The Three Truths: A Celtic Framework for Seeing Straight
We’ve covered these truths in isolation elsewhere; now, we’ll look at them together. Though I divide them into categories, no hard-and-fast barrier separates them. They are immanent and co-existing. You can think of them like a 3D object with an X, Y, and Z axis. Armed with all three measurements, you can accurately describe the space it occupies in the world. To omit any axis would leave you without depth, hamstring your perception, and leave you flailing about in a world that forever seems askew.
Most modern men are flailing. Their myopia is not a new phenomenon, but the modern diagnosis differs from previous periods in the degree of affliction. The 19th century had Rationalists disputing with Romantics, but the chasm was neither as wide nor as deep as it is today.
The reasons for this chasm are too sundry to get into now, but what we can see is its effects: an entire class of barely human humans. I call them cadavers. Cadaver likely comes from the perfect participle of cadere, which means to fall, sink or settle. A cadaver is a fallen creature — a soulless being trudging through the world aloof and glassy-eyed. They are NPCs — not so much in that their responses are pre-scripted and dull (although they often are) — but because there is no discernible soul beneath their vapid eyes.
There are two types of cadavers: the Reddit “do you have a study for that?” rationalists and the “my feelings” banshees. Both are fallen in their own way, and their types outline the consequences of myopia: a blindness that culminates in the immolation of personhood.
The Fallen Rationalist
The rationalist is that smug man leaning back, twirling his pen in his hand, brow knitted as he struggles to recall the precise figures of a recent study in between scolding his opponent for “sophistry” and “fallacious reasoning.” His speech and thought are as desiccated as his soul. Whatever his supposed brilliance in arguments and stringing together claims and premises, he fails to pass the Turing test. You remain skeptical: am I speaking with a human or a robot attempting to be a human?
His aridness is a consequence of his blindness. The spiritual and the unitary elude him. Instead, logic and empirical facts dominate his thinking and circumscribe his debates. He obsesses over studies, syllogisms, and consistency. Feeling is dismissed as laughable and stupid — or given lip service while smothered by his insecure intellect.
“A mature man must step back and dispassionately assess the facts and deduce the proper course of action. Any allowance of intuition, spiritual vision, myth, religiosity, gut instinct, or mysticism corrupts the process and leads to unproductive results.”
The rationalists have gouged out their eyes, held up the bloody oculi, and declared their sagacity. What they pride themselves upon marks their foolishness. Their vision has been obscured by their self-mutilation, poisoning whatever flows from their minds and mouths.
If the rationalist cadaver’s ideas were revolting, the myopia of reason would pose no threat. Unfortunately, they are seductive to a certain type. They dazzle wanna-be intellectuals and actual eggheads with promises of increased productivity, more wealth, and public policy guided by impersonal, objective truths rather than the screechings of the mob or the machinations of politicians. They can beat down opponents in debates — yet fail to move the cultural needle beyond their autistic circle. Their felicity with words masks how unhinged their ideas are. In a culture that so highly prizes the intellect and that is full of midwits and try-hards yearning to sound smart, the rationalists exert a powerful influence on public life.
The new atheists, men like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, are icons of what happens when egghead syndrome reaches its most advanced stages and the soul has been subdued by logic. Eggheads are stiff, dull, and stupid-smart. They can dissect arguments with precision and construct edifices of propositions and supporting evidence while landing upon the most inhumane and idiotic conclusions.
Though they and their devotees claim to worship alone at the foot of reason’s altar, the spiritual and the unitary exert themselves subterraneously. Cadavers of this variety rationalize their emotional outbursts, fanatical beliefs, and yearning for dissolution through the language of science and reason. Since these impulses must pass the sniff test, they can never directly and naively express their desires. Instead, they must read Robert Frost and wax robotically about poetry’s beauty — all while failing to pass the Turing test with much aplomb. During one interview on poetry, Dawkins expressed his wonder at the universe by pondering whether mammals would have existed if a mole had sneezed at the wrong time. Apparently, this is the apogee of artistic appreciation.
The Fallen Banshee
At the other end are the banshees. They are captivated and driven by feelings, authenticity, and intuition. Reason is rejected as a ponderous tool too inaccurate for the complexities of life and as a straight-jacket used to hem in man’s natural and healthy instincts. “If only we would let ourselves go, we would naturally return to a communist paradise or, among right-wingers, the grandeur of Ancient Greece.” To cling to the mind and logic is the act of the small-minded man who cannot see beyond his nose.
The banshee cadavers are not without reason. They use it liberally in their discussions — throwing in charts, numbers, studies, but it is a weapon to justify how they already feel and bludgeon those who stand in their way.
Banshees do not hold positions in the highest echelons of political and intellectual institutions, as they once did a few centuries back. Scientism and the ineffectiveness of this view leave them vulnerable to being paralyzed by more cunning operatives or dismissed by discerning critics, but do not mistake its absence among the highest ranks as grounds to dismiss it.
Swathes of bureaucrats, HR harridans, social media influencers, and wild-eyed activists fit this type and wield influence over many institutions. Often, it is the reasoned and consensus-seeking cadavers that end up serving as a front for the mob of banshees behind the scenes, cowed into submission by temper tantrums and threats.
The banshees are not exempt from the forces of reason. Ironically, their repudiation of the logic cuts them off from any possibility of rising higher in the ranks. It hampers their ability to organize and direct their efforts. Since they lack the discernment necessary for realpolitik, they end up as tools of more malevolent and crafty actors.
A Comprehensive Vision
If we are to see properly, if we are to sluff off our status as cadavers, as fallen men barely worthy of the title human, then we must behold the world in all its depth. Without such depth, we risk being eggheads who talk about poems like a doctor discussing the organs of a dissected frog or we turn into hysterical banshees for whatever latest propaganda we’ve been initiated into.
Seeing with depth means seeing the world through the three truths.
The three truths are:
- Dliged
- Comartha
- Oentu
Next, I’ll expand on each, following up with concrete examples.
Defining the Three Truths
1. Dliged
Dliged held a number of complex meanings in Old Irish. The word translates into law, dictum, duty, or theory, covering a similar range of meanings as its linguistically unrelated counterpart logos. Law reflects the underlying rational structure of the universe, imperfectly mirrored in Ireland’s Brehon laws and the complex and precarious relationships and duties that bound different groups together.
Dliged is the intelligence that orders and contains the universe. Necessity determines the fate of all, including Día and the pantheon of gods. The law of gravity, the theory of evolution, the iron law of oligarchy, and even laws around abortion and murder are all byproducts of dliged — man’s puny attempts at articulating the mechanisms driving creation.
Philosophers, in the broadest sense, discover these laws through two ways: deducation and induction. Deduction begins with statements and pushes them to their logical ends, as in the case of mathematics. Induction observes nature, accumulates facts, and infers from the data. Whatever the means, dliged sees the world through the lens of reason and necessity — a sort of formulaic unfolding of events in accordance to the inner logic that governs all.
2. Comartha
Comartha translates as sign, symbol, or mark in Old Irish and carries with it echoes of the divine. Comartha was used in secular contexts, but it was also used to describe the language of the gods piercing through the mortal veil — omens, readings from sacrifices, visions, and, most importantly, the gods’ depictions in masks, statues, and prayers.
The word is constructed from the Proto-Celtic suffix kom-, meaning with, and arto, meaning stone — combining to mean with stones. Stones marked territory, recorded oaths, and took stock of goods. Precisely how the word moved from the quotidian concerns of territory to messages from the gods is unclear. Stones were very likely used in divination, such as at the site where an animal would be sacrificed and its entrails inspected for signs or in the near-universal practice of casting stones for divination. The basic function, though, was the same as the markers of territories, the recounting of victories, or the celebration of a life well lived. The stones signaled something beyond themselves.
For the ancient Celts, icons of the divine were not merely visual stand-ins. The god was in the thing itself. Lugh literally possessed the statue of himself placed outside the Hill of Tara, and worshippers would conduct themselves accordingly — perhaps covering their eyes and prostrating themselves before it as a sign of respect. In many parts of Asia, this belief still persists. An image of the god was not a mere representation but a conduit that brought the divine’s presence concretely into the world.
The etiquette surrounding these sacred signs was not mere performance. It was truth. Lugh was truly there, able to bear witness to the ceremonies and grant blessings to his devotees.
In both the religious and secular sense, the principle of comartha is unchnaged. The comartha codes truth into emotionally charged symbols, and these matrixes of symbols interact and burgeon forth with all creation in their wake.
Like dliged, comartha is causally effective but in a manner modern man is unaccustomed. Comartha views creation through the eyes of an artist, prizing feeling and intuition over reason and careful analysis. This artistic view is not the feverish dreams of a mad, solipsistic genius. It is how Día actually shapes the world — through the inner, inscrutable logic of epic and painting rather than the crisp equations of physics or political analysis.
3. Oentu
Oentu translates as oneness in ancient Irish. Since little remains of the druids’ beliefs, how commonplace this concept was and its details remain a mystery. Looking further afield at other Indo-European religions, however, we find many similarities. Monás is the Greek counterpart and describes the unity underlying all existence. In Hinduism, a similar concept can be found as early as the Rig Veda, which was written in the 2nd millennium BC and with strong links to the Corded Ware culture that exploded out of the Caspian Steppes and eventually transformed into the Celts.
Oneness has multiple forms. On an everyday level, oentu is the simple sense of an object being a thing. A bicycle is composed of dozens of different parts, yet we have little difficulty identifying that red, dirt-clad thing hanging from the garage wall as a bike. This is an intuitive sense of oneness that modernity has yet to strip from us.
Oentu is more than the ability to apprehend individual objects. At another level, oentu is a sense of porousness of being. It is the feeling that a mother or father has that he lives on through his children. It is the artist’s sense that the painting he spent 100 hours perfecting contains a part of his soul. It is the sense in which we believe a self persists throughout time, joined by an inscrutable thread that links a 3-month-old baby with a 30-year-old man and somehow concludes they’re the same person.
At the highest level — and one given the most air time, oentu is perfection. It is the union of all opposites. It is the dissolution of all objects and subjects into the One. It allows neither gain nor loss, self or other, this or that, good or bad.
The oentu frame sees oneness as immanent and essential in all phenomena. Since oentu is without change or duality, it does not move nor is it causal. It simply is. At lower levels, it appears that there’s some change. Family lines arise and pass away. Individuals with persistent selves eventually pass away, taking their perception with them. These individual perceptions do alter according to conditioning, but the fundamental truth that they all point to remains unchanged: all is One.
The Unity of the Three Truths
Whenever we see an object, we almost always see its three truths: dliged, comartha, and oentu. The proportions change dependent upon the perspective of the viewer and the nature of the object, but they are omnipresent in much the same way that space and time are. To perceive is to see dliged, comartha, and oentu.
Accepting that dliged and comartha are simultaneously present is not a radical proposition. It’s less obvious that we also always perceive oentu. In an earlier chapter on God and Gods: The Union of Mono- and Polytheism, we discussed how the one and the many are already intrinsic to how we experience the world. When we look at a massive oak on the crest of a hill, we perceive it as both a singular object and as being composed of many parts, such as branches, leaves, roots, bark, etc. The apprehension of the oak’s unity, of it being a single thing, is oneness, all-be-it of a less majestic variety than that celebrated by mystics. Oneness is not some recondite experience available only to monks who meditate ceaselessly atop the Himalayas. It’s very ordinary and already present in the fabric of everyone’s experience.
here are degrees of realization, but that is not exclusive to oneness. You might look at a fan turning its head back and forth and only faintly understand the dliged behind it. Why does the fan generate cool air? Who produced the fan? What parts are included? How has the fan changed over time? What will the newest generation of fans be like? There are an infinite series of questions before you, many of which you’ll never know the answer to. The more intellectually familiar you become with an object, the more clearly its dliged will appear to you.
The cormatha of the fan also possesses unplummable depths and angles. You might absorb yourself in the vivid experience of its presence — although I do hope that you find better things to meditate on than household electronic devices, but the psychic content of a fan is as multifaceted as its intellectual content. Among the Amish, it is a symbol of decadence and modernity. Among a poor family in Connacht, it is a beacon of hope, the promise of even greater comforts and opportunities secured by wealth. If that fan is a century old and was your grandfather’s, it is an icon of the pioneering spirit that fled to California during the Great Depression and turned his life around — creating the wealth that you enjoy today.
The fan, as symbol, is promiscuous and possesses endless facets, most of which we will never fathom. The few aspects we do seize onto come to inhabit much as Lugh inhabits a statue. Through repetition, through rituals sublime and profane, through the object impressing itself again and again upon our hearts, through stories shared over meals and read in the privacy of one’s study, the psychic saturates the material.
Oentu is equally vast and plastic. Pagans typically rush to imagine a universal, all-encompassing oneness that annihilates all differences, but that is a fraction of what the concept covers. There is the oneness that emerges from a lifetime of companionship with a dog. There is the oneness of an organization, when everyone is zeroed in and marching towards a singular goal. There is the oneness of painting, when a man’s sense of self vanishes and the brush moves of its own accord. All are contained within the umbrella of oentu.
Examples of the Three Truths
Thus far, our treatment of the truths has been abstract. Now, let us get concrete and particular to move our understanding from concept into flesh.
We’ll look at three examples of the three truths in action to do just that:
- Your childhood home.
- A sunrise.
- A laptop.
Your Childhood Home
Imagine that you just pulled up to the home that you once passed your childhood in. If you grew up in several, pick one that sticks out the most to you. You step out onto the sidewalk, plant your hands on your hips, and take the sight in. You notice the new clay roof, the cypresses along the fence, the scent of lavender and freshly cut grass, how the air hums in the afternoon. Memories and feelings gush through your head and heart, floating up to the surface and expelling their energy through sinew and flesh.
Dliged
The dliged is, first, the raw, sensuous experience of the home. The red of the front door. The carefully trimmed bushes along the front of the yard. The labrador barking in the distance. In this frame, you experience your former home clinically, dispassionately observing its features like a forensic pathologist dissecting a corpse.
Next follows the theoretical understanding. You deduce that the new owners must be well-off and squared away, since the property is so well-managed. You estimate the cost of the property given the neighborhood and the home’s size and quality. You wonder who owns the home and what their story is. Out of curiosity, you pull out a few envelopes from their mailbox and scan them over — cell phone and utility bills, advertisements from travel companies, a Democratic party donor request. You begin to piece together the character of both the place and the occupants from these disparate facts.
Cormatha
The cormatha is the raw emotion of seeing that property. The memories of playing in the sprinklers with your best friend, Ryan, on hot summer days, drinking lemonade on the front porch, and your mom yelling at you to not spray the passing cars. Images bubble up in the yard and on the porch. The uncanny feeling of this place being both familiar and alien, of being both welcome and hostile, impress themselves upon you.
The cormatha is not limited to old memories. The present home exerts itself upon you as well. In the precisely trimmed plants, the blemishless lawn, and the pristine patio, you sense its sterility and order. An artificial equipoise that simultaneously entices and revolts you. It feels too perfect. Too ordered. Too contained.
In preparation for an upcoming tea ceremony, a Japanese tea master ordered his disciple to sweep the grounds surrounding the hut. After hours of sweeping in the heat, the disciple returned to his master and informed him that his task was done. The master got up and walked to the hut to inspect his work. He knitted his brow in disapproval and scanned over the scene, carefully studying each feature. “This won’t do,” he declared. “What did I do wrong?” the student bristled, “it’s perfectly clean — everything is in order.” The master walked over to a maple twisting away from the hut and gave it a shake, loosening a few red leaves onto the grass. “There,” he said and returned to his study. This home lacks scattered leaves, and its perfection raises your suspicions and mars your delight.
All these feelings, symbols, and tales simmering in the body, heart, and space are its cormatha.
Oentu
Old memories and tales stretch you decades into the past while shrinking you down into an infinitesimal point in time. Shrinking, this life is little more than drops of dew clinging to grass. Twenty years gone by are but a flash of lightning. Utterly insignificant, you melt into the background that envelopes you. The ants crawling across the fence. The clouds soaring overhead. A few cars parked on the street. Ultimately, there is no separation.
You also expand into your own largesse. The worries that felt like mountains shrink into mounds of dust. You are no longer defined by whatever crises or failures haunt you. You are more ancient, venerable, and vast than you have given yourself credit for. In that expanse of time you occupy, a long, unbroken thread of “I,” your burdens lighten and freedom rushes forth through the lacunae.
Nostalgia has disarmed you and pulled you into two competing poles. Made porous, you measure just how diaphonous the borders between things are.
A Sunrise
It’s the last day of a two-week trip through Killarney National Park. You spent the early morning brewing a pot of coffee and admiring the slopes of the surrounding mountains. Easing into a foldable chair, Muckross Lake stretches to the west and rises into an austere mountain tapering to the heavens. Dawn cracks the darkness with a band of white. Pinks and purples bloom on the horizon. The sun soars over the ridge, and shadows crawl over the campsite. The waters glitter. Awe wipes clear all thought and anxiousness. For a moment, all is as it should be.
Dliged
The sensuality of a sunrise is secondary to its feeling and presence. A childhood home revisited is psychically loaded, but images and sounds pierce the nostalgia and soften its emotional force. The door is repainted bright red. The old trees out back are gone, and the space of the sky and garden punctuates their absence. The stucco on the wall has been sanded off and replaced with faux stonework. The newfound landscape forces you to reckon with it as both a physical object and as a cormatha.
A sunrise does not lend itself so readily to the dliged. How many, upon witnessing a beautiful sunrise, have thought to themselves, “This is a perfect time to think about the sun!”? A sunrise lulls the heart into serenity. It throws the narrow categories of the senses and the conceptual webs we’ve spun around them into disarray. Explaining dawn through the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind can never do the moment justice. It operates beyond the ken of these faculties, dictating movements registered at a distance, just as the moon’s presence generates waves in the ocean.
Since the event defies the senses, a picture of a sunrise will always feel anemic compared to the real thing. Dawn is all-encompassing. The air buzzes. The blood and bones hum. Inscrutable energies impress themselves upon the body and mind. The shift in the sounds, colors, and textures confirms the change rather than causes it, recording a simultaneous stirring and settling.
If you could escape from the sun’s seduction, you might begin to appreciate it as a natural phenomenon. You begin to notice the colors, the temperature of the air rising, and the new sounds of the forest not as objects with some lofty significance but as data to be gathered for your report. The observations generate a series of questions: Why are the sunrises so much more spectacular at a high elevation? Why does the sky turn into the colors of dawn at dawn? How is it that the mere shift in light excites the body and mind so much?
Alongside these questions, facts picked up in science class hover on the surface. It would take 330,000 earths to match the mass of this giant now floating over the peaks. Even at that scale, this star is but one of trillions upon trillions of stars drifting through space and dawning over innumerable planets and moons.
The spell of the sunrise is broken. You behold the daybreak through the eyes of the dliged, contemplating it as an objective, empirical, and rational event.
Cormatha
At the site of your childhood home, the visual sense dominated. A sunrise is far richer in its sensual delights. A new set of birds rises to greet the dawn. You sigh as you feel the warming of the earth relieve your cold-reddened hands, toes, and nose. Green saturates the leaves. The air is crisp as it passes through your nose and lungs. These are not cold facts. They glow. They suffuse your heart with a sense of hope and anticipation, with the endless possibilities on the cusp of day.
The power of the moment is heightened by its place in the Western mythos. Dawn marks the triumph of heroes over the forces of evil. It reminds protagonists to cleave onto hope. It brims with youth and the cheer of childhood. In The Iliad and many a war memoir, it is a tiny miracle at the end of a long night on edge. They have survived to fight another day. You have survived to fight another day.
Sitting beside the lake, you settle into the magnitude of the moment and all these symbols and senses wash over you. You feel the weeks of seclusion, immersed in the hallowed halls of nature, crashing down. The intensity of the moment, the inscrutable transformations accumulated over the days, the ecstasy of possibility — all rise to the fore as Helios glides over the mountains and basks the world in his light.
Oentu
Dawn’s potency derives from its immersion. A childhood home can be viewed from a comfortable distance. Even if you see the place as contiguous with yourself, it’s difficult to shake the sense that you’re looking at an object out there through which you are briefly passing.
Dawn is total. It is more than the mere changing of the guard in the firmament. The color of the leaves emerge from their slumber. Birds stir and sing. The chorus of nocturnal insects hum to silence and the diurnal one’s rise to replace them. The temperature, the quality of the air, the wind. Everything around you changes. As the environment changes, so do you.
You might not register it consciously, but you are in concert with the sky. At these liminal moments, the self softens as we viscerally recognize how embedded we are in where we are. In our smallness, we glimpse the grandeur that we are inseparable from.
A Laptop
You snatch your laptop as you rush out of your home to head off to work. As you slam the door behind you, your trusty companion slides into the passenger seat. Your eyes run over its frame, checking it for any damage. The sleek case. The logo imprinted on the back. The mottle of mysterious liquids. The shallow scratches. The chipped paint at its edges. “It’s fine,” you reassure yourself before noting that you need to give it a good clean when you get back to the office.
Dliged
Tools lean heavily towards dliged. We use them for what they do rather than for how they make us feel or their ability to melt the barrier between self and other. As you look at the notebook, a list of tasks rush through your mind. The email to a client that you’ve yet to send. A presentation later in the day. The cracked screen that you’ve been putting off repairing for weeks now. Switching back to the road, your mind scuttles over the day, forming plans, anticipating what to say, and weighing each word in your upcoming email.
What you do observe in its form is also task-related. The chipping on the edges betrays its age and the potential costs that wait not so far down the road. The cracked screen is a cautionary tale: never leave your laptop unattended with cats. And each time you flip on the computer, it’s more tasks: finding the right documents, writing up reports, and whatever else your boss has commanded you to complete.
A byproduct of the objectification of tools is that the laptop feels more concrete and thingy (a technical philosophical term) than objects with more psychic weight, like a childhood home or a statue of Taranis. Highly psychic objects feel luminous, ethereal, and energetic. They quiver and sing. Laptops, pens, knives, and other instruments feel heavy and dense. They lie squarely in the empirical world — a world of cold, hard items stripped of magic.
Cormatha
Laptops are not without psychic content. Imagine returning home from the gym knowing that there’s a 50-slide presentation awaiting completion. The laptop sitting on the kitchen counter menaces you, like a demon staring at you from the shadows.
This morning, sat on the passenger seat, the laptop scintillates with anxiety and seriousness. A feeling cultivated over years of working for your corporate overlords. These feelings are grounded in the myths you have about your work. The tales do not bubble forth from the recesses of the memory and into conscious thought — that is, unless you’ve had a recent catastrophe on the job. Rather, they exert a pull beyond your ken. The myth of that one really, really bad project you sent in to your boss that nearly got you fired. The cumulative stress built up after years of rushing to meet deadline after deadline and the added uncertainty of whether it will pass muster. Late nights with a cigarette hanging from your lips and a cup of tepid coffee on the desk as you grind away. Burnouts and that lingering feeling that you don’t want to care but are afraid of letting go. These tales infuse the laptop with their presence. As they saturate the case, they burn and twist in your guts.
Oentu
Annoying, technical objects do a poor job of breaking down barriers of self and other. In fact, they have the opposite effect. Instruments obscure oneness because they present the mind with crisply defined objects. Few of us confuse ourselves for a dresser or broom.
The instrumentalization of our environment carries with it a hidden cost. It subtly instills within its residents an ossified duality, obscuring both the realm of cormatha and oentu, and leaving them with a husk of hard, cold things. Unsurprisingly, corporate environments are so hostile to the human spirit, for they reduce everything to function.
There is one big caveat here. When you return to your office, open your laptop, and throw yourself into writing that email, instrumentalism falls away. Rather than using the laptop, the creative act merges you and the tool into an undifferentiated whole. You are in the zone, and the walls between self and object briefly vanish.
Reestablishing the Three Truths
Modern culture has collapsed all truths into either one of two extremes: the dliged or the cormatha. The rationalist cadavers are hyper-aware of the dliged but rarely register the cormatha and oentu. Rather than living in the ecstasy of existence that is common to animals, they live in a hard, aloof, and alien world. In turn, they come to act as robotic and dull as their vision of the world.
The banshees of feeling suffer a similar fate, only they prize the cormatha over and above all else. The world is filtered through symbols and the emotional responses they elicit. Reason is sidelined for authenticity and what feels good or right. The oentu lies slightly closer to the banshee, yet it remains out of reach. Behind the complex matrixes of symbols, the banshee fails to grasp the inner unity. Rather, like a schizophrenic, it is but a wall of inscrutable chaos impelling them onwards. Ungrounded in dliged and lacking the evenness of oentu, the banshees turn into madmen driven by reactions rather than sense and the ease of unity.
Individuals are naturally drawn to different truths. Mystics bolt after the one like a hunting dog after a hare. Artists long for the stimulation and depth of the symbolic. The scientist and philosopher seek the clear, ordered vision of reason. These natural propensities only become destructive when they are pursued at the exclusion of all else. A myopic man is a blind man, no matter how finely attuned his working eye is.
Pagans should train themselves to see all three truths. As you go throughout your day, tune into these different senses. Don’t analyze what you’re experiencing or paper it over with the stories you’ve been told (even my own). Simply see how you really experience the world.
You’ll discover (if you aren’t aware already) that the maps modern Western culture has so persuasively argued for and promoted are nonsense. I grew up being told that my enthusiasm for my grandfather’s army jacket from WWII was “just in my head” or a “subjective experience.” But if you actually look at how you experience a rare family heirloom, the explanation doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. First, the feeling isn’t even in the head. Reverence and wonder ripple through the body like waves through a lake. Second, the feeling also lies in the object itself. The jacket buzzes with wonder.
This might sound like some woo-woo hawked by a hippie at a Grateful Dead concert, but it’s painfully obvious if you look at another example: a hot girl (or guy). When you look upon the woman that turns you on, their hotness is not in your head. It pervades their entire body. They sizzle with sensuality and beauty. Why else would you find them so attractive if all that sexiness is actually embedded within your own mind?
All objects are experienced like this. A statue of a god. An old heirloom from the family. A signed book from a hero. It’s neither just out there nor in here. It’s everywhere. Your guts, your stomach, your eyes. In the feeling itself. Radiating out and basking other objects in its glow. In thoughts and stories beyond the ken of consciousness. It's all that. The hard division between inside and outside, upon honest inspection, collapses.
The porousness of the psychic is not the only realization that awaits. Countless others will present themselves to you should you simply let loose the ideas you’ve accumulated about who you are and what the world is and the more you simply allow reality to speak for itself.
What is of import is to free one’s mind of the prison of myopia. The world is not either/or. It is both/and, and the more we attune ourselves to this truth, like an archer restoring sight to a bad eye, the more truly we’ll hit the mark.