getting up on the soap box

This is where it starts to get intense.
After reading a friends blog entry on theology and spiritual evolution i realised I had a lot to say on the subject myself. Some is in response to those statements which were made from a christian perspective, by someone who I quite respect, and some simply a lot of stuff that has been rattling around in my head for years needing a semicoherent expression.
This is really long, so it will help make up for my laziness in posting. Another gargantuan post on a different but related subject is coming soon.
It is a common perception that paganism is barbaric, primitive and unrealistic, practiced by power hungry individuals with overactive imaginations. It lacks maturity and critical objectivity. This is, unfortunately, a largely accurate picture, as any stereotype is. A stereotype, however, never accurately reflects the essence of the thing it is generalizing.
There is such a thing as fundamentalist paganism as well. Worldviews just as rigid as those of the stodgiest practitioners of organized religion are commonly seen in even the more reputedly enlightened members of our community. In paganism, as in any aspect of human culture anywhere, there are those who become stuck at a certain level of development and cannot conceive of there being anything beyond it.
Spirit has an objective reality independent of our individual awareness of it. In the beginning, we are not aware of anything not immediately confronting us, and that we struggle to understand. Our minds begin eventually to associate one experience with another, cause and effect. I am hungry, I am cold, I am wet, I am alone. I cry out and Mother comes. Mother comes and I am fed, warmed, dried, loved. This is a true understanding, but an incomplete one. Mother does not exist solely to care for me. She will not always come when I cry out. She will not always give me what I want when she does come.
We begin to learn that certain actions have certain consequences. We learn new ways of propitiating Mother, by crying louder or by being good, obedient children. As we progress we gain a more complete understanding of the nature of the Mother. Our perception of all things becomes more complete. We begin to see the greater world beyond our immediate surroundings, and we come to understand that there are higher forces that the Mother is subject to. We begin exploring and addressing ourselves to them.
Many people do not leave the childhood state of simple pursuit of desires. Many do not see beyond their own experience to the shared world and the influence of their actions upon it, except insomuch as it yields their desires to them. This is as true of the "Sunday Christian" who goes to church and prays for the benefits of it (ie; salvation, blessings, social acceptance etc.) as it is of the self centered pagan who thinks nothing of magickally rearranging the universe to satisfy their wants, or at least bragging about their ability to do so to swell their own sense of importance.
It is not, in my opinion, a separation from the self that is required to move beyond this, but rather the expansion of the concept of the self to encompass more of reality.
We begin to see beyond our immediate needs and desires to the greater world, and the greater good, ideally. We begin perhaps to show compassion and consideration to the Mother rather than simply taking what she has to offer. We begin to see good behaviour as more than simply a means to manipulate rewards out of our surroundings, but as correct and in harmony with the needs of the collective of which we are a part, which is an intrinsic part of us, and our creator.
What I am describing here is not only the growth progress of a child into maturity, but also personal spiritual development and cultural evolution. How we have come from being primal animals to deifying nature, to personifying impersonal forces, to associating our experience of the divine and intangible with what we are already familiar and comfortable with.
The point I started this making was merely that Spirit, and the nature of Spirit, exists independently of our level or mode of awareness. There are many different ways of perceiving truth, but it remains the same in essence.
The one Reality that transcends all realities is a single microscopic point at the center of an infinite sphere of possibility. The center is always the center, and the only fixed point in the sphere. It is the only vantage point from which the entire circumference is visible and conceivable. If you try to separate your awareness from the sphere and look at it from further away, you can only see half of the surface at most.
This is still a more advantageous perspective than clinging to the surface, where we see only what is before us. From this close up we perceive the ground as flat and it is difficult to imagine the totality of possibility.
As we grow closer to the center, to the source, which generates its surrounding realities, we begin to realize a few things:
We ourselves are microcosmic reflections of the macrocosmic truth. We are created in God’s own image and therefore, by understanding ourselves, our own deepest natures, we come closer to understanding the nature of God. This suggests that we have creative powers.
This also suggests great responsibility inherent in that power. It also allows us to begin to empathize with God as it becomes clearer and clearer that the divine is our source, and part of us. We come to understand that we are part of the whole ourselves, that what appears to be a collection of individuals is actually one Body composed of many cells. . This awareness seems to take us outside of ourselves, to recognize the concerns of other beings and our responsibility to the whole.
Then we realize, as science teaches us, that the blueprint for the whole is contained within each cell and we begin to recognize ourselves as beings of infinite possibility. The individual cell is not the whole, and yet all the information for recreating the body is contained within it. The nucleus of the cell is the Divine Spark.
As above, so below.
It is this awareness which gave rise to the Wiccan Rede, the only hard and fast rule of modern paganism. If it harm none, do as thou wilt. Many ceremonial magicians shorten that to simply Do as you Will. This sounds terrifically selfish and irresponsible unless it is recognized that the Will being spoken of in this case is the will of the Soul, the center of individual being, which is in perfect alignment with the Will of God, the center of the All.
Coming from this angle spirituality becomes more a process of reduction than a process of growth. Stripping away the layers of conditioning imposed by the necessities of mortal existence to access this core essence. If you could live entirely as this essence, you could do no wrong, but that is not what mortal experience is about.
Magic, then, becomes less about forcing the universe to your will and more about aligning your consciousness and energies to the possibilities already existing. Magic is not an egotistical demand that your wishes be granted, but an act of affirmation of your openness to the correct manifestation of your highest good. You cannot see with your eyes closed, you cannot receive with your hand closed. Magic is for opening both, allowing yourself to experience the potential for fulfillment that exists already.
I have often gotten results far quicker than expected when doing spellwork. In far less time than it would take for the influences to rearrange themselves, things start to happen. Therefore it was already set to happen, but may not have happened to me had I not attuned myself accordingly.
The ironic thing, of course, is that the more closely you are in alignment with the Divine Center, the less concerned you are with the exact form that fulfillment takes. Also the less important the symbol becomes in the face of the reality it represents.
When we first learn magic, many of us will put great stock in the objects and imagery we use. We think that our actions will yield literal results, and that everything will happen as we say. The tools and symbols we use are there to speak to the subconscious mind, where the decisions are made as to what we will allow into our sphere of conscious awareness. Magic works because it disarms conditioned conscious objections which conflict with the change in awareness we are attempting. It is not guaranteed to work, its success depends largely on our willingness to surrender to the larger forces at work. More and more we come to realise that we cannot force anything, and magic becomes as humbling as it is empowering.
When we invoke archetypal personifications of primal forces (gods) we acknowledge that influences exist outside of ourselves which may or may not cooperate with us. We are expressing our wish to act in harmony with the preexisting structure and asking expressed approval of our actions. We offer service to them in honor of the realities they represent.
These gods may not have had objective existence in their personified forms until they were believed in by so many people, but over time those associations were reinforced over and over until a thought form was created. The thought form, given life by belief, can take on an existence of its own.
The principles behind the thought form will continue to exist and retain their validity, even if one particular expression of that principle is forgotten, and the archetype will resurface with a different name and face. These principles are conscious emanations of the central intelligence. These emanations are called angels by some, gods by others. We call on them, and they help us.
The virgin Mary performed no great feats in her time, other than an apparent virgin birth, but billions of Catholics since have attributed all manner of miracles to her intervention, and with each one her influence and power grows in the minds of her believers. She was a mortal woman, but came to embody the Mother principle, the sense of someone who cares for us and feeds us the necessary strength to grow. This is the first and oldest concept of god, the One who creates life.
If one is able to see past the literal interpretation to the essence expressed in this concept, it becomes more condensed, more simplified, more a truthful and accurate expression of the center we are trying to reach which transcends all the definitions we attempt to cage it in.
To summarize, primal archetypes retain their validity to the deep self no matter how far we evolve from the original concepts and mindsets that formed them, because they represent the earliest conscious human understandings, which formed the foundation on which all further thought was built. If we had somehow begun by formulating different archetypal concepts, we would be an entirely different species by now.
As we evolve, our awareness will become sharper and more refined. Truth is real unto itself, and shows itself to be so if you simply look at what youre seeing and understand it as itself. The nature of God is the nature of everything.