___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Spirituality, Religion, Enlightenment, and the Magickal Mind (Shaman Mind):
It is impossible to address Spirituality without also looking at the off-shoot of it 'Religion'. I firmly believe that the root of Spirituality lies at the foot of the Tower of Babel. All peoples one people, all races one race; the sons and the daughters of Eve.
Perhaps this manifested in places we now call Atlantis, Lemuria, or Mu and this place is the basis for the stories of the Tower of Babel. But more than a physical place it is also a spiritual place; A place that all of us must journey through, to reach our destiny of reunification with spirit.
The tragedy in this story is the scattering of the peoples at the onset of this cataclysm. Each group taking with them a piece of this knowledge and after a multitude of telling, the formation of a belief system, entrenched within each group. Creating a belief system that has splinters of some universal truths and a whole lot of interpretation and filtering that supports a separatist system.
Every person has a tie back to this place, through myth, legend and tradition. The tower of Babel is referenced in each of these systems although the reason for the 'fall' differs among the groups. To me the fall is the illusion we choose to believe, that says we are separate from all things of this world; The disconnection from the web of life, in which we no longer hear the song on the wind, nor understand the meaning of the words of wisdom that are whispered to us from the sacred.
The Tower that figures prominently in the ‘fall’ can be likened to the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden of Adam and Eve, or in the far earlier Sumerian story of paradise with Ereskigal, Inanna and Eniki. The tower also represents the great lie, that we are separate from each other, and that spirit resides somewhere outside of ourselves; that our humanness is a state of lacking somehow. A state that must be overcome instead of experienced as a vehicle in which to travel within a tangible universe.
Through religion mankind struggles with unification with spirit. Through spirituality mankind strives, and struggles for “Enlightenment”, a word that has been corrupted and misunderstood by as many who have sought it. Turned into a marketing term the word has little to do with the essence of what enlightenment is, and is more of tool to herd masses into another corral of limitation.
Enlightenment is the unification with spirit, and is as simple as understanding what the still point is; The place of non-superego, of non self; the place where magick is born; the great Abyss, the cauldron of life, the home of the great mother, the womb of all existence. It is the center of the magick circle, the place between worlds, and a place that many have been at least once in their life when they realize that they are a part of the all; It is the place of the self melting into the everything, dissolving and becoming a part of the great web; All that was, all that is, and all that will be existing simultaneously.
So to me...In creating, and working with magick, I actively choose not to delineate it into a category of mundane, or ethereal, high, or low. Since we are touched on all levels by any workings that we do, as all that is, and can be created is created from this central place, the choice is simply which area do we "will" to be affected by this change. I purposefully pull the language of high and low out of it, as the language creates another way of separatist thinking. Terms that once distinguished what areas magick was worked upon, but have become another way of reinforcing mankind's black and white thinking, and are viewed as good or bad, or better, or less than.
In reality Magick is a word that describes a tangible, palpable alteration in our personal universe that we create when we make a connection to the very fiber of universal laws, and within those laws create an effecting change upon all that resides within that paradigm. As mankind learns more about the universe, what once was viewed as superstitious folk belief and medieval thinking is now being understood as manipulation of imponderable forces within the cosmic laws of the universe.
Everything comes back to this center point. As we believe so we create… How many of us actually ponder what that means… Everything comes back to what we believe about our spiritual selves; how we view religion, and spirituality, what magick is to us, where we fit as magickians in our own lives, and how those views influence us on a subtle level in every possible way.
Katarine Anu