OTHERWORLD ALLEGIANCES

Sometimes you have to be a bit careful what you are talking about, because these inner loyalties we have don't necessarily want to be broadcast all over the internet. But I want this to be a place I can talk about these things without too much disapproval from the Otherworld 😏 And I guess I want to say as a kind of declaration, an affirmation, that the fairy realm has a claim on me.

And these are not the Christianised tiny pink things that we perhaps get told about as children, but the big mothers who are not good or bad (human ideas) but are what they are, part of the natural world, with their own power and their own point of view. They are maybe invisible to us because we modern humans have been brainwashed into thinking literally, so that if something can't be pinned down and tested and measured, then it isn't real. The loss is ours. But it is also a loss to the Otherworld, because to perceive is to exist: this idea is natural to indigenous people, and has been turned into a school of thought, 'Philosophical Idealism', by moderns on the right track, but who often confuse rationality with experienced reality.

 

Fernworthy Reservoir, Devon

So as we stop giving offerings to the natural world and treating her with reciprocity, then by the same token we deny the fairies their existence, and there less place for them. They are beings in their own right, as is the natural world in her wholeness and aliveness. And that is something you can't pin down, and just as well.

 

Like my mother, who came from the west of Ireland and who used to wander off to the woods on her own as a child and hang out with the little people. And she gave me a detailed description once of these beings, and a few months later I repeated back to her what she had said, by way of confirmation, and she replied "Did I say that?" No, you can't pin the fairies down, and you couldn’t pin my mother down.

 

And if you marry a fairy woman - or one who has been claimed by the fairies, and is maybe in some ways not all here as a result, like my Mum - then she will find your way round you. Like my Dad who was English and very straight, decided maybe before I was born that I would be called 'Barry', and what he said went. He didn't realise for a moment that Barry is derived from Fionnbharr, who was king of the fairies at a mound at Knockmaa near Tuam, about an hour from where my Mum grew up.

 

And then I called my son Finn, the other half of Fionnbharr, not realising the connection at the time, and so the fairy lineage continued through my mother then me and now my son. And when he was a baby he had a laugh that was like bells from another world. He is in a bit of a muggle phase right now, and good on him, but we will see what the future brings.

 

Finn was born in 2000, just after Fenny Castle, a 12-acre field near Glastonbury, fell into my hands, a site known locally as 'The Last Refuge of the Fairies'. This was when I first had an inkling that these guys had a claim on me. And I could feel them following me around the field, these big mothers, taller than me. Half the field was hill, and that part didn't feel like human territory, it wasn't mine to do with as I willed. You went there with respect. One guy who put his yurt on the hill went into a kind of dream and I had to ask him to leave the field, and he did not forgive me for years. But my fault for letting it happen.

 

Venford Falls, Dartmoor

I moved to Devon in 2010 and later sold the field, and it seems now to have a worthy steward who has planted trees (as I did) and kept the field unnoticeable, as I am sure the fairies want. I was back there a few months ago and the connection was very strong, I felt treated like royalty in the presence of the sidhe. And they are right, it is time to be what I am. Maybe Queen Oonagh will in time show herself too? If you visit the field, please bring an offering with you and you will be welcomed. These guys want to be known, but not in a celeb kind of way, and need their kingdom respected.

 

Be that as it may, I find myself walking on Dartmoor several times a week, and there is no shortage of fairy places here. Wistman's Wood, Vennford Falls, and down below Birch Tor, to name a few. And now I bump into someone who has her own list of fairy places she visits on Dartmoor, and who wants to write an illustrated book on them. So the fairies have given me some kind of job to do here, and it is one I do willingly and with delight. For the fairies are a kind of fate, a claim over oneself, a loyalty, a world to which one has allegiance. And I will defend them when necessary, like I did in my satirical broadside against Richard Dawkins in 2014 when he said children shouldn’t be read fairy stories because they are ‘not true’.

 

Fenny Castle

And my plan is early next year to look for a place I can buy with a bit of land that people can come to, and the money should be in place by then. And the fairies will take care of you if you honour them, and the place I get will be found in association with these so-called 'little' people. They are also the power of the natural world and the ways in which she will help us if we honour and promote the life within her.

The natural world has a subjective dimension just like we do. It is alive and has its own point of view, whether it is an animal, a plant or a rock. Just as Matter is the objective dimension of our experience, so is Spirit the subjective dimension. And the fairies get forgotten because we think only the 'objective' is real. More fool us. Above is Fenny Castle from years ago. There are more trees there now.

THE BEGINNINGS OF WISDOM

The real qualification in this Shamanic business is not the certificated courses we have been on, or even the profound initiations that Spirit has given us - invaluable as the latter are - but the degree to which we have a straightforward relationship with our 'shadow' side. It only gets called shadow 'cos usually we don't want to know about it. But if we start to make friends with those bits that torment us or that we even feel ashamed about, then they are very happy to make friends with us, it's what they want.

It's all actually a very straightforward business, but that doesn't mean it's easy. It's about catching yourself at all those times when you feel anxious or overwhelmed or self-doubting or raging or envious (go on admit it 🤣) and just saying it to yourself WITHOUT JUDGING and just being with it, and even better being able to say it straightforwardly to other people. And hauling the feeling off the object/person/circumstance to which it has attached itself.

 

It's not about trying to change those 'demons' either. They almost certainly will change, as it happens, if you stay with them and don't judge them. And why would they want to stay around if you are judging them? I wouldn't want to stay around in such company! But it's not for us to 'change' them, they may even be serving certain purposes beyond our ken (like Gollum in Lord of the Rings). Spirit is such an unfathomable thing, how do we know what-is-what with our merely human judgement?

 

So here is one with me. I haven't written a book. I do not currently have a genuine urge to do so, but I know at some point I probably could and would love to. Meanwhile, if someone else has written a 'shamanic' book, and particularly if they are my age or younger - and that is without even looking to see if the book is any good - I feel threatened, I feel envious. And if I'm not careful, I could start to fault-find with that person. That is envy, and it was the first sin in the Bible, it was why Cain killed his brother Abel, because God had praised Abel and not him. So I'm like that with anything I'm good at or want to be good at, and I'm like that with astrology too: if someone appears like they might be better than me, I feel threatened. I start to lose myself.

 

Now I think this is a universal tendency, and it can be very hard to admit to. A lot of criticism of wealth and privilege comes down to this: envy. But actually, it's not hard once you start admitting to it. Why not admit to it? Why feel ashamed and hide it, especially from oneself, if not from others? But people do it all the time. And that means, in my book, that they haven't reached the beginnings of wisdom.

 

Wisdom requires 'humility'. But humility is not about 'lowering' oneself. It is about being level headed and straightforward about who we are. And it is such a fucking relief, I tell you. And in the case of envy, it is based on comparison, and the first thing we lose when we start doing that is to lose sight of our own unique gifts, or what it is in our life that works well.

 

And let us call these things by their old-fashioned names: let’s not talk about someone making us feel insecure, but about envy; not ‘anxiety’ but ‘fear’; maybe sometimes instead of ‘self-esteem’ we might say ‘pride’, the flip-side of envy. And on the subject of ‘self-esteem’, as the great Bill Gates said, it is not a given, you have to earn it: take that thing you can be good at and keep doing it. Then you will feel good about yourself, and rightly so.

 

I used to live with someone who could not for a moment admit her own insecurities, and if I wanted to talk about mine she would use it against me, as a way of propping herself up. And for years I longed to be able to talk about all that stuff in myself. And what a relief it has been, the last 3 years living on my own and at least being able to be honest with myself and not having someone else around needing to stand in the way of that. Now I don't want to judge that other person, because Wisdom begins by not judging others as well as oneself, and forgiving ourselves each time we catch ourselves judging, because it is something we will keep doing, we can't help it. But at least we can forgive ourselves, and why not?

 

And here is a good one (with a Toltec origin): keep, in your mind at least, asking those who you feel have wronged you for forgiveness for judging them, because that is something we do to those who have wronged us, and it is not helpful to judge anyone.

 

So I think this is when we are really on ‘the path’ in a grounded way and have something solid to offer others: when we can be honest about who we are to ourselves and to others. We don’t need to be an ‘advanced’ being to be a teacher, we just need to be an honest being.

 

And I think this is a common misconception. I regularly encounter people who have put themselves in a teaching position on the strength of their ‘spiritual’ experiences and trainings, but they are not the sort of people you can get near to in a personal sense. I feel they are not fully present, and sure enough sooner or later they will do something, usually to do with power, that gives the game away. But they are usually quite unconscious of this, they just think they are ‘light-workers’ or something, they are identified with that. They may even make a noise about how they acknowledge their ‘shadow side’, but without being specific, and that is a giveaway.

 

But that is where they are. I feel tempted to judge them for their false pride and the harm they do. But it is just one of those things, there is no law saying that anyone has to come into relationship with their shadow, and it something we can learn from if we come out the other side of those kinds of teachers. We learn to trust our own discernment more deeply, in the face of someone, and probably the people around them too, who want us to put their opinions above our own.

 

And when there is this non-acknowledgement of the shadow, then there is usually projection of it. I listened to a ‘lightworker’ the other day giving a long spiel about how evil the world is; it is standard for I would say most people to project their shadow onto the political party they don’t vote for (in our context, that usually means Republican/Tory); and in a spiritual group - or a family - anyone who is critical of the unspoken rules is usually seen by everyone else as having a problem.

 

Whole religions are founded on what is now called ‘spiritual bypass’: I was part of a Buddhist set-up like that for many years, and it made me ill. There are plenty of shamanists like this too. Religion tends to be like this across the board, because it is based on a division into good and evil, which is an all too human thing to do. Not many people can do shadow work. It requires standing outside what society regards as ‘bad’ and finding the ‘evil’ inside ourselves and welcoming it. Finding, as Jordan Peterson puts it, the concentration camp guard within ourselves. Then we start to become a whole and balanced human being, and have something of real value to offer others.

MONDAY MORNING DIGRESSIONS

To adapt an old Hermetic maxim: "Spirit is all-encompassing. Its centre is everywhere, its periphery nowhere."

The maxim is in Marie-Louise von Franz's book CG Jung: His Myth in our Time, which is a great run through the basics of Jung by someone who was his close collaborator for many years. For me, Shamanism and Jung are completely congruent. They are both completely open to Spirit. The Unconscious, in Jung's use of it, and Spirit are the same thing.

Of course you will get both Jungians and Shamanists who are not completely open, and then you have religion, because you have fixity. And it's a phase that maybe many of us go through. For me it's been a gradual process over many years, and it's still work in progress.

Of course everyone will SAY they are open and their shamanism isn't religion. But religion isn't a crime, and it is rooted in an emotional need for authority and certainty, rather than being primarily an intellectual position. And I think we all have that to some degree. It is the human condition. It is why when someone contradicts us, we leap in to defend our position. I sometimes make a point of trying to explore what the other person has said, which ain't easy, but it's a fabulous thing to do, and others will notice, because it is unusual.

Matter is the Dream of Spirit, they are not different to each other. The purpose of our lives is not to ascend to a 'spiritual' realm, but to incarnate, to bring spirit into matter: in other words, to engage with the world, to show up, to be here, and in-so-doing to become balanced and whole. That doesn't mean that periods of withdrawal cannot be immensely useful, nor does it mean that we have to become full-on members of the rat-race. But we have a body that is also spirit, and it needs to be used. I think that the metaphor of 'Ascension' is not useful, and easily leads to the avoidance of the Shadow. In fact it may be the attraction of such a metaphor in the first place.

I've just run the first evening of a 4-month exploration of the Medicine Wheel, courtesy of Zoom. I'd say it is a North exploration, inasmuch as it is about people telling their stories from the viewpoint of the different elements/ directions. And story-telling belongs in the North. It is the place of the Elder and the Wisdom-keeper, and how else do they transmit that wisdom but through stories? Religion has doctrines, and in the same tradition science has its theories/doctrines. But wisdom is not contained in doctrines as much as it is in stories, because stories speak to our hearts and to our imaginations, they enthrall us. And wisdom is a function of the whole person, not just of our heads. And wisdom is spontaneous too: traditional stories are not told as prepared set-pieces, but in response to whatever is happening there and then in the 'audience'.

The North, the Air element, the mind, comes last on the Medicine Wheel I use: the mind is such a tricksy thing, and we need to do the other elements/faculties first, so that we can use our mind in a balanced way; so that it can be in service of Spirit instead of thinking it is the master, which of course is one of the problems in our modern culture.

Shamanism begins not with doctrines but with something very simple: the experience of belonging to the natural world. So go outside and appreciate and give thanks to the different elements that we humans have divided the natural world into: the Sun, the Rain, the Soil and the Wind. And do that several times a week, let the natural world nourish you. If anything is 'core' shamanism, it is this. If you read about shamanic cultures, their lives are rooted in this experience, and in continually giving thanks to the spirits around them, which are not different to the natural world, everything has a spirit and a point of view.

So I am out on Dartmoor several times a week, I am grateful to live in such a place. And I am grateful for all the things that work in my life. I am grateful for the zoom course that has just started and all the people who are attending; I am grateful for the house I live in, which has come at a time of a big transition and which takes care of me; I am grateful for my health and very grateful for the renewed vigour, greater than ever before, that has come to me at the age of 62, which I wasn't expecting; I am grateful for the world of books and ideas and all its riches that I spend a lot of time in. And for my ability to write what is in me and for the people who read it and appreciate it, that is a gift too. And I am grateful for all the friends I have made in the last few years.

There are major things in my life that I would like to be there but aren't. But there are always going to be things like that, and it is a matter of what we concentrate on. And trust in what is NOT happening in your life, as well as in what is happening. Spirit knows what it is doing. We may not need all the things that we want; or it may not be time, it may be years off even; and sometimes it is about making changes in ourselves so that those things can happen, and how can Spirit deliver if we are not ready?

So this is the thing about prayer. I was introduced to it in a Navajo way, but by an ex-Catholic westerner who also viewed prayer as a kind of bucket list, and if you prayed exactly and precisely for what you wanted, then you would get it. But it's not like that. Sometimes we get the opposite of what we pray for, because there is a deeper thing going on that we cannot see. So prayer begins by giving thanks for all the things that work, and then we move into a kind of dreaming, an aligning of ourselves with the deeper purposes of spirit. That is why we may need to talk at length when we pray, we may need to circle round and round until that deeper clarity is reached, where we let go of our superficial sense of lack, and move to a place that is aligned with Spirit and that can truly nourish us. And when we do that, it comes from the heart, and how can such prayers not come true, albeit in their own way and in their own time?

The picture above is of Chinkwell Tor on Dartmoor. I was there on Saturday with Typhaine, Alexandra, Claire, Phil and Susanne. We started at Bonehill Rocks and wandered on to Bel Tor, Chinkwell Tor and Honeybag Tor, then back to the tearoom in Widecombe. I have a book of circular walks on Dartmoor, it is a great way to do it and you can get these books for most areas. We meet every couple of weeks and do things like walks and journeying and Pipe Ceremonies and we do a lot of talking, and that is the way I like my shamanism, it's something you pick up along the way by doing stuff together. And there is maybe something traditional in that.

Dreams and Spiders

Jung said that the earliest dream you remember can foreshadow the pattern of your whole life, or at least the first part of it. My first remembered dream is from when I was about 4, and soldiers were attacking our house from the rear. They climbed up onto the conservatory and approached my bedroom window. One of them threw a bomb at me - like a yellow grenade - and it hit me on the nose. I woke up with my nose itching.

 

This dream describes the assault on who I was - my security in who I was - from an early age by my parents' needs and fantasies, and later by the boarding school system. They did a good job. I grew up very concealed from myself. I was colonised by an invading army.

 

I have 3 house spiders who have recently come to live with me. How they got behind the secondary glazing I do not know. This is me consciously spinning my own webs and connections, that reach far into this world and the otherworld, instead of being part of the unconscious webs of others, that do not connect and enchant, but entrap. As for the flies, they are my tormenting shadow elements that are transformed by being held in this otherworldly web. Mother Spider is taking care of me.

THE SHAMANIC GROUND OF BEING

The greatest gift that Shamanism has given me is the experience of the earth as sacred. Before Shamanism I spent many years involved with a world-transcending form of Buddhism that eventually made me ill. In that sense it was just a continuation of the old Christian separation of Body and Spirit, which at root is an attempt by organised religion to control people. As the saying goes, if you get people by the balls (ie control sex), their hearts and minds will follow. This principle was first articulated by Theodore Roosevelt, but religion discovered it millennia ago.

Religion uses abstractions such as emptiness and the ground of being and ultimate reality and absolute truth, but that is because it mainly has the mind to work with; it puts the mind on a pedestal, however much it may also emphasise the limitations of the mind. 

 

For the indigenous mind, what is ultimate, what is most real is Mother Earth. This does not even need saying, for how could it be otherwise? 'Ultimate reality', 'God' is in front of our noses, every day, in everything we do. She is the air we breathe, the rain that refreshes, the Sun that warms and gives life, and the soil that supports and nourishes. There are no abstractions.

This can appear 'primitive' to the modern mind, which is used to the complex abstractions of philosophy and science - which are beyond the understanding of most of us - to describe the nature of the universe. We have been brainwashed, our minds have been colonised by a system that wishes us to see only a tiny sliver of reality and to look down on what is in front of our noses. 

 

You don't need to be a conspiracist to see this. Conspiracy misses the point, however, for it attributes our brainwashing to a shadowy and deliberate plot. Make no mistake, it is something we all collude in, it is collectively generated and perpetuated. The forms of the brainwashing may shift, but the frail human need for simple certainties persists. As TS Eliot said, 'Humankind cannot bear very much reality.' Or as the Buddha didn't say, 'All worldlings are mad.'

 

At least in a tribal situation, you have small enough numbers that those with a bit of wisdom can have some influence, and not let the simplistic certainties - which remember many people actually need - predominate. But in a society of millions, the sheer collective pressure seems to squeeze out much room for people with a bit of wisdom - or people who will listen to it - at the top. (In my opinion, Prince Charles has room for it.)

 

Real knowledge is simple to find. It is in our minds as they are right now, and it is in the elements around us. The Fool is simple enough to understand this, the professor generally is not. It is simple, but it is not easy.