The Lady Below

Whispers sweet like honey,

Caresses in the dark recesses of my mind.

The Goddess Below has chosen

And I answer

I listen

Down into the depths of the Earth

To the Realm of the Fae

To the Land of Magic

To the Underworld

I follow

Her psychic scent stirs me

As she beckons my serpent to rise

Entranced by her beauty

That radiates beyond physicality

I rise

Spirits entwined in our Great Rite

The way to my enlightenment is clear

In our embrace she shows me

For she is my mirror

I fear

My power is more than I knew

As is the case for all

But in this moment she shows me

The Truth of my Being

I AM

I AM her consort

I AM her Twin

I AM her lover

I Am Her

I AM

Will and Faery

I would like to preface this post saying that I am not a member of any OTO or Thelema related body.  My opinion comes from personal reading of the subject, and so I speak from that basis.

Thelema, as I have come to understand it, is very compatible with Faery in general.  My training that led up to initiation was geared toward strengthening and developing my connection to my own God Soul, or my own Holy Guardian Angel.  By opening that communication, by bringing myself into alignment with all my parts, I have tried to seek out my True Will, that which is my Great Work and purpose.  When that communication is made, the communication between the part of the self that is God, and through that God Herself, what external law can override “Do As Thou Wilt?”  When I know my True Will, and I don’t mean ego based desires, nothing can come in between me and my Great Work. 

But how do we know if what we are experiencing is our Great Work?  How do we differentiate between Talker only desire and the communicated goals of our personal Holy Trinity made one? 

Will alone is only half of the Law, only half of the equation that is our shared reality.  Will is the manifest God at work, the Masculine Principle, and I am not referring to a physical gender.  It is Yang, White, Movement, Electric, Kinetic, or whatever term the individual has linked to this aspect of the Divine Twins.  The problem with Will alone is that there must be balance.  In Faery lore we would talk about the Blue God out of the influence of the Goddess, and at those times he is terrible.  He is the embodiment of base desire without consideration for the consequences.  I think we can simply look around at the world around us and see the reality of this story.  The Goddess has been removed from our spirituality, and so corruption reigns.  But fear not!

 The second half of the Sacred Law is Love!  When we are aligned and in communion with our Godsoul, the Love of the Goddess flows through us, side by side with the Will of God.  When I am whole in all my Parts, and the Love and Sacred Compassion fills me so that my Black Heart overflows, the purpose of my Will becomes clear.  Not only am I the embodied Blue God in action of Will, but I am the Love of the Mother, and in this balance of the Twins, in this Sacred Dance I am whole! 

 Do as the REAL YOU Wills!  Love as the REAL YOU Loves! 

I don’t mean to imply that the Talker space we generally inhabit most of the time is a complete illusion, but rather a partial reality.  In order to know the Real You, you have to bring everything into the fold.

 Crowley said that we are witnessing the birth of a new aeon, what he called the Aeon of Horus, but what in a Faery context I would call the Aeon of Melek Taus.  In my lineage, the Melek Taus aspect of the overall godhead that we call the Blue God is the complete balance of the Divine Twins.  This model breaks down slightly when we bring the Goddess into the equation of the Twins, but Faery is paradox, and the totality of one Twin exists at all times within the body of the other.  The Divine Twins are the dance of the holy binary nature of reality in action.  We are entering the age of balance, of Will and Love existing together, bringing out the best of both, and tempering away the negative aspects of either.  Everywhere around us, more and more people are waking up to the spiritual reality that coexists side by side with the physical.  More and more people experience Gnosis within their religion, and when that happens, you realize that the outer forms that we connect to simply speak to a greater spiritual truth that can’t be contained within one religion.  The old Aeon is fighting back, but only because they see the writing on the wall. 

 But an Aeon is much longer than a single lifetime, and we are just seeing the beginning.  We may not get to see the balance in this temporal incarnation, but we are all faces of God Herself, and so as we grow and heal ourselves, we heal the world around us.  Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world,” and this is a spiritual truth.  When we bring balance to our own lives, when we are kala and let our Love and our Light spill out into the world around us, healing happens.

 Today we all have a choice.  Do I want to continue living in the old patriarchal world view?  Do I want to be will out of balance?  Do I want to continue the cycle of damage and trauma that was our birthright?  Or do I want to embrace Love and transcend both matriarchy and patriarchy?  To embody both, to BE Melek Taus, so I can heal myself and those around me.

The choice is ours.

Kala

Kala is, in my opinion, one of the most important concepts for the early student to understand and embrace. The word Kala itself can be used to convey multiple ideas within the Tradition. The first meaning is related to the state of being. To be Kala is to be completely clean within yourself. This is an ultimate state of perfection that we strive for; to be completely unburdened by complexes a...nd blocks so that our three Souls can be in total alignment and we can shine brightly.

The next way that the term gets used is as the techniques that different lineages use to try and attain this state. The Kala Rite, or Making Kala, can and is done in a myriad of different ways, depending on one’s lineage and/or intention. One simple way is to charge a glass of water with mana, and the intention to become pure, and then to drink that water down. To a Catholic, this might seem sacrilegious, because we are basically drinking the Holy Water that we blessed ourselves, but when you look at how much of your body is water, why wouldn’t you wish to drink it? As this water leaves your stomach it becomes part of your overall water system, spreading that blessing throughout your whole body. The last phase is when you urinate next, where impurities that block your connection to spirit are purged with the rest of the toxins you expel. As most of the Feri folk I know tend to be a jovial bunch, when hanging out together we will announce our need to use the restroom by saying “I need to go finish my Kala.”

The Kala Rite is not intended to be something you do once and then you are forever clean and in the Kala state. I wish that were the case, but the reality around us tends to lend itself toward the creation of blockages within the energy body. We pick up lots of toxins as we go through our day, both physically and psychically. Some lines of Feri refer to the Fetch as the “sticky one”, because well, it grabs onto things and has a hard time letting go. Be it the anger someone sent at you because of their own road rage, or any damaging thoughts and emotions that you have yourself, when we are out in the world, outside of the Circle, outside of meditation, you get dirty. And just like we shower or bathe to keep our physical body clean, so we make Kala to keep our spiritual body just as clean.

I also want to point out that this, like many other somewhat abstract Feri concepts, is an ultimate ideal. It is something we strive for, so that in the actions we get closer to the level of perfection that we crave, but is unrealistic to expect to be 100% Kala at all times. I can safely say I have never met a single individual who was always perfectly Kala. The end goal is not the point, the point is the journey there, and it is a journey that will go beyond this single lifetime.

What is Power?

Feriesy alert!

Lately I have been thinking a lot on the Feri phrase that we all pass along and say, “We don’t give away our power.”  On the surface, this sounds great; of course we don’t want to give away our power, and our culture has trained us since birth to do just that.  But the problem is when something becomes dogma, and people stop thinking about what something really means and just take it at 100% face value.  I have had many people ask me about this, as they have reached a point in their practice where their concept of not giving away power has become problematic.  We tend to not distinguish between different types of energy in our shared Feri technical language. 

 So what does that mean exactly?  What is OUR power? 

When we breathe in the air around us, does that make the air ours?  Well, maybe for a breaths amount of time, but do we hold our breath and never exhale so that we don’t give away our air? 

 We don’t just have one kind of energy running through us; our energy body is just as complex as our physical one.  The vital life energy that has a million names, but that I will call basic chi, flows through our body just like breath, and with our breathing.  You don’t own this energy any more than you own the air; it is constantly coming into and out of our body.  Holding onto this energy so that we “Don’t give up our power” is just as toxic to us as holding onto that one breath.  When we hold onto this energy psychic gunk and emotional residue build up like energetic carbon dioxide. 

Emotions are powerful, and we feel them strongly and fully, and then we let them go on the winds of our breath.

 The Power that we don’t surrender or give away is the Power of our Soul.  This is what I think is meant by Personal Power.  It is the part of your energy body that, for the time being at least, is totally you and yours.  The parts of our soul that splinter off into complexes, the parts that we give away when we surrender to a life that we don’t want to live but are too afraid to fight.  When we give in to the little voice that self sabotages your path to cultivating this power, that is when you give it away, and that is what we want to avoid.

But here’s the rub, I have never met a single person, Feri or otherwise, that NEVER gives away their personal power SOMETIMES.  We all do it, and so there is no point in berating oneself for behaving like a human being.  The idea is to be aware as much as possible.  When we are aligned, when we are centered and living in the moment, we can minimize the damage that our psyche does to itself.  We can call back the little bits of ourselves that we have splodged away over time.  We make Kala to repair and revitalize both our Chi and our Souls.  We monitor our actions and motivations, so that in the moment we can act, not react, to the stimulus around us.  When we take charge of our life, we stop giving away this power, while letting Chi flow through your Fetch like the blood flowing through the soul body of the Goddess that it is.  And then we fall again, and we pick ourselves up and start over, and each time it gets easier to do so. 

 So then how can you tell if a particular energy or feeling is part of your Chi or part of your Soul?  Only you can decide that, in the moment, in alignment, and when you have enough information.  Then you can Act with Your Power and know what is right for YOU.

The Way of Shitty Things

My personal work has been very Fetch based lately.  I have been using a different focus with some Taoist mechanics to really ground into Fetch first before making HA.  I have found it to be very helpful for sustainably maintaining connection to Godsoul more throughout the day, outside of meditation.  Upon rereading Etheric Anatomy, I remembered the part of my training that talked about a different way to focus on the 3 souls, that of their "aura" within the body.  The energy body of Fetch is the aura of your whole body that extends only about a half inch.  The body of this soul is the energy of your physical body, so I have been revisiting a lot of my qigong.  This ties in with healing from my injury as well.  I am far from perfect here, I have a lot of work to go, as part of caring for Fetch is caring for the physical body.  To be totally in 100% alignment at all times, one has to have a healthy physical body, which is very difficult.  There is no judgment here.  I haven't met a single person, initiate or not, who is 100% in alignment at all times, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't kindly strive for it.  There is always room for improvement in everything we do, we always are growing and moving.  When we think we have perfected something, it can become stagnant.  If you are perfect in something, why keep at it?  There is no way to improve perfection, so why try?  

 

Most of us expect self perfection, but self perfection is an illusion, so why do we torture ourselves?  

 

Because, for what ever reason, pain is the most effective catalyst for growth within the human condition, initially anyway.  I like to think that at some point growth will come for growth's sake, but in reality if I look back on my path, it has been the very painful times that have spurred the most movement.  If you are comfortable all the time, what is the drive to change?  What would make you get out of bed and do something?  Without discomfort, I suspect life wouldn't have evolved past single celled organisms. 

 

But does that mean we are doomed to suffer for our whole lives?  I guess that depends on who you ask.  I am personally not a Buddhist, so I think that the goal is not to escape pain, but to accept it and move on.  Our brains are wired to retain painful memory far more readily than pleasurable experiences.  Its evolutionary, we need to remember the painful things so we can avoid them in the future.  But we can make a concerted effort to remember the good things too!  Why do we forget amazing, ecstatic trance experiences, but remember the mean thing our mother did to us when we were 10?  The answer, with so many other things, is knowledge.  By being aware of how our brains work, we become less bound by their patterns.  By being in the moment, being aware, and being as aligned as we can be, we can make choices to change our patterns.  But it requires action, intent, and purpose. 

 

And then shitty things will still happen again.

 

But hopefully we can use the things we have learned to make those shitty events less painful and not hang on as long.  We can remember "Oh, I need to do Kala now.  I need to not throw this painful energy down into the subconscious abyss of Fetch.  I can look at it here, look at it now, and transform it.  I can take right action in the moment to minimize the fallout.  I can act in Love and in True Will.  I can Be!"

Good Morning Feriland

Good morning world, you sure look beautiful today. Even after needing to restabilize from the time fluctuation phenomenon that happens in the spring where it is still dark when I wake up again, girl, you got it going on.

How are you doing this morning? And by you, this time I am referring to the manifest Goddess and yet paradoxically individual deity wearing a cloak of stardust we call a body. You, reading this right now. How are you?

Did you have pleasant dreams? Less than pleasant ones? Dreams can be a powerful influence to how we start our day. Our Talkers can make judgements about experiences, say "It was 'just' a dream" (although that's a whole other topic), but Fetch can't. That is not part of that soul, it's job is to feel, to BE. Your emotional state right now reading this could be directly influenced by dreams that your Talker might not even remember having.
...
Now, if you had awesome dreams of making love to your dream lover on the back of a unicorn while riding over a rainbow, you may be feeling great (That is of course unless you have a phobia of unicorns, rainbows or fucking, but if you have a fear of fucking this might not be the page for you). But less pleasant dreams may leave you feeling a bit on the poopy side.

But fear not! You are not helpless to be left to the whims of your subconscious mind! As always, the power to choose your mindset is within you. Not that just thinking "I want to be in a good mood today" will always do the trick. No, most of the time the decision has to include action. You have to decide to do the things that help you feel better. Decide to make the time to sit and breathe, to align your souls, to make kala

Or maybe you can't make that decision today, and that's okay too. Be kind in all things, and mostly to yourself. Have the same compassion to your own pain that you would to a loved one. It might make the decision easier, or it might not. But it will make your day easier.

Let love into your life, not just on the Pearl Pentacle of your relation to others, but in your own souls.

Feri is

Feri is about beauty. It is about the ecstatic creation unravelling all around you. It is about loving the Goddess in everything you do. It is about loving yourself in everything you do. It is about finding your True Self and reveling in the glory that is your True Will.

It is not about egos. It is not about the infighting and drama. Those are human symptoms. We are all human, we all have issues, but Feri is the vehicle in which we can unravel and shed those complexes.

So don't look askance at the Tradition I love because of the human drama that plays out amongst us time and time again.

Look at the beauty of the art we have created, the songs we sing, the jokes we tell. That is where you will find the core of what Feri is.

Feri is.

It just is.