Magic 201: Emotions As Tool
This series has mentioned emotions before, in reference to the way negative and lesser spirits can ensnare priests and spiritual workers (and everyone else) in delusion, illusion, and fantasy. Emotions, generally speaking, can be thought of as a kind of spiritual intoxicant: the spiritual equivalent of a very stiff drink or a drug.
This does not make them inherently negative. It also does not make them inherently a problem. What it makes them is a tool which can be used in concert with other tools for some purpose. For negative or lesser spirits, the purpose of entrapment. For priests and spiritual workers, potentially the purpose of healing, elevation, or any other use they care to put it to.
The ability to use emotions as a magical tool starts with the innate capacity and permissions to do so. It is not just the ability to sense emotions as a kind of spiritual energy. Emotions are not the only kind of energy a living being produces, but that energy is plentiful, easy to get, and impactful. This is part of why the involved capacity is not just the ability to sense emotions as energy: the ability to notice that it rains is not the ability to make it rain. Because that energy is plentiful, easy to get, and impactful, the ability to use emotions as a tool is going to be essential for priests and spiritual workers.
Using emotions as a tool requires the healing and elevation work necessary to prevent the priest or spiritual worker from being intoxicated by their own emotions. This can, of course, be incomplete. Some healing and elevation work is enough, but this can make using that energy problematic. The more incomplete the healing and elevation, the greater the chance that the priest or spiritual worker will be intoxicated by whatever they are attempting to do to someone else.
The healing work is self-explanatory—any unhealed trauma, unexamined and unhealed patterns, any lingering effects of life experience will prevent mastery of emotions as a spiritual tool. Wherever there is a vulnerability, there will be an opportunity for negative or lesser spirits, and an accompanying reduction of the ability to use the tools in front of the priest or spiritual worker.
The elevation work is less self-explanatory. To some degree, the approach which can be taken to using emotions like this depends on the priest or spiritual worker. Some of us don’t particularly enjoy working with emotion as a tool, some of us prefer to work with some specific spectrum and all our elevation will be focused in that direction. Love is a common example: much of that particular worker’s elevation work in that life will concern love and relationships. There will be some general elevation work, but it will have a theme.
Whatever we cringe at will be brought up for work.
One of the common parts of elevation work, especially for priests and spiritual workers with facility to use emotions as a tool, is releasing their ties and connections to lives in which emotion is a common bond. For many of us, that’s family ties, friends, and romantic ties. This is not to say we don’t have family, friends, or romantic relationships. This is to say that we must release the ways those ties can bind us so that we can engage in those relationships and their emotions voluntarily, able to resist or simply not be swept away.
This is not a state you can reach alone, and is a milestone in the life of priests and spiritual workers. It marks a certain kind of priest or spiritual worker.
