When Your Spirituality Is Not About You
I have a lot of potent experiences while in the hypagnogic state prior to falling asleep. For instance, the other night I was settling down to sleep and I was pondering some kind of astrological movement, as I do incessantly on a daily basis. At some point, the wheel of the chart in my mind moved on its own so that I saw the Mercury glyph at the top of it. The glyph shone bright gold and seemed fiery and warm. I could feel vibrations coming off of it, similar to previous experiences where I knew Mercury or some other spirits were conversing with me but I couldn't quite understand them.
So the next day I woke up and was like, "WHAT IS THE MESSAGE?" I got up. I walked my dog. I looked for omens with no luck. I pondered if I should cast a geomancy chart or pull some tarot cards. Then I pulled up my phone and went on my main occult-based Discord server.
"Happy Mercury cazimi!" said one of my Hermes-worshipping friends.
Oh... OH!
That's it. That's what I saw. No specific message. No grand declaration to an egotistical prophet. Mercury was just doing its thing and heading into the heart of the Sun. I may have been affected by the transit like many people were, but it has nothing specifically to do with me.
The culture of American occultism—or at least its reputation—is kind of strange because of its position as averse to mainstream Christian teachings and the role it has in horror films. Thus, the elementary concepts of "spirit work" involves Ouija-based hauntings/possessions or attempts to work with demons. The latter often refers to the Goetic tradition, which resembles the slavery-included caste system from which it originated. To work with spirits is to either rid of them eventually or to essentially enslave them for your own ends.
In either scenario, the magician lords over the spirits, right? That makes zem the master, the protagonist, the center of the universe, the action or pivot point.
But in real life... I don't find a role so fulfilling when in relationship and truly, none of us do although many may think so. It just causes so much more sense of responsibility and conflict than is necessary to have that kind of self-centric belief.
Currently, I am midway through a visit from my parents in which I am touring them around my beloved city. Anyone who has ever hosted can tell you how much pressure it is to plan out all the activities and take food tastes into consideration when reserving meals. It's easy to go wrong, and that's even without the long, complicated history I have with my folks.
My mother frankly seems discontent with my plans today, but refuses to break from them and do what she really wants even as I have bluntly asked her to do so. I then had to politely request her to try to refer to me as "her child" to new people instead of "her daughter," which she did not take so well.
In the past, I certainly would have gotten visibly upset about this—I am definitely emotionally worn from all the misgendering the past few days even as I present masculine—but now I know I have done all I can. I have comforted myself as she's continuously misunderstood me and I've behaved in accordance with my own values by asserting my very selfhood with kindness. I can't even shove her onto a tourbus that literally had a stop right by where we were walking despite her desire to board it; there's no way I can go into her mind and change her narratives about me and binary gender when I have my own to take care of.
(There's at least one Buddhist concept, if not several about this.)
Where self-decentralized spirit work comes into my viewpoint this is that even though my mother doesn't love and support me the ways I wished she did, my spirits do. This morning, I went to a specific local business to get their renown rosemary bagel and found that it was closed. It was suspiciously fortunate that the next coffee shop I went to only had rosemary bagels left (then again my city has always managed to provide me with what I need... or eventually will, when its next few bagel storefronts open in the near future). And then there were all the other times outside of this most recent where I saw the planets' glyphs, helping me out with panic attacks in grocery stores or immediately preceding generous gifts by individuals they traditionally represent. In her novel Freshwater about the Igbo religion, Akwaeke Emezi has a line that goes something like, "Go to the gods with your troubles, they love it."
Isn't it so wonderful, to have allies who love you not because they have to but because they want to? It's one thing to have to learn that you, and every human, is deserving of good things. It's another to actually experience it.