Tuning Consciousness

The advice “be yourself” is rarely sincere until you get into spiritual work, where it gets crucial if you have the capacity to possess.

It goes a little like this: possession is a state of consciousness, though to be most accurate, a state of unconsciousness in which another consciousness uses the innate capacities of the horse (person who can be possessed) to perform some sort of work. It’s a truism that the innate capacity of the horse determines what can be done by the other consciousness, which is why personal development in vodou is considered central to the faith. In practical terms, whatever hangups the horse has become a kind of crippling of the spirit’s expression.

The difference between this and various religions’ definitions of good character are stark: a good horse has no requirement to be, for instance, chaste and charitable. In fact, a rather sizeable ego can be an initial boon to being a good horse, though it will have to be tempered. Some of what we consider virtues do tend to be expressed, but they’re a side effect of something else, which starts in the absolute refusal to be someone else.

Seems paradoxical, doesn’t it?

As it turns out, the restrictive social rules we tend to pick up as children are a rather serious impediment to being ourselves, in part because they insist on us restricting and sublimating ourselves to be acceptable. There’s a whole stage in the creation of priests in which we’re poorly behaved as hell, as we work through removing those social rules from our consciousness.

What is left is ourselves, at which point a better class of character development can occur, in which the actual character can be transformed, instead of simply adding another layer of shit over the existing social rules we’ve been taught.

It’s a tuning process, as we slowly cease to pay attention to social rules and our own hangups, to better tune into the spirit.