Free Mystic

The most attractive self-name for me—more than Pagan or Witch (both of which I accept and use)—is Free Mystic. I like that better because it’s looser and freer, and because it describes my transcultural sources and my refusal to commit to institution or collective ideation. Dogma and tradition (as institution or role) are things I see as always confining… as things that we reach for to block Spirit when it threatens our accustomed states of being or our partial desires. In practical, interpersonal terms I’m tolerant of any tradition that doesn’t impinge on my freedom, but in personal terms I’m radically iconoclastic. I like tradition as a folk palette, but as structure or ideology or “group think,” I am hostile to tradition. I see only harm in the adoption of borrowed ideas, unless those ideas are borrowed as a wedge or stepping stone. Ideas and practices are limitations, confining and grounding consciousness in a collective that is usually more interested in money (etc) than in the Great Work of becoming conscious. “Free Mystic” expresses my conviction that experience is primary, and that the objective of my spiritual growth is the annihilation of the mind and identification with the limitless All.

At best, it seems to me, tradition is the shell of an egg. It may be developmentally necessary, but if it is, so is leaving it behind. I am a hatchling. I may someday mature to be a Rooster before the Sun… but for now I am a chick randomly-not-randomly pecking for my food and true grit—and the Hen I seek shelter with is very loose in Her parenting. My spirituality no longer depends on community or shared ideas, though I continue to find freedom and support within the loose structures of Reclaiming and Fellowship of Isis, and in the idiosyncratic forms of religious expression I facilitate or teach. The shell has become skeleton or armature that I will carry for life (with modifications), but which also must be parted with. I'm working on not being irreparably bound to my skeleton.

At worst—and most often—tradition is a prison… a collective retreat from the risks and uncertainties of the encounter with Spirit. Tradition is an attempt to control and domesticate Spirit, to render it predictable and consistent. So too is conventional reason. Convention is a false or provisional agreement that must be learned and socialized—a false union. Spirit, however, is the actual experience of actual unity as material and spiritual reality. That actual union isn’t changed by mere ideas, nor by such things as race, class and gender, nor by divisions like Christian and Pagan. It’s always there, always conscious, always full. If convention doesn’t facilitate that actual experience, it’s at best worthless and at worst hostile. For me, articulating something is a way of excreting and disposing of it, putting it to rest, letting it out for a life of its own. I try to put it down and use it as a step.

I have been trying to make religion and spirituality cognate in my mind (after years of separating them), but it’s not taking. I don’t believe it. Rather, the attempt makes me more aware that religion is typically meant to reinforce limitation and confine all aspiration to the narrow streets of the human social world.

I prefer pleasure over pain, but I prefer freedom over confinement. I value wealth and ethics and stability for the reasons that others do—relative, temporal reasons rooted in the limitations of my reason, emotion and senses. But these things are not the point of my existence and do not possess the capacity to satisfy or satiate, and ultimately they are merely a matter of fashionable twists of logic maintained or altered in accordance with perceived self-interest. Social morality and concepts of beauty are entirely malleable, ideationally and biologically. I am not a Hellene.

When I was a teacher, I had a sign on my door that said "Absolute freedom is the image of God" and one in the office that said "Authority is Illusion." I believe those things deeply, and feel both desire and obligation to mention those things (one way or another) when authority is deployed over me. There is no authority that should not be resisted, no authority that is legitimate. I am opposed to institutional secrecy enough that I don't keep secrets. With sexuality and witchcraft, "outing" is sometimes an ethical obligation.

These things can make magic; they can heal the social self and do all sorts of other desirable things. But Kosmos, God and True Self are not only what's desirable. That's only half the Truth. We do not choose--we postpone.

I do not respect tradition-as-dogma nor tradition-as-institution. I think initiatory traditions are rackets. I advise and propagandize against them. I'm against commodification or profiteering on religious/spiritual teaching. I take what works and pass it on. Anything that works from anywhere--ideas are no one's property and I won't treat them as property. Hierachy is de facto illegitimate. The worthy teacher or true guru is an anti-guru; s/he corrals and eats sheep and liberates those who would be free.

I perceive a more valuable wealth within reach, a love that is actual unity, transcending social ethics and embracing all as self, and a stability that cannot be shaken because it is rooted in Conscious Spirit. Material wealth and social stability are not worthy ends in and of themselves, and sought for themselves alone will, I believe, always backfire. Static ease is not the purpose of existence, nor is any one-sided thing like Beauty. The only thing that really must change—that all the kosmos conspires to change—is the scope of selfhood. Everything else serves this, without regard for the passing fancies of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, left and right. The “Beauty” I have seen and seek inheres in all things, including all the things I hold in aversion, all the things I would run from. My body already dwells in a physical kosmos of that kind of Beauty… spirituality is about bringing consciousness along. All the social engineering of religion and politics and education is entirely beside the point.

So my truest passion is around the transformation of consciousness. Practice helps me to remember that all other passions are secondary, tertiary, or even oppositional to truest passion.

Life is short, all is in flux, pain shall always attend pleasure, and death is not the end.