It has occurred to me that I am inundated with gods and spirits the way I’m inundated with story ideas. And I’ve been just as inconsistent with both—unable to choose, unable to reach satisfying conclusions. A hard lesson I’ve learned through the discipline of fiction writing: sometimes you have to make a difficult decision to end your project, no matter how much you’d prefer to continue. Sometimes, you need to make a difficult decision between one story (or god) and another, no matter how much you’d prefer to keep them both as part of your life.
Being a Libra, this makes painful sense to me.
But the challenges all Libras face have to do with this—with deciding,
with saying yes to one option and no to another. So I often need to choose between spiritual
and creative influences and projects.
And yet a message just came to me through the kledon of my online
magical colleagues, quoting Manly Palmer Hall: “The true Mason is not
creed-bound. He realizes with the divine
illumination of his lodge that, as Mason, his religion must be universal:
Christ, Buddha, or Mohammad, the name means little, for he recognizes only the
light and not the bearer. He worships at
every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque, or cathedral,
realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth.”
Thus,
I am led back to the ecumenical ethos of the Golden Dawn, which was my starting
point on the spiritual path. “All gods
are one god, and all goddesses are one goddess, and there is one Initiator,”—Dion
Fortune, The Sea Priestess. I
realize this is highly controversial, but the more I practice, work, and turn
inward, the more Fortune’s line seems true, at least to me, at least in my
personal gnosis. And it has occurred to
me that all stories are actually one story being told over time in different
ways and parts. Just as all people may
actually be one being, incarnated and realized through the telling of those
stories.
Moreover,
the esoteric, fundamentally Masonic, implications of “E Pluribus Unum” become
clearer if we can accept (or at least seriously entertain) this vision of a unity
distributed through human experience and perception, endlessly assembling and
reassembling itself. Those of the
ceremonial magical, Christian Cabalistic persuasion (also controversial) will
recognize the “Path of the Serpent” in this.
Meanwhile, mystics and esoteric Buddhists skip all that and follow the “Path
of the Arrow” straight to the godhead (though they may not have as much fun as
the magicians along the way).
As
long as we exist in the finite, binary world of matter, samadhi, however
we attain it, will be fleeting and irregular.
But the fact that we can experience it at all hints at a throughline:
there is a unity beyond disunity, a communality beyond that which seems, on the
surface, to be isolate, distributed, and disjointed.
To seek
that unity does not mean falling into some mindless hypostasis where identity
is lost because that would default to just another form of estrangement. Instead, it must amount to becoming more
full, more whole, more manifest in all areas, subjective and objective. It means becoming more of what and who we
already are. So maybe we don’t need to
make any other choice than: I accept whatever comes as an expression of my
whole being. If “out of many, one,”
then “as one, many.”