Stay if You Will

How do we interact with the gods? I have been putting together a ritual based on Plato’s cosmology. It is a sequential honoring of the energetic beings that we know as spirits, ancestors, and gods. My friend was disturbed by the lack of closure at the end. Yes the ritual needs work to be sure. But I’m not sure that the intent of having deity depart is what I want.

My experience with deity is deeply personal. A presence, always there. Guiding and protecting even when I was in despair. I did get angry that bad stuff happened, but at one point I realized that I must still believe that God/dess was present because I persisted in talking – or yelling – to her.

There is a concept of deity that says the gods are huge and scary and powerful and we need to be careful to politely invite them to leave when we finish our veneration. If they stay, their energies might wreak havoc. But what does that mean? It means something will change. If we ask the gods to stay they will change us. Whether that change means transition or havoc depends on who is being asked and how intense one wants the experience to be.

At a blot I attended some years ago, one of the participants invited Odin to “lay it on him.” The general consensus was that the guy had enough problems, and what was he thinking by asking for such drama? Odin is not known for his gentleness. Nor is Hel. Inviting some deities into our space, lacking clear concepts about what we need from them may make for a rough ride. Invoking the trickster god of the North is grounds for ejection in many kindred’s, largely because that particular god doesn’t much care about clarity or boundaries.

But sometimes, this sort of dramatic disruption is for the best. A speeding ticket when you can least afford it, might make you slow down enough to save your life at a later date. And not everyone learns quickly. Another friend of mine used to say the when the Goddess didn’t like what he was doing, she would take a 2×4, pound a spike into it, and swing it at him while saying, “Be one with the nail!” And I suppose that if one finds life rather dull without regular chaotic drama, then a trickster deity is just the ticket.

All experiences offer the opportunity for learning and change if we bother to take responsibility for not just our current actions, but what got us to this place. Taking responsibility is being in integrity with deity. I want my gods and ancestors close. They help me (at times forcefully) to be a better person, to do the right thing. They help me figure what the right thing is when the path is obscured. And they love me.

Nature on a Pedestal

In the last few years, I have become unhappy with the environmental movement. I was raised to love the Earth, to cherish wildness, and to recycle and conserve energy. As a Pagan, I believe in the sacredness of the immanent world, I don’t just believe, I feel it. It resonates in my bones, throbs in my blood. But as I have listened to the rhetoric of the environmental movement, they don’t seem to be bringing anything to the table but guilt. I loath the idea that somehow humans are by ‘nature’ bad. From a spiritual standpoint, this makes no sense to me.

In

The “Health” in Healthcare

This week, SCOTUS listened to arguments about the constitutional validity of Obamacare. However one feels about this piece of legislation, everyone does seem to agree that there were major problems with the system. One of the conversations I had this week was about how cool it would be if insurance covered preventative measures. I suppose it would – be cool that is – but why do we need to wait for insurance to cover such measures?

People often assume that insurance – government mandated or otherwise – is necessarily synonymous with good healthcare. I disagree. A great many problems, both physical and mental can be improved, or even dealt with completely, with the application of dietary changes and the use of herbs and homeopathy. People often complain that good food is more expensive, but this is not true if the first thing one cuts out is sugar and all processed foods. Even non-organic produce and meat is an improvement for both one’s health and one’s wallet. Quitting smoking is another example of a behavior over which we have control that greatly affects our health.* I don’t understand why someone would continue with such an obviously destructive habit when they have serious physical issues. To me this seems a failure of personal responsibility hardly better than continuing to drink after getting a liver transplant.

A great deal of our health and well-being is within our control. What we eat and do not eat, whether we move or do not move, whether we engage in recreational substance abuse or not, we always have the choice to say “yes” or “no,” and these choices have consequences. As a young person, I ate a lot of sugar: four candy bars a day for several years. I said “yes” to something I knew was a bad habit. Eventually I quit, went back to it at a lower level, quit again, and came back with even less. Each time I quit, it was a little easier, and I noticed improvements in my wellness. I no longer suffer from anxiety, and my gum disease has been halted, and those are just the effects of not eating sugar. There are numerous other changes I’ve made in what I eat that have paid off. At 47 I am finally free of life-long depression, and I just feel good. I have energy and my thoughts are clear. A doctor would have been unlikely to have asked me what I eat, and would have prescribed drugs, drugs which often have side-effects that lead to other problems.

My ideal health insurance would be a group based on eating traditional foods. It would work well as a high deductable plan because such plans are gambling that one’s health is generally good. Without asthma inhalers, insulin, and medications for high blood pressure, thyroid dysfunction, cholesterol, costs for such insurance could be more reasonable.

Such health insurance would only be possible if health insurance were allowed to sold across state lines because there are too few of us that eat this way to make a big enough pool in any one state. I will hope for such an option in the future.

*I personally would never advocate for laws that outlaw smoking, although I have no problem with laws that make it illegal to smoke in indoor public places. I even think bars should have the option of being smoking or non-smoking. If I want the freedom to drink raw milk, I have to advocate for other’s rights to do as they like, as long as it doesn’t infringe on others.

Advancing, Not Retreating

In his blog post

Biology, Culture, and Relationships

One of my classmates at Cherry Hill posted this article on FB and ask for comments

The Spiritual Vegan

As a holistic health counselor, I cannot condone the practice of veganism. But as a spiritual person, I have no problem with this way of eating. In case any of my readers has been living under a rock, vegans do not eat any animal foods at all. Plant foods only. In the US, this practice has been strongly influenced by the spread of yoga and the teachings of the ancient Indian philosopher Patañjali. The relevant teaching is that of ahimsa, which effectively means to do no harm. Since Patañjali was an austerity practitioner, he advocated eating no meat. Fine interpretation of Patañjali ‘s intent is well outside my area of expertise, but I do know the human species has a long history of this sort of practice.

Both Patañjali and Plato believed that fasting, austerity, resisting sexuality and other pleasures of the body would lead to knowledge that would release one from reincarnation. Both say that animate beings are composed of a body and soul that are distinct entities. This is an un-natural union and results in desire. Desire attracts matter, which drags the soul down and into a series of incarnations. Soul, when separate from body, is pure and perfect. Plato says when the body dies, the soul is still dragged down by matter and cannot escape. The way out is detachment from passionate response, and the cessation of both pleasure and pain as they are known in the body. One should be celibate, and not eat meat.

To enter the next life on better terms, a Holy Death is recommended this can be done by self-starvation, or by ‘entering fire.’ There are many such incidents recorded in Indian history, but such also exists in the Greek Record. Socrates took poison, and Empedocles was reported to have jumped in a volcano – although this is unsubstantiated.

The Jains hold that their religion goes back further than the Vedas and perhaps as far as the Indus Valley Cultures. There is good evidence for Orphic thought in the texts of the 5th century B.C. and the Jains loved to send out ‘missionaries.’ They tended to follow lines of trade, and they had a period of training that had to be carried out in a foreign culture.

In the context of Paganism (and other spiritual paths as well), becoming vegan is one answer to the ethical dilemma of the sacredness of the world, and one’s kinship to all life. And even a little knowledge of the horror that is factory farming is enough to make the average person want to avoid meat for at least a while. When I was writing my thesis, I read many studies about the health of these animals and I was nauseous about their treatment. This most certainly ran counter to my ethics. The way we produce food is the outcome of our desire for convenience and our resulting inattention. There is a spiritual disconnect between how we nourish our bodies and our souls. If we care about the well-being of all life, then mindlessly eating meat from animals raised in factory farms is spiritual necrosis.

But in terms of nutrition, veganism has huge failings. The article linked here is only one of many. Vegans have an almost legendary reputation for nastiness to those who contradict the idea that being vegan is the most healthy way to live. But the health benefits of a vegan diet are limited to cleansing the system from having spent years eating badly, and there are no traditional cultures that maintained an all plant diet. While I have often heard the contention that we have “evolved beyond needing to eat meat,” the three generations that have passed since the first vegan cookbook was published is inadequate for such evolution. Some people can last on an all-plant diet for longer than others. It depends on how efficiently one’s body recycles vitamin B12, whether or not one has a high conversion ratio for beta-carotene to vitamin A, and if the vegan in question is consuming saturated fats necessary for assimilation of fat-soluble vitamins. But the majority of humanity needs quality animal products to maintain health. Even Ghandi was unable to give up milk, to his great disappointment.

It is noble to sacrifice one’s health to protest factory farming. Perhaps if we were more accepting of variations in human spiritual practice, vegans could just call a spade a spade without having to get into an argument.

The Stories We Tell

The great religions all have powerful spiritual practices. Practices which are designed to lead the postulant through a series of revelations and self-exploration, and which bring the experience of Unity or spiritual ecstasy. A teacher or spiritual director is available to coach, comfort and answer questions. The inner journey can and should take one to explore the darker reaches of the soul, and this is not a kind or gentle process. Guidance and perspective are essential least the seeker loose their way in the gloom.

While unquestionably valid in their approach, most of these practices were developed in a far different context than our modern, and sometimes frighteningly secular world.
The idea that deity could manifest in pop culture came to me one evening while I was watching the Power of Myth, with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers. Power of Myth was a television series based on the life work of Joseph Campbell. This man had studied mythology from cultures all over the world, and was deeply respected. He was delightful to watch because he was so filled with the joy of living. His motto was “Follow your bliss”, meaning find what brings you the most happiness, and do it whole-heartedly.

Much of his work made use of Jung’s theory of archetypes. Carl Jung theorized that when a story is told over and over in different forms, that it becomes a symbol in the group mind of humanity. The Hero’s Journey is a good example. We all know stories about a hero who had to go through many trials in order to reach a goal.

Joseph Campbell compared stories. He found that many cultures had similar stories even thought they had had no contact with each other. For example, many cultures have a myth about a great flood, and many cultures also have a myth about creation in which the creator made the first two humans. Individuals who show up in many stories are The Fool, The Lovers, The Mother and The Father. These are archetypes. Archetypes show us how to be good people, how to fit into our communities and how to discover our unique contribution.

What got my attention in Campbell and Moyers’ conversation was that Campbell was concerned that because there had been so many changes in the last fifty years, that we were loosing our archetypes. Things were suddenly so different, that our archetypal stories could no longer guide us and there was nothing filling the gap. The trouble with the older archetypes was that it is difficult to apply the lessons they offer to our modern world. They certainly had corrupt governments, but they did not have corporations, computers, cell phones, video games, genetically modified foods, cars, etc.

My gut reaction to Campbell was disagreement. We still have stories being told in the form of movies, something in which Campbell himself agreed. He influenced and supported George Lucas in the creating of the early Star Wars films. But this is not the only example. Paganism most certainly generates and/or claims stories that change how we live. For example, both Wicca and Feminist Goddess practices are based on stories of how the religion started and how the world once was that have little or no basis in historical fact. But these stories have served to inform people’s actions in a positive way.

This sort of revelation has been a cause for much anger in the Pagan community, but that is only because, by cultural habit, we have become hung up on facts. We treat them as if they were Truth. Discordians have no such problem. Their truth is that playing with the narrative – whatever that is – is fun, and powerful, and just as true as any other approach to living. Although I am not a Discordian, I love this approach. Nor did facts deter the Church of All Worlds from blossoming out of a work of fiction. For those that need to believe that their tradition is based on ancient practices, and who Poo-poo such silliness, I would remind them that everything starts somewhere. A good story gets told over and over. Perhaps what is missing now is not the myth, but the ritual.

Rituals tell stories. And if they do not tell them well, then they don’t work. I believe in story-telling. The ancient Israelites defined themselves as a people by the stories they told and the rituals they enacted about those stories. In our world, the media tries to define the narrative of what is happening in the political and social field. But what stories do we tell about ourselves? More often than not, we are letting others define who we are. I prefer to tell my own stories.

How can we integrate scientific knowledge in to our lives in a way that supports our growth as a species?

How does a piece of art express the ideals of what it is to be human?

How does even popular culture express our innate (although suppressed) connection with the All?