I Realized - Two

I realized that the natural world brought me peace and joy, always.

I realized that Goddess worship and Earth-based spirituality, also called paganism by some, was a way forward for me because it used the power of words, the power of vocalized song in the form of chanting, and the beauty and power of the natural world, (the natural world’s frequency I would now say, although I would not have used that word then). I realized that paganism was a great fit for me.

I realized that spellcraft was specifically directed at the self and the self’s experience of the world, rather than being directed at the world which would then conform to the self. Spellcraft, I realized, changes the self and so the self experiences the world as changed.

I realized that I loved the world anew through spellcraft and could do Earth healing, whereby I sent that love out to the world as an energy for the Earth to do with as Earth chose to do.

I realized that spellcraft is healing of past traumas; it is the bringing into wholeness of a fragmented self, a self that has fragmented because the pain or distress were too great to bear, so they were repressed and pushed away. Spellcraft worked actively and consciously to allow awareness of these with compassion and then to release them through rituals of release and transmutation.

I realized that there was a point of presence and a point of power or will inside of me. Again, I wouldn’t have used that phrase ‘point of presence,’ but it fits now; I use it now. That point of presence was big.

I realized - and it blew my circuits - that I could embody the consciousness of Gaia. I ‘aspected’ Gaia, which is what new age wiccans call it when we drop our selfhood down down down through our body, through our feet and then bring in, call in, the aspect of a Goddess or off-world being. I aspected Gaia, and I haven’t been the same since. I was Gaia, in the body of this little human being.

I realized that each of these many Goddesses are aspects of the ONE, which is neither male nor female, neither creator alone, nor destroyer alone, but all things simultaneously.

I realized that I could again begin to use the word God, although both the words God and Goddess are completely inadequate to THAT which we feel as God/Goddess.

I realized that I wanted to feel into the One whom people call Jesus the Christ. I realized that I didn’t want to throw that particular ‘baby’ out with the filthy bath water of Christian dogma, cruelty and dysfunction.

I realized that I didn’t need to do ritual out of doors to achieve that feeling of union with the divine in the world, that feeling of union with the spirit of the world; I could do ritual within my small room and be as big as the world. I also realized that whenever I walked out of doors, whenever I walked the land, I was communing with that spirit of the world.

I realized that psycho-therapy was again a healing and transmutation of past trauma and old wounds and scars from wounds; the methods that worked well for me as a client in psycho-therapy took me into awareness of the trauma, allowed me the time and a safe space to observe it with compassion, and thus to transmute the woundedness, just as witchcraft had done.

I realized that I could do the work of psycho-therapy on my own and I began to do this whenever I was ‘triggered’ by overly dramatic responses within myself to external stimuli. This practice was exceedingly and invariably beneficial to me; I developed the courage to ‘see’ the past trauma, the wound or the scar with compassion and thus to transmute it with, as I now would say, unconditional love, although I would not have used that term then; I would have used the term compassion.

I realized that I didn’t need the external symbols of spellcraft; I had internalized them.

I realized that I didn’t need to ‘protect’ myself by casting a circle. I still loved to call in the directions, the energies and the spirit of the world in the form of Goddess, but more and more it was becoming all one thing, all one calling to and then receiving. I realized that wiccan ritual was no longer appealing to me.

I was about 41 years old by this time.

I Realized - One

Something within me prompted me to recount for myself and for others how I have become the person that I am now. I realized that a series of realizations, a growing awareness, was the path that brought me here. I committed myself to documenting these and since I keep a journal and have done so for many years, this project was not so difficult as it had at first appeared. I intend to share these realizations with you. They comprise many pages and I will offer them one segment at a time. Here is the first such offering. These realizations came to me as I was a child and a young adult. By the age of 25, I had come to the realization which you will find at the end of this segment.

I realized that I kept falling in love with the world. I kept falling in love with feeling, with moments. I kept falling in love with the places where I experienced these feelings, lived these moments.

I realized that poetry could potentially express this love. I realized that some prose, a sort of poetic prose, could potentially express this love and so I began to explore words and the power of words to express this love for moments, this rapturous love for feeling states.

I realized that movement could express also, that joy could be expressed through movement, through dance, more easily and directly than through any words.

I realized that vocalizations of song and vocal harmonies could express so much. It didn’t matter what words were being sung - well, it did matter, but not nearly so much as people thought it did. And my love for words and the power of words and my love for the vocalization of song, the singing in the choir of over one hundred voices, came together and I began to recreate the words of the Anglican church services. I began to use their words differently and to change their words within my own consciousness.

I realized that I could not negotiate Christianity’s teachings and beliefs, that they were fundamentally opposed to my feeling and innate knowing about self and society and world. I realized that I would need to create another path to God for myself because I wanted to know God and to have God in my life, but not on Christianity's terms.

Humanity Grows Wise

Humanity is changing. Actually, humanity is evolving to become something far more wise, kind and honourable than we have ever been. We can do this. We are, in fact, doing this now.

Because of our internet technology, we are becoming more and more aware of ourselves as a global community. We are becoming therefore, more politically aware and more compassionate.

We have integrated the wisdom traditions of people all over the world, from the Eastern philosophies and religions to the paradigm of the native peoples of the Americas. We have integrated the wisdom of the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Australian continent as well.

We are evolving our ability to hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time. We are literally growing our brains, beginning to use the front of our brains as never before. See the work of Joseph Chilton Pearce for more information about this.

We have an ever-growing environmental awareness, which sometimes causes us to feel distress at the state of our world's environment and biological systems, ecological systems today. The same is true of our growing awareness of animal rights. We are exploring right action on a global scale. We are deciding together, as a collective human society, what kind of world we choose to live in.

This is tied irrevocably to the growing understanding among us that we make the world, and that we are the agents of change that we have been looking for. Thus do we develop our sense of stewardship and responsibility.

We have the Declaration of Human Rights. We have a global anti-war movement. And in fact, we have less war in the world now than at any time in the past 1000 years or more. This is something to think about profoundly as we move through our days now.

We've never before been who and what and how we are now. This time is unprecedented. So breathe deeply, and as you breathe, cast away from yourself all of your pre-conceived notions of what we are as a world and of what we are capable. The image of our planet seen from space totally changed us and we have continued to change and will continue to change since then.

People say that the world is in crisis. Crisis is both danger and opportunity. In many ways, we are a world in crisis, surrounded by danger, surrounded by opportunity. And this is global. For the first time in human history, we can and MUST do this together. And we are together now, through the internet, through technology, we are together.

We are continuously deepening our awareness, our knowledge and our consciousness. Our awareness has been broadened WAY beyond the awareness of people thirty or forty years ago. Most of our problems - political and environmental - originated in the late 1700's and through the 1800's. We don't think that way anymore. We can and will transcend those problems. Racism, religious intolerance, competition for resources, exploitation of lands and peoples. We are doing this now, albeit slowly and beginning here and there. This change in our world is happening daily now.

We are, individually, becoming wise in our personal choices, wise in our communal lives, open-minded, tolerant of differences, non-judgmental. We are becoming wise in our development of political structures that truly serve our highest selves. We move from the small to the large and we do this organically and through our emerging wisdom. All that we envision for our planet will come as we realize our ability to make this world as we will have it be.

Everywhere I look, all over the internet, all over the planet, in all the hearts and minds, I see humanity grow wise.

And thus do we change the world and create it anew.