycling options in our region of southern Vermont. We continue to tweak our car and woodstove emissions by wise use, insulation, consolidation of trips, carpooling, etc. Infrastructure shifts will eventually impact these, as mass transit improves and efficiencies increase, or whole modes (like petroleum-sourced energy) eventually fall out of use. Only this February 2014, out of the past 24 months, did we use more electricity than our solar panels generated, so we’re in the black there. But a chunk of that comes from liberal surplus buy-back subsidies from GMP, our local electrical utility company.
Cap’n Henry T.
All told, apart from property taxes, our annual shelter costs run roughly $600 — for firewood. I mention all this as evidence for one person’s start at working with one network among many — by no means an endpoint, nor a claim for any kind of praise or desire for virtue** or self-satisfaction. It’s part of practice, a point along a continuum, remembering my practice is both a “what to live for,” and also a “how to live” at all. And again I repeat: your practice, because you are you, necessarily differs. As H. D. Thoreau observes, “I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.”
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Images: Paramahansa Yogananda; that “other” driver; compost; Calvin and Hobbes resolution; Green Mountain Power; Thoreau.
*I don’t know about you, but I can feel gratitude without needing a target, a recipient or respondent: a magnificent cloudy sky or bright flash of plumage or swirling blizzard evokes awe and gratitude I love to express. Do I need to say I’m grateful to Anyone? Can’t I simply be grateful for? Of course! Gratitude feels good. Why deny myself such pleasure? There’s a motivation if you need it: practice gratitude out of selfishness, because it makes you feel good, if for no other reason! Or if I choose to thank a spirit or Spirit, that in no way detracts from my gratitude. A target for it is another kind of pleasure I choose not to deny myself.
**Except for virtue in the older sense of “strength” or “power.” This kind of “original virtue” is literally “manliness” — what a vir “man” ideally accomplishes that makes him worthy to be called vir — to de-gender it, “what humans do at their best.” And what’s “best”? That which accords with the Way, the Tao or pattern of the universe.
Updated: 7 July 2014
A Druid Way 
