Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
The other day, in the magical experiments Facebook group, a really good question was asked about what people consider a deity to be, versus what a spirit being is. One of the respondents noted that non-physical entities really don’t care about labels attached to them, and that the labels are mainly used for the convenience of humans, as a way of providing context and categorization for them. when working with spirits. The person went on to note that such categorizations are subjective. I agreed with the person’s response to the question, because in a very real sense the categorizations that occur with spirits are rooted in a humanocentric perspective.
A humanocentric perspective is a perspective rooted in the human experience. It brings with it set expectations around how spirits are encountered and worked with. For example, one such expectation is the expectation that a spirit will appear before a person in a form that makes sense to the person and speak in a language that the person understands. Such an expectation is based around the human need to control and label the experiences we have as much as possible.
There is value to a humanocentric approach to working with spirits because it can provide you foundational experiences that help you start recognizing when you are working with spirits. Such categorizations that result provide people a way to make sense of their experiences so that they can apply them to their spiritual path and make progress on that path.
Yet at a certain point there’s also limitations that come with humanocentric perspectives. We may get so caught up in our expectations about how a spirit should show up that we end up missing out on the actual experience that’s occurring. We might have a set idea around how the spirit will interact with our lives that we don’t recognize when they have impacted our lives, but not in the way we expected. A useful exercise that can help us recognize these limitations is to write out what our expectations are for a given magical working, whether its with a spirit or not, and then ask ourselves how that expectation might actually get in the way of the magical work.
By examining the expectations we’re bringing into a magical working, we start to acknowledge where we’re bringing specific stresses into our working. We can then either remove those points of stress or find some other way to address. In the case of working with spirits, my way of doing that has involved opening myself to the actual experience and paying attention to the sensorial awareness I have around the experience. This allows me to let go of expectations around how the spirit ought to show up or interact with me, and instead focus on the actual experience that’s happening.
