The Discernment Spectrum

Morning walk thoughts:

We should talk about discernment as a spectrum, not a state.

The word "Discernment" is used by Pagan types to mean something like "I am able to tell the difference between genuine divine/magical experiences, and make believe. This is in part an ability or skill: having a genuine 'third eye'. And this is, in part, about humility and wisdom: not letting your ego and pride run away with you".

I encountered the concept of discernment early - too early. I have a cautious, fact-seeking personality - so the idea of discernment really appealed. But I think it stood in the way of my development, and I think perhaps we shouldn't introduce it to seekers at all for like...the first two years. Magic is also about play; rediscovering a childlike relationship to wonder, the unknown, and make believe. As adults, we don't need more influences telling us "...but this might all be fake, I could be imagining it, it's all rather silly" - we need less.

I am a fairy. What do I mean by this? I mean: where I come from, we have a local myth in which all the women were stolen by the fairies and lived seven years underground. When they had to return above the earth, many brought their children - and thus my people are quite literally fairy-blooded. Probably the most important step in my magical development was embracing this. There's a factual approach to this story: "my hometown has a local legend". And there's also the approach which takes you into magical time: "I have fairy blood". It's about how you choose to think about the world and your experiences in it. When I say "this is who I am", I am choosing to play; to be joyous, creative, imaginative, playful, and to embody something I think is beautiful, and which leads me down strange paths. From a magical perspective, that's considerably more useful than restraint. It helped free me from the desire to look for proof, to be discerning, and ultimately to spend more time doing magic, having otherwordly experiences, and having experiences in this world which take me closer to the things of beauty and delight.

I think we should talk about discernment as a spectrum. There are problems at both ends:

• Too much: you're shutting the magic down. You're not open. You're not experimenting. You're looking for "proof" in predefined ways which bar you from the unexpected, from experiencing the Landweird in it's authentic state. You're not stepping onto the path which leads to enlightenment. You may be demonstrating cynical behavior to an extent which isn't fun for those around you.
• Not enough: you are blind to genuine experiences. You are only interfacing with your head: you are on the path, but do not wish to arrive anywhere. Your religion is shallow, or more about you and your needs than the authentic divine. You are also expecting your experience of the Landweird to look and feel a certain way, and are closed off from experiencing it fully. You may be demonstrating egocentric behavior, and if others are involved, it isn't cool.

And how do you tell where you are? Almost certainly - if you are worrying about discernment, then you need less of it; if you're not worried about discernment, you need more.

OR - discernment is situational. Seeing it as a spectrum allows us to move along it, and ask ourselves: "what burden of proof is required to continue?". When I go out in the morning and leave a saucer of water for the fae folk, discernment is not really necessary. The act itself is enough, to be simple and pleasurable, to keep the Landweird in mind, to set my intention for the day.

However, there are situations where greater discernment is necessary. For example, if you're doing regular religious practice then yes, you owe it to the gods to keep dancing until they manifest at least some of the time. Advising people based on divination would be another situation where a greater level of certainty is required. Doing effective Results Magic requires a good bullshit detector, so you can tell the difference between real results and the placebo effect. And anything where other people are involved, you ought to seek a higher burden of proof, stating clearly whether this is what you think or imagine, or whether it is god-given tablets of stone.

SO them's my thoughts. Talking about discernment as a spectrum helps us:

• Recognise that both too much, and too little, can bring different kinds of problems
• Choose how much discernment is required for a situation, and move up and down the spectrum as is helpful

And if any of my readers are newer on their magical paths, it is my recommendation that you avoid thinking about discernment to begin with. Concentrate on rediscovering play & make believe, becoming more OK with childish behavior, with being imaginative for its own sake, and all these things that growing older makes us forget. Once you're regularly doing ritual and slipping into magical time, that's the time to begin observing when (and why) some of these experiences are more "authentic" than others.

Teaching The Infinite

Anyway, one thing I'm thinking about right now is the impossibility of sharing anything that's really important about Paganism with anybody.

My trad stuff is now in a very shareable state, and it's giving me pleasure to work on it; it helps me to arrange my own thoughts to imagine I was explaining it to another. But. I don't think it's relevant to anybody else.

Or rather, I think the *act of development* is the powerful part of it, more than the specifics I've discovered. If you haven't seen the sunrises I have seen, or seen what I've experienced within them, then how could you understand the divinity of the sun in quite the same way?

I think the bit that needs sharing is the encouragement to go out and seek the divine, and be reverencing and perhaps naming the parts of nature one finds infinity in. It works because it reflects my experience of the world, not because it's objectively any good. The time I spent designing the system was the magical thing - not the end result - the time I spent reading, researching, exploring, and so forth. There's so much that is unspeakable, unnamable in what I have found; I could begin explaining, but I don't think it would have any relevance to anybody else's world.

I've got such a deep wellspring of associations now for each concept within the system - but it's so ideosyncratic, and that's the way it should be. Like, even if I could explain - would that benefit the listener? Clearly not to the extent that it is benefiting me.

Probably part of why Wicca works so well is the mutable emptiness of the Goddess. She can be all sorts of things, and it's thus easy to assemble covens where everyone's conception is a little bit different within the umbrella of a feminine divine. All the stuff I've pulled into my religious tradition - like obscure 1970s teleplays, and psychedelic records, and local legends, and colours and shapes - the primary thing they have in common is that I like them and they spark things. So what parts of the divine can and should one teach, and what parts are personal and meaningless? It's hard to know. I'm not sure anyone else needs a pantheon which can explain horror of the sea, nuclear war, the summer of love, the beasts and bones, public service announcements, it's such a grab bag of my things.

It's not so much "I don't want people playing in my playground" so much as "the playground is imaginary; it's actually urban scrubland; but I've decided this old mop is a broom and this bucket is a cauldron".

(no subject)

 Like, obviously you can follow Fencraft even if you've never had a full on panic attack followed by a dissociative episode just by thinking about the depth and immensity of the sea and of space, and seemed to see water pooling up out of the floorboards and up around your ankles and then sloshing across the table, up turning the white crockery into barnacle-encrusted piles half buried in sand, and sea beasts swimming aimlessly down your corridor which has now lengthened, black and marked by many doors - all of them to small, trapped rooms, no way out, infinitely deep and infinitely dark.

But it helps.

(no subject)

 Because i can start describing a Sea Goddess, and what she does and is, but are you really experiencing the divine as I experience the divine if you see the sea as marvellous, or childhood memories, as beaches and sun brollys; she is so completely rooted in this visceral feeling the sea gives me, and if you've never grown up on an island, and seen it as both an infinite and limiting thing; and if you've never almost drowned; and if you've never seen the way the sky stretches above you when you swim, or what it feels like to be in a rip tide

Then you're probably not going to hear or sense the same thing as I do when I say "lady of the sea". Or even like, "her sacred bird is the seagull". I hate seagulls. Have you ever been attacked by a seagull? Have you ever seen a toddler mobbed by them? You're probably not meeting the same entity as I am. The sand is both dirt and glass, filled with little weevils; I don't like ice cream, I don't like fish or chips, I don't like the sun or the taste of salt, thinking about beaches is like thinking about being unhappy or in love or some combination of the two, of being exposed and profoundly alone; I'm always astonished when people get excited about the seaside, romantic or beautiful or a place for holidays or play. I hate the beach and im terrified of the sea, but the divine in nature is the divine that you feel and find, and I have a Lot Of Feelings about the sea.

It's a primary element within my system, in a way that it probably wouldn't or can't be for most people. I was talking on the traditional_witches group about this, because someone said Land/Sea/Sky is very ancient. It's also my primary division, but am I really able to talk on an equal level with say Hades/Zeus/Poseidon, because "goddess of the sea" is - well - a shallow understanding of a single facet, and it doesn't really speak to what I mean by The Sea. 

Maybe this is oK?  Like this is what I'm thinking, it probably doesn't matter; so long as everyone is finding and revering the infinite in whatever way they find it. but it does shut off the possibility of religious fellows who i can share Syd Barrett vinyls with so