Magic 501: Consciousness and Perception
If it hasn’t been clear through this series, we might operate day-to-day from consciousness and perception, but they are both ultimately liars.
Consciousness and perception offer the promise of consistency and truth, and with them the promise of comfort and stability, while providing none of these things. Instead, they provide a particularly fertile ground for any amount of magical or spiritual work. Any number of spiritual entities are able to use the promise of consistency and truth to influence people, to guide their behavior, or to simply keep them trapped in delusion.
We do not often examine things which seem comfortably settled, like whether memory and consciousness are accurate, especially when whatever’s happening in our delusions seems more urgent or painful. The remembered pain often seems a lot more urgent than whatever is currently happening to the body. Your mind can be easily ensnared in remembering trauma while the body is completely safe, and this will reliably preoccupy someone for the rest of their life.
For a certain kind of priest or spiritual worker, the fluidity and malleability of consciousness is itself a tool. It is also something which priests and spiritual workers are forced to be aware of: we are not exempt from the interference of various spiritual entities. In fact, priests and spiritual workers can be particularly attractive for that kind of meddling. The ability to influence our consciousness and perception will spill into the lives of those dependent on us. Whatever healing or elevation work we lack becomes a site of influence for various spiritual entities and whatever priest or spiritual worker has the capacity to do that sort of influence.
Only people who do not understand the fluidity and deceptive nature of consciousness think influence is not a powerful and effective tool. Far too often people, assuming their own experience of consciousness and perception is accurate, look to some sort of magical or spiritual contract for what is more cheaply accomplished with influence—entering into restrictive, expensive arrangements with spirits because they believe legality is stronger than an adjustment of understanding with influence.
It is important for priests or spiritual workers to be essentially distrustful of whatever is happening in their consciousness and perception as an initial tool in learning to recognize that interference. We must always be at least a little wary or aware of the risks involved in consciousness and perception as tools, but we do not have to stay distrustful.
Through training, it is possible for some priests or spiritual workers with this capacity to discern the difference between what is accurate or true and what is merely perception and consciousness, and to recognize interference versus the voice of their lwa. Because various spiritual entities can mimic the lwa and easily enlist whatever is in the consciousness and perception of the priest or spiritual worker, this is not a trivial task.
And like the other entries in this series, it cannot be done alone.
