Relationships and Illusions
One of the reasons I’m happy I don’t do much love work, though I am capable, is that people often try to get something out of their romantic relationships that no relationship can give them: the illusion of wholeness or being complete. Magic work is just as good for getting someone a partner as it is for healing them, but only one of those two things results in lasting satisfaction and fulfillment and it’s not the option where I use magic to get you a partner or make you keep a partner.
“Wave a wand and make someone love me” is unfortunately the option that seems easiest to people. It’s the option everyone wants to take, in part because the illusion of wholeness is something they can imagine, but actual wholeness is as foreign (and impossible) to them as living on the surface of the sun.
Part of accepting that the point of living is to rejoin divinity through elevation across lives is accepting that people are wherever they are in the process, and may not be ready for healing or wholeness. They may not be ready to view wholeness or being complete as something they even want, or something that comes from themselves and not something they can get if they just get the right person. Sometimes, the only and best thing we can do for them is to help them end up in a relationship, so that they can experience the cycle of disillusionment until they are ready to drop their belief that all they can have is the illusion and stop looking for it in other people.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of a mature priest or spiritual worker is the willingness to go ahead and get you the partner, even though they know that you’re still stuck in the cycle of illusion. It is the willingness to facilitate your cycle of delusion and disillusion, and the knowledge that it will help convince you that what you’re doing is never going to give you what you want. People often have to burn themselves out, many times over the course of lives, in order to try something different.
One of the other distinguishing characteristics of a mature priest or spiritual worker is knowing when it will help, and when having a partner won’t help you at all. Sometimes, the answer is “no” because you aren’t willing to learn, because your spirits (if you have them) and mine are sick of your unwillingness to learn. We do not typically want to feed your delusions, except when feeding it is actually helpful for you.
It is not pleasant to deal with someone desperately seeking the next act in their cycle of delusion but if you were reading carefully, you know that getting them a partner or healing them can have the same result: healing, either by burnout or by something more direct. Priests and magical workers take as a truism that every road eventually ends up in elevation.
It’s just that some of those roads are shorter than others.
