Magic 501: The Imitation Game
The consciousness is permeable and easy to influence for a variety of spiritual entities. This is the consciousness working as it should, as a messy place for lessons to occur and for the rest of the soul to experience lessons. The ignorance of the consciousness is also part of the design—the slow progression of lessons across lives, results filtering into the consciousness as the soul tries this and that. Maturity takes a shocking amount of time.
One of the fundamental lessons on consciousness, late in the progression of lessons, is that when we are still divorced from ourselves, we are the easiest to influence. It’s not a complicated lesson, just a difficult one: when you do not have a clear sense of who you are and what that means, you will be very poor at distinguishing what is influencing you. You do not know where you end and where something else might begin.
Successfully passing that lesson is characterized by integration between parts of the soul. This is not a conscious process. The consciousness is where it shows up, not where it is completed nor initiated.
On the same token, if you cannot identify yourself, you cannot reliably identify the nature or identity of the spirit speaking to you. This is, again, because you cannot successfully distinguish boundaries or qualities, nor any of their complexity. Recognizing the self is a fundamental task, and the same skills that allow you to recognize yourself and your complexity allows you to recognize the spirits with whom you speak.
The lwa are well aware of this and use a variety of explicit behaviors, statements, and signals designed to help people identify them. This information is usually passed down in lineages, as explicit call signs for the way the lwa interact with that lineage. There are some commonalities between lineages for spirits, but there will always be specific signs per lineage.
Unfortunately, external signs can be imitated. How hard a spirit has to try to imitate another spirit depends directly on the person they are trying to fool. A person whose soul has not yet reached the point where they have significant integration is going to be easy to fool through a variety of tactics. Without a combination of external signs and some sense of the presence with whom they speak—whether just by paying attention to intuition or by keeping track of behavior—they are going to be very, very easy to fool. A spirit merely showing up and giving a name will be enough if the person is sufficiently un-integrated.
One of the reasons we tell people not to just try to work with the lwa is because the lwa pick us, we don’t pick them, but plenty of things will imitate them. Anyone arrogant enough to assume they should be able to pick their own spirits is someone who has not done enough personal work to know themselves (or for that matter, to possess humility.) Even a very weak spirit can successfully fool that person. The spirits don’t have to try hard, nor do they need to be very knowledgeable, powerful, or effective. A name is enough. Having elders and a temple, society, or soyeste will ensure that at least one of the people present has done enough spiritual work to be helpful identifying the spirit or spiritual presence that is present. Their identification might not be perfect, but it’s going to be more accurate than not and a lot more accurate than the judgement or discernment of someone who has not done the requisite spiritual work.
Various spiritual entities also imitate a person to themselves, in the same way a parasite might attempt to fool someone’s immune system. This is a particularly effective way for spiritual entities to influence people. We say they ‘attune’ to people. What we mean is that they match, as much as they can, the energy, thought patterns, behavioral patterns, and judgement of the person. They will, if motivated, study the person and try to imitate them just as much as they might imitate a lwa. A person who does not know themselves, and particularly a witch who does not know themselves, requires little study and little effort to steer, making the person believe what they are doing is their own idea. That person or witch will think it’s their idea to do the things that spiritual entity wants them to do, even when those things are different than what they would normally do.
I give the example when I’m explaining this to others, of a random thought to commit arson which is out of character with anything and everything you would ordinarily think. Could be something else, but also could be a spiritual entity playing games with your consciousness. The negative entities will do so explicitly to produce emotions they enjoy: fear, shame, anger, etc.
Anyone who intends to work spiritually will need significant spiritual work on the integration of their soul specifically to avoid entrapment via imitation, knowing the limitations of the consciousness. It is generally safer to work in a tradition specifically because of these things.
