One of the most distinctive qualities of Faery Seership is its focus on refining and transforming the operations and shape of human consciousness through direct exchange with otherworld beings. In fact, the shifts occur in both the human seeker and the spirit, and it broadens spiritual growth from the usual concept of a human seeking something, to two (or more) types of beings seeking to aggregate or “cluster” and form a new, refined, actualized, and powerful being. In this way, in the Faery work, spiritual growth occurs as different beings come together and form a whole new creature, and the human component embodies the bridging skills for the cluster or team. This bridging capacity is a distinct quality of the human species and is a direct result of its free-will qualities. It is not until you discarnate (die) that you transition fully into the spirit world as a spirit being and then work from the inside out as a “go-between” for embodied humans (seekers) reaching inward to the spirit world.
The distinctive qualities of Faery Seership are grounded in an understanding that being spiritual is about seeking your place and role in the spirit world. I call this process “finding your place upon the sacred land.” The sacred land is a folk term referring to the original plan or vision of the universal being. There is a process to achieving this understanding that often involves unraveling your current understanding of the spiritual dimension and moving through a cleansing or “redeeming” phase that brings your awareness back into communion with the spirit world and the unfolding vision of the planet and the universe as embodied in the Vision Keys and the Tree of Enchantment. This process can be challenging and very painful at times, because it requires that you face the illusions you live by as reality and embrace your spiritual quest as a “we” thing instead of a “me” thing.
We inherited many of these illusions from our cultures, religious politics, social networks, family, and even the media. We, too often, have accepted them as truth, even though our inner voices have tried to reveal these deceptions. I ask my students to ask themselves what binding spells they have cast upon themselves. And what is the source and intention behind these charms of illusion? How have these spells only served to keep them in spiritual bondage and driven them further into loneliness and loss? There seems to be a pattern in these “spells” or false truths that I have witnessed repeatedly as I train people in Faery Seership, conjure, and traditional witchcraft. I call them the “blinding binders,” because they blind us to truth and bind us to spiritual poverty. I am sure this list is not complete, and perhaps many of the items on it can be challenged, but I share it as food for thought, not as a challenge to any religion or as overt or covert disrespect to the beliefs of others.
These blinding binders prevent you from becoming one with creation through the necessary means of partnership, communion, exchange, and mutual love and respect. They prevent you from embracing what our Native American wisdom keepers imply when they make the affirming prayer “to all my relations.” In The Faery Teachings, I present a detailed discussion of the three primary modes of life: incarnate or embodied, discarnate or once embodied and now disembodied (i.e., the ancestral dead), and non-carnate, or beings like the Faery who have never been embodied and never will be. In fact, humanity is cousin, brother, sister, and even child to the rest of the incarnate, discarnate, and non-carnate world. Realizing this brings you home. Perhaps one of the most important steps in this process is to understand the nature of both contrived and innate incarnate human consciousness, as compared to that of the discarnate and non-carnate spirits.
These binders create a false impression that has conflicting implications for humans. On one hand, these binders imply that we have been abandoned or exiled from direct communion with the Creator, while also implying that we are the only beings that have a right to, or capacity for, direct communion with the Creator. This breeds arrogance fueled by fear and self-destruction fueled by desperation, loneliness, and frustration. Faery Seership challenges these binders by re-introducing your awareness to a paradigm where all beings (seen and unseen) share a mutual quest for truth by awakening the inherent role and perfection encoded into all living things (including, but not exclusive to, humanity). When you face this challenge and become attuned to the forces in the Tree of Enchantment, the original magic, perfection, and beauty, as well as the love, wisdom, and power of life, embraces and is embraced by you. At that point, you are home in the circle of life instead of feeling lost, as if you stand exiled outside of it. When this occurs, loneliness, abandonment, fear, greed, and other true demonic forces invoked by the blinding binders fall feebly away and the truth of living in blessedness is revealed.
As I explained earlier in this chapter, most of humanity's awareness and perception has been dulled to perceive only the surface of life on the planet Earth. Tragically, even most of the surface world is lost to us through overpopulation with the demands of the human world, giving a further sense of isolation from the natural world. This view ignores the subtle energetic inner life of creation, where creation begins and the webs of connection between the seen and the unseen give rise to the patterns and purpose for each animate and inanimate thing in our world. When perception is limited to the carbon-based, concrete, and chemical- or element-based surface world, it denies the exchange of awareness with the creation forces behind these processes. In fact, it makes us slaves to the whim of organic processes and chemical formulations with no hope of understanding the patterns or co-factors that produce them.
This mode of awareness also imbues us with a morbid sense of loneliness and even futility, as we think that this is the only level of life and that death of the body is a permanent transition from one state to another. Consequently, we greedily try to amass as much control over the natural world as possible to feed its ever-growing populace, squelch its fear of death, and mask its sense of abandonment from the rest of creation. Yet how can we prepare for the transition from physical life into energetic/spirit life if we cannot be introduced to it while we are still in a body?
Without direct contact with the spirit world, we must rely on faith and the dictates of religious institutions alone. At the same time, we struggle internally with a constant need to feel embraced by the spirit world in a way that makes life worth living and Earth a safe home instead of a way station or stopping point that tests our ability to become worthy spiritual beings anointed by the unfolding truth of the Creator. Faery Seership teaches that this world and the creative processes that pour into it, the living seen and unseen beings associated with it, and the transition into and out of it are all part of a sacred redeeming process that brings pure truth through all the worlds in service of the Ancient One, the Creator of all. But before we can truly embrace this concept, we, as human seekers, must become as children and look through the eyes of purity and wonderment. We must let the inner life of our world reveal its innate beauty and truth, as well as the communion of life shared by all creatures on all levels of life. This includes you and me.
A major casualty of surface-only perception is the loss of wonderment and enchantment. Ask yourself how many people you know who are able to sense the presence of spirits at work in the natural world and the human social world and feel their love, their embrace, and their sacred touch without being afraid. How many people feel that they too are spirits in a human body, with non-human brothers and sisters in the forests, the wind, the oceans, the soul, and the depths of the soil with whom they share this glorious magical paradise called planet Earth? We must return to this way of living so that our fellow humans can heal their fear and loneliness and restore all aspects of their own lives and their connection to the rest of the beings in, on, and around our planet. We must rekindle the sense of family that comes with this connection. This process is “the re-enchantment of life.” Once this occurs, we will once again see the beauty, mystery, magic, miracles, and love of life, because we will see ourselves as conscious participants and co-creators instead of angry, scared, and struggling children attempting to control the uncontrollable and missing the very purpose and power of our own existence.
Although there are many types of spirit beings in the underworld and over-world, there are qualities that they all share as discarnate or non-carnate beings. These qualities are associated with how their consciousness works and certain gifts or powers they possess. To encounter and work with these otherworld beings, to exchange information with them and evolve our human consciousness, we must understand the gap that must be crossed between the two species. This gap is primarily a synthetic product of human consensus reality based on an indoctrination that is passed on from parent to child, from birth throughout life. This training process transmits from parent to child many of the blinding binders presented earlier. Once these binders are unbound through conscious effort and contact with the different levels of inner life inherent in the Tree of Enchantment, the gap begins to close and we can use our own spiritual senses as awakened through conscious life in the spirit world.
In short, we live as terrestrial life forms with our science, our social structures, and our religions entirely centered on human life. The spirits have a much broader and deeper sense of self in relationship to all other living beings and their roles and purpose within a larger scope. They even have a deeper and truer understanding of the role of humanity in the vision of the universe and the planet Earth. In Table 6, I have detailed a brief comparison of the two broad forms of beings (human and spirit). Although humans represent a small band of life, the spirit world represents an unimaginable range of beings, from ancestral human dead to Faery and angelic life. This table is helpful, although, by its nature, it is oversimplified. Also, keep in mind that humans become spirit beings at death and thus become tied to two species of life at once—human and ancestral/spirit. In the end, every living thing is a spirit, whether incarnate, discarnate, or non-carnate in expression. In most cases, the longer a human soul remains in the underworld after death, the less human it is as it morphs into another order of inner life form.
Another way to think about spirit versus incarnate human consciousness was developed and presented by Edward L. Gardner in his work, Fairies: A Book of Real Faeries. Gardner uses the terms “vertical” and “horizontal” consciousness to describe the differences. As he points out, “myth, legend and folklore, and the scriptures of most religions, teem with allusions to another order of living beings, all of whom use bodies of a subtler texture than visible to the ordinary physical sight.”2 He uses the term deva (meaning “shining one”) to describe Faery beings, elementals, and other nature spirits. I also include the ancestral spirits. Gardner asserts the following:
… [D]evic evolution possesses what I must call vertical consciousness; which means that their numerous ranks function as a unitary whole from the highest levels to the physical, without any break. On the other hand and in contrast, humanity must be said to possess horizontal consciousness, for man normally has no conscious link with a higher or lower rank than his own. For example, the animal kingdom is distinct and separate in consciousness from ourselves and, though the gulf is not impassable, it is wide. A similar gulf separates man from any ranks above his own, though again, this can be bridged with deliberate effort. These two streams of evolutionary life, human and devic, though in many aspects opposites, are vitally and very wonderfully complimentary. With horizontal and vertical types of consciousness respectively, they may well be regarded as the weft and warp of manifestation.3
TABLE 6
Processes and Consciousness
This provides us with some additional insights into the nature of human and spirit consciousness, in that we tend to perceive intelligences and consciousness only on the surface world of the five senses. It is rare that we allow ourselves to perceive other living beings like ancestral dead, Faery beings, angels, and other orders of non-terrestrial life.
As you open to awareness of the threefold life, vertical consciousness begins to awaken and you are able to perceive and exchange with other orders of life in the upper and lower worlds. This process occurs as consciousness is strung through the three walkers like a string through pearls. This allows you to become complete in the awareness of self and all forms of life on, in, and around the planet, as well as other energetic life forms that are in other realms not linked to our world. This also allows you to exchange with ancestral spirits and eventually with the unified consciousness of the whole Tree of Enchantment. Likewise, the ability to communicate more clearly with animals, plants, minerals, and other incarnate life forms begins to awaken.
The coming together of vertical and horizontal consciousness is another form of the opening of the Crossroads that is inherent in Faery Seership, traditional witchcraft, and southern folk magic. It also appears in many traditions worldwide.
The process of awakening your threefold life into its capacity to perceive, operate, and exchange in all three worlds requires the treading of an ancient path or, as witches often refer to it, “the path well-trodden.” Treading this path of discovery requires a detoxification of the pollutants and false ideas we often accept as true but that, in reality, act as distractions from the spiritual path to becoming one with creation and the Creator. This process is called the Faery ordeal and involves encounters with different spirit beings, modes of life, and universal truths that require that you evolve, change, and challenge your old paradigms and your values, morals, beliefs, and relationships. We call this shape shifting, for it requires that you change shape as the fires of truth encompass you from the three worlds and the three souls, forging you into one complete being that is fully alive, fully empowered, and living at one with creation. Each ordeal, when traversed and completed, gifts you with a treasure.
Each treasure is a pearl of perfection on the string of life that comprises your life-walk. As each ordeal is faced and each treasure received, you become a more actualized human being, living not just for yourself, but for the vision or truth that lives through all things in the body of the one universal being. The levels of life and the beings that dwell there are the components of the Tree of Enchantment. Your three souls are the vehicles for contacting these levels of life. The Vision Keys, as they are encountered, unlock the potentials already imprinted into the souls. This is an important aspect of growth in Faery Seership because it reminds us that the truths we seek are already in us, but they cannot be revealed except through connection with the rest of the living world. The inherent truth in this is that we are on one path of discovery with many streams flowing into and out of it. Each of us as individuals, and the human species as a whole, are one aspect of this process of discovery—but not the only one. Only through a series of exchanges and relationships that involve the activation of your complete self (the threefold life) and exchange with your co-walkers and cousins in the natural and spirit world will the revelation of truth be made manifest.
Table 7 illustrates the relationships between the souls of the threefold life, the keys, the ordeal to be faced, and the pay-off (treasures) to be acquired. Look closely at the relationships between all of these components, for there is a predictable process that occurs for seekers of the Faery way as they trod the old path of the Tree of Enchantment and bring themselves back into an awakened and actualized state as humans in communion with life, truth, and profound love. As this book progresses, material on the inner contacts, the Vision Keys, and activities to activate them and the walkers will be provided. It is my sincere hope that you will face the ordeals, make the shape-shifting changes within yourself, and receive the Faery treasures. May each of the keys unlock the secret doors of our souls and reveal the treasures hidden from view under the spell of enchantments that we have cast upon ourselves and our species. When, and only when, this spell is broken will humanity re-enter paradise fully and claim its place upon the sacred land.
TABLE 7
Vision Keys, Ordeals, and Treasures of the Soul
