Archive for the ‘spiritual tools’ Tag
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Updated and edited 22 June 2017; 14 Dec 2017
Readers of this blog know I frequently quote John Michael Greer. As a writer, blogger, and leader of another Druid order, he challenges me to dig deeper into my own order and understanding of Druidry, and examine its teachings more critically, as well as ponder the implications of his cultural criticism. While his popular blog The Archdruid Report deals primarily with the consequences of Peak Oil, and offers productive strategies for thriving in the coming hard century or more of scarcity and turmoil, as we transition to a post-industrial age, most of his other writing centers on his spiritual journey until now.
As a case in point, his most recent book, Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth (Weiser, 2012), is a reimagining of The Kybalion*, published anonymously in 1912. Greer asserts as his book’s underlying principle that “The laws of nature are the laws of spirit; this is one of the great secrets of the Mysteries.” He reworks the seven principles of the earlier book into insightful observations about spiritual ecology, framed as spiritual law. Here’s the first one, the Law of Wholeness:
“Everything that exists is part of a whole system and depends on the health of the whole system for its own existence. It thrives only if the whole system thrives, and it cannot harm the whole system without harming itself.”
The American myth of rugged individualism and self-reliance, part of the cultural story we Yanks have told ourselves over the decades, has served its purpose, and possibly run its course: it may be more of an obstacle now, in an era when we need cooperation and interdependence more than we need stoic endurance. We’re interconnected, and what I do affects you. One of my teaching colleagues always used to laugh at the idea of non-smoking sections in restaurants. “It’s like imagining there’s a non-peeing end of the swimming pool,” he’d exclaim. “A feel-good label doesn’t make it so.” I cannot harm myself without harming the whole system. But anyone buying wholesale into the myth of individualism doesn’t want to hear that.
Rather than seeing the divine as standing outside nature, here’s a way of perceiving the universe as a single immense feedback loop. Suddenly the Golden Rule isn’t just a good moral guide, but also blindingly obvious common sense. What you do comes back to you. What goes around comes around — not because “God punishes me,” or because of “karma” or “sin” or anything other than what goes in, comes out. Computer programmers know it as GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Maybe it’s time for LILO: love in, love out. As long as we see the world as a collection of separate, discrete individuals rather than an interconnected series of networks, we’ll kill, abuse, pollute, steal, etc. And likewise, as long as we believe that we should be free to do something that “doesn’t hurt anyone else,” we live in illusion. Everything that each of us does matters to all the rest of us. We’re interconnected, linked up to each other in astonishing ways that we’re only beginning to discover.
At first this seems to dump all the guilt for why things suck squarely on our shoulders, and a lot of people today are sick of guilt. Rightly so: it doesn’t accomplish anything except to poison the heart and to distract us from moving forward. It’s only useful if it goads us into constructive action and that’s rarer than it should be. But guilt isn’t the same thing as responsibility. Accepting responsibility is the death of victimhood. If I begin to see that everything I do has an effect, a consequence, then my life matters in a way it may never have seemed to matter before.
To put it another way and quote a Wise One, “If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do.” In the midst of nihilism and cynicism and hopelessness, each word, thought, deed and feeling carries weight, shapes the universe for good or bad, and leaves a trail, a wake, a ripple, that will flow outward from my life now and also after I am gone. I matter, and so do you, simply by virtue of being alive and here in this place, now. To not choose to act, or to act foolishly and blindly is to waste a priceless opportunity to contribute to the commonwealth, the res publica, the Republic, this shared world of ours.
Who among us can deny that even small acts of kindness or cruelty committed by others have an effect on us out of all proportion to their apparent scale? Can we then imagine for a moment that our own acts don’t set in motion a similar set of ripples? We don’t have to be “big” to matter. Love has no size. Any is much. Blessed be this life, gift to others and ourselves, chance to act, to love, to participate in the Web, to leave ripples at our passing, to vibrate the strands with our existence and choices, to play on life and pluck its melody, note by note.
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Image of Mystery Teachings: Amazon.com
You can read the Kybalion online and download a PDF of it.
Image: ripples.
Druid teaching, both historically and in contemporary versions, has often been expressed in triads — groups of three objects, perceptions or principles that share a link or common quality that brings them together. An example (with “check” meaning “stop” or “restrain”): “There are three things not easy to check: a cataract in full spate, an arrow from a bow, and a rash tongue.” Some of the best preserved are in Welsh, and have been collected in the Trioedd Ynys Prydein (The Triads of the Island of Britain*, pronounced roughly tree-oyth un-iss pruh-dine). The form makes them easier to remember, and memorization and mastery of triads were very likely part of Druidic training. Composing new ones offers a kind of pleasure similar to writing haiku — capturing an insight in condensed form. (One of my favorite haiku, since I’m on the subject:
Don’t worry, spiders —
I keep house
casually.
— Kobayashi Issa**, 1763-1827/translated by Robert Hass)
A great and often unrecognized triad appears in the Bible in Matthew 7:7 (an appropriately mystical-sounding number!). The 2008 edition of the New International Version renders it like this: “Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened for you.”
Apart from the obvious exhortation to persevere, there is much of value here. Are all three actions parallel or equivalent? To my mind they differ in important ways. Asking is a verbal and intellectual act. It involves thought and language. Searching, or seeking, may often be emotional — a longing for something missing, a lack or gap sensed in the soul. Knocking is concrete, physical: a hand strikes a door. All three may be necessary to locate and uncover what we desire. None of the three is raised above the other two in importance. All of them matter; all of them may be required.
And what are we to make of this exhortation to keep trying? Many cite scripture as if belief itself were sufficient, when verses like this one make it clear that’s not always true. Spiritual achievement, like every other kind, demands effort. Little is handed to us without diligence on our part.
And though the three modes of investigation or inquiry aren’t apparently ranked, it’s long seemed to me that asking is lowest. If you’ve got nothing else, try a simple petition. It calls to mind a child asking for a treat or permission, or a beggar on a street-corner. The other two modes require more of us — actual labor, either of a quest, or of knocking on a door (and who knows how long it took to find?).
It’s possible to see the three as a progression, too — a guide to action. First, ask in order to find out where to start, at least, if you lack other guidance. With that hint, begin the quest, seeking and searching until you start “getting warm.” Once you actually locate what you’re looking for — the finding after the seeking — it’s time to knock, to try out the quest physically, get the body involved in manifesting the result of the search. Without this vital third component of the quest, the “find” may never actually make it into life where we live it every day.
Sometimes the knocking is initiated “from the other side” In Revelations, the Galilean master says, “I stand at the door and knock.” Here the key seems to be to pay attention and to open when you hear a response to all your seeking and searching. The universe isn’t deaf, though it answers in its own time, not ours. The Wise have said that the door of soul opens inward. No point in shoving up against it, or pushing and then waiting for it to give, if it doesn’t swing that way …
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*The standard edition of the Welsh triads for several decades is the one shown in the illustration by Rachel Bromwitch, now in its 3rd edition. The earliest Welsh triads appearing in writing date from the 13th century.
**Issa (a pen name which means “cup of tea”) composed more than 20,000 haiku. You can read many of them conveniently gathered here.
book cover; door image.
Secrecy often emerges as a national issue in times of crisis. Recall the debate over the Patriot Act enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks, and the kinds of broad governmental powers the Act authorized, including significant reductions of citizen privacy. Secrecy can become central to state security, and exists in uneasy tension with the “need to know.”
President Kennedy declared in an April 27, 1961 speech that unjustifiable secrecy is repellent, dangerous, and virtually un-American:
The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.*
Of course, he was addressing the American Newspaper Publishers Association, and also standing implicitly against the Communist bloc and its perceived threat to the West. (You can listen to a portion of Kennedy’s speech on Youtube here.) Nevertheless his points are well-made, and still almost painfully applicable today, in the wake of Wikileaks and similar events.
Yet secret societies, in spite of Kennedy’s assertions, do have a long and well-established place in the history of America, and many still thrive today. They flourish at many colleges like Yale, with its Skull and Bones the most famous — or notorious — of several societies for college seniors. Another similar and infamous example, though not affiliated with a school, is the Bohemian Grove. Both have generated entertaining conspiracy theories, books, films, and news articles, all of which occasionally offer pieces of the truth. Both exist, and both count among their membership some of the most powerful and influential people in the world. Bohemian Grove counts among its members George H. W. Bush, Clint Eastwood and the late Walter Cronkite, according to a Univ. of California Santa Cruz website.** Should we be worried?!
Opening Night at Bohemian Grove
Many sororities and fraternities also share elements of secret societies, depending on their charters and missions. Still other similar organizations enjoy spotless reputations, such as the PEO Sisterhood, mostly public in its support for education, but still retaining some secret aspects.
Secret organizations are in fact particularly American, or were in the past. At the nation’s founding, all but two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were by some accounts members of the Masons or other society. In the late 1800s, roughly 40% of the U.S. population belonged to the Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, the Grange, Knights of Columbus, Order of the Eastern Star, or other secret, service, fraternal or social organizations. The 19th century was in many ways the heyday of such groups, which have declined since, even as Americans began to lament the loss of community cohesiveness and devotion to public service, unaware of the irony.
To step even further back in time, secrecy was after all crucial to the survival of Christianity, which took form as a sect within Judaism, and within a generation was perceived as a threat to Rome. Suspected Christians were arrested, forced to worship the reigning Roman emperor (who in some cases claimed divinity) and recant their faith, or face execution in various bloody forms, including by wild animals, in the Circus Maximus, Colosseum or Amphitheater. Until the emperor Constantine in the 300s made the religion a recognized faith of the Empire, Christianity was often an underground practice, with the ichthys (sometimes called the “Jesus fish”) as one of its secret signs, by which fellow believers might recognize each other.
The range of contexts in which secrecy manifests can be surprisingly wide. The discipline of keeping a secret sometimes serves as a test for membership in a group. If you can keep a secret about something insignificant, then you may earn the right to gain access to the greater secrets of the group, because you’ve demonstrated your integrity. Shared secrets are a key element to defining in-groups and out-groups. In the Middle Ages, much knowledge was automatically assumed to be secret. If it was disseminated at all, it appeared in a learned language like Latin or Greek which only literate persons could read and access, and as often it was a zealously-guarded guild or trade secret which only guild members knew. Significantly, the Old French word gramaire meant both “grammar” and “magic book,” and is considered the most likely source of the word grimoire, also meaning a magic book. Inaccessible or secret language and hidden or secret knowledge were the same thing, and occult meant simply “hidden.”
Some kinds of knowledge are experiential and therefore in a different sense hidden or secret from anyone who hasn’t had the experience. Consider sex: there is no way to share such “carnal knowledge” — you simply have to experience it to know it. And thus Adam and Eve “know” each other in the Garden of Eden in order to conceive their children. Many languages routinely distinguish “knowing about” and “knowing” with different words, as for instance German kennen and wissen, French savoir and connaitre, Welsh gwybod and adnabod, Chinese hui/neng/zhidao. The kinds of experiential knowledge humans encounter in a typical lifetime are substantial and significant: first love, first death, first serious illness and so on. Note how these are often connected with the experience of initiation, discussed in a previous post.
It’s vital here to note that it is not secrecy itself but the nature of the secret that is crucial in assessing its significance accurately and dispassionately. I continue to cite J.M. Greer for his lucid and keen observations about the importance and potentials of secrets and secrecy, and the influence of his thinking pervades this series of posts. I mentioned in Part One that though we all take part in the web of communication, there are ways to see it from the outside and more objectively. We can occasionally and briefly free ourselves of its more negative effects and minimize its compulsions, then return to it for its positive benefits of human solidarity and companionship. As I’ve mentioned, solitude can temporarily ease its influence, and grant us a clearer space for reflection. Another group which experiences a consciousness apart from the web are sufferers of mental illness, who are sometimes involuntarily forced outside it. There they may perceive the arbitrary nature of cultural assumptions and behaviors, the “blind spots” inherent in every culture and human institution, and the hollowness of social convention. Their unwitting shift away from the web can make their perceptions, words and actions bizarre, frightening and difficult to manage. Clearly there is danger in breaking the web, or leaving its patterns of coherence that allow us to make sense of the world.
Greer observes:
To have a secret is to keep some item of information outside the web, so that it does not become a part of the map of the world shared by the rest of society. A gap is opened in the web, defined by the secret, and as long as the secret is kept the gap remains. If the secret in question is something painful or destructive, and if secrecy is imposed by force rather than freely chosen, this kind of breach in the web can be just as damaging as the kind opened by madness. If secrecy is freely chosen and freely kept, on the other hand, it becomes a tool for reshaping awareness, one with remarkable powers and a range of constructive uses.**
An examination in the next post of the conscious use of secrecy for positive ends will conclude this series.
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*A transcript of Kennedy’s entire speech is available at the JFK Library here. (The quoted portion above begins in section 1, after the prefatory remarks.)
Bohemian Grove dinner image and article.
Grimoire image.
**Greer, John Michael. Inside a Magical Lodge. p. 116.
The start of the year is a good time to look back and forward too, in as many ways as it fits to do so. If you’ve got a moment, think about what stands out for you among your hopes for this new year, and you strongest memories of the year past. What’s the link between them? Is there one? Here we are in the middle, between wish and memory. In his great and intellectually self-indulgent poem “The Waste Land,” Eliot said “April is the cruelest month, mixing memory and desire.” But April need not be cruel — we can make any month crueler, or kinder — and neither should January. Let’s take a sip of the mental smoothie of memory and desire that often passes for consciousness during most of our waking hours, and consider.
To recap from previous posts, if we’re looking for a workable and bug-free Religious Operating System, we can start with persistence, initiation and magic (working in intentional harmony with natural patterns). You’ll note that all of these are things we do — not things a deity, master or Other provides for us. While these latter sources of life energy, insight and spiritual momentum can matter a great deal to our growth and understanding, nothing replaces our own efforts. Contrary to popular understanding, no one else can provide salvation without effort on our part. We can “benefit” from a spiritual welfare program only if we use the shelter of the divine to build something of our own. Yes, a mother eats so she can feed the fetus growing within her, but only in preparation for it to become an independent being that can eat on its own. We may take refuge with another, but for the purpose of gaining or recovering our own spiritual stamina. If we’re merely looking for a handout and unwilling to do anything ourselves, we end up “running in our own debt,” Emerson termed it. We weaken, rather than grow stronger.
The recent SAT cheating scandal involving the Long Island students paying a particularly bright peer to take the tests for them is a case in point. We condemn such acts as dishonest on the societal and human level. Why do we imagine they’re any more ethical or viable on the spiritual level? Just as no other person can fall in love for us, undergo surgery in our place, eat for us, learn on our behalf, or do anything else for us that so intimately changes and affects us, so nobody else can do the necessary work we all end up doing whenever we’ve grown and changed. It takes effort, and it’s up to us. This usually comes both as a sobering realization and as a wonderfully liberating discovery. Our spirituality and growth are up to us, but that also means they’re in our hands, under our control, responsive to our initiative and effort and attention.
For a ROS to actually work, then, it needs to fit our own individual lives and circumstances. Jesus confronted this squarely when he observed, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” While we can overdo the jettisoning of old religious forms and habits, convinced they have nothing more to offer us, it can be a very good thing to haul out and burn the old stuff to make way for the new. What have we elevated to “god status” in our lives that, in spite of worship, offerings and adoration, is actually giving us little or nothing and holding us back from growing? For too long we have clutched old forms and outmoded beliefs and held them tightly to our hearts, convinced that forms can liberate us. But they have no more power than we give them. Belief is a ladder we construct. Reach the goal, and the ladder is merely extra weight to carry around. We don’t need it.
So you say I’m just supposed to up and cull out-of-date beliefs and dump them? Easy to say (or write), harder to do. One of the most useful items in our spiritual tool-kits is gratitude, the WD-40 of spiritual life. As a solvent, it can loosen hard attitudes, stubborn beliefs, closed hearts and dead growth. We may think of gratitude as an often wimpy sentiment — something softhearted — but I like to call it the grr-attitude. It’s an attitude with teeth, and helps us build a “spiritual firewall” against destructive energies.* Every life without exception, no matter how hard, has something in it to praise and be thankful for. Gratitude, along with persistence, can show us how to make do when every other avenue seems closed. It’s the great “life-unsticker.” It moves us out of spiritual ruts and ravines like nothing else. In fact, an entire life spent in gratitude and persistence, without any other “spiritual garnish,” could carry us remarkably far. It would be a very full life.
I can be grateful for habits and attitudes that have brought me to where I am, and I can often let them go more easily by thinking kindly of them, rather than hating them and beating myself up for being unable to move on from them. But the value of gratitude isn’t just anecdotal. The field of positive psychology is producing significant research findings. Here’s just one example, from Prof. Robert Emmons’ book Thanks! on Amazon: “[R]egular grateful thinking can increase happiness by as much as 25 percent, while keeping a gratitude journal for as little as three weeks results in better sleep and more energy.”*
Every aspect of our lives has spiritual lessons to teach. I even feel gratitude for my cancer, because it has brought me back into balance with myself, revealed friends to me, brought me more love than I could handle, and reminded me again to make the best use of my time here that I can. And that’s just a start. Gratitude is a choice of consciousness. It definitely belongs in any religious operating system.
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Cartoon source.
*Emmons’ book Thanks! deserves reading — it’s in paperback, and you can get cheap used copies online (and no, I have no connection with the author! The title was on the list of books for the course I took this fall — one of my subsequent favorites).
The term “spiritual firewall” I’ve derived from the excerpt below. The book helped strengthen my growing understanding of gratitude as a stance or posture toward life that has palpable strength in it, a kind of spiritual toughness and healthy resiliency — with powerful consequences, too — rather than an exercise of mere empty sentiment.
Grateful people are mindful materialists. Deliberate appreciation can reduce the tendency to depreciate what one has, making it less likely that the person will go out and replace what they have with newer, shinier, faster, better alternatives. The ability that grateful people have to extract maximum satisfaction out of life extends to material possessions. In contrast, there is always some real or imagined pleasure that stands in the way of the happiness of the ungrateful person. Consumerism fuels ingratitude. Advertisers purposely invoke feelings of comparison and ingratitude by leading us to perceive that our lives are incomplete unless we buy what they are selling. Here’s a frightening statistic: by the age of twenty one, the average adult will have seen one million TV commercials. By playing on our desires and fears, these ads fabricate needs and cultivate ingratitude for what we have and who we are. Human relationships are hijacked. Consumer psychologists argue that advertising separates children from their parents and spouses from each other. Parents are portrayed as uncool and out of touch with their teenage children, who are encouraged to reject the older generation’s preferences and carve out their own identity around materialistic values. Gratitude for our spouses can have a difficult time surviving the constant parade of perfectly sculpted bodies exuding perpetual sexual desire. In a classic study conducted in the 1980s, researchers found that men who viewed photographs of physically attractive women or Playboy centerfolds subsequently found their current mates less physically attractive, became less satisfied with their current relationships, and expressed less commitment to their partners. Gratitude can serve as a firewall of protection against some of the effects of these insidious advertizing messages. When a person wants what they have, they are less susceptible to messages that encourage them to want what they don’t have or what others have (Emmons, 42-43).
As a case in point, his most recent book, Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth (Weiser, 2012), is a reimagining of The Kybalion*, published anonymously in 1912. Greer asserts as his book’s underlying principle that “The laws of nature are the laws of spirit; this is one of the great secrets of the Mysteries.” He reworks the seven principles of the earlier book into insightful observations about spiritual ecology, framed as spiritual law. Here’s the first one, the Law of Wholeness:
At first this seems to dump all the guilt for why things suck squarely on our shoulders, and a lot of people today are sick of guilt. Rightly so: it doesn’t accomplish anything except to poison the heart and to distract us from moving forward. It’s only useful if it goads us into constructive action and that’s rarer than it should be. But guilt isn’t the same thing as responsibility. Accepting responsibility is the death of victimhood. If I begin to see that everything I do has an effect, a consequence, then my life matters in a way it may never have seemed to matter before.
A Druid Way 
