Vodou 501: Theosis
The consciousness recognizes god at gunpoint. Ideas about god, concepts concerning god, other people’s perception of god: all these things are easy enough. Direct recognition of god, however, is something the consciousness does not do voluntarily.
A priest intended for theosis will be driven there by whip, held at gunpoint, and their consciousness tortured until it can no longer deny what it sees. Many of us want to keep an insulating layer of something between us and the sight—drinking, drug use, various distracting excesses are all very common among priests. There is no pain quite like this process, and it usually begins when we are children. We die so often we lose the capacity to mourn. We must dissolve our connection to ego and our consciousness must not be allowed to operate as if it is the whole of our soul, which means that we are typically deeply traumatized.
The process of theosis is, to be blunt, horrific. It takes a certain strength of character. Strength can, of course, be trained. Trauma is a common training ground.
I like to refer to the process as being akin to a Magic Eye puzzle—one moment, you are suffering and then, your eyes refocus and the misery falls away in favor of an alteration of consciousness. You alternate between the intense misery of your consciousness and a knowledge that makes the misery less distracting.
Understand, the misery is physical and emotional and intellectual and spiritual and any other form of misery necessary to accomplish the change. The consciousness is inundated in pain until it can no longer cling to its singularity, can no longer view itself as the primary and only seat of the person, until it is only a part of the the person and a tool. We can achieve this state temporarily via drugs, exhaustion, drinking, or sex, just as much as we can insulate ourselves from it. It all depends on the dosage.
But the necessary changes for theosis are not temporary, and whatever might be initiated during an altered state has to be finished painfully sober, dragging on until it is done.
The process has its own logic and its own timing, which is never convenient nor particularly brief. What might motivate someone to start the process is just as likely to change as anything else in consciousness. Not even altruism survives the process: not mercy nor cruelty nor any other particular motivation. The process scours away anything and everything but the shape of the god in the person.
