Announcer 0:28
Hello and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.
John Moore 0:43
Hello, hello. Hello, everybody. I have missed you all. I don't know if you miss me. It's been. It's been a long time since I have done a podcast episode. There is a good reason for that. I have been astoundingly busy launching a brand new shamanic community that I'm very excited about, it's doing very well, but required some significant effort on my part in the part of my partner who's working on it. And you know, it's a fantastic thing. And if you are, if you practice shamanism, this is a good community for you to be supported to journey together to get prompts to get self care tips to learn new things. It really is amazing. I'm getting a lot out of it myself, even as a as a co host and founder. And the URL for that is ShamanCommunity.com. So you can check it out there. And see what we're up to. Today is a beautiful spring day, it's going to be where I am in the 60s, Ferrant and that's Fahrenheit or centigrade, we'd be in big trouble. It's gonna be a beautiful day the sun is up, it's shining, the Chipmunks are running around the birds are out, I have to get some more bird seed for my feeders. And feed my little feathered friends, do a little, do a little work outside as well. So anyway, today, I want to talk about magic and mysticism, and the esoteric and the exoteric and you know, some different aspects of spirituality and just bring some thought into these paths and what they're about and sort of what we define as magic and what we define as mysticism and what is exoteric and what is esoteric. And I'm gonna start by saying that, you know, I am going to be talking about some religions here. And they don't, you know, I being a person who does not belong to an organized religion. But I respect people's choice to do so. I don't want to I don't want this to come across as me bashing anybody's religion, far from it. But I'm gonna talk about the, you know, some history of things. And not everybody's history is beautiful, and wonderful. I mean, it's tempting to believe that it's tempting to say, you know, Christianity is all about love. But then you look at the crusades, and the Inquisition and burning witches at the stake. And, you know, there. This isn't about the religion. These things were done in the name of the religion, this is about people justifying horrible actions, using religion. So I'm not talking about that at all. But I'm going to delve into perhaps a little bit of history. And if anything I say disagrees with what you believe that is totally fine. We can disagree and still be friends, can we not? We're living in a very divisive age, politically, spiritually, economically. Let's not make this another area that has to necessarily divide us. And I, you know, I fully believe that everybody is on their own path. Everybody is on a completely unique path. I don't know care if you are a shamanic practitioner, like myself, we're still in different paths, and no to Christians and no to Jews and no to Muslims and no to everybody is unique. Everybody is living their own thing, their own life, their own path. And we should start by recognizing that. And the other thing is, when we look around at the world and up the universe, what we see is a mind boggling and astounding infinity of diversity. Right?
Think of how many species of beetles there are on this planet, how many species of plants and fungus and mushrooms or mushrooms or fungus, how many different types of minerals there are, and that's just on this planet. You know, we're a speck of dust in a gigantic Galaxy full of billions of stars swirling around in a universe that's made up of billions of galaxies. And there are probably an infinite number of parallel universes. It's hard to get your brain around all of it. And so to think that any one person has it has it right for the rest of the universe is pretty haughty. It's you're kind of putting yourself in the place of the Creator. And I'll use the word, I'll use the word God sort of interchangeably here. And the word God has a lot of baggage with it. So sometimes I don't use it. Sometimes I'll say source or the universe, or the creator. But I want to dissociate from the idea of God as this white bearded male who lives in the clouds, and who gets angry a lot, and decides to commit genocide, and, you know, that sort of thing. And I'll talk about that when I get to talking about mysticism a little bit more, this morning. And one thing I'm going to do, and that I always do, when I talk about things, I will define my terms. And if you've listened to this podcast before, you're proud, you may be sick of hearing me say this. But it's an important distinction I make. And it's important thing that I call out. For people who might not have listened to my podcast before, that when I define things when I say this is what magic means. And this is what mysticism means. And this is esoteric exoteric. It's not that I want my definition to supersede yours. Or that there's one way of defining anything, there isn't. It's only that I want you to have a better understanding of what I mean, when I'm using these words. And that's it. If your definition of something disagrees with mine, then that's totally fine. I think we can both be right. Okay. And everything happens in context anyway. So when I describe things, it is in the context of my life and my studies and my practice. And like I said, no two people are on the same path, we're all going to the same place, ultimately. But no two people are on the same path. And so your context is different than mine, even if, and here's a good. Here's a good example of this. I have I have identical twin daughters. And the word identical is a little strange to me. Because my daughters are very different. They look a lot alike. They share genetics. They were born a minute apart, and essentially have close to identical astrological charts. Yet they are very different personality wise. The things they like the things they dislike. There are similarities, of course, like any two human beings or any siblings raised in the same household, so they're raised in the same household at the same time. Then environmental factors the same they went to the same schools. You know, they have had different friends, they have had different teachers, they like, different, you know, they they have things in common with, with many other 15 year olds, you know, things they watch, they like Snapchat and Tiktok. But they're very different people. Very different. And they have been since birth. So
thinking about these children that have, you know, that shared genetics, they weren't started as a single fertilized egg, that split apart. single egg, single sperm, same genetic material, split apart in the womb. And we know that they are, we know they are identical. Because they shared a single placenta, which only happens with identical twins. It's called mono, they're monochorionic. Twins, they do not share a single a single sack they had, which is good, because that's very dangerous. And chances are that one one of them would not have survived. That is amniotic sac. And this, I guess, my understanding of this is, it's it depends on when the egg, the fertilized egg splits into two different children. But, you know, can you imagine in the womb, there's this clump of fertilized cells that could grow into a single being, and for some unknown reason, that splits into two, two independent beings. They live in the same environment for you know, it wasn't quite nine months, they were born prematurely, but they live in the same environment and get the same nutrient nutrients, essentially, and have the same genetics and they were born behaving completely different, differently. And my explanation for that is that they have different souls. There are different souls in those little bodies. And they're very different, and their paths may be different. And we have raised them to follow their own path. Their mother is Catholic, nobody is forcing them to be Catholic. I am a non religious, but very spiritual person. And I practice shamanism and nobody's forcing them to practice shamanism. So very different. And everybody's on the same path. And this is a long way of me saying, if we differ in our viewpoint on things, it's totally fine. And my entire intention for this is just to give you some things to think about. And I don't want you to believe everything I say. In fact, I invite you to disbelieve everything I say, or to take it for what one teacher told me is this expression a lot. Take it for checking. And another teacher of mine would say everything I tell you is BS until you make it until you study it and make it your own. To prove it for yourself. This is very different than a lot of systems, religious systems, spiritual systems that tell you don't ever question anything. Don't question anything. You question things that's blasphemy. Don't question things. Question everything my friends. Stay on your path. I don't care. Do what you want to do. But question everything. So anything I say you don't have to believe and I expect you not to, unless it makes sense to you. Unless you do some exploration and it makes sense to you. But I want to give you some things to think about today. Today I'm talking about my two of my very favorite topics, magic and mysticism. And I'm gonna talk also about exoteric and esoteric. So exoteric e x and esoteric E S. Spirituality. We'll start there a little bit. So exoteric spirituality exoteric means like outer the outer form. So you go to church and you pray and you read the books and you say And when you go to temple or you go to a mosque, or you go to satsang, or you, you know, whatever, whatever it is you go to, or you have this sort of outward practice these outward teachings of your form of spirituality. And maybe you have doctrine, maybe you have books that are full of stories like the Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah, or the, you know, the other. Any other spiritual books, the Vedas, the
Dhammapada, the, you know, I'm losing track of all the spiritual books there are. So you have doctrine, and you have dogma and you have outward facing rituals, right? You go to Mass you go to, you know, do whatever. That stuff is very exoteric. And I'm going to, I'm going to talk about, I'm gonna talk about Christianity quite a lot, just because it is the religion I'm most familiar with having been raised in a couple of different Christian churches and having, you know, gun to church for at least some of my wayward youth. And I gotta tell you, it didn't keep me out of trouble. I was a natural born rebel, I guess, just gonna have a little sip of my coffee here. So, so I'm going to talk about Christianity, but these things are not. You know, these are examples. And these things happen in every sort of, form of spirituality that has been made into a religion, and organized religion. So again, the exoteric is the outer stuff, and the esoteric is the hidden stuff. And one might be one might believe that there is no esoteric Christianity, or there is no esoteric Islam. I mean, we certainly know about esoteric forms of Judaism, Kabbalah is, has, you know, lots of esoteric stuff in it. But I will tell you that there is a lot of Jewish esoteric mysticism, brought into Christianity. And I'll give you an example of this. I'll give you just one tiny example of this. And then I'll also talk about some of the other forms of esoteric Christianity. So if you're a Christian, you're most likely familiar with the Lord's Prayer. And at the end of the Lord's Prayer is a phrase for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever amen. Or something very close to that. And kingdom power and glory in Hebrew malkuth net sock and HOD our directs come directly from Kabbalah whoever wrote that prayer, and I believe that many Christian sects believe that Jesus himself handed down that prayer. And that would, you know, I have no idea of the historicity of it, but that would certainly make sense. But that part of the prayer contains a very potent invocation that comes directly from Jewish mysticism. And if you're at all familiar with Kabbalah, or you can, you can look it up. You know, Cabela's, it can be spelled lots of different ways, because it's, you know, technically it's spelled in Hebrew. So when we transliterate it to English, some people spell it with a K and two L's and an H. And some people spell it with a Q and some people spell it with a C. And it did come into modern knowledge from you know, sort of medieval Jewish writers as the first and the word Qabalah comes from the Jewish word kibble. I may be pronouncing this incorrectly I don't really speak. Not really, I don't speak Hebrew at all. I just know a few words here and there. But it comes from hippo, which means received like it was an oral tradition and then Some rabbi in the Middle Ages, I think in Spain, I think in Spain, actually wrote wrote the some of the first books first person to commit this stuff to writing because it was so it was hidden, it was esoteric. You had to go study with the Essenes or somebody to learn this stuff. And their stories that,
you know, when Jesus was 13, he was recognized as being very wise. And, you know, 13 is the age of majority in, in Jewish tradition, right? It's when you have your Bar Mitzvah, or your nowadays, your button mitzvah. And I didn't realize that, but mitzvahs haven't been around that long. And they were pretty much I think they were invented in the US, as a matter of fact, now it's much more commonplace. But Bar Mitzvahs, or when having at the age of 13, and we have stories of Jesus going to the temple and discussing topics, and then there's nothing about him until he's around 30. And some stories have him going off to study with this mystical group out in the desert called the scenes. Ultimately, we don't know I mean, you know, we can, we can take guesses and stuff. But, you know, if he did, indeed, depen, or recite the Lord's Prayer, it contains Jewish mystical wisdom in Jewish mystical knowledge. And I think that's pretty cool. And they're, you know, there were other there are other very esoteric practice practices and Christianity, you know, hidden stuff. We get, you know, not forms of Gnosticism, a lot of it was heresy, a lot of a lot of the esoteric stuff got wiped out. And the reason for that is, you know, the, through many of the Christian eras, the different eras in Christian history, starting with, you know, the Holy Roman Empire, and, you know, then on to the crusades, and the inquisitions. A lot of this stuff was about political power. And again, I'm not, I'm not talking crap about people who believe in Christianity or practice Christianity, I'm talking about organizations that used Christianity as a weapon of control and domination, and committed genocide and all things that are not Christian ideals. You know, converting people at the point of a sword is not very Christian. When I was a kid, I always wondered about the, you know, Onward Christian Soldiers that they sang, as I thought Jesus was about love. You know, oh, that's not what we're singing about. Yes, it is. It is, in fact. So, Christianity in the early early ages, when, you know, during the Holy Roman Empire, and during the crusades, and things like that, so for like, the first 1000 years, was strongly associated with the military. And that's how it got spread. It wasn't. Christianity in the beginning, was a sort of an offshoot sect of Judaism. And it wasn't, it wasn't until, you know, while after Jesus's death, of course, he didn't, you know, they didn't call themselves Christians before his death. It wasn't until well after that, that, you know, they started recruiting Gentiles and non Jewish people. And, you know, by then, we're looking at the teachings of other people besides Jesus Himself. And then it wasn't until, you know, the fourth century of the Council of Nicaea, where they actually decided they voted on many things, including which books would go in the Bible and which ones wouldn't, because there were a lot of books circulating at the time. You know, the gospel of Thomas is one of those. So, you know, there were these Gnostic Gospels, the Gospel of Judas. You know, it talks about talks about Jesus kissing Mary Magdalene and her being preferred among In His apostles, but because Christianity was adopted by a Roman Empire, and
you know, the army was forced to be Christian and the pagan temples got overturned and all this stuff, it was very patriarchal. And to this day, there are still many patriarchal remnants, the Catholic Church will not make women priests or cardinals, for example. You know, that has changed somewhat in some other denominations, but it is, you know, it is what it is very patriarchal. And so, Christianity spread around the world at the point of a sword, and it wasn't, because people were like, Hey, this is some people were, but very, very few. Imagine, you know, you're following the religion of your ancestors forever. For all your memory, and somebody comes along and says, hey, guess what, my religion is better than yours. And if you believe this, you're going going to heaven? Well, most people are going to, you know, whether doesn't matter if you believe that your religion is the one true religion, or that you testify to that fact. If I showed up at your house right now, whatever your spiritual belief in knocked on your door, and tried to set sell you on worshipping squirrels, most people, and I'm not comparing Christianity to worshipping squirrels, I'm using this as a terrible example, a stupid example, an absurd example. Most people would say, go take a flying leap. And the same would be true of Christianity as well, for a very long time. In many places, you know, it came in late to many areas, and it would take sort of, you know, either a king, adopting Christianity, realizing that it was a great way to control control people, and use it for political power. And, you know, hang on to that patriarchal system of power, and then forcing everybody to convert. And that's what happened. And because the Roman Empire was so huge, you know, it went from Asia Minor to, you know, to Egypt to you know, all the way to what is now the UK, to Britain, Ireland, Scotland. Although, you know, the Christianity didn't go into Ireland and Scotland quite late as well. Which is interesting to consider how religious, Irish, you know, the Irish tend to be, but there is a lot of, you know, what happens there a lot. When Christianity goes into an area, I've seen this in the Philippines, which is predominantly Catholic, and I've seen this in Ireland, and a lot of local stuff gets pulled in. So they have St. bridgid, in Ireland is essentially took over for bridgid, a goddess, a goddess of the hearth and of blacksmiths. In Ireland became, became a saint, a Catholic saint, we see that a lot, quite a lot, as a matter of fact. Um, so there's some stuff, you know, there's stuff that gets mixed in, makes it easier to convert and then the holidays get converted, right, we put Christmas on December 25, which was Saturnalia. We put Easter, you know, in Ostara, we put, you know, we put we put a lot of the holidays and stuff to eclipse the pagan stuff. You know, there was the, you know, all that lots of replacement happening. Anyway, let me get to So, the outer stuff is the exoteric. And the hidden stuff is esoteric. And there is esoteric Christianity. It survives to this day. But again, it's esoteric, it's hidden. There's esoteric practices in Judaism, which are a little bit more well known because they were written down and they were adopted by other traditions. So in Western ceremonial magic for example, there is a lot of Kabbalah this I'm listening to an audio book on Kabbalah by Dion fortune, who is a
Christian magician, I guess, ceremonial magician. I will say that it comes off as by today's standards that comes off as quite racist. She's talking about the white races and stuff like that. It's a little tough, it's a little bitter. But you get past that stuff. You know, there there is still, there's still good mystical, magical learnings there. So there's lots of you know, there's lots of that in. In Islam, for example, the esoteric stuff, you find, well, you find mystics among the Sufis, for example, and there's probably significant esoteric teachings there. But I also know that there are there is Islamic magic dealing with the jinn or what we might call we, in English might call genies, which are spirits of the, you know, spirits that live in the desert. Many consider them devils, but that comes from pre Islamic stuff. And what happened when a lot of these religions took over, is they turned everybody else's Gods goddesses and local spirits into devils and demons. Definitely happened with Christianity. If you think about the God, the, you know, the god Pan from the Greek, from Greek paganism, you know, cloven hooves and horns, sounds a lot like the devil doesn't it. And the word demon comes from the Greek a daemon, which just means spirits. And there were good demons and bad demons. And in you know, you had a house demon, which is the spirit that lived in your house that took care of things. They weren't angels that rebelled against the one true God and fell from heaven. And that was, that came much later. That stuff so you know, when they would go in, they would eclipse the holidays, they would replace the holidays with Christian holidays, they would burn the temples to the ground, they would force people to convert or kill them, they would erect churches on on older holier sites, this happened. This happened in the British Isles quite a lot in just talking to somebody the other day who is biking along ley lines, which are these lines of, I don't have those these lines of spiritual current that run through everywhere. But it's easy to map in the UK, because there are churches built along them, because that were built on earlier pagan sites. So it's one way to sort of give give the middle finger to the pagans was to, like, take over there, take over their sacred sites and build a church on top of them. So, there's still a lot of esoteric stuff going on, you know, less of it, a lot of it got wiped out. They, you know, they burned the libraries in Alexandria. So we lost a lot of knowledge in the West. Unfortunately, in the east, you know, magic and mysticism is blended with everyday life quite beautifully. You know, you can, you know, if you go to Japan, you can go to a Buddhist temple, or Shinto shrine, and in most people, their practice kind of both, I mean, 80% of people in Japan consider themselves Shinto, which is an animistic religion that has, I would say, mystical practices, you know, you know, they do a lot, there's a lot of purification rituals involving water and fire and all kinds of stuff. And you can go to a Buddhist temple and you can practice meditation there, you can practice Zen, which is a very, you know, technically mystical practice. Meditation is akin to mysticism. Because it is about it is about well, we'll talk about I'll give you the definition of mysticism in a moment, but so In the east, it's a little more difficult to differentiate between exoteric and esoteric practices, because spiritual practices vary widely. And a lot of them are out in the open. I will say this, though there are places
there are places that are very closed in the east, for example, there are certain mystical markets, for example, in Nepal, where Westerners are not allowed, there are certain practices that you would not be allowed to participate in or see, you know, that sort of thing. And in, in Judaism, we have the story of the Ark of the Covenant, which I find fascinating. And, you know, so if you've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, or if you know anything about it, you'll know, you know, is this box in which a number of things were kept, including the 10 commandments. And the instructions for building this box are no were are in the Bible, and you can read them in a certain size box. And it's made out of wood, and is lined inside and out with gold and contains an elixir inside a certain elixir and has, you know, it was one of the things compose inside and then has these essentially, what they're what they call Caribs, but they're sphinxes. On top of the box, you might think of Caribs or cherubs as little fat babies with wings. But that's Renaissance art for you. Real kerubim, which is an Order of Angels were sphinxes. So the body of a lion, but they had wings, usually the head of a man and they had wings. And so many people have posited that the Ark of the Covenant was a giant battery. And when you read some of the stories about it, like casting lightning, that sometimes caused the high priest to explode, you know, and that it was kept, it was kept covered inside the Holy of Holies. And I don't know if it was once a year or whatever. You know, the high priest would go in and lay his hands on it, and sometimes would explode. And he would go into this chamber, he was the only one allowed in, and he would have a rope tied around his ankle. So if the thing killed him, which happened with some level of frequency, his, you know, other priests could pull his body out of the chamber. So a lot of it sounds like it's a giant battery. And there are, there have been, there have been working batteries, or what would have been working batteries recovered in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia. Look up the Babylon battery, if you don't believe me. We're missing. You know, in the modern ages, we're missing a lot of ancient technology that we haven't found because, you know, to be honest stuff that's 10,000 years old decomposes. Even if it's made out of metal, we really only have a lot of things. Most of what we have has to be made out of stone, because it doesn't decompose quickly. Or it's been preserved by being in a desert somewhere, which is why we have working batteries from Egypt and Mesopotamia electrical batteries. So we have an acid solution, we have an insulator, we have, you know, an anode and a cathode. And, you know, this thing probably did give off lightning, they probably collected charge out of the atmosphere for a long time in more than a battery was probably, you know, a giant capacitor. Judging strictly by the instructions on how to build this thing, it would have served as a capacitor. So anyway, you imagine like once a year or however were however frequently going in and laying your hands on this thing, not knowing if you're going to explode. But even priests who didn't explode were often I'm struck down by the power of the Ark of the Covenant, which was seen as the power of God.
And not to take anything from anyone's beliefs or anything, but you know, I mean, electricity is a pretty amazing thing. And if you think that source or God created the universe, then everything is electrical. You know, everything has electrons. So we could say that this is a power of, of God, indeed. God's great lightning. So, that's exoteric. And esoteric. exoteric is the stuff that everybody sees going church reading the Bible. Esoteric is frequently, sometimes written down, but frequently word of mouth stuff, or stuff written in cipher, or hidden in images, or written an allegory. So let me tell you some a little bit about a little bit about the, the, the Bible. So you know, there's obviously there's the Old Testament, there's the New Testament, and, you know, the New Testament was written in Aramaic and Greek and the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. And then everything was later translated into Latin. Because that was the language of the land in the language of law. Even if you lived in England, or wherever, the only Bibles around for the longest time, were written in Latin. And the reason for that is that these, the Bible was not originally meant to be consumed by everyone. In fact, you could have been in big trouble, even killed for possessing a Bible if you are not the right person. And certainly most people couldn't read until pretty recently. And masses were conducted in Latin. So if you didn't read and you didn't understand Latin, you didn't even know what the heck was being said. You know, you just went to church to get the you know, because that was the thing that you had to do things I know you know, things are different now. You know, Catholic mass, it was only in the 20th century, when that changed, I think it was in the 1960s. So 2000 years, mass was almost 2000 years mass was conducted in in Latin, and you know, translating at various times translating the Bible into the vernacular, which is the, you know, the local tongue was illegal. But the Bible was not meant to be a read by unlearned people. Because be it was not meant to be read literally. And while there are events and people in the Bible that are that are historical, a lot of what in what is in there is allegorical and hidden. And that doesn't take a lot, actually, to see that, to find that out to learn that you don't have to look too deeply. I give you an example of the Lord's Prayer, being, you know, the bottom triad of the tree of life from Kabbalah is the last line for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. The olam Amen forever. Amen. Right, kingdom power glory malkuth netzach, hod. And so there's, you know, literally reading the Bible and thinking the world is 6000 years old, which actually the Bible doesn't state. But looking at this as a historical document, was seen for most of the history of the Bible, as the lowest form of reading the Bible. Because it did not give you an understanding of a real understanding of God. And I can tell you that, you know, unless you're, unless you can read Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek. You're reading, you're reading a translation that may not really approach what is you know, more or less approaches what is said there but might not and I know of, I know if people who went to Divinity School and we're taking
Biblical Greek, and reading the New Testament, and many, many of them had a crisis of faith, when they found out that the original New Testament in Greek did not say what they thought it said for their entire life. And in Hebrew, one of the things I find really interesting is the, the creator in Genesis is Elohim. And Elohim, also, you know, in some places referred to as Elohim. Adonai, which I don't know is frequently translated as Lord. But Elohim is often translated as God, sometimes as Lord in English. But that word is complicated word Elohim. Eel, or E, L is a word for goddess, female, it's a feminine word. And heme is masculine and plural. So you have a word that is both feminine, masculine and plural. And that flies in the face of one a patriarchy, and a lot of monotheism. And some might translate that as in the beginning, the gods and goddesses are created to mankind in their own image. But that would be sacrilegious. For many in Christianity, that would be blasphemous, but I do know that there are some people who translate it that way. Anyway, let's get on. I've talked a little bit about mysticism already. And mysticism is about reuniting with the Godhead. Now nowadays, there's this new age movement towards ascension and the fifth dimension, and all of these things, and people are putting these different, different terms on things and, you know, it's okay, I don't want to take anything away from anyone else. But I just think a lot, you know, I see a lot of that is very egoic. Right where true reunion with the Godhead is about peeling away layers of the ego, not about it's not about achieving something. It's not about achievement, it's about dropping away, it's about dropping away the false now, in the, in the Kabbalah, you you know, if you ever get a chance, and you don't haven't seen this, look at the tree of life, there are true two paths on the tree of life. And the Tree of Life is a diagram, which many take as looking at different states of consciousness, between God, the Creator, at the very top of the tree, and the physical universe at the bottom, being malkuth, the kingdom. And there are two paths in the tree of life. One is a pathway down from God to the physical universe. And the other is a pathway up from the physical universe to God, the pathway up which is known as the path of the snake, and where have we seen a snake in a tree before Oh, in the book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve in the tree of knowledge, and eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, get you kicked out of the kingdom malkuth. Interesting. And some would call that original sin. But it's called the path of the snake as the snake is winding up the tree. And this is about movement from identification with physical to identification with less and less physical, physical, you know, physical universe to higher and more subtle states. Until one fully identifies with essentially limitless light, which is what you know, essentially what God has pictured as in this model. And everything's a model it's not, you know, it's a map of reality. It isn't reality. The pathway down the tree, from God into the physical universe, is the path of magic. I'll talk about magic in a moment. But magic is about creation. It is about affecting, you know, going, taking from high and going down into more and more solid planes of existence until you get into physical reality. Let's talk about define magic for a second. I'm not let me be very clear that I'm not talking about stage magic here.
I love Penn and Teller. I love stage magic. When I was about eight years old, I won second place in a talent show, doing a magic act. I have not kept up my practice, but I love love, love stage magic, I love illusion. I love the psychology of it. I like tricking people, you know, in ways that make them happy, not in ways that, you know, make people less happy or cause them harm. But, you know, surprising people, delighting people. I like all of that. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about magic. And sometimes in the West, we spell that with a K to differentiate it from magic. And that was that K was added by an infamous magician named Aleister Crowley who called himself the beast 666. And, you know, the guy got a lot of bad press. And, you know, by all accounts, he was not a very nice person. It's kind of a jerk. However, a lot of his bad press was his own doing. He, he was a guy, he was really good at PR, really good at PR. And he knew that he could get a lot of attention. And he was, you know, he was an egomaniac, let's be clear about that he could get a lot of attention. By painting himself as the most wicked man on earth. He wasn't the most wicked man on earth. I mean, certainly Hitler would fall into that category, Stalin would fall into that category. But whatever he, you know, he, he promoted his image as a black magician, and a drug themed and all of these things. And he he was the those things, and the people were afraid of that back then. And that got him in newspapers, it got him press, it got him a following. And that's what he wanted. But he defined magic as causing change in accordance with will. And I think that is a little too general for me. Because if I pick up an apple and throw it across the room, I have caused change in accordance with will, but most of us would not consider that a magical act. But, you know, if I pray for somebody, and they are healed, or if I pray, and my consciousness is elevated, or if I, you know, practice a ritual, and I, you know, I have a change in consciousness. Those I would consider magical acts, and I do consider prayer, a magical act. And the Catholic Church in particular is full of ritual magic. I mean, Transubstantiation, they turn the, you know, the, the host into the body of Christ, literally, when you're eating the wafer, in, in Catholic mass, you are literally consuming the body of Christ, they do not consider it a spiritual change, they it, they consider that an actual physical change, whether you see it or not. That is a magical ritual. But lots of things, marriage, you know, all kinds of stuff. So, I would say using, you know, non physical means, and there may be a physical component, because there might be a physical ritual that is performed. But I'm not using direct physical means to cause a change in reality. And the change can happen on all of the different planes or some of the planes. So if I do something in change my consciousness, I believe that's a magical act, because that's a different plane. But most of us think of the physical and we think of stuff that looks like we see, we've seen in the movies, you know, casting fireballs out of your fingertips, or, you know, that sort of thing, but that's not really what it's about. So the magical path is, is it is the path of creation.
It's the path from divinity. So in a lot of Western magic, they work with angels and archangels. And there's all of these orders and there's these complex systems of who works for who and there are different worlds and you, you know, you reach up to work with these Archangels who set their angels to work do meaning these tasks are you bind demons and there's, there's all kinds of stuff. But there's all kinds of different types of magic, there's chaos magic, there's mental magic that works with pure consciousness. Ultimately, it's kind of all kind of all the same. You're using different methods to have your consciousness, create change, and to create change, you have to change your consciousness. So, as a teacher of shamanism, I would say that shamanism is both exoteric and esoteric and has both magical and mystical components. When I work with clients on behalf of clients, for example, I need to merge my consciousness frequently with helping spirits to do the work. And that is, that is mysticism. And doing that work to cause change, to cause healing to happen to cause psychological change for the client. That's magic. So there's a little bit of both going on there. Both magic and mysticism. This is just a little taste. You know, I'll talk more about these subjects. As as I am fond and love them all. But I will talk more about magic. I will talk more about mysticism and esoteric and exoteric stuff in future podcasts. I just wanted to give you some things to think about. And again, I hope you don't think if you follow a particular religion or spiritual path, please don't think that I am bashing on that or looking down upon it or saying bad things about it. I am not. I'm not at all, I'm just trying to point out some things to think about. And again, I think all paths can be equally valid. Except when they say this is the only path that I have a problem with. And I you know, don't mean to, again, that might fly in the face of what you believe. But if you need to believe that the way you do things is the only way to do them, you've got some work to do. You've got some work to do on yourself, you have given up your identity, you've given up a good portion of your identity, and you are uncomfortable with other people not giving up theirs. And that's not what, that's not what this reality is about. So at the very top of divinity, we can say God, we can say source, we can say the universe is limitless, light and soft, or is what's called in Hebrew, which stands for limitless potential limitless, unrealized potential. So this is a consciousness, an all pervasive consciousness that has every potentiality in it. And the only way that this limitless potentiality can sort of experience itself is by dividing itself into into many, many, many things and almost infinite amount of things. So this is where we get this infinite diversity from the source. I like to use the allegory of think of source as this infinite brilliant white beam of light that has no beginning and no end. But this light, wants to wants to look at itself. But that's really hard. That's about like trying to look in your eyeball. You can't, you're gonna look in the mirror and see the reflection of your eyeball, but you can't look at your own eyeballs. You know, you can take a picture and look at a picture of your eyeballs, but you can't look at your own eyeballs. So this differentiation is like a prism. And this white light, if you've ever you know, we've all seen prism. You put it in white light and it separates the light out into every color in the rainbow. Right and then and then some some we can't see.
So all of these different beams of colored light have the same source. If you were to turn off the source well, then everything ceases to exist. Right? No white light, no rainbow but we're you know, an individual beam of this rainbow and where we make an error is is where we think that we aren't connected to source and that we are all separate. That's ego. We are all separate individual things without connection. And the mystical path is about learning that everything is connected to everything. I understand that it's hard for the human mind to conceive of this, I can't really conceive of this. And I've been working on this for many, many, many years. I know at an abstract level, that everything is connected to everything. Everything you do has an effect on everything else, everything else has an effect on you. And everything has an effect on everything. It's the butterfly effect, but times times infinity. So mysticism, is about moving back towards source moving up your individual beam of light, again, we're all in different paths, we're all on our individual beams of light. And moving towards that prism, realizing that the prism is there, first of all, and moving towards that source light and then identify, oh, oh, I m, I m source, I'm just happen, my consciousness happens to be just differentiated. But I am no less source than anyone else, or anything else. It's all connected. All Connected to source. And that is the mystical path, the magical path is, can be enhanced by the mystical path, because it is reaching up to source and bringing down another color of light to make a change in the world as we see it. So with that, this has been, I don't know, maybe a lot of tangents, but I hope this has given you some things to think about some things to examine. You know, I would love it if you again, took what I said for checking, took it out and explored on your own. What makes sense for you do some reading, do some research, look into things. Do some practices, do some meditation, do some prayer. And by the way, interestingly, the you know, the Yoga is a path of you know, path of union to God, although nowadays in the West yoga is like a workout. But that's only one branch, one arm of yoga, there are eight different arms of yoga, eight different methods. And one is devotional path, and that's bhakti yoga. Right? And that is predominantly Western. Western religion is bhakti. It's devotional yoga. There is also some chanting, right? You know, you do your rosary. Well, that's mantra yoga. Okay, but we, you know, we missed many times in the West, we missed the other eight arms of yoga, we don't call it yoga. We call it devotional practice, or you know, whatever it is. So anyway, look into your own stuff, be a mystic, be a magician. You don't have to give up your spiritual system for that just look deeper. Read about other systems with an open mind without judgment. And understand that everybody again is on their own path. And with that thought, I'm going to leave you and I promise there won't be quite as long a break between this time and the next time and I will happily talk to you very soon.
Announcer 1:04:38
You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John more. For more info or to contact John go to maineshamon.com That's MaineShaman.com.