One reason the Old Ways still call to us is that they’re replete with earth-wisdom and heart-truth. For dogma, read experience. For doctrine, read rule-of-thumb. Our favorite childhood stories, our fairy-stories, legends, myths and tall-tales all seem to take place in such a cosmos, where the smallest actions spin out their consequences, where magic flourishes, and where hopes and dreams come true. Samhain wisdom.
It’s a revealing expression, come true. This world of change and manifestation is constantly arriving, shaped as much by our misunderstandings and mistakes as by our grasp on truth, all tangled up in the physics of a cosmos that’s often far weirder than we imagine. Samhain cosmos.
Often we’ve jettisoned belief in a single truth-with-a-capital-T, but in the process we’ve also often forgotten that cause and effect still play out in our lives, and not all of our personal truths are equally viable. (That’s how and why we keep learning and growing, after all. We test our understandings against our lives. I don’t know about you, but I’d not want to jump back to 14-year-old me and my beliefs, doubts and fears of that time.) Samhain truths.
In place of our traditional and healthily provisional/experimental perception of what spirit is and how it works, we’ve turned to all manner of beliefs and disbeliefs, forgetting that spring keeps coming every year, that the power that underlies and sustains things still pulses through them regardless of our human awareness or obliviousness. Rather than bothering so much with belief, it might help us to find out where and when and how things are true, under what circumstances they can be true, and so on. Less church, more laboratory. Samhain practice.
Even words like wisdom and truth and evil have fallen out of fashion, because we think we don’t believe in them any more, until they bite us where it hurts. (Well, wisdom still manages to stick around in a few places — especially if it comes from somewhere exotic, and can be bottled and marketed as hidden or never-before-revealed or traditional.) Sometimes we even notice that most of the “new and improved spirituality” on offer is our traditional wisdom with a hip contemporary makeover. Samhain fashion.
But catch the spirit of Samhain and I get plugged back into a cosmos alive under my skin and in my blood and flaming in the autumn leaves. Get out in the cooling air and I smell the old earth-year. I watch the moon swell to fullness this time coinciding with the last day of October. Samhain reminds us we are alive in time and space, here and now, but also that the world turns, whether we will or no. The chorus of the old goddess chant deserves meditation: “Hoof and horn, hoof and horn/Those who die shall be reborn./Corn and grain, corn and grain/Those who fall shall rise again”. Where and when and how is this true, under what circumstances can it be true …? Samhain questions.
And what of Samhain music? It’s in our blood, a human heritage. Wisdom makes a song we all know by heart. We hear echoes all the time — a fragment of a melody that arrests us in the middle of whatever we’re doing when we hear it. A phrase in a speech or book or conversation that makes us sit up straighter, or slip into reverie. All the things we tend to discount in our humanness, things we rarely talk about. Samhain stuff.
Earth of Samhain, bone and boulder. Air of Samhain, breath and breeze. Fire of Samhain, ______ . Water of Samhain, ______ . What draws us to fill in those blanks we might call the gravity of Samhain, the tug of the time on us. Things have a particular shape, fit into a certain space and no other. Aptness. Identity. Fire of Samhain, heart and hearth. Water of Samhain, blood and brook.
Turn those phrases toward however they work best for you. Then do it. (For counsel on what your particular it is, consult the season of Samhain, your left ventricle, your right hemisphere, you animal guides, and the blessed time you spend outdoors under trees, listening.)
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The Beltane Fire Society will hold a digital Samhuinn this year, with live events posted to Facebook and Youtube.
“What … is your name?” asks the Bridgekeeper. “What … is your quest?” Monty Python and the Holy Grail is definitely onto some truths about the cosmos, veiled in the form of humour, a potent magic. Looking for a Noble Quest? It will demand of us an account of who we are and what we seek. Do we really know? Can we answer truly?
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When does the excitement of the Quest of our lives first dim? We set off, full of a consuming certainty that This is It. The Big One, whatever it is. Sooner or later, though, we run smack into some kind of Wall. Our first Obstacle. (All the Great Quests include them!) Often enough, it takes on the form of a Rule. We face a “No”. A Can’t, Shouldn’t, Mustn’t. Often, human life being what it is, the Rule comes to us through a person. Our Bridgekeeper of the Moment stands before us.
Enough people have turned away from — and been turned off by — “rule-religions” and the “morality police” that it can sometimes come as a surprise to encounter any mention of spiritual law apart from the dogma and doctrine of a particular faith group. Yet a successful Quest navigates via spiritual law — navigates it with style, with flair, with panache. We instinctively respond to a good quest story because it “rings true”. Its spiritual melody harmonizes with something deep within us.
Windham Pinnacle Trail. A Golden Path to …
We’re usually not surprised by the existence of physical laws, like Newton’s laws of motion that govern the movement of physical bodies. In our first dozen years on the planet we typically pick up enough firsthand experience with gravity, acceleration, mass, and so on, even if we don’t call them by those names, so that by the time we start to operate cars and trucks we don’t (usually) have to start from scratch and repeatedly crash into trees, walls, or other vehicles just to learn how to drive.
Indeed, we spend our first years falling down, getting knocked over, getting up again, bumping into things, getting hurt and recovering, because we often learn best by doing. (The trick of good parenting is letting that happen under reasonably safe circumstances.) We may then spend the next several decades learning (or not learning) how to apply versions of the same lessons to our relationships, jobs, goals and dreams. Yes, our lives provide such good material for song lyrics and film scripts that we should all get a cut of the box office proceeds and royalties.
For example, at some point I may find myself pondering old proverbs such as ‘birds of a feather flock together’ and ‘like attracts like’. I run into some version of the law of harmony, or harmonics. By the time we arrive in our 20s or 30s, we’ve seen people careen from one bad relationship to another, while it can seem others ‘have all the luck’. We’ve also met enough exceptions to such proverbial wisdom, maybe in our own lives, that many situations we find ourselves in deserve more than a fixed or set response. Sometimes it can seem like “other laws are at work”. Often enough, we’re not wrong. When things “go our way”, we’re often going their way. We’ve aligned, however briefly, with a current, a larger flow in the cosmic stream. And that’s usually a pretty damn cool sensation — a kind of “effortless effort”, a sense of connection to something bigger.
View northwest from Pinnacle.
The Shape of the Quest
A helpful approach in studying spiritual law is one of curiosity and experimentation, an echo of the effortless effort. I don’t want to just listen uncritically at the outset to somebody else’s moralizing about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ — their version of “No” — mostly because it offers little more than just the kind of fixed or set response I mentioned above. Instead, I want to find out for myself what laws exist, how and when they operate and interact, and how I can work with them, like a sailor learns to sail with, across or down the wind. ‘When the winds blow, how do I go?’
Most formal moralities express a codified version of spiritual law. Too often, it’s one that’s either clumsily taught, or taught without imagination and human insight, taught hypocritically and humorlessly, or in ignorance of its underlying purpose. Someone “holds the the rules over us”, rather than setting them down so we can stand on them to reach the stars. Good teaching liberates rather than confines. It opens up possibilities and new pathways, rather than shutting them down. The old insight that “the truth shall set you free” means spiritual law is for our benefit and growth, not for our limitation and restriction. We learn the steps so we can dance — we learn the notes to join the song.
What makes our quests so deliciously Druidic is that “we can look to the world of nature around us for help in understanding our own nature, recognizing that if a theory about the nature of the universe proves to be a mistake when tested against the world around us, it will also prove to be a mistake when applied to the world within us … ‘the visible is for us the measure of the invisible'” (Greer, Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, pg. 15).
To put it another way, my life is my laboratory, my studio, my garden, my craft space, my canvas.
You hear a lot about “top-down” and “bottom-up” initiatives. Start from the grass-roots. Or identify good leaders and let the growth come from their inspired guidance through hard times. But I’d claim that most of our best ventures build and grow from the center outwards. We’re all involved in this kind of initiative, and as a result we instinctively know what to do, even if we tell ourselves — or others have convinced us — otherwise. So the center is a good place to start.
Whether it’s an embryo, a crystal, a sapling, a story idea, a garden, a relationship, a ritual, a company or a nation, there’s a core, a center from which energy, ideas, blood all flow. This center — and this is an important key — also replicates itself everywhere, establishing new centers of activity and growth. Some — many — are within us. A tree sends out roots, plants send out runners, healing occurs and spreads from re-energized tissues and bones, and human nudges and hunches and gut feelings point us toward inner and outward changes. All living things seed themselves, passing on their dynamic potential to another generation, on multiple levels.
Druid attention to the ancestors, if it’s prudent, never seeks to excuse poor choices, bad parenting, or painful and difficult legacies passed down through generations. Each living thing is awash in a sea of tendencies that pair up with inherent directions and characteristics in its environment. I won’t ever have the body or metabolism of a long-distance runner, but that’s not really the issue: I can keep the body I do have as fit as possible, starting from the center of where I already live each day. The small daily changes I make are ones I’m more likely to stick with, even as the small changes my body makes as it ages prompt me, if I’m paying attention, to make adjustments for strength, endurance, energy and so on. Then when larger shifts and changes occur, I can better adapt to them. The same holds true for my inner bodies, emotion and thought and vision, memory and intuition.
Partly this comes out of practice with the small changes first, and partly out of stores and reserves put in place by going with the flow rather than fighting every single direction that living in a physical realm urges on us all. Electric cars coast downhill and save energy for the next climb. Hibernating species store up resources against the hard times. So, if I’m paying attention, can I, both physically and spiritually, prepare myself for each turn of the spiral. The “how” becomes part of my practice, if I let it, and the next challenge I face becomes my chance at re-calibration. Quite simply, is it working? Even to ask that question at all opens many doors.
Out of our sometimes violent human history and its consequent long conditioning, we may fall back on military metaphors, which don’t always yield the optimal mindset. You have to pick your battles, we say. No general wins on every front. More helpful is a range of metaphors, a rich gathering of stories to tell and learn from.
If it seems that spiritual laws swallow up individuality in statements about general tendencies, groups and patterns larger than one human life, it’s important to remember that it was humans who first noticed these principles, studied them, plumbed their potentials. And humans have always chosen either to disregard them or to work consciously with them. Intention is powerful. Animals largely follow an instinctive path. Humans have wider choices. Conscious and creative cooperation with the spiritual principles of existence is a powerful key to our individual human fulfillment. Through such means, we can manifest what has not yet been seen or experienced or even imagined, in forms of power and beauty and usefulness, for others as well as for ourselves.
As we become ancestors ourselves to our descendants of blood and spirit, passing along this “connective tissue” of life-giving thoughts and actions to succeeding generations, that’s one deep way to repay the gifts we’ve been given. It will then be their task to choose what works best for them, to honor and build on what they’ve received, and add their own stamp and color and flavor to the lives they live.
One of the formative books of my adolescence is R S de Ropp’s The Master Game. First published in the late 60s, long before some of the shadier margins of the New Age self-help movement earned a few hustlers some big bucks (you can see his “names for their games” in the third paragraph below), de Ropp flattered, cajoled or profited from nobody’s ego as he examined what we spend our lives loving.
If I had to sum up his book, I’d cite this from the first page: “… what people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort or esteem, but games worth playing” (pg. 11; italics in original). We witness, to say it tactfully as I can, many dysfunctional life-choices that arise from lack of worthwhile games.
Some of the less commendable games de Ropp names are “Cock on Dunghill” and “Hog in Trough”. We’ve seen plenty of players of both those games over the last few decades. The 2008 global financial crisis resulted directly from “Hog in Trough” players. “Verily”, said a long-ago Galilean Druid, “they have their reward”.
Some play nobler games, like the Householder Game — raising a family. Some opt for the Art Game (beauty). We have the late Stephen Hawking as a premier example of a player of the Science Game (knowledge). Many go in for — and here de Ropp shows a monotheistic bias — the Religion Game (salvation). None of these are completely mutually exclusive, but people sort themselves by the games they play as much as by anything else. As you might expect, though, the game de Ropp favors, and calls the “Master Game” of his title, is awakening.
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So what do you know, how have you learned it, and how do you apply it in your lives today?!
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Denise observes (commenting on the previous post), “There is only one rule: treat others as you wish to be treated. When I remember that ‘others’ doesn’t only mean human others, the rest falls into place” [punctuated for clarity–ed.].
The law of love deservedly tops many lists of rules, sometimes in surprising ways. If you’ve raised children, you’ve probably deployed some version of tough love. That can mean letting others learn the hard way, or directly from consequences, if they’ve disregarded repeated warnings, instruction, examples, and loving requests. It can also mean not letting sentiment get in the way of responsibility. We do few favors by enabling bad behavior. But oh, it can be hard to put into practice!
Yesterday I removed a dead mouse we’d caught that had been living in and crapping all over our car for the past year. If you’ve listened and attended to the non-human world that chooses to live in close proximity with humans, you know the remarkable negotiations that can happen — on both sides. Ask spiders to leave a bedroom, and sometimes they will. Contact the moles in the yard and request they leave the garden alone, and sometimes they will.
It works both ways. Clean up the trash the previous owner left in our woods, came the message shortly after we moved in. Leave the undergrowth along your property lines, for habitat. Let the backyard weeds flower and go to seed. Then you can mow — just later in the season.
Sometimes we can reach an accord and live harmoniously. Sometimes one or the other side steps across, and learns the hard way. The non-human world has been asking us to clean up our messes for quite some time. We haven’t bothered, for the most part, and the payback continues to come due with each passing year.
Is this love?
Like you, like us all, I’m a work in progress. Love is a gift of attention and work, energy and time. You might call this the law of reciprocity, or balance, or harmony. Maybe a law guiding us on the way to love.
Other rules for this game of living arise in the world’s wisdom. One that’s bandied about a lot in New Age and Pagan circles, but too often without adequate exploration, is “As above, so below”. From what I’ve seen, it often works the other way, too, in ways I’m still discovering: “as below, so above”, insofar as what I do today has a definite effect on other planes, not just this physical one. Cultivate a negative habit, and it spills over into the quality of relationships, into opportunities missed, into other self-defeating behaviors, into dreams, and so on. The universe builds in multiple directions, not just top-down. It may be a uni-verse, a single turning, a whole in itself, from a certain perspective, but it’s poly-valent, too.
The law of paradox has also taught me a lot. “The opposite of an ordinary truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth is, often, another profound truth”. I’ve carried that one around for decades, and it’s proven its value. It seems like a harmonic linking us with another plane, part of “as above, so below”. It teaches me to look more deeply at my own life, to mine it down to the marrow for meaning. And it’s a helpful first rule of thumb for testing a truth in the first place. (Do its opposites generate corollaries?)
Then there’s the law of unity, appropriate for a uni-verse — not any of our superficial, political unities, or a politically-correct drive for equality (limited and partial harmonics as they are), but a demonstrable unity, at work whether or not we believe in it or enforce it with merely human laws. It precedes us; it’s a thread in the pattern, part of the Web. It means, among so many other things, that the human sense of isolation and loneliness, of separation, doesn’t mirror the truth of things, but is rather a deception, a learned and self-reinforcing lie. It also means that whatever we do has consequences. We matter in so many ways to the whole and to each other, beyond our capacities to comprehend. The Hindu mystics put it in theistic terms:
The one Godhead, secret in all beings, the inner Self of all, presiding over all action, witness, conscious knower and absolute … the One … fashions one seed in many ways (Svetasvatara Upanishad).
But we all have sensed it, fragmented it may be, refracted, momentary, transient, flickering past — or sometimes longer, depending occasionally on a chemical or alcoholic lift, yes; or in meditation or ritual, or arriving unlooked for, unawares; or at the birth of a child, the death of a parent, in love, wonder, awe, deep emotion. Given all our many backgrounds, perspectives, filters, worldviews, we understandably give it different names, explain it variously. But it’s a near-universal in human experience.
In 2012, on the centennial of the anonymous 1912 publication of the Kybalion [free pdf/public domain], J. M. Greer published a reworking of the seven spiritual laws it explores in his Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth: An Introduction to Spiritual Ecology. In Greer’s latter version, the seven laws re-emerge as statements of an ecological spirituality. [See here for posts examining each law].
Note that these aren’t things anyone is called to believe: they’re scientific facts, that much-abused word. One of the things that means in practice is that anyone can witness them in action, and draw their own conclusions from them. Turns out what we need to know has been around under our noses for at least as long as we’ve been here.
Other laws or rule for the game? If you took up my suggestion in the previous post to write down your own rules, you have some in hand. Denise did: for her, love tops the list.
Our understanding of life has the greatest impact when it’s put in terms we can grasp — especially when we put it in those terms for ourselves. Mine won’t work completely for you, simply because they’re mine. Yours are for you. We need individual understandings, because we’re individuals.
It’s because of the law of unity that we’re each individual, each one. For this reason we can also (learn to) value another’s freedom, even as they acknowledge ours. So the law of freedom also ranks high on my list. Grant others the freedom to be who they are, in accord with their granting me my own. This one much of the planet is still learning, to judge by daily headlines and our widespread experience of life in this world. “Your freedom ends where mine begins”, goes one popular formulation, and vice versa.
Tomorrow, to round out this discussion, I’ll post “Eleven Strands of Educational and Life Philosophy”, which I composed as part of my application with a teacher’s placement agency some two years ago.
Love, unity, reciprocity, paradox, and freedom — some of my rules. And my game? Druidry helps to keep waking me up, though I still drowse a lot.
Now that I’ve chased away, as I usually manage to do every few weeks, a few incautious new readers who thought they’d follow my blog — until I said something indigestible to them — you and I remain to take stock. It’s part of my job description, in fact: blogger must intermittently provoke, offend or banish a portion of readership, if only to establish and maintain some semblance of integrity. That’s one route, anyway, to blogger bona fides.
Otherwise I’m just a spiritual politician, telling people mostly what they want to hear, scrambling for votes or likes. Please don’t merely “like” me. We’re not in primary school, right? Life isn’t, despite what the weak magic of social media enchants us to believe, a popularity contest. We’re not even in secondary school any longer. Read and ponder what I’ve said, and test it — not just with your opinions, but with your life. As I try to do, in spite of that annoying and near-universal tug toward hypocrisy.
So there really aren’t any rules? my inner teenager asks. The previous post was a feel-good piece. Love is all you need. All paths lead to the same destination. We’re all in this together.
And we are. Except.
Anyone who practices an art or craft knows that rules, especially rules-of-thumb gained over long experience, can be really useful. Gardening? Plant marigolds with tomatoes. Tuning your guitar? Start with your sixth string, the Youtube video instructs, held down on the fifth fret. Guidelines for what to do, how to tackle challenges and complexities. Received wisdom. Even, if I can use the word, a tradition. We rarely need to start from scratch.
When we’re young, we’re told to color inside the lines. What happens if you color outside the lines? Nothing. You’ve colored outside the lines. What you do is what you get. Maybe a well-meaning adult scolds you, or not. A little later, perhaps a reward or penalty. We know how early such patterns and personality traits get set. Some kids without prompting will color up to the lines so neatly an adult couldn’t better it. And they’ll get praise for neatness and attention and whatever other labels get put on noticing boundaries and respecting what they have to teach. Because they do have much to teach. Just not everything.
All right, teenaged self. What do you want rules for, anway? To push against, so you can declare yourself an original? To piss off a special adult, or adults in general? To run roughshod over, ’cause you’re such a rebel? Win the attention of possible partners, producers or profit-sharers? Welcome to inverse conformity: you’ve still let the rules define you. Can you make your own liveable set?
Robert Frost said writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. He meant it disparagingly, but it’s actually just another game. Handball. Without a single thing labeled “net”, nearly every surface becomes playable. Players don’t stand opposite each other, but — often — side by side. The rules: changed, but still present. Because that’s what a game is. It’s hard to make “whatever” into a game very many folks want to play.
Yesterday John Beckett posted “Get Over Your Fear of Religion!” tackling the frequent superficiality of much contemporary spirituality. On at least one online forum I visit, his post predictably sent some into a tailspin. Beckett notes, “Some of this [the “spiritual but not religious” movement] is an understandable reaction against negative religion, but much is an avoidance of the work required to build any real spiritual or religious depth”. Some scolding is good for me.
Of course, our reaction against stifling religiosity also has ancient roots in human experience. It will never go away as long as we face complacency and laziness in our cultural institutions and practices. As a certain rabbi once observed a score of centuries ago, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life”.
But beyond the pleasurable intoxication of a numinous moon or molten sunset or gold-drenched sunny afternoon, there’s more. “If you want a deep spiritual practice”, John continues, “that will help you handle life’s challenges, build deep and meaningful relationships, and change yourself and the world, you’re going to need religion”.
The first part sounds like what many people say they want. The last clause, though, tosses a dead mouse into the punch bowl.
Whatever else needs to happen as a consequence of mouse or punchbowl or tossing, reactions to the incident will reveal something to me in my own thinking and practice that I need to work on. Maybe you or I will take the bowl to the kitchen and bring out a fresh one. Maybe we’ll just cringe a little, and wait for somebody else to fix things. Maybe we’ll fish out the mouse, or shame the tosser, or ask for better punch-bowl covers, or mouse-traps. Or we’ll take to raising larger mice. Whatever our roles, the incident jolts us. Your outrage is yours. I do mine just fine, without help. But I don’t want to stop there, but start.
Over the decades, I’ve noticed life becomes custom-fitted to teach each of us what we need to learn. It gets to know us, scouts us right up to our weaknesses. I’m not always talking “fair” or “easy” or “blessed”, either. What I hold on to most tightly I’ll probably be compelled to relinquish. Rigid things tend to break. The gods prodding humans to grow. Or evolution fine-tuning a whole complex of eco-systems, sharpening the ability of each species to thrive by choosing the most adaptable individuals and going forward with them because — quite simply — they can change. A hundred thousand lemmings die, but one, slightly different, flourishes and becomes the progenitor of a new species. Ancestral lemming, I salute you.
If we’re changing, how could all the old rules possibly serve? Because rules can change, too, and most of the ones that trouble us and dog our heels are ones we’ve made for ourselves that haven’t changed with us. A few other parameters we encounter, like this pesky aging-and-mortality thing, and finite planetary resources, and cause and effect, we’re still learning to work with. It’s just that from time to time we confuse human rules with spiritual law. Confuse them so successfully we think they’re the same thing, until we find they’re not.
Imagine your ideal set of rules for how you’d play the game. Or laws, if you’re going for large-scale. Work to get down in writing at least three or four of them — you may uncover more — then try them out on your life, checking for fit, and then try them on the lives of a few other beings. Revise as needed.
[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: yourpractice, because you areyou, 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.”
*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 toAnyone? 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 virtuein 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.
Rosmert had appeared recently during my Inner Grove exercise. I’d been discouraged about my progress. So many setbacks. Autumn had come, and projects I’d set for myself over a year ago remained distant goals. After I recovered from my surprise at his appearance, I realized I had indeed been asking for help. Of course, when it comes, I often don’t recognize it. I nearly snarled at him to go away. I’m glad I didn’t. But that showed me how out of balance I was.
My awareness shifted from inner grove to my living room and back again. Half the time I saw Rosmert sitting on a tree-stump. Half the time he was perched on the edge of the recliner in the living room, facing the woodstove. At first I scolded myself for lack of focus. Then I realized it just didn’t matter. Grove or living room, he was still here. So I just went with it. I told myself I could figure it all out later. Soon we were in it pretty deep.
“You mean there’s a law behind even the randomness of things?” I asked him. So many obstacles, it sometimes came near to breaking my spirit.
“Yes,” said Rosmert, stretching out his legs in front of him. “But it’s not only a physical law, even if it accounts for physical things. Spirit is at work throughout all the worlds, continually keeping everything in balance.”
“That makes it sound like there’s still room for slippage,” I said. Overhead, heavy storm-clouds and sun competed for equal time. “Between one interval of growth and inspiration and another, there can be an awful lot of bad weather.”
He nodded. “In a world of change, the adjustment is continual,” he said after a pause. “So the tests we face, the people we meet, the problems, excitements, opportunities, setbacks, decisions, challenges, sorrows and joys are expressions of spiritual energy finding whatever opening it can into our consciousness to expand our awareness and our understanding of life.”
“Doesn’t it also sometimes shut down, or diminish? Or maybe we do that to ourselves? All I know is that we certainly take a lot of sidesteps, or steps backwards, too.”
Rosmert gazed steadily at me for a moment. “If we’re trying to get a mile further down the road, a flat tire looks like a delay. If we’re learning how to travel, it’s just another lesson. Keep a spare. Have your tools ready. Change your tires before they wear too thin. While you’re in the moment, though, a flat tire can definitely seem like a major setback.” He grinned and leaned forward.
He was about to continue when I interrupted. “What if the ‘flat tire’ is your life? Not just a small setback on the journey, but all-out disaster.”
Unexpectedly, he laughed. “The human consciousness does love drama at times. And Spirit creates as it flows. That’s what it does, what it is. If we choose to create disasters as it flows in and around us, that’s what we’ll usually get.” He laughed again, this time at my scowl. “Yes, we encounter lesser and greater cycles of spiritual movement and flow. Some of them involve a whole lifetime. Some remain small, and fit into the larger cycles. We each work with spiritual energy in our own way, as it flows into us, and as we give it back to situations and people according to our state of consciousness, through our words, deeds, thoughts, feelings, and imagination.”
He stood up, turned slowly in a complete circle, and then faced me again. “Have you ever gone horse-back riding?”
I shook my head at the sudden shift of topic. “What?” I said.
“We can move with the horse, or we can bounce on every up and drop an instant late on every down, out of the rhythm all around us. That makes for one really sore butt at the end of the day. It’s a choice that solidifies into a pattern and then into a destiny. For a while. Then we choose differently, moving from one pattern and trying another, learning, and sometimes crashing and flailing as we go. For a long time, we’re all slow learners. Then we begin to notice the patterns, and finally maybe even look at the choices. What is it you say? ‘Been there, done that’?”
“So is there a way to increase the flow, or does that kind of pushing also throw us out of balance? I guess my question is, can we speed up the process?”
Rosmert didn’t answer right away. He breathed slowly and steadily four or five times. Then he said, “The goal of the most useful spiritual exercises you’ve been learning is ultimately to invite a greater inflow and permit a greater outflow. We need both. We also need balance as we learn to do this more effectively. Bottle it up without letting it out-flow and the result is the same as if you shut the inflow off completely. To put it another way, we need to complete the circuit. As we become more conscious of the movement of Spirit in and around us, we’re able to relax into this current that is always in motion, and live our lives more fully. This is our own individual spiritual path to greater love of all life.”
“So if we stop resisting the complete flow,” I said ruefully, “we won’t get beat up so badly.”
“Right,” he said, chuckling at the expression on my face. “It’s a practice. Who doesn’t have some scars and bruises, and a broken bone or two?! We keep practicing till we get it right. Let’s stop here and go for a walk.”
In early June my wife noticed a particularly vigorous shoot rising from an old compost pile beside our woodshed. The squash plant it eventually revealed itself to be has flourished joyfully, spreading in two directions, while the pitiful growths in one of our new raised beds refuse to be coaxed into thriving.
If life gives you lemons, you could make cleaning supplies, ant repellent, pickles, sore throat medicine, laundry whitener, stain remover, fruit preservative, copper cookware restorative, disinfectant — and if you insist, lemonade, too. The dead (cliche) comes to life when our attention lies elsewhere. Practice resurrection, and get used to it.
We hear a lot about growing where you’re planted, but what about everywhere else? The surprise that is our universe so often arrives with the unexpected, the new pattern, the shift, the change. Life does a one-off. It does what it is. (Isn’t that what you are, too — individual, unique, nothing else quite like you? The trouble comes when I or somebody else insists you should be like the rest of us. The universe never “conforms.” It’s simply itself. That’s our pattern too. We are where we come from.) We stand amazed at the burgeoning of vitality in places we doubted it could exist. If we have different plans, life may upset them. A young Christian couple I know, just married, decided they would leave conceiving a child “up to God.” A friend from their congregation remarked, with considerable glee, “They gave it to the Lord, and he gave it right back to them.” She got pregnant six weeks after the wedding.
In the mass of asphalt and concrete that is Route 91, like any superhighway, a few weeds have taken root on the meter-high divider between northbound and southbound lanes, a little way north of Hartford, Connecticut. They’re particularly visible because they happen to be growing just about at eye level as you drive by, and the highway department hasn’t yet set upon them with weedkiller. I give a silent cheer each time I pass, though I know my tax dollars support their eventual extinction. Still … Give them a few years and their roots will begin to split and break down the rigidity of man-made material into the beginnings of something more closely resembling soil. If there’s an “agenda” at work here, it isn’t always a “human” one, though humans are born into such a world, have grown and evolved within and through its shaping patterns, and have lived in it for millenia before they thought to try permanence on a scale the universe doesn’t really support.
Instead of worrying about “what the financial situation will support,” or what our many and often distinctly weird human institutions “demand,” why not ask what moves in harmony with the patterns of the universe? The main reason is we wouldn’t always like the answer. Sometimes we would. But we might find more balanced and sustainable ways of living that would approach “permanence,” which is just a weak version of natural equilibrium. Could we devise a “financial permaculture” that might not jolt us from crisis to crisis? Sure. Will we?
The Dao De Jing winks at us when it makes its observations:
Not exalting the gifted prevents quarreling.
Not collecting treasures prevents stealing.
Not seeing desirable things prevents
confusion of the heart.
The wise therefore rule by emptying hearts
and stuffing bellies, by weakening ambitions
And strengthening bones.
If men lack knowledge and desire, then clever
people will not try to interfere.
If nothing is done, then all will be well.
“Doing nothing” isn’t exactly what Daoism teaches; it’s more along the lines of “unforced action,” or “going with the flow”: wu-wei in Chinese. And can we expect people to succeed by weakening their ambitions? I don’t know; have we ever tried it? In all this there’s a wink and a smile, too. As if that wise voice is saying, “I don’t always mean this literally, of course, but you get the idea …” And who knows?! “Emptying hearts (in a good way) and stuffing bellies” might just pay off. Fill our stomachs, not our heads …
Or take this advice, surely perfect for our U.S. political season:
To talk little is natural.
High winds do not last all morning.
I’ll let Ursula Le Guin’s version of Chap. 27 have the final say here, a kind of diagnosis of how we’ve “gone astray,” that peculiar human thing we can do that the rest of the natural world doesn’t:
Good walkers leave no tracks.
Good talkers don’t stammer.
Good counters don’t use their fingers.
The best door is unlocked and unopened.
The best knot is not in a rope and can’t be untied.
So wise souls are good at caring for people,
never turning their back on anyone.
They’re good at looking after things,
never turning their back on anything.
There’s a light hidden here.
Good people teach people who aren’t good yet;
the less good are the makings of the good.
Anyone who doesn’t respect a teacher or cherish a student
may be clever, but has gone astray.
There’s deep mystery here.
/|\ /|\ /|\
There are many free versions of the Dao De Jing online; the site from which I drew these few excerpts provides several reasonably reputable versions to sample. Sustained meditation on the text (get a couple of versions and let them talk across to each other) can ease stress and open up many doorways and paths. It’s one of my most beloved Druid written resources. Wikipedia’s entry for Tao Te Ching captures some of its qualities: “The written style is laconic … and encourages varied, even contradictory interpretations. The ideas are singular; the style poetic. The rhetorical style combines two major strategies: short, declarative statements and intentional contradictions. The first of these strategies creates memorable phrases, while the second forces us to create our own reconciliations of the supposed contradictions.” If you recall, resolution of supposed contradictions, or finding the tertiary that resolves the binary of “either-or,” is a technique and strategy of wisdom taught in several Druid paths.
My wife has a designated daily mid-afternoon contemplation period at 2:00 pm. “I made a commitment,” she reminded me again this morning, when we were planning the day and I sweetly noted that her set time conflicted with other tasks that needed doing. While another time would probably serve her better (read “be less inconvenient for the people who live with her”!), I respected her response, because I know how precious an established positive habit is in transforming my own life.
One of the first discoveries almost anyone makes who sets out on a path of spiritual exploration is the apparent initial state of our individual inner worlds. If you make room for some down-time to relax and grab your recommended minimum daily requirement of silence and commune with yourself, you frequently get brought up short:
After an amazingly short time you will most likely feel bored. This teaches us one very useful thing. It gives us insight into the fact that if after ten minutes of being alone with ourselves we feel like that, it is no wonder that others should feel equally bored [with us]! (68)
These words* by Orthodox Christian monk, bishop, writer and spiritual director Anthony Bloom (1914-2003) strike home, for me at least. While boredom is a particularly American problem, it’s not unique to us. Others know it, but with our incessant desire for entertainment and stimulation, to be bored is the prime cause that drives us toward whatever is new. Even information about recent events we don’t yet know about, information which in a different world might actually be more useful to us, is called simply “news.” “What’s new?” we ask. Think about what really is “new.” Are you finding it at 6:00 pm nightly on your media source of choice?
Bloom continues his examination of boredom and the challenges of “inwardness” and stillness:
Why is this so? It is because we have so little to offer to our own selves as food for thought, for emotion and for life. If you watch your life carefully you will discover quite soon that we hardly ever live from within outwards; instead we respond to incitement, to excitement. In other words, we live by reflection, by reaction. Something happens and we respond, someone speaks and we answer. But when we are left without anything that stimulates us to think, speak or act, we realize that there is very little in us that will prompt us to action in any direction at all. This is really a very dramatic discovery. We are completely empty, we do not act from within ourselves but accept as our life a life which is actually fed in from outside; we are used to things happening which compel us to do other things. How seldom can we live simply by means of the depth and the richness we assume that there is within ourselves. (68)
Bloom doesn’t exaggerate about that emptiness in us, and yet of course there areindeed wonderful riches inside us all, just as we suspected. The difficulty I face in accessing them measures out for me how outward-directed I have become. How much I have to dig to regain one darkly shining edge of those inner worlds shows me where I have work cut out for me. (And that itself has become one of my spiritual exercises, rather than wasting time feeling guilty or making unlikely resolutions to do better. When you can’t do anything else, do laundry, or dishes. You’ll get something done that needs doing, ground yourself with a physical act, feel better about how you spent your minutes, and even carve out another space where you realize you can be both meditative and “productive” at the same time.)
As with so many things, balance is priceless. For everything else there may not necessarily be a spiritual MasterCard at hand, but you get the idea. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (here and here, among others), the challenge of becoming cause in our lives, of living consciously and with intention, is a prime Druid discipline, as it is in almost every spiritual tradition in some form.
Bloom points out an opposite trap we can also fall into. Now that you’ve given yourself the delicious gift of downtime and reflection or meditation or contemplation, whatever you prefer to name it, “you will not be pulled out of it by the telephone, by a knock on the door, or by a sudden upsurge of energy that prompts you to do at once what you have left undone for the past ten years.” And you make another find, when “you discover that the world does not falter and that the whole world — if you can imagine it — can wait for five minutes while you are not busy with it. This is important, because we usually deceive ourselves, saying, ‘Well, I must do it: it is charity, it is duty, I cannot leave it undone.’ You can, because in moments of sheer laziness you will leave it undone for much longer than the five minutes you have chosen” (86-87).
Then at length the gifts of silence and inner discovery begin to open up. But the less I say about them here, the better. You already know what they are, from those rare precious moments when they already manifested to you. What is fleeting can eventually become an atmosphere that accompanies you and cloaks you. Such deep silence rings with a powerful intensity. If you’re fortunate, you’ve met someone who radiates this as a living presence. As the Bhagavad Gita says, “Even a little practice will free you …”
/|\ /|\ /|\
*Bloom, Anthony. Beginning to Pray. Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1970.
Compromises. They get bad press. In this time of American public life, compromise is among the worst of bad words. It’s true that we often seem weakest where we make one. That’s OK, as long as we aren’t blindsided by them, as long as our compromises aren’t destructive to us, as long as we can make them and live with them as conscious acts. But any one of those challenges can pierce us to the core.
As a case in point, I want to address a “local” issue that echoes everywhere. Last December, over a thousand residents in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts gathered to protest the continued operation of the Vermont Yankee (VY) Nuclear Plant beyond its original 40-year licensing period. There were over 130 arrests, though the protest remained orderly — both protesters and police had prepared months in advance.
As Vermont transplants rather than natives, my wife and I inherited the controversy when we settled here over a decade ago. So first, some details — as unbiased as I can make them, from sources on both sides. A Druid tries to find the multiple tertiaries or neglected alternatives between two opposed binaries, so bear with me here.
First, the pros: VY has been through $400 million of upgrades since it was first commissioned in 1972. These include a 2006 retrofit that allows the reactor to generate approximately 20% more energy than its original design specifies, obviating the need to build other plants or increase fossil fuel use. Vermont relies on the plant for about 30% of its current energy use, and when VY is down for refueling, increased consumption of gas and oil must make up the difference. Decommissioning the plant would require finding other (and mostly more expensive) energy sources to make up the shortfall. Published estimates put the pollution savings over the past four decades of operation at 50 million tons of carbon that VY’s nuclear capacity has avoided dumping into our atmosphere. That clean operation contributes heavily to keeping our famously pristine Vermont air famously pristine. Employment statistics put the number of jobs directly connected with the plant and its operation at around 650 people, and the impact on the state economy in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Obviously, shutting down the plant isn’t just a matter of pulling the plug.
Second, the cons: VY’s design closely resembles the Fukushima reactor in Japan that failed in the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami. The 2006 upgrade that allows VY to generate approximately 20% more energy beyond its original design specs imposes unknown and unstudied stresses on a reactor structure deteriorating in spite of repairs — uncertainties the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) admits. The plant stores its spent fuel in containment tanks that are now already at 95% capacity, yet the scheduled recommissioning is for another 20 years. VY sits on the Connecticut River, whose waters ultimately empty into Long Island Sound. An accident to either the reactor or fuel containment pools would not only affect the immediate area of mostly small towns, but carry radiation and waste downstream directly into the middle of major centers of population like Springfield and Hartford, and numerous smaller towns like Greenfield, Deerfield, Northampton and Holyoke, MA, and Enfield, Middletown and Old Saybrook, CT. It would then spread into the Long Island Sound and quickly impact eastern Long Island. Tucking the spent rods and other waste away in “remote locations” like Yucca Mountain is no real solution, only a poor stop-gap measure.
Critics cite a string of mostly minor incidents at the plant over the years — small leaks, structural failures, and accidental discharges, as well as cover-ups, lies, bribery and arrogance in responses by the parent company Entergy, which runs eleven other nuclear plants around the country. Vermont governor Peter Shumlin openly says he wants VY shut down. Entergy’s own website for VY (at www.safecleanreliable.com) addresses safety, somewhat obliquely, with a list of emergency contact numbers and the statement: “The area approximately 10 miles around the Vermont Yankee is called the Emergency Planning Zone. Plans have been developed for warning and protecting people within this 10-mile area.” Within this 10 mile radius live approximately 35,000 people. Yet after the Fukushima reactor meltdown in Japan, the NRC recommended that Japan extend its emergency safety zone radius to 50 miles. The number of people within a 50 mile radius of VY is 1,500,000.
Here’s an aerial view of VY, courtesy of Entergy:
VY may well be shut down in some future election cycle, or it may face a spate of incidents that call into question its safety. It may even run safely (for a nuclear plant) until its all of its operating extensions expire. Until then, unless I and everyone else who benefits from the plant volunteer to cut our energy usage by that 30% that VY generates, and help subsidize a transfer to alternate sources of energy, can we justify our self-righteous claims to “shut it down” with no further personal sacrifice? What are we willing to give in order to get what we want?
Though some people deride our Druid rituals and mock our perspectives about the earth, what we do to the world we do to ourselves in very real ways. The facts can be disputed — the principle operates in full force as it always has. What goes around comes around: we know this, which is why such sayings have penetrated the common language and consciousness. We alive today are part of the world’s karma — our karma, the choices we make and actions we take every day. I turned on the oven to heat my lunch earlier today. Would I be willing to make do with a solar oven, or eat my meal cold, or … any of a number of alternatives?
A Wise One observed that in the last decade the entire world had the opportunity to accept a major initiation — a step forward in consciousness, based in large part on our accepting greater responsibility for our actions and their consequences. As a single aware corporate entity, the world consciousness refused this opportunity. (Was it majority vote?!) Individually we still all grow at our own paces, but we also take part in a world shaped by planetary consciousness as a whole, to which we each contribute a part. We can plainly see the results all around us right now, and whatever we may think of the ultimate causes, they began in human choices. As Gandalf observes (and why shouldn’t a decent movie Druid get his share of press?), if we regret the choices we see and the consequences of those choices which we know many will suffer, “so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. … All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” And that is enough for any film character, or four-dimensional beings like ourselves. Each life improved is a life improved, and within our circles we can accomplish much of value before we leave this world. It is not our task to redeem the planet. World-saviors appear in flesh and myth to do such tasks. (Unless you’re signing up for the job, in which case you should have been told where to go and what to do. Just don’t ask me.) The time that is given to us is enough to fill with the best that is in us right now — not in some imagined future “when we — or our people — have the power.” To leave the last words again to Gandalf: “[I]t is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
So here we are at the last installment of this seven-parter. Indigestion and too much caffeine. No, not the series, though you may be thinking or feeling that, too. Looking back over earlier ones I realize each post has gotten more random than the preceding one. Not sure if I’ve done Greer a favor, writing about his seven keys — keys belonging to all of us — but doing it in such a way that they’re more “notes for a revolution” than anything like a review. You can’t just dump a bunch of principles by themselves on people and expect them to see how they fit, exactly. Which is what I’ve sorta done anyway. Inoculation by reading.
Like I said, they’re more notes for a revolution, so that when it comes, you’ll recognize the advance guard and maybe the sound of the explosions and know you’ve seen and heard something like this before, and maybe deal with it better or more inventively than your brother or neighbor out here panhandling and prospecting with the rest of us. “Look what I found! It’s a … well, I don’t have a name for it, but it might be useful at the weekly swap-and-steal.” Heaven consists of the spare parts of creation that didn’t get used elsewhere. We’re destined to mine the scrap heaps for the gold everyone’s tossed there by mistake.
Here goes with the last Law. (Of course it’s never the last law. There’s always another one, like yet another stray that won’t leave, moping around for scraps. Throw it a bone, or a filet. Watch what it does with it.)
“Everything that exists comes into being by a process of evolution. That process starts with adaptation to changing conditions and ends with the establishment of a steady state of balance with its surroundings, following a threefold rhythm of challenge, response and reintegration. Evolution is gradual rather than sudden, and it works by increasing diversity and accumulating possibilities, rather than following a predetermined line of development.”*
A shiver of awe and delight coursed through me when I first read this one. Maybe nobody knows where humanity is headed — it’s not something mapped out beforehand. “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit,” says the Beloved Disciple in the eighth verse of his third chapter. (What, you didn’t know portions of the Bible are a Druid stealth device? Look twice before crossing.)
Sure, our DNA has something to say about it, and so do the causes we’re always setting in motion. These will shape our experience and our future. But they’re ourcauses. We can change. And we want to “accumulate possibilities” because these mean freedom. The dead-end singleness of conformity and bland homogeneity leave us hankering for the quaint, the queer, the mysterious, the odd, the doesn’t-fit, the original, the new, the surprising, the fresh. After all, we left Eden (some versions have us kicked out, but the result’s the same) and we’ve been on quest ever since. But “pave paradise and put up a parking lot”? Not what we really want, is it?
In “To Holderin,” the German poet Rilke writes to a compatriot:
Lingering, even among what’s most intimate,
is not our option. From fulfilled images
the spirit abruptly plunges towards ones to be filled:
there are no lakes until eternity. Here falling
is our best. From the mastered emotion we fall over
into the half-sensed, onward and onward …
We suspect so much more of reality than we let on. Or than it does. It’s not safe to do so, but it’s right, in the best senses of the word. Who ever wanted what is merely safe, when fuller life offers itself to us? Well, some people do, and often enough they get what they desire, and before long beg to be freed of it. Poetry means “making” in Greek, and we all make, we’re all makers, poets of our lives. Song is our native tongue, or could be. It’s that melody playing just beyond hearing that we’re always trying to capture, to get back to. That crashing sound? That’s just another person banging around the music room in the dark, trying to pound out a melody.
While we’re listening to Germans, here’s Martin Heidegger: “To be a poet in a destitute time means to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.” Cool, just so long as we know the holy really isn’t safe at all. No place to hide. Here’s Rilke again:
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise …
Sometimes you get the sense from Rilke, like from other madmen and seers, that you’ve always known what he means, that in fact you’ve done what he’s saying, even though you may not be able to say it yourself. But he manages to. We leave saying to the poets as if they’re somebody, but not us, who forgets you aren’t supposed to say these things, or that nobody expected you couldsay them. But you say them anyway. And get inconveniently booted to the curb by your neighbors, who take over “for your own good,” and after you comes flying what you thought was your life.
So you pick yourself up, brush off the worst of the dust, and keep going, without a life if you have to. Not as if nothing has happened, but as if everythinghas, and it keeps on happening. Who else do things happen to, but us? We’re mistaken if we think that disconcerting little factoid that reaches the news but which happens in “some other part of the world” — outer Don’t-bug-me, central I-don’t-care-yo! — isn’t our concern. Next week I’ll find refugees from there in my basement, peering up at me. My new psychic friends, walking my dreams, if I don’t see them actually fishing through my garbage, desperate for food or love or those pieces of my life I decided weren’t worth my time.
Oh, Druids are a little bit crazy, more so on certain days of the week than others, and most of all under certain phases of the moon. We’d cry if we weren’t laughing so hard, and sometime it sounds much the same. But the spirit lightens a little, and we see the outlines of a Friend where before was only a little mannikin of sadness or despair. We keep doing this for each other just often enough to go on, suspecting ourselves of the worse motives, and probably right to do so. But there’s a fire over the horizon, and singing, and the party’s going on without us. It’s the same fire in our heads.
Shapes move and stumble around the fire, vaguely familiar, so that after joining them it seems we know them, we left them years ago, but this is a reunion where we see everyone’s suffered and grown, though some have become knotty and twisted, like old trees. But there’s a few among us brave enough to hug them anyway, and bring them into the Dance. And so we dance, all night, the last stars twinkling when we finally stumble home to bed and a delicious, bone-weary sleep. And later, who knows what waking?
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*Greer, John Michael. Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. Weiser, 2012.
“Everything in existence exists and functions on one of several planes of being or is composed of things from more than one plane acting together as a whole system. These planes are discrete, not continuous, and the passage of influence from one plane to another can take place only under conditions defined by the relationship of the planes involved.”*
One “map” of the planes I’ve found useful also features in many other spiritual teachings (mystical Christianity, Neo-Platonism, and some forms of Hinduism among them), including one I’ve followed for over thirty years, and identifies the physical universe as just one of several other planes. Besides the physical plane which we experience with our physical bodies, we experience the astral (see the third paragraph of Earth Mysteries — 4 of 7) or emotional plane (also sometimes called the etheric plane), the causal plane of memory, and the mental plane of thought. These last two also sometimes have different names — not surprising, considering they can seem more removed from immediate physical sensation and experience — and thus, understanding. Yet we exist in and experience these planes all the time.
Who’s doing the experiencing here? According to this way of perceiving things, that’s the real you, soul or spirit who wears these other bodies like clothes appropriate to different seasons and climates. So if we say “my soul,” who is talking? The experiencer or consciousness is soul, using the mind to think, the causal body to remember, the astral body to feel and imagine, and the physical body to experience physical reality.
While we can’t directly experience the astral world with our physical bodies, given the close proximity of the two planes, we certainly can feel the effects of strong emotions with our physical bodies and the “atmospheres” of places likewise charged with feeling. We’ve all walked into a room where there’s just been an argument, where religious observance has been performed over a sustained period of time, etc. We may pick up the vibe of such places — vibrating at a characteristic frequency, physics tells us, is what everything is doing already anyway — and if we’re inattentive we may internalize it, harmonize with it, and then not understand why we ourselves may feel tired, energized, angry, calm, etc. after spending some time there.
But our astral body is fully capable of experiencing the astral plane, and doing neat things like flying, changing form, and generally responding rapidly to thought, as it does in dreams. (Our physical bodies also respond to thought, but being of a slower vibrational rate, they more often take years or decades to show the effect. You’ve heard the expression “to worry yourself sick,” and that’s one of the more negative uses of focused and intense emotion — a kind of magic turned against ourselves.) The astral is the plane of imagination, where we may see things in “the mind’s eye,” or with “rose-colored glasses,” if we’re particularly optimistic, because pink or rose is one of the dominant colors there, just as green is characteristic (though by no means ubiquitous) in the physical world with its plants and chlorophyll.
The astral plane, according to many traditions, is where most of us transfer our consciousness after the death of our physical bodies. It is certainly possible to open our astral awareness (often without much control, which can make it dangerous without proper guides) with alcohol or drugs. Safer techniques include drumming and trance work, dance (like certain Dervish orders do, for instance), chant, mantra, ritual, physical exhaustion, daydreaming, meditation, creative visualization, and so on.
The causal plane of memory, like the astral plane, has its own rules and qualities, as does the mental plane. We say “that rings a bell” when we’re reminded of something, and each plane has characteristic sounds associated with it as well as colors. When we focus attention on these other planes while physically awake, we tend to tune out the physical world and its body, and are “lost in thought,” or “in another world.” In these and other instances, our languages preserve fragments of ancient wisdom our modern world tends to ignore, though we often intuitively know something of its truth in spite of the habitual skepticism of our current age.
Our contemporary default position of disbelief is no better than the habitual credulity of previous ages, when people believed all sorts of things which, while they may have been true of some other plane, weren’t usually true of this one. And in our turn toward the currently widespread religion of science, we’ve adopted its characteristic blind spots just as wholeheartedly. Ask scientists why the universe exists, for instance, and you can usually reduce them to speechlessness. It’s simply not a question science is equipped to answer.
The ability to manifest consciously the realities of one plane in another — and since we’re focused heavily on the physical world, for the sake of this discussion that usually means bringing something into physical form — is a supremely human accomplishment. Yes, animals are wired with instinct to reproduce their own kind, and in the case of birds and mammals, care for their young, but in addition to such instinctive drives, humans create cultures, with their languages, arts, crafts, technologies, rules, perspectives, and ways of living in the world.
In each of these posts on the seven Laws, I’ve barely scratched the surface. Each Law deserves repeated meditation, and in his book Greer makes several suggestions for experiencing the creative force of each Law and some of its far-reaching implications. Alone, the Laws can seem rather abstract, hard to apply to daily concerns and problems, too generalized to match the specifics of our individual situations. This itself is a powerful realization: to bring things into manifestation, we need the individual, the distinct and unique set of qualities, experiences, memories, talents, perspectives and strengths, in order to achieve what makes and keeps us human.
If it seems that the Laws swallow up individuality in statements about general tendencies, groups and patterns larger than one human life, it’s important to remember that it was humans who first noticed these principles, and humans can choose either to disregard them or to work consciously with them. Conscious and creative cooperation with the spiritual principles of existence is the fulfillment of humanity. Through such means, we can manifest what has not yet been seen or experienced or even imagined, in forms of power and beauty and usefulness, for others as well as for ourselves. That’s one way to repay the gifts we’ve been given.
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*Greer, John Michael. Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. Weiser, 2012.
“Everything that exists is the effect of causes at work in the whole system of which each thing is a part, and everything becomes, in turn, the cause of effects elsewhere in the whole system. In these workings of cause and effect, there must always be a similarity of kind between an effect and at least one of its causes, just as there must be a similarity of scale between an effect and the sum total of its causes.”*
Under the guise of karma, this principle is superficially familiar to more people, perhaps, than the other six laws. Though not exactly what some people have in mind when they wish you “good karma,” as if it were the same thing as luck. Where does luck fit in a world system of cause and effect? Worth considering. A Wise One once remarked that it’s not always possible to be the cause in every situation — to initiate, to be the active force, to get things moving — but that if we must be effect, at least we can strive to be conscious effect. Recognize the cause, and respond consciously, rather than be manipulated by it unconsciously. Because who knows? — it may not have your best interests at heart.
That’s not to say that a cause is necessarily actively malevolent or is seeking you out to destroy you and unmake you. But it may simply be a cause you or someone else set in motion at random, unconsciously, unintentionally. If you’re its unconscious effect, it’s suddenly detour time. Willing to go for a ride with a strange cause, one that beckons to you, flashing those stunning looks, that oh so beguiling smile? Have fun! Just don’t expect things to be the same when you get back. Whenever that turns out to be …
You can be spontaneous and conscious too. But be the cause. Otherwise, what’s consciousness for? I find that a fascinating, troubling question.
So many beings get along fine without the human excess of self-consciousness, that strange echo-chamber or feedback loop that tells us our thoughts, our feelings, our thoughts about our feelings, and our feelings about the thoughts we’re having about our feelings. How often we long for pure experience, without that inner narrator who insists on supplying second thoughts, doubts, fears, insecurities, grubby little (or big) desires, and so on. It’s like a bad voice-over in a film, a jangling mess that some spiritual traditions remedy with meditation to calm the “monkey of the mind,” so we can get at whatever of value may lie underneath the noise of consciousness.
OK, that’s human consciousness, and specifically self-consciousness, at its least attractive. But what of consciousness itself? It’s not all bad. In fact, it seems to confer some evolutionary advantages. A conscious being can make choices, react with more than instinct — maybe even live through challenging situations where instinct isn’t enough. If you’ve observed animals, you can sometimes catch reflection and thinking. Dogs and cats give evidence of it. Both birds and mammals can learn and adapt, maximizing their ability to survive, and to pass on their genetic material to their offspring. But is there more than evolutionary advantage to the species? How about to the individual?
In more conscious creatures, play and possibly even pleasure are gifts that consciousness also seems to confer. Otters play for hours, and birds — if you’re convinced by people like David Rothenberg — sing not only to defend their territory, attract mates and warn off rivals, but also to express joy. Is that too human? Are we anthropomorphizing?
And creativity … to me that’s the greatest gift of consciousness. We’re problem solvers. We love smooth sailing for sure, long for it deeply in the trough of trouble, but we’re often at our best when challenged, when pushed to grow. Even our attempts at avoiding growth are frequently clever, creative, inspired. We procrastinate, rationalize, justify, repress, suppress, distract ourselves, get addicted to something too small for the love we’re driven to express, and our suffering is outrageous, ridiculous, painful, outsized, exaggerated — often because we’ve made it just that way in our struggles to escape what we know we must do eventually.
And here’s the kicker: even — and maybe especially — our avoidance just makes us stronger for when we finally do face down the problem or issue or challenge. We’ve tried everything else, all the other options, and they’ve failed in some way. So we bring to that eventually unavoidable moment of growth a head of anger and frustration, true, but also a chunk of wisdom and strength that we got precisely because we’ve resisted for so long. That momentum, that power and wisdom with a glow of a little anger and a dash of curiosity under the fear — this very mixed package of preparation — may not always get us through the challenge. It still may not be enough this time around. Now we’re still effect, but we’re on the way to becoming cause.
The failure to meet the challenge this time, to pass the test, signals to us what we still need to do to be ready next time. And the heightened emotion clinging to the lesson, the issue, and the events and people around it, flags it for us. Never again will we completely be able to avoid it, to shove it entirely back into the shadows, and let ourselves slide into unconsciousness. A tail sticking out of the box, or paw scratching at the door, or fur on the carpet, will be evidence of this animal self, our helper, our “trouble double,” that we’ve tried to hide. We willbe cause, even if we can’t yet pull it off. Something in us knows this. Our growth will seem to pursue us on its own — because we’ve made it ours by being cause even to a limited degree, and cause must, inevitably, unavoidably, have its effect.
All this time, we’ve not been idle; we’ve also been building up strength for our next attempt: by more avoiding, maybe (if we’re really good at that), but also by a slowly growing awareness that growth is what we’re destined for, that we can actually work toward it, even if our own lives have to drag us there kicking and biting and howling the whole way, functioning as some of the causes we ourselves have set in motion. There’s more strength building in us, and if there’s a cost, then we’ll pay. (Another cause, another effect.) We’re slow learners, because sometimes that’s the only way the lesson sinks in deep enough that we really get it good, get it down pat, and run with it. One way or another …
And so the causes we absolutely needed to set in motion will become just the effects we need to experience down the road. But because we grow as a result, the effects which were “everything we ever wanted” at the time will eventually come to box us in, because we’ve grown, and so they’re no longer enough for us. Then they start to strand us, and constrict and blind and infuriate us, until we arise from them stronger and are again able to set new causes in motion. Open-ended growth. Our ideas of perfection often seem to involve stasis: at some point we imagine we’ll “arrive” and not need to grow anymore. Heavenly choirs and streets of gold, no telemarketers or spam or mosquitos or flu, and sitting around all day in Paradise Lounge, plucking at harps and sipping (virgin) daiquiris and margaritas. Likewise our perspective on setbacks often doesn’t take in enough time to see the causes and effects playing out. Sometimes we can’t see them all, if they span multiple lives. Or parallel ones, if you’re not prone to reincarnate like I am.
But back to perfection as stasis: from what I’ve seen, that misses how the system works. “Everything becomes, in turn, the cause of effects elsewhere in the whole system.” No final perfection — that’s just another trap or sidestep. Which is fine, if you’d like that experience: then it’s no trap or sidestep so much as interesting or even productive diversion. (Having your cake iseating it too, after all. Otherwise it just sits there.) We don’t arrive at long last at any unchanging endpoint. That’s not perfection. We’re travelers. We may get rest stops, but the growth is endless. “Eden bears those footprints leading out …”
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*Greer, John Michael. Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. Weiser, 2012.
“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.
Here, in the third of this series on J. M. Greer’s principles from his book Mystery Teachings, we come to the Law of Balance:
“Everything that exists can continue to exist only by being in balance with itself, with other things, and with the whole system of which it is a part. That balance is not found by going to one extreme or the other or by remaining fixed at a static point; it is created by self-correcting movements to either side of a midpoint.”*
The Dao de Jing (Tao Te Ching), another keen guide to the natural order of things, observes, “Extremes do not last long.” After storm, sun. After destruction, rebirth. But what are we to make of natural disasters? How in hell, literally, are we supposed to “live in harmony” with an earthquake or hurricane or tornado?
Our science, which is just another word for knowing or wisdom, has only begun to recover some of the nature wisdom of our ancestors and spiritual traditions. And perhaps too much time, at least in some of the “hard” sciences, is spent in pursuit of a grand theory, where close observation might serve our immediate purposes better. But we’re recovering lost ground as we can.
The horrific tsunami of December 2004 in southeast Asia makes for a good study. Here and there, among the human and natural devastation in its wake, are curious and instructive stories. The case of 10-year Tilly Smith, vacationing with her parents in Phuket, Thailand, merits recounting. According to the Telegraph‘s article, Tilly saw the tide drop unnaturally, remembered a recent geography lesson about tsunami warning signs from her school back in the U.K., and alerted her parents. They were wise enough to listen to their daughter, warned the hotel where they were staying to evacuate inland, and over a hundred lives were saved as a result.
Another story comes from off the coast of India, in the Andaman Islands. One of the aboriginal peoples living there is the Onge, who still practice hunting-gathering. When the sea level dropped abruptly, the tribe responded immediately. After a quick ritual scattering of pig and turtle skulls to propitiate the evil spirits they perceived at work, they retreated inland. Unsuspecting tourists and local fisherman walked the exposed beach and gathered the fish floundering there, only to perish in the approaching monster waves. The National Geographic account from about a month afterwards includes commentary from Bernice Notenboom, president of a travel company specializing in indigenous cultural tourism and one of the few westerners to have visited the area. She observed of the Onge, “Their awareness of the ocean, earth, and the movement of animals has been accumulated over 60,000 years of inhabiting the islands.”
While this isn’t exactly expert testimony, every member of the tribe did survive, and her reasoning is sound. The commercial influence of Western culture has uprooted many tribes, and this is something Notenboom does know, since she’s on the forefront of it with her tour company. She remarked that one day in another nearby village, an old man approached her and said, “It is great to have you here, but let’s not make it a habit.” There can be a cost to careless physical ease and the acquisition of material abundance, and if we “gain the whole world and lose our souls,” to paraphrase the renowned Galilean master, we may be swallowed up, figuratively or literally.
Balance doesn’t mean stagnation. Many Westerners have felt the stirrings of a vague dis-ease with their own lives. We point to this or that cause, shuffle our politicians and opinions, our allegiances and subscriptions to cable, but to reuse the almost-cliche, it’s another version of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. When the problem is systemic, tinkering with symptoms won’t help. The “solution” is not one single thing to apply like a band-aid, but it will indeed involve changes of heart, which will come in different ways for different people over time. Anyone who has a single prescription for the troubles that ail us is frankly talking out his ass. Getting the ____ into or out of political office won’t budge the problem.
The “self-correcting movements to either side of a midpoint” of the Law of Balance sound so innocent. But whenever the balance shifts, the corrections come just as predictably and inevitably. Whether we like them or not, welcome or resist them, is another matter entirely. We forget that we’re not “in control”: there’s no helm to manage, no boss to prop up in place so that “things keep going the way they always have.” Already they aren’t, and they won’t. We’re part of a whole: whatever happens to the whole happens to us, and what happens to us happens to the whole. This is good news for those who work with the whole, and bad news for those who think this particular rule doesn’t apply to them.
There issuch a thing as natural “justice” — it’s another name for rebalancing — but not always as humans would have it. There’s no court of appeal when we’ve fouled the air and water, destroyed local economies with mega-corporations, junk-fed ourselves sick, fought our way to a glutton’s share of the world’s resources which are running out, and tried to rationalize it all. Now we have to find ways to live through the re-balancing. What tools do we need? The inner resources are still available, though we’ve burnt through so many outer ones. The classic question of “Where is wisdom to be found?” really needs to be answered individually. It’s a fine quest to devote a life to, one that I happen to think is far better than anything else you can name. Right now especially, money certainly doesn’t look like it’s worth the game. I know that I feel more alive looking for wisdom, and finding a piece of it I can test and try out in my own life, than I do swallowing anybody else’s brand of fear and paranoia and cynicism. This blog is a piece of that quest for me. Whose life is this, anyway? Make of life a laboratory for truth.
In the end, balance really is a matter of the heart. One Egyptian image of the after-world that’s stuck with me is the Scales of Anubis. The jackal-god of the Underworld places the human heart of the deceased in his scales, to weigh it against the feather of truth, of Ma’at, the natural order, cosmic justice or balance. (For inquiring minds, that’s Anubis to the right of the support post.) Only a light heart, literally one not weighted down by human heaviness (you can fill in the ____ with your favorite kinds), can pass muster. One distinguishing quality of the truly holy or wise ones that we encounter in their presence is a lightness of being, a kind of expansion and opening up. There is always possibility, a way forward. Whatever happens, we can face it better with that kind of heart beating in our chests. Look for that, in others and yourself, in your quest.
Some of the less commendable games de Ropp names are “Cock on Dunghill” and “Hog in Trough”. We’ve seen plenty of players of both those games over the last few decades. The 2008 global financial crisis resulted directly from “Hog in Trough” players. “Verily”, said a long-ago Galilean Druid, “they have their reward”.
In 2012, on the centennial of the anonymous 1912 publication of the 
A Druid Way 
