Cosmologies and the Virtuosity of Senses

Let’s say we are fully alive to our senses and we’ve begun to experience the vibrancy of everything around us. Now what?

For most people that is enough. Their ripening senses underscore the preciousness of all things and validates their being—the oranges that deliver sunshine, the oceans that cleanse us, the earth we plant ourselves on, the trees that greet us every morning. We are precious in how we feel and appreciate these things, especially in this world where so much of Spirit goes unnoticed. Spirit finally witnessing and loving spirit. Once the pores of our sensoria open, we can finally saturate our parched selves in the juices of Spirit. 

For practitioners, this is just the first step. We’re not only nourished by Spirit, but we’re also instruments for Spirit. That means we cultivate a virtuosity in our senses so we can actively and accurately hear the messages all around us. Our awareness allows us to siphon more information from our surroundings, our clients and our Helpers—which means our actions can be more thorough and effective, in a way that benefits more of Life.

We also need to know how to handle the impressions that aren’t pleasant without freaking out. (People who have sensation-overwhelm should take the Mediumship class with Betsy Bergstrom who gives the best instruction I’ve seen on this.) We freak when we have no handle on a situation, when our cosmologies can’t deal with the information we’re being given and we therefore have no appropriate response. This is where PTSD can come in. If we’re not successful in making sense of something, it get blocked out—and before you know it, another one of our senses shuts down and gets archived into the dead zone. 

Our cosmologies are living things that need space to grow, to handle more of what we witness as our senses (and therefore spheres of knowledge) open up. Sometimes we just need to flesh out what we already understand through our experience. Other times, we need to drop our working cosmology (the machinery through which we do our shamanic work, and the landscape in which our Magical Selves operate) in order to take up a new one. This takes courage and beaucoup assistance from the Helpers…in fact, it’s usually instigated by them. But without this renewal, we get prone to what Roger Walsh calls “Truth Decay”—the dogmatisation of a living reality.