{"id":1982,"date":"2009-07-01T01:10:58","date_gmt":"2009-07-01T06:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paganpages.org\/content\/?p=1990"},"modified":"2009-07-01T06:38:56","modified_gmt":"2009-07-01T11:38:56","slug":"elemental-perspectives-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/2009\/07\/01\/elemental-perspectives-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Elemental Perspectives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are They Friendly Spirits, Rocky? <\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the fifth and last article in my Elementals Perspectives series for PaganPages.\u00a0 The classical Elements of the ancients \u2013 Air, Fire, Water, and Earth \u2013 have served for ages as a model by which an ordered sense of the universe can be formulated.\u00a0 This model has been used by magicians, philosophers, and scientists.\u00a0 It is quite likely the seed of our modern sciences because it presents the notion that the world around us can be understood through observation of its parts and how they relate to one another.\u00a0 But the four Elements, like all classification systems, have never covered everything in the universe.\u00a0 Nor does it provide a way to explain how the Elemental parts of something can produce a whole thing.\u00a0 What makes the parts add up to more than the whole?\u00a0 Thus there has emerged a fifth Element.\u00a0 That mysterious fifth Element has come to be known as Spirit.\u00a0 It is by far the most important Element and probably the hardest to \u2018master.\u2019<\/p>\n

As a priest (and as just a plain, curious person) I\u2019ve studied Spirit for years.\u00a0 This study has now dominated my life.\u00a0 I\u2019ve even helped write a book about it that I hope to see published.\u00a0 But even now I have difficulty explaining what Spirit is and how we can use it in our everyday lives.\u00a0 It is a slithery subject and any study of it often will lead the student to believe they have opened a bottomless can of worms that wriggle in every direction.\u00a0 Even deciding where to begin that study is argumentative.\u00a0 But since I am the author of this paper and can begin anywhere I wish without having to argue with anyone but myself, I will start with an attempt at defining the word.<\/p>\n

Like many words, \u2018spirit\u2019 can be used in a wide variety of ways.\u00a0 We say, \u2018the spirit of the law,\u2019 or \u2018the spirit of Hamlet\u2019s father.\u2019 We hear about \u2018The Great Spirit\u2019 and we say that the combination and balance of the other four Classical Elements produces Spirit.\u00a0 To a casual observer, it might seem that the definition of the word in each case was somehow different.\u00a0 But that actually goes against how words come into existence and grow in usage.\u00a0 When the word started out in life (in whatever language), it was to signify a specific concept, a unique set of ideas.\u00a0 As the word grew into wider usage, the application of that set of ideas to explain something also broadened and made the word cover the wide range we use it for today.\u00a0 Over the tens or hundreds of thousands of years since the word-idea we call \u2018spirit\u2019 was born, the basic meaning has become somewhat obscured.<\/p>\n

A good way to find out more about the meaning of a word is to look up its synonyms.\u00a0 If you use Microsoft Word\u2019s handy right-click and ask for synonyms of \u2018spirit\u2019 you get: \u2018strength, courage, character, guts, will, strength of mind, force, and fortitude\u2019.\u00a0 Dig a little deeper and you\u2019ll come up with: \u2018soul, inner self, life-force, chi, essence, mood, tendency, atmosphere,\u2019 and a lot of other stuff.\u00a0 Out of all of those words, I finally chose \u2018essence\u2019 as possibly my best chance at getting at the root meaning.\u00a0 It seemed odd to me that the very first word in the whole bunch was \u2018strength.\u2019 Later, I felt like banging my head against a wall a few times for not paying attention.\u00a0 However, at the time I liked the word \u2018essence\u2019 so well I did a little happy-dance and started to follow the trail of thought it had produced within me.<\/p>\n

Eventually, my thoughts ran this way:\u00a0 Spirit is in everything because everything has some component of one or more of the Classic Elements.\u00a0 And, besides, Spirit absolutely must be part of everything because everything has some sort of essence.\u00a0 Extend this a little further and you come up with: Spirit is the most vital, the most essential part of everything there is.\u00a0 And that was when the little light bulb went on over my head:\u00a0 Spirit is the force, the strength behind the existence of everything.\u00a0 There\u2019s a long (years long in this case) and involved philosophical and theological discourse I\u2019m glossing over here, but I went from the light bulb to the belief that Spirit is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as Deity.<\/p>\n

I know this might seem very sketchy and I apologize.\u00a0 As I said, my wife and I wrote a whole book about it and even then there are spots where we had to settle for a less than rigorous train of statements.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I\u2019m going to carry on with such bold proclamations and not keep boring you with apologies.<\/p>\n

So I will assume that Spirit is a piece of god, or the gods, or however else we care to name that big, wondrous\u2026 something\u2026 that we all seem to sense is bigger than everything else put together!\u00a0 And we concluded that the spirit of any one thing has a connection to the spirits of every other thing in the universe.\u00a0 Another way of saying this would be that every piece or aspect of Deity knows all of Deity.\u00a0 Any interaction between one spirit (piece of Deity) and another would be known by all spirits in the universe\u2026 instantly.\u00a0 Find this hard to believe?\u00a0 Check out recent experiments in light; you\u2019ll find instant communication between photons.<\/p>\n

Wow, talk about cosmic!\u00a0 But I think I already mentioned this was heavy stuff.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s say all of the above is true.\u00a0 What good does it do us?\u00a0 Aside from being of interest to an old Pagan theologian, why bother?\u00a0 First of all, I believe this is the kicker in favor of doing magic the Pagan way.\u00a0 That is, by combining magic and religion.\u00a0 There\u2019s always a religious (spiritual) element to our magic and always a magical element to our religion.\u00a0 And the point at which they always meet is Spirit.<\/p>\n

Spirit is the template for existence for a \u2018thing\u2019.\u00a0 It is what causes it to be.\u00a0 Any and all changes to something represent a change to its spirit.\u00a0 So if the purpose of our magic is to change something (and what magic isn\u2019t for that purpose?), then we must make a change to the spirit of that \u2018something\u2019.\u00a0 Since all spirits are part of that big, huge, all-encompassing spirit we call Deity (also called by some: \u2018the Great Spirit\u2019), then the only thing that can change the spirit of anything else is Spirit itself.<\/p>\n

Magicians use many tools to do their magic and each tool has a spirit.\u00a0 But the most powerful tool in the magician\u2019s bag is the magician himself!\u00a0 Pagans believe that without some kind of religious discipline the magician\u2019s spirit (and, therefore, his or her magic) can all too easily get messed up.\u00a0 You might call this the Pagan version of \u2018original sin\u2019.\u00a0 We also believe that the most important matter when doing magic is keep our work from harming others because we know that to harm another is ultimately to harm ourselves.\u00a0 Learning about your own spirit is even more important than learning about the spirits of other things.<\/p>\n

Besides, if we don\u2019t have some way to know our own spirit better, how can we become better at our magic?\u00a0 See?\u00a0 There\u2019s that spirit-in-magic and magic-in-spirit thing again.\u00a0 Ever wonder why the first \u2018commandment\u2019 of magic is to \u201cKnow Thy Self\u201d?<\/p>\n

Okay, I\u2019ve given you my take on what Spirit is and why it\u2019s important.\u00a0 The next question is: how can we recognize the spirit of something?\u00a0 How can we \u2018see\u2019 the essence of a thing and use that in our magic and our religious (spiritual) work?<\/p>\n

The answer is simplicity itself.\u00a0 No, really: simplicity!\u00a0 Spirit is the essential, the \u2018reality\u2019 of the thing we are observing.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t all the surrounding mishmash of stuff going on around it, though that surrounding stuff is constantly having some kind of effect (making a change) on that spirit.\u00a0 We have to be able to observe the subject in the moment.\u00a0 Learning to see \u2013 really see \u2013 something clearly requires training and lots of practice.<\/p>\n

Whatever system for magic you learn, it won\u2019t be easy.\u00a0 You\u2019ll likely get better at it as time goes on but you\u2019ll probably never get it right 100% of the time.\u00a0 You will have to dedicate your life to perfecting this, the highest of all arts.\u00a0 You will need to increase your understanding and skills in all of the Elements.\u00a0 It also means you will have to factor in your own spirit because simply by observing something you will change it and it will change you.\u00a0 This, by the way, fits nicely into modern day physics.\u00a0 It\u2019s called the Heisenberg Principle.\u00a0 Anyway, as you can easily see, any act of magic is going to be so complicated by all this spirit changing that to say you know about everything that\u2019s going on is a big fat lie.\u00a0 By the time you\u2019ve figured out what the spirit of a subject is, it\u2019s changed a million times and so have you.\u00a0 What\u2019s a magician to do?<\/p>\n

First off, don\u2019t expect your magic to turn out exactly as planned.\u00a0 That also fits in with physics since the Heisenberg Principle is usually called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.\u00a0 Simply put, that principle says you can\u2019t know everything about something all in one shot.\u00a0 We (magicians), just like physicists, have to accept that if we know enough about something it will work most of the time\u2026 but not all the time.\u00a0 We have to rely upon past experimental data that tells us how certain interactions of spirits have worked out in the past.\u00a0 A great deal of that information is found in our spiritual studies, our religion.<\/p>\n

Well DUH!\u00a0 That\u2019s why they\u2019re called spiritual studies!\u00a0 Every religion, even the ones that get upset over using the term, \u2018magic\u2019, are there to improve our ability to interact with Spirit.<\/p>\n

To be precise, studying Spirit doesn\u2019t demand belief in any sort of god or goddess.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t require us to join any kind of organization or declare ourselves to be any kind of Pagan, Buddhist, Catholic, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, or devotees of The Great Ralph.\u00a0 We can be spiritual without religion.\u00a0 The fact is that everyone has their own particular form of belief and it is almost impossible that anybody else has exactly that complex of beliefs.\u00a0 Religion mostly exists so we can find a way of peaceably sharing our beliefs and have a shot at refining them while kicking back and enjoying a brew (hey: bread and wine; cakes and ale \u2013 I\u2019m just saying).<\/p>\n

And while we\u2019re trying to figure it all out, while we\u2019re scratching our heads and wondering why Plan A didn\u2019t work exactly as planned, at least we have a community of fellow head-scratchers to be with and kick around the wonders, the magic of our lives.\u00a0 Being Pagans, we\u2019ll be happily serious and seriously happy because, down deep, we believe in the inherent rightness of the universe.\u00a0 We have accepted that we will forever be scratching our heads over something but we\u2019ll keep trying to get better and refuse to kick ourselves too hard over being ourselves.\u00a0 The gods (or, who knows? maybe it really is The Great Ralph) are probably having a great time watching our efforts; why shouldn\u2019t we have just as good a time living them?<\/p>\n

This series of articles, the Elemental Perspectives, has been a delight of mine for the last few months and I hope you have enjoyed them as well.\u00a0 I will be offering other articles to PaganPages as time goes on but I\u2019m not planning any other series of related articles such as this.\u00a0 Of course, that\u2019s my current plan.\u00a0 Who knows what\u2019s really going to happen?\u00a0 After all, Plan A doesn\u2019t work out much of the time.<\/p>\n

Live, love, and laugh, my friends.\u00a0 It\u2019s all magic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are They Friendly Spirits, Rocky? This is the fifth and last article in my Elementals Perspectives series for PaganPages.\u00a0 The classical Elements of the ancients \u2013 Air, Fire, Water, and Earth \u2013 have served for ages as a model by which an ordered sense of the universe can be formulated.\u00a0 This model has been used by magicians, philosophers, and scientists.\u00a0 It is quite likely the seed of our modern sciences because it presents the notion that the world around us can be understood through observation of its parts and how they relate to one another.\u00a0 But the four Elements, like all classification systems, have never covered everything in the universe.\u00a0 Nor does it provide a way to explain how the Elemental parts of something can produce a whole thing.\u00a0 What makes the parts add up to more than the whole?\u00a0 Thus there has emerged a fifth Element.\u00a0 That mysterious fifth Element has come to be known as Spirit.\u00a0 It is by far the most important Element and probably the hardest to \u2018master.\u2019 As a priest (and as just a plain, curious person) I\u2019ve studied Spirit for years.\u00a0 This study has now dominated my life.\u00a0 I\u2019ve even helped write a book about it that I hope to see published.\u00a0 But even now I have difficulty explaining what Spirit is and how we can use it in our everyday lives.\u00a0 It is a slithery subject and any study of it often will lead the student to believe they have opened a bottomless can of worms that wriggle in every direction.\u00a0 Even deciding where to begin that study is argumentative.\u00a0 But since I am the author of this paper and can begin anywhere I wish without having to argue with anyone but myself, I will start with an attempt at defining the word. Like many words, \u2018spirit\u2019 can be used in a wide variety of ways.\u00a0 We say, \u2018the spirit of the law,\u2019 or \u2018the spirit of Hamlet\u2019s father.\u2019 We hear about \u2018The Great Spirit\u2019 and we say that the combination and balance of the other four Classical Elements produces Spirit.\u00a0 To a casual observer, it might seem that the definition of the word in each case was somehow different.\u00a0 But that actually goes against how words come into existence and grow in usage.\u00a0 When the word started out in life (in whatever language), it was to signify a specific concept, a unique set of ideas.\u00a0 As the word grew into wider usage, the application of that set of ideas to explain something also broadened and made the word cover the wide range we use it for today.\u00a0 Over the tens or hundreds of thousands of years since the word-idea we call \u2018spirit\u2019 was born, the basic meaning has become somewhat obscured. A good way to find out more about the meaning of a word is to look up its synonyms.\u00a0 If you use Microsoft Word\u2019s handy right-click and ask for synonyms of \u2018spirit\u2019 you get: \u2018strength, courage, character, guts, will, strength of mind, force, and fortitude\u2019.\u00a0 Dig a little deeper and you\u2019ll come up with: \u2018soul, inner self, life-force, chi, essence, mood, tendency, atmosphere,\u2019 and a lot of other stuff.\u00a0 Out of all of those words, I finally chose \u2018essence\u2019 as possibly my best chance at getting at the root meaning.\u00a0 It seemed odd to me that the very first word in the whole bunch was \u2018strength.\u2019 Later, I felt like banging my head against a wall a few times for not paying attention.\u00a0 However, at the time I liked the word \u2018essence\u2019 so well I did a little happy-dance and started to follow the trail of thought it had produced within me. Eventually, my thoughts ran this way:\u00a0 Spirit is in everything because everything has some component of one or more of the Classic Elements.\u00a0 And, besides, Spirit absolutely must be part of everything because everything has some sort of essence.\u00a0 Extend this a little further and you come up with: Spirit is the most vital, the most essential part of everything there is.\u00a0 And that was when the little light bulb went on over my head:\u00a0 Spirit is the force, the strength behind the existence of everything.\u00a0 There\u2019s a long (years long in this case) and involved philosophical and theological discourse I\u2019m glossing over here, but I went from the light bulb to the belief that Spirit is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as Deity. I know this might seem very sketchy and I apologize.\u00a0 As I said, my wife and I wrote a whole book about it and even then there are spots where we had to settle for a less than rigorous train of statements.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I\u2019m going to carry on with such bold proclamations and not keep boring you with apologies. So I will assume that Spirit is a piece of god, or the gods, or however else we care to name that big, wondrous\u2026 something\u2026 that we all seem to sense is bigger than everything else put together!\u00a0 And we concluded that the spirit of any one thing has a connection to the spirits of every other thing in the universe.\u00a0 Another way of saying this would be that every piece or aspect of Deity knows all of Deity.\u00a0 Any interaction between one spirit (piece of Deity) and another would be known by all spirits in the universe\u2026 instantly.\u00a0 Find this hard to believe?\u00a0 Check out recent experiments in light; you\u2019ll find instant communication between photons. Wow, talk about cosmic!\u00a0 But I think I already mentioned this was heavy stuff. So let\u2019s say all of the above is true.\u00a0 What good does it do us?\u00a0 Aside from being of interest to an old Pagan theologian, why bother?\u00a0 First of all, I believe this is the kicker in favor of doing magic the Pagan way.\u00a0 That is, by combining magic and religion.\u00a0 There\u2019s always a religious (spiritual) element to our magic and always a magical element to our religion.\u00a0 And the point at which they always meet is Spirit. Spirit is the template for existence for a \u2018thing\u2019.\u00a0 It is what causes it to be.\u00a0 Any and all changes to something represent a change to its spirit.\u00a0 So if the purpose of our magic is to change something (and what magic isn\u2019t for that purpose?), then we must make a change to the spirit of that \u2018something\u2019.\u00a0 Since all spirits are part of that big, huge, all-encompassing spirit we call Deity (also called by some: \u2018the Great Spirit\u2019), then the only thing that can change the spirit of anything else is Spirit itself. Magicians use many tools to do their magic and each tool has a spirit.\u00a0 But the most powerful tool in the magician\u2019s bag is the magician himself!\u00a0 Pagans believe that without some kind of religious discipline the magician\u2019s spirit (and, therefore, his or her magic) can all too easily get messed up.\u00a0 You might call this the Pagan version of \u2018original sin\u2019.\u00a0 We also believe that the most important matter when doing magic is keep our work from harming others because we know that to harm another is ultimately to harm ourselves.\u00a0 Learning about your own spirit is even more important than learning about the spirits of other things. Besides, if we don\u2019t have some way to know our own spirit better, how can we become better at our magic?\u00a0 See?\u00a0 There\u2019s that spirit-in-magic and magic-in-spirit thing again.\u00a0 Ever wonder why the first \u2018commandment\u2019 of magic is to \u201cKnow Thy Self\u201d? Okay, I\u2019ve given you my take on what Spirit is and why it\u2019s important.\u00a0 The next question is: how can we recognize the spirit of something?\u00a0 How can we \u2018see\u2019 the essence of a thing and use that in our magic and our religious (spiritual) work? The answer is simplicity itself.\u00a0 No, really: simplicity!\u00a0 Spirit is the essential, the \u2018reality\u2019 of the thing we are observing.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t all the surrounding mishmash of stuff going on around it, though that surrounding stuff is constantly having some kind of effect (making a change) on that spirit.\u00a0 We have to be able to observe the subject in the moment.\u00a0 Learning to see \u2013 really see \u2013 something clearly requires training and lots of practice. Whatever system for magic you learn, it won\u2019t be easy.\u00a0 You\u2019ll likely get better at it as time goes on but you\u2019ll probably never get it right 100% of the time.\u00a0 You will have to dedicate your life to perfecting this, the highest of all arts.\u00a0 You will need to increase your understanding and skills in all of the Elements.\u00a0 It also means you will have to factor in your own spirit because simply by observing something you will change it and it will change you.\u00a0 This, by the way, fits nicely into modern day physics.\u00a0 It\u2019s called the Heisenberg Principle.\u00a0 Anyway, as you can easily see, any act of magic is going to be so complicated by all this spirit changing that to say you know about everything that\u2019s going on is a big fat lie.\u00a0 By the time you\u2019ve figured out what the spirit of a subject is, it\u2019s changed a million times and so have you.\u00a0 What\u2019s a magician to do? First off, don\u2019t expect your magic to turn out exactly as planned.\u00a0 That also fits in with physics since the Heisenberg Principle is usually called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.\u00a0 Simply put, that principle says you can\u2019t know everything about something all in one shot.\u00a0 We (magicians), just like physicists, have to accept that if we know enough about something it will work most of the time\u2026 but not all the time.\u00a0 We have to rely upon past experimental data that tells us how certain interactions of spirits have worked out in the past.\u00a0 A great deal of that information is found in our spiritual studies, our religion. Well DUH!\u00a0 That\u2019s why they\u2019re called spiritual studies!\u00a0 Every religion, even the ones that get upset over using the term, \u2018magic\u2019, are there to improve our ability to interact with Spirit. To be precise, studying Spirit doesn\u2019t demand belief in any sort of god or goddess.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t require us to join any kind of organization or declare ourselves to be any kind of Pagan, Buddhist, Catholic, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, or devotees of The Great Ralph.\u00a0 We can be spiritual without religion.\u00a0 The fact is that everyone has their own particular form of belief and it is almost impossible that anybody else has exactly that complex of beliefs.\u00a0 Religion mostly exists so we can find a way of peaceably sharing our beliefs and have a shot at refining them while kicking back and enjoying a brew (hey: bread and wine; cakes and ale \u2013 I\u2019m just saying). And while we\u2019re trying to figure it all out, while we\u2019re scratching our heads and wondering why Plan A didn\u2019t work exactly as planned, at least we have a community of fellow head-scratchers to be with and kick around the wonders, the magic of our lives.\u00a0 Being Pagans, we\u2019ll be happily serious and seriously happy because, down deep, we believe in the inherent rightness of the universe.\u00a0 We have accepted that we will forever be scratching our heads over something but we\u2019ll keep trying to get better and refuse to kick ourselves too hard over being ourselves.\u00a0 The gods (or, who knows? maybe it really is The Great Ralph) are probably having a great time watching our efforts; why shouldn\u2019t we have just as good a time living them? This series of articles, the Elemental Perspectives, has been a delight of mine for the last few months and I hope you have enjoyed them as well.\u00a0 I will be offering other articles to PaganPages as time goes on but I\u2019m not planning any other series of related articles such as this.\u00a0 Of course, that\u2019s my current plan.\u00a0 Who knows what\u2019s really going to happen?\u00a0 After all, Plan A doesn\u2019t work out much of the time. Live, love, and laugh, my…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1982"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1976,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982\/revisions\/1976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}