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I have often said we live in a Dark Age of the spirit. Seldom has it been more difficult to take up genuine spiritual work. All the religions are corrupt, all of the prophets are false, and for most of us, there is no source of guidance save a small, flickering, constantly endangered candle deep within the cloudy windows of the soul. Demons, those shifty beings who feed off human sorrow and pain and wait for opportunities to parasitize the weak and greedy, are having a field day. Any kind of spiritual work such as basic prayer or the creation of genuine community is almost impossible in these heavy times.
There are always disparate paths one can travel no matter how bleak and unilateral the road may appear. If you’ve ever watched a particularly bleak art film such as Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl or The Devil’s Bath, you are familiar with nihilism as a genre. The character, usually a depressed woman, winds her way towards inevitable suicide because circumstances and patriarchy can only lead to one kind of grisly, self-harming outcome. Yet there is always a choice, even for those afflicted with the worst cases of Sartrean bad faith.
One of these choices is to go full Rambo on a bad guy/gal like Luigi Mangione did on Brian Thompson and Shane Tamura did on Wesley LePatner. Vigilante justice works quite well, no matter what its detractors like to claim. A dead CEO stops a great deal of cash from hemorrhaging out of middle and lower middle class pockets, and better yet, the rest of the CEOs start living in fear. When CEOs actually fear for their lives as a consequence of being horrible people who actively make grandiosely evil choices, this is an undeniable net positive. A dead criminal has a zero percent recidivism rate. When Muslim migrant rape gangs have to worry about being stalked, tortured, and systematically murdered by larger gangs of disenfranchised, ski-masked white boys, every young English girl and boy who has to walk to school alone breathes a little easier. You won’t sell me on the notion of the baddie rapist exterminators going to Christian Hell or atheist oblivion. I believe Valhalla awaits them, because just as the old gods are stirring, all signs point to them having readied their old realms for exclusive reentry to heroes.
The heroic Saint of Killers schtick is not for everyone. It is certainly not for me in this incarnation where I am so short that I cannot refill my bird feeder without a stepladder. Though I pity the fool who drives me to invoke my old, latent, inner serial killer, at this time she is not in the building. Most people choose the Path of the Normie, and though this path can go six ways to Sunday, more often than not it leads to a great deal of reincarnation and short stints in both Heaven and Purgatory between lives. The Path of the Normie is especially problematic in our day an age as souls are sifted to determine how attached to the material they have become. It is my impression we should separate ourselves out from Normies as they are easily moved by astral tides and can easily become zombified monsters.
As often happens with me these days, I was doing my normal routine when a disembodied being essentially sat me down and instructed me to take notes on concepts it wanted me to explain to my small yet highly intelligent audience. As per usual, this entity was far smarter than me (not that hard of a state to accomplish, I’m afraid) and I suspect it could have been from the Divine realms of consciousness. It said that I needed to do my best (in my own retarded way) to outline three main strategies for approaching spiritual work. It said that the three basics I should cover — these things often come in threes — were the virtues of Differentiation, Diligence, and Humility. As always, I acknowledged I could be wrong about everything, including the nature of the entity I believe was speaking to me. I promised it I would do my level best to meditate and explain the concepts to my small cadre of Meatworld friends. You are among those friends, Dear Reader, so here we go.
Differentiation
The first part of true spiritual work is differentiation from what I have called Normie consciousness. In my essay about the Normie path, I liken Normie consciousness to a shallow ocean of muddled clouds that is currently being driven off the edge of a great cliff. There is that old saying “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” This is usually said by adults to kids who are intent on following a stupid trend, implying that they are moving towards self-destruction because the herd is moving the same way. True confession: the vision of the shallow ocean of clouds came to me in one of my nightly dreams and I unpacked it in discursive meditation, during which I believe I had help understanding it via one of my many, smarter-than-me, possibly Divine spirit guides. The trouble with following trends is that you become what you follow. If you fail to draw boundaries around what you will and will not do, the borders of your soul disappear and you become subject to massive forces that would seek to drive you towards a particular outcome or karma. This is why I likened the Normie response to MRNA vaccination pressures to a mass choice to fall into Hel, because this is the outcome I believe that has been created for many souls due to the pressure of many erasing their soul borders to join the great blob of vaccinated materialism. Of course vaccination is not the only determinant whether a human soul is one with the blob or apart from it. There are a zillion factors that make a soul, most of which are far too complex to derive any blanket judgements. Also, I could be wrong.
In an age of extreme materialism, the work of differentiation means shedding materialism and practicing what you preach. The original Jesus and Buddha are two good examples of what this looked like: both became wandering mendicants who eschewed luxury in favor of mystical enlightenment. Most Normies go the opposite way of Jesus and Buddha, seeking the various initiation rites of the Bathroom Class. Nowhere is this more true than of televangelist preachers who live in McMansions and fly around in private jets. The Bathroom Class and its aspirants are deeply attached to the material to the point where they frequently become Earthbound after physical death. When physical life revolves around comfort, convenience, and the inflation of the ego, you vibrate more strongly in death to what you did in life. Those who treated everything and everyone as an object to be used and thrown away will end up tied to their own rotting garbage after death. They will remain tethered in Meatworld as hungry ghosts, their astral revenants animated by the ever-starving Wendigos of material lust. This is a terrifying age of unique horrors, especially as a psychic sensitive. Those who chose to incarnate in this era — this includes you — have balls made of brass.
I hope it goes without saying that differentiation means learning to stand on your own, alone if necessary, against tyranny, greed, and lowest common denominator peer pressure. Fear is the mind killer, said the Dune sci-fi novel series, and it is a good take away even if you have no interest in those books. When everyone around you, including the poor people, entertains themselves with lurid fantasies of living in luxurious mansions, be the rebel who sweeps his own floor in the morning and cleans his own toilet every night with no plans on ever changing those habits if your bank accounts swell. When every unemployed, former IT manager is scouring Indeed and milking every connection to compete for the golden ring of another $100K+ cushy corporate position, be the guy who walks away from the rat race entirely and starts a bike repair business or who restores old furniture to its former glory out of a two room apartment. When every person in your peer group subsists off a steady dopamine drip of video games, social media, and porn before going off to college and accumulating permanently life-ruining debt, be the girl who turns off the machines and goes outside and talks to the trees. Be the weirdo who takes jobs merely in order to understand regular, working people while she is still young. In my own case, my successful management of my own fears about lucrative employment ushered me into a lifelong career of music teaching. Thirty years later, I love my job and I am amazing at it. If I had been more afraid of the bohemian life of a music teacher, I would have made different, more materialistic choices and I would likely be unhappy about them.
Letting go of Perfect
Ironically, the drive towards perfectionism makes us into Normies and dissolves our soul borders as effectively as consciously slipping into the stream of the herd. If you are anything like me, you want everything in Meatworld “just so” and you have had trouble accepting things the way they are since before the day you were born. As a child, I already had a rampant desire to look perfect, act wisely, and to be among those whom I thought of as perfect.
Perfect, of course, is not possible in Meatworld. It is often the most perfect looking people who are the foulest and vilest. Perfect, at least in Meatworld, is an illusion and a trap.
Perfectionism often comes with the toxic trait of snap judgement of the perceived imperfect, especially where appearances are concerned. If you are a perfectionist, the next time you see a person or people who do not present an immediate, bodily threat, catch yourself before you condemn them for their appearances or judge yourself against their appearance. When your brain goes to judge with “She looks tired” or “I look tired compared to her”, “He’s fatter than I am” or “I am skinnier than him”; “Her hair looks like s**t”; “He is a slob”, stop and acknowledge that they are probably doing their best to get by in the world, just like you. Like you, they crap and have stinky butts. Get over it and move on to thoughts that are more constructive for you, you, and you.
As I aged, I noticed that my perfectionism and competitiveness also affected the spaces I occupied. I was always running algorithms in my head to determine which spaces were “good enough” for the likes of me, not even knowing I was doing it. The entire time I was doing this, I remained deaf, dumb, and blind to the spirits of place and all they wished to tell me. Gratitude (in place of worry) is the primary method of connecting to the spirits of place that I espouse in my upcoming Aeon book, Sacred Homemaking, due out in Summer 2026. Compulsively and constantly appreciate helpful spaces and items just as you would helpful people. For instance, I am writing this sitting in a sixty year old chair while looking at my spectacular front yard garden in a lower middle class block on a rare, cool summer day. I could focus on the list of projects I need to do to make this little house perfect — repotting plants, vacuuming, repainting, growing hedges, remodeling, or I could focus on how grateful I am for this time to write, the lovely porch that my husband fixed up and painted, this brief spot of respite from summer heat, the wonderful books in the bookshelves, the adorable cats, the door that keeps the outside out an the inside in, the windows that easily open and close, the colorful rugs, the fine air, being well-fed. There is much to love here — more, actually — than what needs improvement or maintenance. Every second of every day offers an opportunity to focus on what is already good, and the very definition of true progress is to stop, smell, and thank the roses.
Diligence
My late father was a diligent man. He measured twice and cut once. He maintained a beautiful house and yard for nearly sixty years of his life, along with marriage to my Mom, who was able to stop working shortly before I was adopted in 1973. My father was mentally alert literally until the second he died, which I personally witnessed. The day before he died, he was perfectly lucid and conversing with relatives. Despite having advanced bladder and liver cancer, he still worked in the yard two weeks before his death in October of 2023. He kept his salesman/estimator job until the day he died as well. He was 85. My German immigrant grandmother was the same way. Her mind was not as sharp as my father’s in late age, but she was as neat as a pin until the day she died, always kind, loving, and sweet to everyone.
As a kid, I remember both my parents and grandparents making their beds every morning. My parents’ house was always clean and tidy. My father loved his lawn and never allowed it to become anything less than a well-manicured park. They were always early picking us up from various events or school. They were dependable. Most kids do not have the blessing of dependable, organized parents. The foundation of security a dependable parent builds underneath a child is a deeply spiritual well regardless of religion or belief. I would not be in the position of spiritual strength in which I find myself had I been without my dependable, stable, organized, diligent parents.
Once we have differentiated and shown ourselves to be fearless (mainly to ourselves), the routines of diligence take over. Making the bold statement is not enough. You must live it every day, through thick and through thin. You must continue to kick ass until the day you die… and beyond. In my own case, my own unwavering, daily dedication to revival Druid practices of discursive meditation, the Sphere of Protection, and Ogham divination for myself and others has resulted in tangible results. These results would not have been as remarkable if I had skipped my practices when I was feeling ill, low, or not in the mood. The gods and helper spirits want to help us to help ourselves, but they cannot assist us if we are not in it to win it. The long haul is… long. We set ourselves on a trajectory and we must remain brave and true to it despite terrible weather and great temptations off the path.
Musical practice helped prepare me for spiritual work. I was born to be lazy as many musicians are: there is this idea that we can hack our way to musical expertise without practice. There is also the issue of there never being time enough in any given day to practice properly. As a music teacher, I have learned that five minutes of practice in a day or a week is better than no minutes. Perfect is not possible, so whip out a tune and stop caring if it is going to get you to Carnegie Hall. Perseverance is what matters. All rivers start as a trickle.
Humility
Imbalance of humility is a major player in the spiritual leprosy of our era, especially when it comes to perceiving the Divine. I find it very frustrating when evangelist Christians claim their God is everywhere. Really? Is He in the underground tunnels where children are flayed alive and eaten after being violently raped by cackling political dignitaries? Is He in the throat of the sea bream who suffocates to death in the Pacific garbage patch? Is He squatting in the reeking contents of my cat’s litter box? The Christian God and his monotheist counterparts (Buddha, Mohammed) are not very relatable. Their stories no longer slap. The metaphors are still relevant but the stories themselves, especially the ones that take place in an ancient Semitic river land when pyramids were still being built, are elderly and fall short. What people invariable end up doing is looking for more updated, modern applications of the metaphors — hence Savior and Changer archetypes being pinned on the Great White Disappointment — instead of more renewed faith that Jesus is actually coming back. Monotheists especially suffer from perfectionist, all-or-nothing syndrome, which is a way of categorizing all phenomena into spiritual binaries: good/evil, heaven/hell, winner/also ran, God/Satan. The problem here is that the spiritual is the subtle. It requires detail and nuance. There is no nuance in a binary, no working ecosystem, only the bludgeon of the Rightly Right and the Wrongly Wrong. See yourself as the Rightly Right and you will unleash all manner of horrors upon your fellow humans: Mao, Stalin, and the Inquisitors come to mind. On the other side, knowing yourself to be Wrongly Wrong (and seemingly helpless to improve) hands you over to the perversity and depravity of that worldview. Those who see and know themselves to be Wrongly Wrong become monsters of a different sort, offered up to similar Wendigos: Jeffrey Dahmer, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sean Combs, and the Marquis de Sade for whom sadism was named are infamous for the harm they have done.
Better to exist within the realm of accountability and diligent discrimination to always discern right from wrong. This discernment is far from easy and must begin with the self. Discernment involves deciding which parts of our world belong to Satan, which belong to God/gods, and an entire, bursting spectrum of in-betweens.
You have both less power and more power than you think. You can control the minds of others if you like — just look at the monsters mentioned in the paragraphs above who started life as regular people — do you really want to be like them? You will not easily levitate spoons or fly a Quidditch broom without material innovation. Maybe take that into consideration if that is your idea of magic.
To be humble is to understand you are special but not exempt. You don’t get to skate, whether you are embedded in the crowd or surfing above it. You must devote yourself to unrelenting, daily work, and sometimes that work is down in the muck with those who will never understand you, nor you them. To be humble is to fully acknowledge you could be wrong and not to be butthurt because you are not yet a god or anything close to it. Humility, like the third element of most ternaries, is what seals the deal and opens the Universe of new possibilities. Stay humble, my friend.
