Hello everyone.

The following is a share from the subscription site. The last few months we have been exploring stillness meditation, and thoughts about The Void, and walking towards that meditative experience. I’ve been unpacking what it is, variations on the theme, as we walk towards an occult perspective on The Void. Currently we are looking at trying Sharon Salzberg’s 10-Day Loving Kindness Challenge, as featured by SoundsTrue and found on Youtube.

The writing below is one of the processes I share on Patreon. In addition to snapshots, artwork, and monthly pieces as I am inspired I share additional invites. Many clients are part of the Patreon process and take advantage of the crossweaving of information that comes through the writing and stitches into their Consulting or healing sessions. I offer deep discounts for Patreon Subscribers, detailed on each page in the navigation links.

I am, as I think we all are, looking for solutions to our current turmoil and there is no one size fits all answer. I am open to the nuance that can come from constructive conversation and mutual exploration.

I offer you a peak inside that process.

Now here is an interesting thought for you:

“Much of the anxiety, restlessness, and destructiveness of twentieth-century persons, Jung believed, results from the fact that their psychic energy no longer flows into religious symbols that can give them a picture of their place in the universe.“ ~ Ann Ulanov

Earlier voices then ours pointed to the schism that arises in the soul when we as a species become so disconnected from the reality of Earth, Nature, and the Divine. It is not a new realization, although ours is at a late stage perspective, that disconnection from the keys that bring us into a sense of purpose and connection can have harmful consequences.

The “religious symbols,” as I read this from the context of Jung’s time, translates for me as any image that offers us a key or a door into the transcendent. It does not mean a crucifix for all, or the Buddha, but whatever that images is for the individual. I don’t judge the images and thoughts from other times, I place them in context to the mind of the past, and translate them to my mind in this moment. I may know the framing or the culture of the past as wrong, but hindsight is 20/20, and the past cannot be changed. It doesn’t stop us as travelers looking back, from digging out the truths our souls seek, but it does allow us to see how we as a species of soul and idea have grown and changed; and change ourselves by accepting our ancestral past, and growing from it. We are part of a strange root system of growth, and no one of us has all the answers, no people clean of ignorance and wrong-doing; and even when we have keen insights into the present, past or future, they are still encapsulated in the definitions of the now.

To see the problem is to be welcomed into the process of growth, transformation, and healing. It doesn’t matter if it was 200 years ago, it matters when we recognize it.

This may be more important to me than you think, but I see my healing process of acceptance (not condoning), and keys into my exploration of Stillness, Loving Kindness, and The Void pursuit (at the Praxis level of subscription meditations we are doing) as means to help back swim out of certain kinds of polarized thinking that are really activated today.

It is the stillness I seek and offer from that void of clarity to come to connection, conversation, and answer to find unity, because we have to move beyond the differences that technology is apparently infusing with steroidal power to increase sides rather than synergy.

I’ve been personally bouncing off of David Bowie‘s conversation in the 90s (linked in notes) about the fragmentation of thought and our perspective of reality because of the power of the Internet, which was so prescient without even knowing about algorithms and the revealed nature of what it would look like with all of us dealing with a powerful technology collectively. It’s appears as if we’ve lost the sense of measurable truth. As in the verifiable, nature of reality… this is very much what magick is rooted in part, as the sciences root in magick. Sciences that have been so assaulted by ideologies that suggest “whatever we think is the new reality,” that contradict truth that can be measured. Unfortunately those thoughts are not always based on how it, reality (Earth, Nature) function. They’re just conspiratorial, fantastic fantasy, or isolationist ideas that capture and mire us in fixed mental spaces we are not designed to live in, and are at odds with the true Nature. And so we start to encounter problems…

There was a meme that one of my students and friends posted to socials which said (this is reduced), ‘If you need to prove your practice than your thinking is colonized.’ The second slide to that share went onto say how they, the creator of the post, had a better practice by offering proof of how it works. In effect canceling out their whole first statement with proof from their own practice. Rejecting the dominant nothin of the measure and then offering a tape with marks to prove their own truth. We desperately need things to function differently in the world not just for people of color, those forced with desperate choices because of the greed of the world and those who hold the power strings, but the answers don’t come from denying our skills in how things functions, and the necessary components that helps us to understand how that function serves us. Truth, in many ways when we’re talking about this lived reality is measurable, not just emphatically believed, it must have or leave an imprint in the soil of our soul, or it’s just ideological.

Arguably the singularity that David Bowie refers to, and I think you might agree with me here, that we emerged from prior to the internet which breaks the shell of those ideas, was largely a pale mans world. It was unified under a patriarchal, colonized, warlike spear of speaking, moving, and acting in the that created mass destruction, slavery, suppression, and the monster that is industrialized world. It is also possible that the nature of reality, and how we can approach that nature in ourselves and in the world, can be extracted from that carnage, seen as useful when weirded with our modern, aware, and compassionate perspective, and reapplied to our collective reality map. We can do away with the dehumanizing forces of control, and not loose our tools and resources in the process. A tool that functions can be used to harm or heal, it is not necessarily the tool that is the issue, it is the hand that wields it. And it has been in the hands of the angry, restless, and destructive, that have lost site of the transcendent nature of self and the world.

These are big questions but important ones as we argue over facts with fictions. All of this is causing me to play with my own reality map. Question what I know, and who I am in that relationship of knowing and unknown. To grow. I continue to deconstruct and reconstruction what I see as I look for meaning in my world view, and the quote as stated above, means I’ve had to look at where I’ve come into my own little ideological islands. We’ve all been in them, COVID, for the compassionate, caused us to physically withdraw, and to reach through the electric wires of our devices to connect. Maybe like me you really looked at yourself and asked deeper questions. Maybe you made changes, maybe changes were forced by fate. The disconnect feels like such a schism. I see some of your, our, friends-list posts that reflect much the same.

We need each other. In more ways than we can yet see, and in very real ways that is going to require cooperation. Working together to get through our past, resolve the present and work towards tomorrow. We’re here in holidays, some of us will encounter family and other folks still dealing with the ravages of misinformation, and starkly different beliefs. We only have so much privilege to ignore one another, look past, or around, or avoid all together,

There is a restorative agent here in this work I am digging into. Other teachers and seekers have done it. I think the answer is within ourselves us, a returning to common grounds and social graces, and necessary steps to talk to each other. We can only hide behind defenses and hurl fire for so long before something really burns and starts another conflagration that’s e are pressed to contain.

I find a healing for myself that is links between heaven and earth, that looks like walking towards rather than away through the words of Sharon Salzberg, which I quoted in the last void post. She said in day 2 of her 10-day challenge, “Look at, rather than look through. Include, rather than exclude.” She reminded me of Metta, the practice “May you be safe, be happy, be healthy, and live with ease.”

I’m trying to resolve this in myself, over coffee, but it’s been percolating much longer than today. Welcome to my morning thoughts, and cultivating inquires into world problems as I experience them…

Looking ahead I’m going into some Somatic Mediations, which I will present in a few weeks for the meditation subscribers. I think there is deep magick in engaging body rather than ideas, and exploring that practice next feels like next steps.

Thank you, dear subscriber, for participating in my process.

I welcome your thoughts, I invite you to share, and connect. let’s talk.

Scott

This post may appear on my blog or other websites outside of Patreon.com/ScottKSmith, where it appeared first. Please credit author and the above, original link.

• Image 1 by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

• Bowie interview on the BBC: https://youtu.be/LaHcOs7mhfU

• Image 2 by 18121281 from Pixabay

• Image 3 by Scot K Smith from September 23, 2017 “Goddess as Reality Map,” a creation for my homework in the Temple of Witchcraft, Witchcraft 4: Temple of High Magick.