Magic 501: Reality
Most of the strategies aimed at perception by negative entities attempt to put layers of interpretation and fantasy between the person and whatever is happening around them. Ego provides the ideas and emotions, and the mind provides a stage to act the dramas out on. All of that is to say that people are predictably not reacting to reality. They are reacting to whatever drama ego is currently playing inside their perceptions.
If you’re a student of human behavior and the various strategies ego employs, you can do a lot with that gap as a spiritual worker or priest. There are times, especially in the process of healing, where you must also be an actor on that stage, in that drama.
However, as a priest or spiritual worker, part of your job is to figure out how to interact as directly as possible with reality, as opposed to whatever layer of fantasy and interpretation ego has provided for you. Vodou takes for granted that you’ll be back for lessons whether incarnated or not. This means that in any given life, raw dogging reality might not be possible. Despite that, it is part of the duty or responsibility of priests and spiritual workers to do their best to interact with as much reality as they can raw dog.
Ego reacts with dismissal and, early in the process of that raw dog experience, with horror. If there’s anything ego is not interested in, it’s dealing with reality.
Reality is a space where the self does not mean what it is often construed to mean, and is both deeply connected to every other thing and not the center of that connection—partially because there is no ‘center’ the way we understand it and can perceive it, no single administrator on a golden throne we can perceive. The divine is not directly approachable in that sense. In reality, even the most important person is only temporarily important, only locally important.
This fundamentally contradicts the hold ego has on the person, the self-centered dramas ego likes to ensnare people in. With enough exposure to reality, ego has a hell of a time ensnaring a person. It’s hard to be the center of a drama when you get a sense of your ‘size’ and the scale of reality. It’s even harder when your emotions cannot fully ensnare you.
The process of resisting, unraveling, untrapping, etc what ego has given you is lifelong, but has multiple stages. Those stages include clearing your spiritual body, which is emphatically not a self-service process. It also includes exposure to a lot of opportunities to learn, which is to say lessons in life designed to make clinging to ego’s dramas punishing. The selection process is simple there—the spirit that persists trying to learn will learn. The question is how quickly that spirit learns.
The spirit that does not persist will still learn, but it should be remembered that we are talking about lives, not years.
Dealing with reality is also a matter of discipline, because to know how to unravel is not to unravel, and to know how to reduce the hold ego has on you is not to reduce that hold. No one can teach themselves, but the lwa and divine do tend to put opportunities to learn it in the path of people. People need a teacher, someone who has been there before, to spot those opportunities.
Those opportunities look like misery. Handily enough, this can be an indicator of the hold ego has on you, and the degree to which you are dealing with reality.
