You don't need to be a Gemini to experience this. Gemini just illustrates this interplay between personal and transpersonal most clearly. If you are any sort of healer or teacher, then there is this other person in you, who is your real life; who if you follow, then your life will unfold as it needs to and you have nothing to worry about. But you will still be given some serious grappling, you will be presented with situations and choices that are very difficult, that really demand of you, otherwise how will you grow? If there is nothing seriously difficult in your life, then you may not be listening to the daemon. And you will know you are not listening.
I don't want to give the wrong impression, a Protestant impression. If you rise to the ongoing challenges, if there is always that gritty flavour, then you will experience joy as well, the joy that comes from spirit that is divine, that comes from inner union, and which is not generally part of ordinary life.
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I
offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk
over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel,
Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres
around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis,
and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work.
Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk
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These thoughts arose out of my consideration of the preponderance of Geminis in our political life right now, and the way they can switch between clowning and ruthless determination. And then a series of lectures on Jung by James Hillman that I am listening to. Now if anyone was a Shaman, Jung was. If you want to understand our path, go to Jung. And at one point, Hillman says that Jung was 2 people - the adapted bourgeouis socialised one, and the 'extremely difficult' personality who was occult and driven, rough and ruthless, and subject to rages. He was a contradiction. It is a contradiction that maybe many of us who do this work, who are driven in this way, experience, because we have to get on in the world as well as being true to this other thing.
I think we long for the daemon as well as being scared of it. In Pullman's His Dark Materials, the daemons are animal familiars, and this has proved a powerful and popular idea. Without a daemon, we have no soul. But we don't want too much of it, thank you very much, because we are tiny fearful people who swagger around like something much bigger.
As Rilke says, 'Every angel is terrible'. The beauty of the daemon, and the demands he/she will make of us, are too much for the little lives we want to lead, surrounded by false certainties, and shielded from death. If you let your animal helper really have her way, she will take over your life, you will live on an edge that has beauty and the bracing air of a high mountain crag.
And who you are will be a mystery to those around you, you will be lonely until you realise that Spirit is always there for you, there is an inner joyful union to be found that is never lonely. What is loneliness, but a longing for this, which connects you far more deeply than the dependency that we often mistake for relationship.
So we dip our toes in, because we cannot resist the soulfulness of the daemon. The Shaman's illness is all about the ordinary person wanting to remain so, and the spirits saying no buddy, we have something much bigger in store for you, and you ain't going to do this voluntarily, so we'll make you ill until you listen. And we see so much of this, people with their ME and fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome and autoimmune diseases and it is NOT 'psychological' but a call from the soul to listen, and sometimes people do, and even then it is a long process, this shamanic path is a slow one.
And sometimes, tragically, and with the complicity of the medical establishment, people turn the illness back on itself and make it who they are, they put themselves in a box, and this can go on for decades, and yes it can eventually kill, because life will not be blocked in its unfolding, the daemon needs eventually to be listened to, and we often learn by our not listening. But it is the only way to live, and it is a life that is much larger and more edgy and joyful than the received values of society can provide.
excellent!
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