The Distraction of Illusion

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science” (Einstein)

Last night, I was passing from a vexatious state into sleep, when a voice outside of myself said “It is all a Distraction.”
A Distraction from what? What is it we are being Distracted from?
I fell asleep then in a state of satori, believing I had had a Peak Experience, an insight which would change the way I lived, how I thought of Life, and all that cool stuff.

Riding to work this morning, side-seat driving my little Fiat Uno on the highway through Northern Joburg, the stands of Cedar and the rows of Acacia sliding by on my left, I thought about this satori a bit.
If it’s all a distraction-it’s all Maya, illusion, and nothing is real-then how great would that be?
I could go out and buy myself that great big SUV which I can afford, but have held back from buying because it’s not responsible to drive that sort of a vehicle when you don’t absolutely have to.
I could stop worrying about the emissions South Africa causes in the course of producing electricity from coal.
I could cease this anxiety for and about Humankind becoming sicker and sicker in its collective mind.
It’s all an illusory soap bubble which will resolve itself when we rejoin the Ground of Being.
This is Pure Bollocks.

As a Pagan and a Witch, I engage with the world on a very deep level.
As Hecate says, part of my job is to keep the Wheel turning.
It’s also to be in the world and of the world in order to understand on a cellular level what existence is.
Every in breath informs me of the state of the world. Every out breath informs the world of the state of me. There’s a wealth of information flowing to my brain on just opening my eyes in the morning.
I don’t believe it’s useless, a lost cause, to be concerned for the Mother and all of Her children. The very act of feeling concern is a motion in the cosmos. Which, if I were to take on board the Maya satori, would be severely compromised, at least in my mind.
I’m in the world and of the world for a reason-to be a part of it and shape and make its continuation.
And so are you.
If it’s all illusion, all Maya, all a distraction- and it may be so, admittedly- I’m going to live my life as though it were not so, as though being engaged in the world does make a difference.

Two sparrows and three glossy starlings, perched against the deep blue of a spring morning sky, have just informed me that my intuition is correct-that the world is good and beautiful as well as rotten and ugly.
So I will continue to light the bale fire on the equinox night, and hang the moon-shaped coloured candles from the awning of my sacred space, and grind the incense to tell the ancestors of my presence on a waft of scented smoke, and feel the Pendragons, white and red, spiral up my legs to cross at every chakra point until I am standing in a pillar of power, rooted in the Earth and connected to the Sky.