Awareness

Trance, says Emma Restall-Orr, is a spectrum of personal control.

So, say I, is consciousness.

There are days when I'm almost overwhelmed by the gadfly distractions of daily life - the tiny bites of irritation with one's fellows, the weather, and the company servers.

Then there are the days when I'm fully engaged in life in all its splendour - when the crises happening around me take on an almost comical cast, when I can see each form of life for what it is - divinity.

These are the days -completely aware of being engaged in Lila - when I know I am most aware, most fully conscious, most alive and sure of what I know to be the truth: that we are all, from hidden Higgs Boson to Ken Wilber, God Herself, at play in the fields of incarnation, and loving every minute of it.


Yesterday was one of these days, when everything made illuminated sense, when I knew I was aware and at my very sanest - even as those around me, I dare say, were of the opinion that I'd lost my remaining marbles.

Days like yesterday, with the infinite blue of a Highveld winter sky, the Pied Crow perched upon a cellphone antenna focusing all his attention on me (and I on him), with the air like shimmering cherry juice in the chalice of emotional sanity, are gifts more precious than - well, than anything.

For I have had tight control issues almost forever - for at least 40 years of this life anyway - and on the days where I can surrender my hold on the logical, the reasoned, the explicable account of shared reality, I am aware of the bare bones of existence. These bones are pure gold. And silver. And all the other materials which we inexplicably prize so highly.

I have never, on account of my idiot control-freak habits, been able to let go completely into deep trance. The kind where you have to to have a guardian hovering near to bring you back that is. In my dreams I come closest to letting the agreed-upon version of the world go to Hel, but even in meditation I only achieve a semi-trance, easily broken by a single loud noise, or by willing it gently myself.

My spectrum of trance does not run deep. Trance mediums, such as Janet Farrar (and despite the fact that I loathed her Progressive Witchcraft I have deep respect for the Lady) remain mostly unfathomable to me.
I rely on those dreams which come on an erratic timetable, or on ritual which snags the hem of my personal depth-consciousness, or a transcendent piece of music, or words of fire on a blog or in a book, to open my understanding to the communications which are possible, the knowledge that the world is not, and never has been, a thing to comprehend solely through equations and controlled experimentation.

That is the illumination which truly rocks the soul awake from its slumber.

Awareness of Lila - the Light of the World.



Afterthought: Eureka. I knew there was a reason I started this entry by channeling Emma Restall-Orr. In the same book she writes:

"In Druidry as it is practised in our modern culture, drugs are not condoned in any way. Instead there is an understanding that if we can't reach the state of release with the power of our on mind,we have no business getting there.
Connecting spirit to spirit with a plant or fungus, instead of ingesting its toxic physical form, we an relate and experience the power of its energy in the same way we find ecstasy and learning in any relationship, and the more so where there is surrender and love. The power of herbal remedies can be accessed in the same way, spirit to spirit, with respect."

(My emphasis).

Thanks Sister Bobcat.

Pic: Maura Holden