So, a big Awful Truth this time, why spirituality is split into 2 categories, public and tantric/secret teachings.. why it has to be.
Again not essential but most get something out of this, even relate it to themselves no less… so read on.
Now, for a lot of years I would teach this by giving endless examples from throughout history to the present day, from Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Daoism, even why the ancient forerunner of all these religions, the secret Mystery Schools existed, but honestly I feel I have already done that. I have proved this is the ‘way’ its always been done. You just need to know ‘why’ its always been done that way as hopefully you already understand that these things are universal.
Now, a narrative method it’s not really that effective – there is no good way to say this, it’s still rankles people, whether they believe they are gifted or not.. Sounds a bit too much like a members club maybe, you are still too Christian for it. Why am I or you more gifted than him, than them, surely this is all a bit delusional. No its not, it’s just the way it is. What’s more, you already know this.. you are just scared of what folks would think if you said it, if you admitted to having these opinions in the terribly woke, cancel culture world we live in. You are looking for proof, to be a little more sure of yourself..
Therefore I’m going to do this a little different now, indeed let’s have some fun shall we, know you like a little of that sometimes..
But first, the reveal, in simple terms the Truth of ‘why’ its always been done this way, so you get it…
Awful Truth: Real spirituality, the entry and exploration of the spirit world is ONLY for those who have the ‘ability’ to do it. See, you NEED that gift, because that ability is a weapon, a tool. That energetic power and the spiritual focus are essential because you HAVE TO USE THAT ABILITY ON YOURSELF, via your attention, to do the rest of it. If you don’t have the ability or the potential to develop it then all of this practise, this cultivation is both pointless and a little dangerous for you, for most little more than an intellectual hobby. It may even mess you up a little, and I don’t want that, I’m here to help those who can be helped find their way, those who have something to ‘work with’. The rest of you are largely wasting your time, sorry.
All high end spiritual method is based on ‘turning your light within’, so if you have no ‘light’ to start with, all you are ever going to see is blackness, and you just end up just starring into the abyss like a fool. Sure you maybe lessen you hyper arousal, put some manners on your monkey mind, but that is not spirituality, that’s just psychology, and honestly you are better off with some well reviewed mindfulness app and a nice soporific guided mediation, put you back to sleep. For the gifted few I’ll cover this method in more detail in the next secret, the first secret of practise, the big one – ‘Attention’, a long with the other 2 in this set, ‘Character’ and ‘Posture’.
The rest of this post is to spur you gifted types on then, rather than put you off, and make it interesting at the same time. See, I think its time to be a little more encouraging now… as you do actually NEED to ‘use’ your gift, because if you don’t it may go a little ‘stale’, it may stagnate, it may become more of a curse than anything else.. An that is a bad thing, as it will cause bad things to happen, to ‘disturb’ you.. you may store up some pretty heavy duty Karma, as some right hand path types like to say. And in the throw away words of the lovely Taylor Swift – ‘Karma is real..’.
So, understand that this is for all of you who qualify, including the sensitive, the high libidos, and that you should not be reading it otherwise, much as that is ultimately up to you – I’m not going to put this behind a login screen, a paywall, its there for whoever wants to read it. Yes, the style I’m using is full of ‘tests’, full of things that should only appeal to the gifted, should put the rest of you off, I’m doing that on purpose.
But for the gifted few, let’s have a bit of fun, shall we? Lets just give you some light reading, something a bit more enjoyable for once. See, a colleague of mine on this path has suggested that if I am going to go on and on about the gifted, a better use of this post to to speak to them directly, about where that comes from, about the reality of it, rather than repeat, over and over what I have already said. I understand, so I going to simply define what it is to be gifted in basic terms, overview terms, give you the break down, and some insight into where your gift usually comes from..
And besides… its ‘X’mas soon.
Before I start perhaps note that even on the left hand path, the 4th way particularly, there are MANY different opinions on where you should draw the line in terms of level, of actually being gifted enough to help, with most of my colleagues actually being quite right wing about it, ie you must have huge potential AND have done a lot of the pre-work yourself before they would bother with you. I would be a more liberal however (believe it or not), I track a lot lower down the spiritual food chain than most would do, as my experience tells me you can miss a lot of high potential folks by sticking to the traditional guidelines.. particularly as in this day and age it makes it just TOO hard for those lazy ass Millennials to engage.
Right, given the above, the breakdown I use is as follows, just in general terms so nothing too exact, but please pay attention cause this is not as straightforward as it looks.
There are 2 dimensions to this, best defined as your strength of ‘consciousness’, better your strength of spirit, strength of the higher self, AND the strength of your ‘power’, or better strength of lower self, your ‘energetic potential’. They are different, but for the very highest of the gifted they usually occur together, and the most obviously gifted always have both. For me, you don’t HAVE to have both, you can use one to develop the other if needed, indeed in later life one side will naturally start to catch up with the other anyway…
So, in terms of your spirit, if you have 100 random people in a room, 10% have ‘some’ level of spiritual gift. Of that 10, 9 of them are Sensitive, they may have little or no strength of spirit, but they can certainly feel the world of spirit, are affected by it. However 1 of that 100 is ‘gifted’, spiritually ie they have actual power at a level that ‘shows’, usually experienced as some level of supernatural state, etc. Now all these people tend to have a natural spiritual or artistic side, to be interested in it, but lack any ‘get up and go’ to really try, they are often quite flightily and dramatic types who don’t settle to anything, grass is always greener. They have some sense of what is going on, but they can’t do much about it, so they drift from one thing to the next..
In terms of energetic potential, if you have 100 people in a room approx. 1/3 of them would have a high energetic potential, a high libido, particularly early in life. However by the time you are 30 this has gone for about half of them and you are down to roughly 15 who maintain this, often all the way up to their death in old age. These can be seen to have enough potential to develop there spiritual consciousness through using their energetic potential. These people tend NOT to be remotely spiritual, indeed they are often anti-spiritual, react against it as a form of projection of them hating what they sense in themselves. These folks want, and can for a while survive while living much harder than most, usually in the party on sense of it. They have not got a fecking clue what is going on, but they are just going to rip it up anyway, this is the YOLO class, the 1 life only types who want it all, now..
Now, obviously, the sweet spot is too have both, to be both the 1 in 10 AND 15 who has both. To be highly gifted. And they do exist, indeed most people like me who have the strongest experiences of spirituality as children fall into this category. However, it’s REALLY NOT COMMON, and no matter what the stats say, the vast majority of spiritual people have either one or the other until much later in life. Highly gifted is RARE, we are talking 1 in the 10,000’s here, even 100,000s. These people can be the great and good of history, the leaders, the geniuses, the folks who change the world, but not always.. Sometimes, indeed more often than not, they tend to have a lot of problems, much more so than normal folks, they have a tendency to crash and burn.
I stress again you don’t need to be one of these to follow this path, indeed its actually much easier if you are a nice solid 1 from the 9 in 100 or 15 from 100, much as your particular combination makes you follow a different path. See for the strongly gifted, it’s highly likely that if you are one of these rare folks that you DON’T want to follow ANY path, you kinda KNOW you are special anyway, know you are different, you already look at other people differently. Plus there is a good chance that you, with your dramatically increased sense of ‘feeling’, particularly in a day and age that mainlines hyper arousal like a drug amongst many other choices of narcotic, that you are going to be a little fucked up already.
Now for the highly gifted, the folks with both a stronger spirit and high libido there are some very odd characteristics. First, this almost always is ANCESTRAL, you get given it from your blood line, your family line, usually on one side only, (god help you if it both sides…) I don’t mean you get this from a country, a race, a creed or colour, I mean from your exact ancestors, who ever they were, whatever they did. They have passed this on to you.. So knowing who they where can, but not always, be quite useful. Indeed, looking the doable 5 or 6 generations back is often VERY instructive for highly gifted folks, you find out a lot of why you are the way you are.
But wait, you say, hang on a goddamn minute there.. where did my ancestors get it from then..? Interesting question, and there is no short answer.. Best just to relate that to experience for now, so primarily its from some type of extreme event, often accidental, something that caused ‘other’ things to happen, way outside of the norm. Secondarily its from being, some how, closely involved in someone else’s highly spiritual experience. Therefore its perfectly possible, that usually in Childhood, something like that happened to you. However from my experience, its very unlikely you were struck by lighting, fought close to death in some grandiose fashion, or were in a car crash that took everyone else but, somehow, you survived. Say you would remember if it did happen though… Far more likely its your ancestors this happened too, back over the generations, some form of extreme sacrifice maybe, or perhaps a beautiful death or 2.. so good idea to look ’em up then…
How to do this..? Lots of websites now, feel free to go mad, maybe your parents have already done it for you. But.. one of the easiest and fun way people like me use is surnames. See when you have an old surname, one that is a coded reference for what people thought of you back 500 to a 1000 years ago, it is often a VERY good tell of what aspect of the ancient spirit world you have inherited from them, what blessing and curse you have been stuck with.
Obviously this is not always true, but it is ‘sometimes’, so let’s keep it slightly light hearted shall we.. I see this all the time, have many examples, but instead I’m going to give you just 3 examples of the specific types, real ones I have known years ago now, that at the time where so clearly gifted through their ancestors it was painful to watch..
Now, be clear, I’m using these as they cover the basic types of spiritual surname, of ‘Witches’ names, and I mean that in a good sense, rather than the current English usage. Witches, in the old sense, are just what the Christians called you after they basically ‘won’ a thousand years ago, at the time you were magical folks, you had some power, so on the off chance you have the same or similar name as below, don’t get arsey… Indeed I have a ‘witches’ name, many spiritual people have, and my names original meaning is the ‘not so nice’ original meaning of the French root of valiant – to paraphrase a much longer and darker breakdown, it means violent, aggressive by ‘nature’ but basically good.
So, quick examples of the 3 basic types, as below, but also just to warn you first that you won’t find this on the internet unless you look real hard, this stuff is airbrushed out of history now, Christianity has done an amazing job of revising are cultural heritage in the West, particularly in what was once the magically obsessed British Isles.
- Classic type: Personal name combined with special ‘Place’: eg ‘Keighley’ – An old Anglo-Saxon personal name, first name, maybe pronounced Kutha/Cyhha combined with ‘Ley’, or woodland clearing. Now anything associated with woodland clearings is associated with Magic, often practical magic, medicine, as that’s where country folks went to get ‘healed’, to get help from the ‘cunning’ women, who gave them charms and potions.. these are the Witches in Macbeth. Now, highly gifted folks with these style of names tend to be foodies, tend to have the classic Doctor related issues, tend to be very good with people, with manipulation, and a little power crazed. This type is the hardest to help, being very sure of ‘themselves’ and set in their ways, often to the point off obvious self sabotage, as they simply won’t doubt themselves. However intellectually this type can, overtime, ‘think’ their way forward, and tend to make stop/start progress in terms of new age fads and guru’s, they are brave enough to try new stuff, to have a go, at least in later life.
- Spirit type: Descriptive of a ‘Type’ of ancestral spirit: eg ‘Markham’ – Anglo Saxon variant of the (very) old Gaelic-Scots name ‘Markey’ which has been translated as Horse Soldier, Rider. Problem is that this name existed before they actually had horse soldiers, and in reality it means ‘you’ are ridden by a killer demon, you have tendency to be aggressive, masculine in your opinions, in you dealings with people and quite rock and roll about it. Much as this type is oft translated as Raider on the Left Hand path, for the highly gifted I think that ‘Pirate’, as the original people from Galway were raiders from the sea, is a better modern word for it. These are the very easiest to help as they tend to notice something is wrong early in life, and start to look for answers to repetitive situations, seek out there own kind, with myself and the majority of my colleagues falling into this category. These folks tend to need ‘proof’ however and can be very confused, very edgy in terms of how they relate it back to ‘themselves’, with the actual type being very important to know early on.
- Common Insults: Bad names for ‘Witch’: eg ‘Hague’ (but there are lots…), this is the classic Witch name as a common ‘insult’, cause they were scared of you, with those Saxon/Norman variants being based on the (very) old Norse Hagi (Hag), with the insult defined as a mad old bitch (Hag) who lives under the hedge (ue), cause that is where the ‘special’ mushrooms grow.. These are the self absorbed types, the lost souls of the world, the disinterested who are simply living for the next good time, with jobs, people, relationships just a means to that end, but seem to spend most of their lives ‘racked’ with one anxiety or another. This is the type who like to fly high on a broomstick, which then as now is a euphemism meaning the extensive abuse of sex and drugs for ever increasing levels of spiritual ecstasy (sorry Potter types..). Helping this type is a very random experience, given they feel life VERY intensely and consequently have zero willpower from a young age. However that lack of stable personality tends to make them the easiest to help once they start, given they ever start, in the meantime these are the ‘muses’ of the world, often the consorts of the great and good. However negative that is, it’s worth remembering that this is the purest archetype of spirituality, they know already than normal life is crap, they just don’t know what else to do, so they try everything.
Now, don’t be pissed if you recognise this in yourself, glimpse ‘you’ in one of these types as above, it’s just for the craic really, just to give you a starter for 10, as the British say… Besides, the vast majority of people have utterly meaningless names, vocation names, place names, physical characteristic names, borrowed names from others. They are animal names, so don’t be jealous, cause that’s just fucking boring.. But approx 5% have some meaning in your name, so don’t be shy about finding out about your ancestors, it is often very instructive indeed. And don’t neglect your female line either.
Now, this is a bit of fun no doubt, but in basic terms that is how it works, but be warned, there is one factor than can completely change this, both from both a personal perspective and an outside view – the effect of other strongly spiritual people on you, particularly over time if you are in close proximity to them. So normal can actually become sensitive, and sensitive can become, usually temporarily, more gifted, which is not too bad. However the effect on folks with high libidos can be a little more dramatic, and so needs to be managed.
There is too much in this topic to go into on this post, but overall the interaction with other strongly spiritual people is when many, MANY folks start to feel the effects of it, and actually notice it in themselves. What Jung famously referred to as ‘transference’. So it’s a good thing really, but…. This can cause your experience to be dramatically increased almost instantaneously, bringing out more of the best or bad in you, depending on where you are in all this. Indeed certain combinations of the above classic types, for example, very quickly become unbearable in close proximity, particularly when you resist it, for both sides of the equation, which can lead to some interesting situations indeed. Once recognised, the best thing to do is simply put some space between you both whilst being as kind about it as you can, much as this is often not enough and you should be careful, only time will tell how it plays out…
Summary: Much as I hope you have enjoyed this post, it obviously has nothing to do with practise.. EXCEPT this – I would encourage you to try and see the patterns in yourself, via the type of mechanisms above, to try and relate your life experience to a spiritual pattern, good or bad. There is no harm at the beginning as seeing this a being a little cursed if you wish, but honestly however it works for you, best know that in the end it is the greatest blessing you can ever receive. If nothing else know that being a little messed up and scary does not really mean much morally, for the gifted, it just means that so far you have failed to ‘use’ your gift effectively, which sadly has consequences.
Before I finish this, I’d like to deal with one of the biggest criticisms of this Elitist approach from the normal religions of the world, even the more enlightened ones, aka Buddhism. They say that EVERYONE should practise, whoever you are, and have done since the beginning.. Now, leaving apart that the primary function of public religion, back in the day, was as a form of social control, it was actually the ‘law of the land’ morally, these religions are deciding to leave one big aspect of the ancient teaching out – you should ALL practise, yes, but know that for most of you its going to take several LIFETIMES to make any progress at all. So here is a range of simple, harmless things you and you decedents can do in the meantime. But don’t worry, when WE judge you are ready we will tell you the good stuff…
Lastly, do remember this – it don’t really matter where you got your gift from.. yes it can be instructive, give you some confidence when you see the patterns in your life, in yourself, even help you realise all of this is not really ‘you’, but, ultimately, all that matters is that you have one… Without some aspect of spiritual Power, without some ‘Virtu’ in the Renaissance sense, or some ‘De’, in the Daoist sense, you can do nothing..
Quote to end as always.. from one of the few Left Hand path authors who was willing to take it there in public, a dark man, but an utter genius who wrote ‘The Razors Edge’, a veritable catalogue of ‘type’, and what happens to them.
“If you haven’t got the gift no one can give it to you, but if you have you can be taught how to use it.” – W. Somerset Maugham
Laters..
TOB
