Crooked path journal 05

us- but is it? What if “over there” was “in here” too? I’ve long discussed the need to drop our absurd and habitual mental labels, divisions, and lines if we wish to engage the mystical vision, and I stand by that to this day- there is a clean and pure experience of wonder, of “otherness” that is possible to us if we allow ourselves to be free of our “wall building” habits. But is it always a good idea?

I must say, it is not. Years ago, I was a psychic voyeur of types; the thrill of the vision was my joyride. I reasoned to myself that visionary states, of the type that I could invoke using various mystical techniques, were perfectly natural and normal, and thus, (my reasoning ran further) they had some role in human spiritual development. If there were otherworlds, and if sentient beings inhabited them, then the capacity held by each human to experience those things was something we should be developing.

I know that I was wrong to think in this manner. While I still believe “sight” and “trance vision” to be perfectly natural to human beings, I no longer burden myself with the naive notion that all things natural to humankind are desirable or even necessary.

That may sound like a scandalous thing to say, and this statement certainly doesn’t extend to those natural aspects of humanity that have been excoriated by mainstream religions, such as sexuality and the like; no, I’m referring to the natural capacities of human beings to experience reality in a greater sense than we normally do.

How in the world could something as basic and simple as “experience” be a problem?

I hope that my words will reach the eyes and ears of understanding, for what I am about to say, I wish I had said before, long ago. Our range of experience defines usit creates all of our memories, builds our personalities, and sets us within the limits defined as “sane” by our societies. The artistic and the poetic- those most precious pylons of creativity that alone have led people for ages into ranges of experience that they could not have reached on their own- these things are the children of the “extranormal” investigation and exercise of experience. We all sense the value of poetry and art because we know that they are emissaries from something greater.

The poet or poetess, like the artist of the sacred, opens themselves to the dangerous reaches of the unseen, and as the story of the Leannan Sidhe tells us, they sometimes pay a price for their Dionysian ecstasies. Even those artists of the tame and the lamethose who, in age past, have labored away at dreary and linear tasks and created representations lacking the fire of real creativity- even those artists, on some level, were sweeping the dust from dangerous doors.

Faery Struck Opening up to a single glimpse of something that one’s mind cannot cope with or integrate can be devastating, or deadly. The death-blow may come as shock or fear, or (worse) as madness. The “fairy struck” of folklore, and the “fairy led”- there is 38