Magic 501: Control and Alignment
If you ask people what they want from vodou (and they’re trying to be good), they will likely tell you they want to live in alignment. They want to live able to move fluidly with life and the spirit, minimizing their friction with the spirit and the world around them. It’s a very nice answer.
Others will tell you they want control. They want to move through life on their own terms as best they can, and force life and circumstance to bend their way. This answer is a bit more honest, in terms of self-observation. It signals that the person understands they have problems with flow or are disturbed by change and want to ensure that they minimize their disturbance.
Like many things in being a priest or spiritual worker, the answer is not one nor the other, but whatever the situation requires. And often, alignment and control do not mean what people think they do.
True alignment requires discipline because obedience, elevation, and healing work require discipline. It is an active surrender to circumstance: to be willing to flow as a stream of choices to flow. It requires the work necessary to be able to accurately observe the situation, its dynamics, and a thorough knowledge of self. It also requires enormous faith and trust in the spirit, which requires a series of enormously painful elevation work. It is not, as people often imagine it, passivity or a passive surrender to circumstance. It’s not uncommon that you will need to make small adjustments to stay in alignment, either.
True control also requires discipline for the same reasons, in addition to the knowledge that you cannot control everything and the ability not to take change personally: the ability to not panic when stuff changes, the ability not to be disrupted by what you cannot control. Those abilities are not accomplished by emotional suppression.
You will also, of course, need a compliment of tools, which requires discipline and a fair amount of spiritual trials and tribulation. It is not accomplished by (the common delusion of free) will alone and requires a lot of magical or spiritual force.
If these two things seem very similar, it’s because they are. A priest or spiritual worker should (optimally) be able to fluidly move between the two because they are so intimately related.
