I may try to ignore it, but I feel the energies shifting around me. It hasn’t really been summer for weeks. We had three weeks of our worst heat and humidity at the beginning of August, after a comparatively mild summer; when it broke, driven away by tropical storms drifting up the Atlantic coast, I began to see feathers on the sidewalks, the first sign of fall. Pigeons, sparrows, mourning doves, mockers, they’re all finished their breeding season and had begun to moult. My own companion parrots have been cranky for weeks as they moult along with their outdoors neighbors.
Today is wind and rain and chill. Temperatures in the low sixties feel chilly when it’s raining and the wind is pushing the wet underneath your umbrella, into the recesses of your hood. Walking under the pin oaks near the swim and tennis club, I saw red-bronze leaves blown down and slicked to the ground next to tumbled acorns. The children have returned to school, the birds are moulting, leaves are turning red, and Mercury dances backward across the sky for the last time this calendar year: It’s autumn. I celebrated the harvest last weekend by a trip to the state fair, where I ate locally produced food, saw local livestock compete, admired local 4H projects, and gazed rapturously on a tamed turkey vulture.
It’s autumn. A few weeks ago, when it was still summer, the founding lama of my Buddhist sangha came to town to give teachings. In addition to leading a lot of meditation sessions, many of them on the back porch of a member’s house while dogs yapped, bugs sang, and neighbors partied, he taught on the practice of Green Tara and gave the bodhisattva vows. I formally took the vow to seek enlightenment in order to help all sentient beings.
I have said that same vow every time I sat down to practice with my sangha. I have said it repeatedly in private meditation. I made a vow very similar in spirit when I reached adeptship in the New Hermetics. The difference, when I took the vow in August, was that I made it as a Buddhist, witnessed by a teacher of my tradition and by fellow members of that tradition. I made it as a significant commitment to the Mahayana path.
I still rather squirm at identifying myself as a Buddhist. I have consciously refrained, for some time now, from identifying myself as a Druid. But I have no qualms whatever about identifying myself as a Mahayanist, as someone who believes in working on the self for the welfare of all. Reginald Ray, whose teacher was the great Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, puts it best when he says simply (in his teachings on Buddhist Tantra), “You can’t pursue a spiritual path just for yourself. You really can’t. It doesn’t work.”
That is the core of what I believe and seek to practice. I find it most clearly explicated in the teachings of the Buddha; I also find it in the teachings of Jesus, if not always in the Church’s teachings *about* Jesus. I find it buried in the teachings of the Western magical traditions; I see it coming to the surface in various traditions of Neopaganism. I think I had better start looking for it in the traditions of Druidry, and bringing it there if I cannot find it… because the wind is changing, the equinox is approaching, and it appears I am still a Druid, somehow.
“You can’t pursue a spiritual path just for yourself. You really can’t. It doesn’t work.”
I’ve been thinking about this, too, and how it’s incorporated into Druidry (and Paganism more broadly). Obviously there are the political and environmental movements that find support within Paganism, and virtues such as generosity, responsibility and creativity which focus on our connections with one another and with the world. Yet I also feel that, with all the emphasis on developing skills, talents and “powers” of various sorts, moving up “grades” and degrees of initiation, collecting titles and accruing clout–there’s an aspect of the Pagan community, and some Druid groups in particular, that tends to undermine this focus on others and the centrality of overcoming ego in the spiritual life.
Growing up as a Catholic, for instance, I never once thought to myself that I could be a better Catholic if only I could pray better or memorize the Bible or have visions of angels and saints during Mass. Yet every once in a while, I find myself thinking, “Some Druids see visions of faeries, or read the tarot really well, or have amazing mystical experiences every time they do ritual, or concoct herbal brews with magical healing properties…. And since I don’t, I must not be a very good Druid.” Maybe this is because Christianity is traditionally more focused doctrine and belief (and to be a good Christian you just have to “have the right attitude,” so to speak) while Paganism is usually centered more on praxis. But if this is the case, perhaps we should be asking ourselves more often how cultivating practical skills, talents and areas of expertise give back to the community as much, if not more, than they feed our own egos.
I don’t know enough about Buddhism, but I wonder if it offers some insight into how practice and service can be brought together in more relevant and intentional ways.
Ali,
One way in which Neopaganism differs from both Buddhism and Christianity is in putting the pursuit of psychic or magical powers center stage. This has been a defining characteristic of Wicca and other forms of the Craft, in particular. Buddhism and Christianity, in different ways, imply that psychic development is a by-product of spiritual development, not its primary purpose. The primary purpose of spiritual development, spiritual practice, is to dismantle the conditioning of the ego; to use spiritual techniques to build up the ego, as we so often do, is what Chogyam Trungpa brilliantly called “spiritual materialism”. And Buddhists are as prone to spiritual materialism as anyone else, but I think the critique is built into the system there, and it’s not, yet, in Neopaganism.
Mam Adar,
There certainly has been a clear distinction made (you hear it all the time in academic circles, for instance) between magic and mysticism. But the difference seems to me to be only superficial at times, relying on a very simplistic or shallow understanding of magic as hardly more than superstition working in tandem with manipulation. I don’t think this is what magical practice is limited to, or at least I don’t think it should be so limited. You mentioning Chogyam Trungpa reminds me: I recently read his book on the Shambhala tradition, and one thing that struck me was the several chapters in which he talks about discovering and invoking magic. Working with the various elements, utilizing sacred animal imagery (such as the windhorse, as well as the animals representing the “four dignities”), deepening one’s presence in the world and the ability to feel its energies… all of these seem very familiar. And then there are books such as Thorn Coyle’s recent Kissing the Limitless, which speaks about the “Great Work” of magic in explicitly mystic terms that seem very similar to Chogyam Trungpa’s.
So the potential is there. And like I said–the times when I feel connected to Spirit and in awe of the natural world, when I feel grounded and present to even the smallest whisper of the World Song… these are the times when I feel most Pagan, even if I’m doing nothing more impressive than sitting there grinning. But even while a focus on magic and psychic powers can lead to spiritual materialism, one flaw of the mystic approach can be that it lends itself to navel-gazing. I feel like there must be some way that these two things can balance each other and work together to help us become people who work in harmony with the Song of the World, people who open themselves up to that presence but then also have the practical techniques and skills available to act freely, humbly, creatively.
Ali,
My overarching metaphor is that there are Two Currents, which one might call Ascending and Descending. They are energy flows in the body; they are patterns of behavior, especially religious and spiritual behavior; they are patterns in the cosmos. The Ascending Current is kundalini, mysticism, prayer, renunciation, the Way of Negation, apophatic spirituality, earth energy rising. The Descending Current is the Holy Spirit, magic, prophetic speech and action (in the Jewish/Christian sense, prophecy as critique), the Way of Affirmation, cataphatic spirituality, solar energy descending. Just as the body cannot be healthy without those two solar and telluric currents flowing through it (and making the third ray, the lunar current, as John Michael describes in The Druid Magic Handbook), so spiritual and creative life cannot be healthy without the in-going, withdrawing current and the out-going, engaging current, prayer and prophecy, mysticism and magic. Each pattern taken singly has its dangers, as you point out, but intertwined, they create health. And no doubt the two currents fuse into a third, but I don’t yet know what to call that.