I have talked about fear and the need for humans to disengage with the divine in order to get somewhere else outside of Christian belief. However, this becomes much more complex when we become afraid of being right. Being right means, ultimately, that being wrong is a reality check. It means that when you perceive something that no one else is seeing, it can be terrifying to figure that out.
When engaging with people who do not take kindly to people who are unafraid of accounting for their wrongdoing and who come right out and say that they may not be wrong and that they are right in their belief they tend to be shoved off and categorized as problematic. We are so terrified of making our pagan religion be dogmatic that we forget where we are going with what we discover. We cannot all be right in the end because unfortunately there will be people who will be wrong who will spread their problematic beliefs with greater effort than those who are right.
Let’s take it a little further and add some texture to this argument. Let’s say, perhaps, you’re going through a tough time and a deity comes down and waits for you to see them and believe that they are ready to help but then your friend comes along and tells you that the Deity isn’t great for that purpose and they would not work with someone going through what you’re going through at that moment and to find someone else.
So you do that and then you get lost in searching for the right way because you let someone else dictate the experience that the Deity that you had originally had ready to help you became irrelevant and completely
Out of your wheelhouse.
Was that friend wrong for saying that they believe that Deity isn’t good for what’s ailing their friend? Of course not. However, they weren’t right, either. You see, there is a kind of nuance to this pattern that you may not like when you are just starting out in getting to know Who or What is around you.
You’re getting to be aware of getting to see that in order to move forward from where you are now, you can’t listen to just anyone and take their word for what they are telling you to believe. They may not have it down pat. They may take what it is they are saying and twist it so that they have the power over others and shut things down that go against the grain of making people feel able to believe what they want to believe even when it is actively harmful to themselves and others around them.
We all want our UPG to be a certain kind of right and when it suits our feelings and egos that make us feel even more correct that we must go share it with the world and assert it on others then that is where we get into mucky territory.
You see, sharing UPG is okay when it comes to making you look like a natural psychic and it becomes more heavily valued the more people respect what it is you’re saying and already confirm what they think is already correct. It becomes a natural phenomenon of echoing the same beliefs over and over again to get to a point where there is what is an “acceptable” belief of the Divine and what is “unacceptable.”
The unacceptable tend to be a framework in which the Divine actively engage with yourself and tend to behave in ways that are misrepresented in the lore around where they come from. Loki is a great example of this as He tends to toe the line between what is considered “appropriate” behavior of a Divine being and then what is “inappropriate” behavior. People, when trying to convey that He is deserving of a God title because for some reason people think He is some larger spirit, tend to convey Him as a little more “canceled” or named to be something He is not so that they don’t get questioned.
In that way, we swing to the other side of the argument and think that if Gods get jealous or feel angry or are considerably mean to other Deities, therefore They must only act in ways that are unbecoming. They make Him some sort of jurisdiction over what presides in chaos and consequence of action so that He inadvertently becomes a great punishment for things that go wrong.
Then we have the “fluffy bunny” or as we like to call it the “roommate phenomenon.” (“But Owl,”you say, “You just said you have a roommate and He is actively being one so why are you criticizing “roommates”?” Don’t worry, friends, I’ll get back around to where I’m going with this). This gets a little hairy because then we have a concept of Divinity wherein They are perpetually agreeing with everything we do to the point that they are only ever engaging in your life when you deem it reasonable or necessary. And unfortunately, that bias still isn’t exactly a good thing because it means that we become a little too comfortable in the presence of a Divine being that we cease to accept that They are more or less to be respected and observed for who They are rather than who They are not.
So where we leave ourselves is walking a fine line between these two extremes where we are not so afraid of the Divine coming down and exacting punishment on any who get in the way of Their plan and then where we are also not so comfortable with Them that we narrate Their lives with us because in order for Them to be “acceptable” They have to also be declawed.
This is where we get to see a little more nuance in this argument of being right versus being wrong because in the end we tend to realize that in order for us to finally get to where we are heading, we have to realize that sometimes we are both wrong and right. We have to hold that in order for the Divine to be a living, breathing, Entity in our lives, we have ti get down into the dirt and listen to what the Earth is saying.
Balance
Balance is a part of nature. It is the very fabric of our reality in which we realize that in order for things to be believable they have to depend on being wrong and right at the same time. The human being is so complex and so profound that we tend to pigeonhole ourselves into a great and vast slumber of existence by categorizing it into one thing or another.
We tend to believe that in order for something to be legitimate, it has to abide by a certain standard and weight and that’s how we can tell who it is we are actually dealing with. And then when a Divine being steps out of line, we push back and tell them that they are imposters or, as Tiktok loves to talk about, trickster spirits. By repressing the possible behaviors of how They may respond to things in our lives, we tend to repress and devalue anything that we deem to be unacceptable behavior for a Divine being to incur upon humans without even realizing that we are, in fact, imposing on Their very nature by creating an echo chamber of our own understanding and finding there is no real way out of it exactly.
While I am not saying that Divinity have certain values to attend to, They certainly don’t hold onto those values all of the time with great weight. Loki tends to also be another great example (sorry, I am very much a Loki’s person, get over it). He tends to be outside of that line of socially acceptable behavior and even to a fault. He can be hypocritical and do one thing but say another or He can be too predictable by being exactly who He says He is going to be. He isn’t waiting around to make us feel understood and often His behaviors earlier in my relationship with him fall between questionably abusive and ridiculously profound and neither of which seem to fall to any one side.
Divinity is complicated. They do not tend to be very well kept in boxes or paradigms wherein They get to be judged based on a certain sort of guidance set forth by other humans and their basis of understanding it. The boxes, of course, were not designed with the well-being of a relationship with a God in mind but rather the relationship between Divinity and humanity and how we keep away from Them with all of our efforts even when we don’t think we are.
So that leaves me at my final point in this which is not just to complain but to believe that we can actually move past all of this one day. I think that in order for us to finally get away from Christian thinking, we need to step away from this needing to be wrong thing.
What’s needing to be wrong, you ask? Well, I’m glad you asked.
The people who need to be “wrong” tend to walk the line between what is imagined and what isn’t imagined and they tend to not be palatable for the general public’s consumption. That’s more than often why mystics don’t tend to be very popular in the end. They tend to hold the scary, undeniable question of reality in their hand and in order to get to the bigger picture, they tend to realize that many people are actually very wrong by way of being scarily right.
This way of acting and practicing a mystic’s world is not for the faint of heart. It becomes more like an addiction and the more in line you go with what you are pursuing, the more you realize how being wrong is much better than being right. Being wrong at least lets you believe that there are other possibilities out there that are more along the lines of what everyone else is wanting to happen. I definitely would much rather be wrong so that I can feel comfortable stating my beliefs in an open forum. However, most people don’t want to be told they’re right when it comes to understanding that most people aren’t actually talking to who they think they are talking to in the end. Mystics themselves don’t want to know that they were wrong way before they gained whatever talent they had prioritized and studied for years on end and go back and realize they had it all wrong the entire time.
It’s just a fact, however, that being wrong looks different on paper when it means you are more humble and have everyone else in mind and being right means you will gain a lot more enemies than lovers or followers on Tiktok or Instagram. People don’t want to read that a Deity has an opinion that isn’t some generic statement of being heard or seen and that’s it. They don’t want to read that the opinion itself may not even be considered politically correct. Disclaimer: I definitely don’t think a deity would come right out and say that they think the swastika is important enough to bring back into importance in Norse paganism or that the black sun is actually a decent symbol when it isn’t even historical to begin with.
I feel like when I say “politically correct” I mean treating humans exactly in the way that is most comfortable for them to be treated. I’ve heard my Deity misgender people, He’s yelled at someone for not getting His feelings accurately on the way they work with Him, He’s done some things that I certainly don’t approve of and get away with them just to prove somewhere down the line how toxic it all was in the end. It could be months before I understand his behavior during things that make me fear Him or regret having to work over whatever is happening at the time.
I don’t feel like it’s my place to tell people where in their practice they went wrong, however, it is my job to indicate that deities have their own nature of opinions and preferences and they obviously do not enjoy being misrepresented just because it is comfortable to be presented that way by humans.
How would you feel if someone wrote a book in your name and commenced to say that you would do something that you never will? It isn’t a great feeling to have humans running around stating the fact that they aren’t wrong when they are wrong and they aren’t right when they are right because that often means there’s a principle nature that they need to abide by in order to be recognized for who they are in the end.
Like, it’s a smaller concept, but if Loki didn’t show up with red hair, would He need to show up as Tom Hiddleston, instead? And if He doesn’t throw your world into chaos, is He really being Himself or is it someone you made up? There’s an expectation to be made the more you listen to what other people are wanting and the more other people actively are afraid of being wrong and not going against the grain of well thought out of well intended things, the more we will push our Gods away.
The theory that everyone creates their perception of Deity in their head means that not everything gets to become the actual Deity they are wanting to have in mind and are more prone to developing egregores and imposters than they might otherwise believe they are. It isn’t easy to just accept that the Deity will tell you who they are and what they want from you, but it is easy to hear other people tell you that you’re wrong and here’s how you actually do things with Them or tell you the right way to go about offerings or dedications or whatever it is that the Deity might have an opinion on that might differ from what the other human can expect.
It becomes a problem when all of your information comes from another source who isn’t the Divine trying to tell you that you’re going about it all wrong and here’s what you’re doing instead. It isn’t to say that in order to be right you have to process everything outside of the general hive mind, but it is more likely that once trauma responses subside and you gain more confidence in where you’re going and who you are, you tend to be able to prove that you’re not actually making shit up and the shit you aren’t making up isn’t actually palatable for everyone else to be hearing or wanting to believe about their deity in the end.
It’s the same question about if Jesus came down today would he actually be fine with people going about their racist, bigoted ways, or would he actually put an end to their whole ordeal by hanging out with prostitutes. If a Deity came down tomorrow and told you everything you were doing was not what They were telling you all along and not to listen to everyone around you telling you otherwise, would you listen to them or would you go ask your friend if they feel right about what just happened? Who’s opinion are you more focused on? The greater community or the being that you’re actually trying to contact?
Just something to consider next time you feel like you can’t share with someone your experiences because they wouldn’t seem to believe it would be real, it’s more than likely what you’re experiencing is unique for a reason. That’s what hurts a society that relies on popular opinion to tell you what to believe and who to count on. It gives power to the wrong authority and creates a cycle of abuse and moralistic determinations by parties who are not actually acting on good intentions to begin with.
Devoured by Flame 