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I keep hearing about the five levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I’m sure you’ve heard of it too.
In a nutshell, Abraham Maslow wrote that in times of turbulence and change, like these, no-one is interested in the esoteric mysteries or their spiritual growth, that they place it on the lowest rung of the ladder of their priorities.
Apparently, during the collapse of civilisations – such as we are currently witnessing – people couldn’t care less about discovering the meaning of life. They are just too busy running from pillar to post, trying to survive.
However, I’m not sure I go along with Maslow on this … or at least, I think he was just playing to the lowest common denominator of materialism and Charles Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest, which was all the rage when he was writing in the 1940s.
I don’t see how fighting to merely survive can help us right now in our journey of the spirit in the human body.
Death will come to all of us, one day. There is nothing we can do about it, try as we may. If death is wrong, then human beings suffer from one hell of a design fault because nobody gets out here alive.
And so then, having missed the point in thinking that the purpose of life is just a battle for survival, we’ll just have to come back and do it all again.
That’s the way I see things.
However, so long as I have a full stomach and a roof over my head.. which most people reading this will still have … then I want to use this life to go deeper into the evolution of my soul.
I don’t care if they won’t let me into nightclubs, festivals or sports events. That’s not why I’m here. I’ve done all that…
I was at the first ever Glastonbury Music Festival, half a century ago, where people rolled around naked in the mud to Traffic and Melanie singing about peace on earth.
I watched the Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart perform at Bickershaw not long after. You may have been at Woodstock too… or the Isle of Wight, when Hendrix handed out acid to the crowd.
So after that, the sorts of festivals that are put on these days seem just like watered-down copies of the originals, and hold little interest for me.
I have more important fish to fry.
To me, it has never been more vital to engage with just why we chose to be incarnated into this Vale of Sorrows, which is what the study of the esoteric Mysteries is all about.
In our deepest darkest nights, in the witching hour just before dawn, we often wake up in a cold sweat, and we wonder:
“Why am I being tested like this? What is the point of it all?”.
Even when we don’t know where our next meal is coming from, we still have these thoughts.
So blow Maslow.
There is no better time to start to ponder what is really happening betwixt and between the cracks of the hysterical voices of the Tower of Babylon, of the harassing harridans and the bat-winged Furies, their sagging breasts hanging with japamalas of human skulls, screaming out the Sturm and Drang of the apocalypse…by which I mean the mainstream media.
We don’t have to pay them any attention. Most sensible people are disengaging now from this bullying and narcissistic gaslighting. But where does that leave them?
It can mean, for many, free-falling in space, with no parachute to keep them steady, and no firm bedrock to support them beneath their feet.
That’s because story is such an integral part of how we learn and how we grow that it’s almost as important as the air we breathe. It is so essential to us, to have a narrative about our lives to follow, that we cannot even get out of bed in the morning without one, and that’s why the major world religions have been so successful.
There are some people who are so desperate for a tale to follow that they will accept anything, and not even bother to investigate whether its true. But even those folk won’t be able to survive like that for much longer, because the directors of this theatre of war are tearing up of all the old storybooks. Psychological warfare, in other words, is far more potent, in many respects, than a nuclear bomb.
So make no mistake, this is an extremely harsh trial that is being presented during this great initiation on Earth. That’s why I believe that the only safe breadcrumb trail out of these strange, dark woods is to follow not his-story but our-story, our own personal story of our destiny and destination.
But how, you might be asking?
Well.. to find our story, we have to start digging down deep.
Think of all of those old war movies, like Colditz and The Great Escape. I think they provide a very good metaphor for this process. How did the prisoners-of-war manage to escape the tyranny of the Nazis or the Japanese? By tunnelling out.
So let’s get shovelling.
It’s time… time to start asking the important questions. Because we do choose our incarnation – when and where, and also the major crossroads and milestones that we will come to along the way. And so why this one and why now?
There is a famous passage in Tolkien’s The Hobbit:
Frodo says to Gandalf:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time.”
And Gandalf replies: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
If this is true … and there is no scientific inquiry that has managed to prove whether it it is or it isn’t… then how do we do approach this situation confronting us?
To me, it is all about initiation – the process that catalyses the alchemical growth of our soul.
As much as we try to meditate, pray and be kind to others, we cannot spur our own spiritual growth any more than we can pull ourselves up with our bootlaces.
This is why we need the alchemy of initiation. It erupts into our reality like the challenging dragon to put our subconscious shadows under pressure … and then we either sink or swim.
To my way of seeing, the whole of humanity is currently going through such an initiation.
But by ‘humanity’, I don’t mean that it’s a collective experience.
Initiation is an I-word; it is for the individual and everyone will experience and respond differently to this initiation according to their strengths and weakness.
Initiation doesn’t take any prisoners. It is as inexorable and as inescapable as a stream of volcanic lava, or a gaseous pyroclastic flow speeding down a mountain at hundreds of miles an hour.
However, we chose to live on the side of this volcano, because that is where the soil is the blackest and the most fertile. It is why we are here .. why we chose to be here. To grow our souls.
But at the same time, never think that no-one is listening or that nobody cares what happens to us.
All of this is being recorded in the Akashic Records on the astral planes … and the data it provides will help each of us, when the time comes, to choose our next incarnation…
To choose where we will go next to alchemically grow our souls.
[The picture in the header is titled The Philosophers (Homage to Courbet) and it’s by Christopher Ulrich, and the artwork on the podcast is titled Alchemist’s Laboratory and it’s by Earthstar01 of Deviant Art.]
Shaman of Avalon 