One line of movement of energy in this regard is known as the tradition of western ceremonial white magic. It creates a structure for transformation that is essentially mental and it intends to connect to the emotional and heart-centered part of the seeking souls that use rituals of white magic by the use of profoundly moving, poignant icons or images, thus making this an essentially mental path to open the heart. It is extremely effective for a certain type of personality.
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What the circle is doing as it enters a sweat lodge is telling its deeper self that it is ready and willing not only to seek the truth but to accept and act on the truth. The truth is generally not something that can be expressed in language. The truth that is sought in a sweat lodge, in a magical ceremony, or in any seeking to find the truth of the self, is a truth without words. The truth of the deeper self has no words. It is an essence. It is.
The structure of this particular illusion that you call life in third density is a structure that is designed with many secret places. They are tucked into the folds and the pleats of your everyday. These folds are bursting with truth and many are the entities who have come upon these little pockets of truth and realization in the midst of the most mundane and everyday chores. Usually, however, the seeking soul must alert itself as to how serious it really is about accelerating the pace of its own spiritual evolution. And that is the basic function of a sweat lodge.
Indeed it is very true, my brother, that there is a death and a rebirth involved when this ritual is done correctly. There is that giving of the self to the heat, knowing that the heat will destroy and burn away all the dross and the chaff of the being, leaving only the shining, glowing, glorious essence of unconditional love. That is the truth of your nature.
The problem of everyday life is that it so blocks your senses with detail that you cannot find your way to the truth of your being. It is well, in whatever way seems good to you, to form these intentions to grow and then to create a structure that will manifest that intention and alert your deeper nature to your seriousness.
Any time that a group of people create an event that is metaphysical in nature and focused upon the Creator, that event does indeed have an impact upon the environment around it. To the creation—to the trees, the wind, the Earth itself, and the sunlight—all is one. You are dancing with them. There is no sense of separation.
I’m not surprised to see the Western style characterized as a mental approach to opening the heart. Kind of a cock-eyed concept, it seems to me.
This business of sending signals to the subconscious self is a very important, and often misunderstood, thing, in my observation. The fact that the inner self is not experienced in words is a big clue, but it makes all this very difficult to discuss. This can be where blood letting and carnal sacrifice come in (as ways of sending signals). To me, it’s more that our own spirit sniffs us like an animal to determine whether or not we are holding guile or honesty or depth of being. If we are genuine, then we are allowed to proceed with our endeavor.
I find it funny, yet real, that the seeking self needs to send itself signals about its own level of seriousness. Something to ponder.
Good excerpt and thoughts. I detect a thru-line in your posts of late, and I’m digging it.
I think people just have to start where they’re at. Many of the people who will participate online in these kind of text-based communities will perforce embrace the intellect simply to be able to communicate like this. By seeking online, you’re self-selecting for the very people who will approach things mind-first. This is one reason why I really, really, really encourage people to form local, in-person seeking groups. That connection and experience can help balance online seeking from becoming too cerebral. I’ve had enough of the Law of One Debate Society that the first 15 or so years of my seeking featured!
My current mental model for inner work – the epitome of which is the ability to access the unconscious consciously – revolves around relationship. To me, the fact that we are complexes in the illusion, not unitary, homogeneous entities but systems in a kind of dynamic tension – requires us to become participants in a greater, plural self that we cannot simply conquer by force or expose by intellectual inquiry (sometimes I think those are two sides of the same coin). We have to learn to give and take with the parts of our self that may not disclose themselves readily, and we have to learn how to be calm in the face of that. By all this, I mean that I come up with a mental “symbol” for a deeper affective state I cannot just get to easily as training wheels for this closer relationship: this is what unity feels like when it has been stepped down into the illusion.
So ritual as a way to negotiate between the phenomenology of waking life and that of the inner life strikes me as merely a starting point. The last excerpt dealt with the importance of trusting the self, and I think this is a huge affective side to the inner seeking within a complex of occluded components. If you look at organization as a political endeavor, it is all about trust, and I suppose there is a metaphysical root of that that redounds to all complexes, from the particle scale to the intergalactic (similar to how love and gravity are analogs).
Assuming the lens that the intellect governs focus and the heart governs encounter, unification, and transformation, ritual seems like as good a candidate as any to mediate this work as long as you don’t make the crucial mistake of confusing the form with the content. When I practice rituals, I place a huge importance on making sure that every time I say symbolic things or do symbolic acts, I am keeping in mind the “why”. It means sometimes it’s really slow going, but then you get to somebody like HARC’s Steve Tyman whose channeling preliminaries almost skip over the symbols because, with 30 years of practice, the feeling states the symbols are intended to invoke are so readily available. That to me is the goal: the intellectual elements of the ritual providing “coordinates” for the less easily accessed feeling tones, but nothing more. It’s then an act of will to access them, and this is what we are honing, I believe: our will to submit to the terms of a greater self than we can command.
The through line you mention is a theme you are alluding to in your comments, to wit, the sharpening of polarity by better organizing the interface of the overtly conscious personality and the covertly conscious layers of inner awareness.
The observation of sending signals to the subconscious (and to guides and helpers) is a, so to speak, signal element in this process.
Here’s a paraphrase of another interesting quote. When the self settles into the inner light, there are no words. In outer life, thee are plenty of words, but not so much inner awareness…
Ergo, the twist in the dance requires the poise involved in bringing silence and awareness into the state of noise and busyness, following the experience of self as ineffable completeness.
How to experience that completeness? Sharpen the polarity.
