Category Archives: Mystical Experience

Energy Follows Attention


An interesting conversation with a dear friend has had me thinking for a few weeks about mystical experience. And one of the things that I've realized is that while it's generally not possible (absent LSD or other psychotropics) to have a mystical experience on demand, it is possible to do work that will lay the groundwork and help pave the way. (That's not to say, given the nature of such experiences, that they don't sometimes come to those who have done nothing to prepare for them, or that all the preparation in the world will ensure them. In this way, they're a bit like athletic performance. Some people are natural athletes and can achieve amazing performances without as much practice as it would take, oh, say, me. Others can practice and work out for a lifetime and still not break the record or perfectly execute the grand jete. It nearly drove Salieri crazy.) And I'm reminded of Adrienne Rich's admonition that:
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

And yet, and yet, what I've observed is that daily spiritual practice and an openness to mystical experience, as well as a willingness to go with the experience when it happens (to not shut it down, discount it, run away to some distraction) are certainly helpful.

And I think that all of this is relevant to the notion of developing and being in deep relationship with your landbase, with your own Bit of Earth. Which is, for me, where mystical experiences come from. Few of us living in this technology-studded culture are able, without some work, to connect easily and deeply to our landbase. Like most important relationships, it can take work. And, yet, that "work" -- once we decide to make time for it -- is really quite easy.

1. Pick a place. Better if it's quite accessible and won't take time and effort to get to. It can be your yard, a nearby park, a strip of weeds between your apartment building and the dry cleaners. It can be a potted plant in your window-sealed office if that's your most likely option.

2. Spend time there. That's all. Don't expect to have a conversation or receive insights. Just go there and spend time. Fifteen minutes, if that's what you've got. An afternoon, or a sunrise, or a long lunch break if that works.

3. Repeat Step Two daily, if possible, or as close to daily as you can. Keep doing this.

4. Begin to notice how things change. What new animal did you see? Is the plant that you sit by blooming, losing its leaves, sending out runners? Keep doing this for months and months, years and years. Maybe you'll feel, at some point, like getting a field guide and trying to learn more about that bird who sings to you from an invisible place in the tree or about that weed that seems invasive. Maybe you'll want to look something up on the internet or ask a local gardener who's been working for years in your area.

5. One day, maybe early on or maybe after a long time, you may get a notion to do something: leave a crust of your sandwich for the ants, bring some water in a bottle to pour on the thirsty little plant you've been watching, pick up the trash, plant a vegetable garden or a tree. Maybe this is the land telling you what it needs, maybe it's just your wild whim. An' it harm none, do as ye will.

I pay a lot of attention (and we all know that magic, like energy, follows attention) to the strip of land alongside the Potomac River that I travel through every day on the way to my office. After years of this work, I can recognize subtle changes and I welcome so many manifestations of the landbase's energy as my old friends.

Today, I noticed that the chicory is now in bloom. Chicory's flowers always remind me of the color Alice-Blue, derived from a dress worn by Alice Roosevelt Longworth and they're happy and dancey, the way you'd feel if you wore that dress to a party. I didn't used to know chicory's name; to me it was just that pretty blue flower that grows by the roadside. But eventually, maybe it was chicory and the landbase talking to me, or maybe it was just a whim of my own (and the real lesson is that there's honestly not much distinction), I wanted to know its name and that's led to me learn more and more about it.

Like Miss Alice, (her father is reported to have said that he could "be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.") it's got a mind of it's own and spreads where it will. The chicory growing along the Potomac River in Virginia likely came from some that Thomas Jefferson imported and grew at Monticello. Like a dear old friend who shows up at the first sign of trouble or hardship, without waiting for an invitation, chicory grows in abandoned fields, along roadsides, in places where the land needs to begin to recover itself. Its leaves can be eaten and its roots provide the flavoring in chicory coffee. It is reputed to have medicinal uses and is sometimes encouraged as fodder for livestock.

And it's pretty and happy and sways in the early-morning sunshine as if it were skipping home late from a dance.

What's blooming just now in your landbase? What might you notice if you committed to spend some time paying attention for the next week, or Moon, or turn of The Wheel?

This


By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Picture found here.

Ivo! Evoe! Hail, Kore! Ivo! Evoe!


One of the morning prayers that I say is, "Mother, Wash away from my eyes the enchantment of forgetfulness. Allow me, as much as I can know, as much as I can see, to realize that we are all connected. Remind me Mother, that it's all just You pouring You into You." A bit of this prayer is based upon a quote from J. D. Salinger and I forget the source from which I borrowed the rest of it, but I'm grateful to that person for helping me to articulate how I feel about those times when we allow ourselves to be ensorcelled by the Overculture into thinking that the world can be divided into the Sacred and the Mundane, that there are "muggles," that magic and mystery and connection to the Ineffable is what happens only inside a sacred circle, censed with sage and inscribed with occult symbols. And I work hard most days, I do, to keep my eyes open, to see with True Sight, to remember that it's all one immense and breathtakingly beautiful and dangerous and perfect and safe and glittering Web and that I'm a node on that Web, but also that I am the Web and the Web is me. I work at it and some days I do better than others.

And then some days, Grace comes flooding through some phloem in the Universe and I'm synchronistically, randomly, at the right corner, on the right street, at the right moment and there's no work involved at all. The Web is so real and visible and crystal clear that I can't imagine, literally can't imagine, how it can ever seem otherwise. And then I'm the Web wondering how that node ever imagined itself anything but a part of the whole. And then even that is part, a perfect part, of the Web.

I had to go to my office this morning, Sabbat or no, but I left at 2:00 to head home, do some errands, and make ready for Ostara. Sitting at the light, I caught a glimpse of her: a girl at that exact age after her childhood and before her teens. She was reedy and thin, not self-conscious, but unconsciously conscious of herself in the way that no child can ever be. She carried some kind of a book or folder, up flat against her chest, and was skip-running a bit to catch up to her father. I looked away, waiting for the light to turn green, thinking of what needed to be done when I got home. I glanced back; she and her father were now at the corner, waiting for the same light to change. She said something to her father, I could see her braces.

And, then, it happened. All in a moment, all of the enchantment washed away from my eyes, and my body and all my senses were simply, perfectly, by Grace, a mechanism for perceiving the Web from inside the Web, the Web's own unconscious self-consciousness of itself. The sun got inside the girl's hair, which was that heart-wrenchingly beautiful color of carroty-red that is not replicated anywhere else in nature. Her hair was simply, perfectly, by Grace, a mechanism for the Sun to make itself manifest and to show its beauty; without that hair, that color, at that moment, on that girl, at that corner, the Sun could never have been all that it was born to be, and the Sun knew it and I knew it and we were both awed by it.

And there, sitting at the red light, surrounded by the city, headed for the Teddy Roosevelt bridge, there, I was -- and best of all, knew myself to be -- in the presence of The Kore, in the sunlight, on the day of Osara. Not, symbolically, not metaphorically, not in any of the ways that it would make sense to say that I was, just a few feet North of that girl, in the presence of The Kore, but, simply, in the presence of The Kore. Not that The Kore "rode" her or that she somehow pulled The Kore down into her. Not that she stopped being a flesh-and-blood girl with a history and a future and braces. Not that she had ever not been The Kore and not that . . . . Well, that is why the Goddess says, "And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire." Words stop working.

And the light changed and I turned my eyes, full of tears and light, back to the road and, shaking, drove on, deeper into the Web.

May your Ostara be blessed, may all that is good and healthy and fresh bloom into your life, and may you have reason to exclaim, "Hail, Kore! Ivo Evoe!"

Picture found here.

Welcome, Returning Light


And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because Sophia over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

~with apologies to Gerard Manley Hopkins

And, so, although I have lived here, on this bit of Earth, lived here Summer drought and Winter blizzard, lived here ordinary day and ecstatic night, lived here in sickness and in health, lived here, slept here, planted here, eaten here, done magic here -- solitary and with Sisters -- for nigh on a decade, and, so, and, yet, on the Winter Solstice the lovely land that owns me had a lot to show me.

The thing about mystical experiences is that -- although "I only am escaped to tell thee," -- mystical experiences cannot be told. This is why the Charge of the Goddess says: "And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire."

And, yet, knowing, as I start, that, at the finish, this thing cannot be told, I will try to tell it.

Every tiny plot of Earth is crammed -- crammed, I tell you, crammed -- crammed and jammed and overfilled and flowing over with Goddesses and Gods and Genius Locii and Fae and Spirits and Beings and Living Rocks and the Bright! Alive! RNA and DNA and Mitochondria of the Worms and Chipmunks who grace this place and every tiny plot of Earth is full to the brim of Consciousness in every form of incarnation and those things that de Chardin hardly dared intimate and, oh, poetry. And there is mystery and easy ecstasy in the skies and the turning of planets makes music in the spheres and as above so below and, well. And, the entire Earth is crammed with divine poetry and music and what I imagine mathematics must be for those, like G/Son, who think in such terms and, well, also, "Everything," our speaker is reduced to noting, "is Alive -- EVERYTHING." . . . .

I was right. You can not tell it.

But you can know it. And my wish for you on this day when the Light begins to return is for you to know it deep inside your cells. And to live in the truth of that knowing.

What would change immediately for you?

Io! Evoe!

Picture found here

You Gonna Eat That?


Continuing our discussion concerning mindful eating,* I recently came across this quote from Alisha Little Tree, who occupied a redwood tree to prevent logging:
I stopped being a vegetarian after that tree sit because I connected with that tree so intensely . . . it has really changed my whole reality. Now I'm thinking of beings not as conscious creatures, but as life-force. There's a really strong life-force in all of us, and in this forest in these trees. Connecting to the tree [is like just being,] it's not like you talk to the tree, because it can't hear, but there's this feeling. I don't know how to describe it, [it is], like a deep rootedness, very powerful, not superior to us, but certainly not inferior to us and more primitive or less evolved than us.

~quoted in Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future by Bron Taylor.

Taylor asked Alisha Little Tree about how the experience impacted her eating habits and she replied:
Because I just started to appreciate the incredible life-force in plants . . . and the line between animal and plants blurred. It's all just different forms of life-force.

Id.

For Lierre Keith, the change in her habits appears to have been related to becoming aware of various scientific studies that highlighted the consciousness of plants (although she discusses the desire that this information created within her for a direct experience with plants) while, for Alisha Little Tree, the change came about as a result of a direct experience, in nature, of the consciousness of plants. In both cases, the women were willing to accept new information (however received) about the interconnection of everything and to change their behavior based upon the new information. What would you do differently if you were even more vibrantly aware of this interconnection?

I'll suggest that practicing mindfulness and gratitude when purchasing, preparing, eating, and disposing of food can be a transformational spiritual practice. Stopping for a moment to be aware of the sacrifices/gifts involved in the food you are about to consume is a good place to start. What would it mean for you to eat as a sacred act, to eat as a Priestess/Priest? Does any part of your practice involve offering food to the Goddesses, Gods, ancestors?

*I'll repeat that I'm not making any judgments about how or what people eat, nor am I advising any eating regimen. I don't think it's my business to tell other people what to eat. People make choices about food based on a wide variety of personal likes and dislikes, health reasons, ethical decisions, and other factors. I am suggesting that we include more mindfulness and gratitude in our daily eating practices.

Picture found here.

Synchronicity: You’re Soaking in It


This grand show is eternal.
It is always sunrise
somewhere;
the dew is never all dried at once;
a shower is forever falling;
vapor is ever rising.

Eternal sunrise,
eternal sunset, eternal dawn
and gloaming, on sea
and continents and islands,
each in its turn,
as the round earth rolls.

~John Muir, quoted in Muir Woods Meditations, edited by Robert Lieber

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings

Gerard Manley Hopkins in Lyra Sacra

Picture found here.

Synchronicity: You’re Soaking in It



Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki:

People often say to me, "You're 81 years old; where do you get the energy from?" and I say, "I get it from that wholeness." I move out in my mind into that immensity of space and there is that, that warmth, that sense of welcoming. And I imagine myself there. I place myself there and I say to this wholeness, "I'm part of you. I came out of you. I'm going to go back into you. And I love you. I really do love you, in the deepest sense of that word, because I'm part of you. And at this moment, I could do with a little bit of you, a little bit more of you. I need some of your energy." And Thorn, I can feel it filling me up, and then, when I come back, it's there for me to use.

~Talking to T. Thorn Coyle in a podcast dated September 13, 2010.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

For the more sensitive the soul of the observer, the greater the ecstasy aroused in him by this harmony. At such times his senses are possessed by a deep and delightful reverie, and in a state of blissful self-abandomentent he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful order, which which he feels himself at one. All individual objects escape him, he sees and feels nothing but the unity of all things. His ideas have to be restricted and his imagination limited by some particular circumstances for him to observe the separate parts of this universe which he was striving to embrace in its entirety.

~quoted in Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future by Bron Taylor. (Listen to Anne Hill interview Taylor here.)

Picture found here.