Sometime ago in one of Gordon White's podcasts or other videos, I can't really recall which, he said something as he tends to do that really stuck with me. Gordon was describing how ceremony is part of our sacred responsibility as humans within the greater community of beings that we call Earth and how as magicians, particularly in these modern times, it's our job to intercede on behalf of humanity with the spirits that surround and affect our lives.

The role of magicians, he said, is to be ambassadors for spirit. I really love that framing because it assigns humanity a very important role without committing any overreach. It's enough to be responsible for maintaining relations with the more than human world to keep our human existence imbalance, and for the last several hundred years, if not more, we've been very neglectful of these duties.

From an animist perspective, which I know isn't quite the right thing to say, but I'm not sure that the right way to say this exists yet; so you know what I mean. Anyway, from an animist perspective, the universe and everything in it is alive, autonomous, and in some sense intelligent. And underneath this truth is an even greater truth; that we're individuals like the cells in our body are individuals, like fungal hyphae are individuals. In one sense, we're separate and another, we're not. We're all part of the same planetary organism. This sameness implies, it requires, interaction -like you and your neighbors. They exist, you exist, and no one's going anywhere.

There is no alternative to sharing and coexisting and attempts to buck the system incur karmic immune responses from the greater organism to which we all belong. Our increasingly materialist, rationalist, society's outright denial of the spiritual, and our inherent interconnectedness, creates incoherence in the field, and by the field, I mean the fabric of shared experience interfacing the layers of reality or dimensions, if you like, which binds us all.

If you've ever had to run in a sack race or even tried to walk holding hands, you'll recognize the challenge of moving as one. But this is precisely what the universe is: a sea of shared experience. Moving together is called coherence, but the king of the universe game that we humans insist on playing is throwing us off balance and also threatens to topple the rest of the community of beings along with us.

Ceremony, stewardship, gratitude, recognition, witnessing and being with these are the sacred duties of humankind. By doing these things, we bring coherence to our shared experience of reality, and this is essential to safeguarding the future, ours and everyone else's. I think that the inclination to do magic in the first place is an attempt to bring your subjective experience of reality into coherence; though most of us probably wouldn't be able to recognize it as such, at first. But it's true whether you're seeking mystical connection, the power to shape the world, or healing for yourself or others, all of it is an attempt to put the world in order. You can't practice magic for any significant amount of time without coming to the realization that it's not about you.

The universe is far bigger and far weirder than can be explained or understood simply and far more haunted than we realize. This impulse to affect the universe -to influence our fate- it comes from feeling out of order and being willing to bend reality to bring it back into alignment. But it's outta whack in the first place because we're going through life unaware of the spiritual wreckage that we're creating, and this is what we desperately need to address through ceremony, stewardship, recognition, and so on.

This is what magic really is, the art and science of negotiating with spirit. And I use the singular here deliberately because Spirit is far more nebulous and indistinct than we're accustomed to in 3D physical reality. It's equally valid to say the universe or the other, or even fairies or aliens if you like.

You're not even wrong if you think the answer is angels or demons. The universe tends to respond to you through whatever lens of belief you choose to see it. Situationally, this matters, but generally it doesn't. I can't honestly tell if the jungle spirits I engage with prefer to be thought of as nature spirits, Fae, or genus loci. It doesn't really matter in practice. The point is that when you make efforts to engage with the universe through prayers, offerings, ritual, and magic, it responds and things get interesting. Even amateurish attempts tend to be rewarded with confidence boosting early successes, and I'd say this from personal experience.

The other is waiting and eager for you to engage. In this episode, I'm going to discuss various practices of spiritual engagement, particularly in relationship to the natural world and how as humans and especially as magicians, we have a sacred responsibility to bring coherence to the field through ceremony, ritual, and by acknowledging and expressing gratitude for the life and contributions of the more than human world around us.

And I'll share some of my own experiences with attracting spiritual allies, forming relationships with them, and maintaining those relationships over the course of a long-term project. Stay tuned for all of that in just a moment.

Welcome to the sixth episode of The Postmugglism Podcast. My name is Nathan, aka Postmugglism, and this is my show. If you're a regular listener, my deepest gratitude goes out to you for being with me on this journey. And if this is your first time to tune in, I'm really glad that you're here and I hope that you enjoy this episode.

If you do, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, or I'm also on YouTube if that's better for you. And since I'm trying hard to grow this podcast and get in front of more people, I'm not above begging you to share this with a friend who'll appreciate it as well. So thanks for helping me get the word out.

In this episode, I'll pull together ideas from Gordon White of Rune Soup, as I mentioned, and Eduardo Kohn's book, How Forests Think, as well as Claude LeCouteux's, Demons and Spirits of the Land, and some stuff I learned in my shamanic training from The Four Winds Institute, plus my own experiences with dirt sorcery over the last few years is my family began our adventure with the spirits of the Yucatan Jungle.

As always, links to all of those materials are included in the show description, wherever you're listening or watching this episode. What makes communication so uniquely challenging as you first try to reach out to the spiritual world is that you have to stretch beyond the boundaries of perspective into territory that's truly incomprehensible to humans.

What do I mean by the boundaries of perspective? I mean the limits of your subjective reality where it has to interact with the subjective realities of other beings. To understand this confusing idea, we have to wrap our minds around the concept of perspectivism. And what is perspectivism? Well, according to Miriam Webster's Dictionary, it's defined as a "complex of interacting interpretive processes in which every entity views every entity and event from an orientation peculiar to itself,", or more simply "the consciousness of different points of view", as in the awareness that we all humans and non-humans alike, view life through a uniquely peculiar lens. Our. To greatly oversimplify the idea, I mean that it's difficult to understand the messages, much less the motivations of spirit because the metaphorical language of their communication is obtuse and unfamiliar to us; their logic is irrational from our point of view, our perspective. Given that Nietzche coined this term and many people find Nietzche intolerably triggering, I think it's worth adding that a number of other important thinkers contributed to the corpus of perspectivist thought. And hey, even Nietzche gets things right, in the broadest strokes, sometimes.

Notably, Jose Ortega adapted the idea by envisioning a sort of a shared collective of experiential awareness, which sounds a lot like a God consciousness.  and I can dig it. Regardless, the core of perspectivism is that every living being, and from an animous perspective, this means every thing perceives and interprets the universe subjectively through the lens of their experience; nature, nurture, and learned experience together. The edges of consensus reality become fuzzy even between human beings, so just imagine what Gulf of experiential understanding lies between us and the rest of the more than human. Across cultural relations between human peoples can provide examples of these types of issues when translating intention across barriers like language, tradition, and social dynamics.

One can only imagine how difficult it must be for nature spirits to understand our uniquely unnatural behavior. And it's no easier on our end of the conversation either. In my experience, spirits are consistently unhelpful when it comes to human style planning, like trying to prepare in advance, coordinating timing, and so on.

I suspect that this is because time is perceived very differently by spirits. When I've tried asking questions like, "When is such and such going to happen?" I get answers like "after a new moon" or "when the problem at hand has been resolved". Super unhelpful, stuff like that, but it's also accurate in a mostly incomprehensible way.

Negotiating with spirits is far more complicated than negotiating with other people because their motivations are opaque to us and the logic is just fundamentally weird from our perspective. This is what makes spirit communication initially challenging. Most people can't even recognize it when it's happening because it's nothing like communication between humans or even a human talking to an animal.

It's much closer to a human talking to a tree or to the wind. Both are possible, but it's a learned skill, and this is why magicians are on the hook for this work. Only the magically operant have the tools to navigate such negotiations. And at all times in history, a minority of spiritually minded people who are already a minority of the general population have felt called to this type of work and are motivated to learn its arcane techniques.

Perspectivism, or more precisely the ability to transcend one's perspective and in some small way gain understanding of the other and their needs, motivations, and so on -specifically how to appeal to them- is an essential skill for us ambassadors for spirit. In the book "How Forest Think", author and anthropologist, Eduardo Kohn, broadly explains the cosmology of the Avila Runa of Amazonian Ecuador as being a series of nested frameworks (my words), where the animal world is within the human world, which is within the spiritual world, or in Kohn's words, the realm of the game masters, the spiritual guardians and caretakers of the forest. In the perspective of the animals, the jungle is home and the humans are apex predators or masters. In the perspective of humans, the jungle is where resources come from, where animals live, and where other predators and the jungle spirits are masters and guardians.

And in the perspective of the jungle spirits, the forest is a garden, the animals are in a zoo, jaguars are their guard dogs, and humans are basically smart apes that ought to know how to live in harmony with their environment. He also relates a story about perspectivism between jaguars and humans of when he was staying overnight in the jungle and was told to sleep face up so that the jaguars would recognize him as a person instead of as meat.

This should remind us how important it is to have your personhood recognized. The premise of "How Forests Think" is that forest life is so incomprehensible to Westerners that we can scarcely expect to study and understand it anthropologically without accounting for our natural bias towards our own framework of mind.

This is true of course, but more crucial to the point that I'm making here, is that to move from scientific observation to spiritual engagement, we have to go beyond the observation of the other. Kohn briefly mentions another aspect of the Avila cosmology that I find fascinating, and tangentially useful, relating the story of witnessing one of the families of Avila Bruno, that he spent time with force feeding their family dog psychedelic beer to essentially raise its awareness to the level of humans so that they could communicate with it to break a particularly bad habit.

Their belief being that humans take psychedelics to be able to perceive spirits and spiritual understanding., so a dog taking psychedelics would elevate their consciousness to something closer to our level. I don't think I'll switch over to this method of dog training or anything, but learning this did give me a lot of food for thought. Kohn refers to this method of raising awareness as up framing, and it offers us guidance when navigating outside of a framework that we fully comprehend. Reading from "How Forests Think," "Here, there too is a nested increased ability to interpret as one moves up the hierarchy. Although the Runa can readily understand the meanings of dog vocalizations, dogs can understand human speech only if they're given hallucinogens. Similarly, although we humans need hallucinogens to understand the forest masters, these spirits can readily understand human speech.

The Runa need only talk to them. Runa, in their everyday life, see the game animals that they hunt in the forest as wild animals, but they know that this is not their true manifestation. Seen from the higher perspective of the spirit masters who own and protect these creatures, these animals are really domesticated. Now I'll quibble with the Una on the presumption that humans really understand the perspective of their dogs implicitly, but up-framing is a useful concept to explore. Instead of this almost neoplatonic hierarchy, I tend to assume humans and other physical beings are horizontally arranged rather than hierarchically, at least from the perspective of our spiritual guardians. And this fits a dimensional model as well, where the humans and animals coexist physically and spirits move within the world, invisibly, although they are present in some other sense, some other dimensions.

Nevertheless, up framing gives us a clue as to how to transcend our limited perspective and to share in the perspectives of other beings. If the Spirit Masters comprehend our way of being and also the animal's way of being, and we can through psychedelics or other means of inspiring gnosis share in part in the perspective of the Spirit Masters, then we can likewise tap into the higher awareness to gain understanding of other's perspectives as well.

Nevertheless, up framing gives us a clue as to how to transcend our limited perspective and to share in the perspectives of other beings. If the Spirit Masters comprehend our way of being and also the animal's way of being, and we can, through psychedelics or other means of inspiring gnosis, share in part in the perspective of the Spirit Masters, then we can likewise tap into that higher awareness to gain understanding of other perspectives as well, or said differently by sharing in the collective God.

We can also be given glimpses into the perspectives of any others in the more than human world. Through adjacency observation and being with, we can become more sensitive to the transmission of spiritual feedback. But feedback from what spirits exactly? Who are we engaging with?. It's very difficult to say with any conviction that any magician knows who they're engaging with beyond trusting their intention to do so..

The very premise of invocation or connecting with the spirit in general is to surround yourself with objects and materials of a similar essence to the spirit, and then to bring that essence into your awareness through reciting prayers, hymns, and certain words, for example. So intention is the very means of contact in the first place. With the many names various spirits have taken over the millennia and the many cosmologies in which they take part across the world, there is very little practical value in categorizing or identifying spirits too specifically. In my experience, you get what you call upon because spirit is far more amorphous and indistinct than we're accustomed to encountering in the visible physical world. Spirits, which are beneficial to work with in this vein of repairing the field, bringing yourself into right relationship, establishing yourself in place and so on, include genus loci, land spirits, spirits of place, and so on, fae, which maybe is the same thing, maybe it's different, ancestors and the dead, angels, guides, guardians, your hga and so on, plus the major players like the archetypes, directions and elements, and Pachamama, which is to say Gaia, the sun, the moon, and the Great Spirit. When it comes to plant and animal allies, nature, spirit, spirits of place and so on in the natural world and the archetypes directions, and the mother goddess Pachamama, the best strategy is to simply go into the wild, give offering, and to send your intention in prayers and so forth, and to stay open for responses in return. For other major spirits and deities, prayer and petitioning at astrologically significant times tends to produce the best results. When it comes to the Great Spirit, I like to use an old analogy from my corporate life where I would ask, which is more likely to work, trying to get a meeting with the CEO of a company or the director of the department that's relevant to whatever it is that you need? I prefer to simply send gratitude to the Great Spirit, God, the universe, or whatever you like to call the supreme architect of the universe as the freemasons say, and work magic with the gods and spirits under God.

Our attempts to bring ourselves into right relationship are themselves offerings to the Great Spirit, that totality of divinity and creation, the pleroma, the living cosmos, and so on. By living right, we participate in co-creation and commune with the great spirit simply by our being in coherence. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Postmugglism Podcast. I'm gonna steal just a few minutes of your time before we get back to the show to tell you a little bit about myself and how I earn a living. I'm a shamanic energy healer trained by the Four Winds Institute, a Reiki practitioner, tarot reader, and magical consultant. I love working with fellow witches, wizards, magicians, or whatever you call yourself, and I find that people like you tend to like working with me as well because it's nice to be able to talk about your beliefs, your practice, and your magical aspirations without feeling crazy.

Often in the pursuit of magic in our lives, we discover parts of ourselves that need work to free ourselves from self-limiting thoughts and other baggage. And at other times, chronic problems with our health can interfere with our goals and our practice. Energy healing can be very helpful in situations like these.

So if any of this is resonating with you, please reach out to me at nathan@sacredserpent.co. Or you can also check out my shamanic practice online, and even book a session with me there, anywhere in the world over zoom at www.sacredserpent.co. That's dot co not dot com. SacredSerpent.co.. Alright, thanks for letting me share that bit of info, now back to episode six, "Ambassadors For Spirit." I've mentioned generally that our sacred responsibilities as humans living here in the Garden of Eden include ceremony, stewardship, gratitude, recognition, witnessing and being with at least. But what are our specific responsibilities?. The answer of course, depends on how you live, what you consume, and so on.

But there are some universals. We all breathe the air. We feel the sun on our faces, the solid ground under our feet, and slate our thirst with cool water. Acknowledging the elements, directions, and so on, the sun and moon, plants and animals, insects, fungi and microbiota, and one's own ancestors. Everyone should do this on the regular.

Magicians, on the other hand, negotiate all kinds of relationships: devotional, magical, pacts for various workings or long-term commitments, and so on. Each carry an energetic contract, a connection of sorts, which facilitates communication. Each should be tended in some way that denotes them as special and sacred.

And all of this, in addition to the universal practices that I mentioned a moment ago, of course. Land stewardship may be the most important of our responsibilities. It's certainly one of the most complicated and also seems to be one of the most neglected of our sacred duties right up there with ancestor veneration.

The imbalance or karmic debt, if you will, of our relationship with the Earth is tremendous. People who own land, or perhaps belong to it, have entered into a sacred relationship with place and its spirits, which is to say a small piece of the great mother, Pachamama, and the nature spirits residing locally. Being the human or humans that live on a piece of land places its stewardship in your care.

We know the truth in this in our bones because human beings are the only creatures that can help nature work her magic. Other creatures can build habitat like the beaver bird, spider, and so on. But so far as we know, only humans have the capacity to learn the magic of nature, to sustain her creations and to help them flourish.

We can because we must. It is our essential nature. Before any real work can be done though, you have to establish contact with your local spirits, and for that, I suggest you listen to episode five, the Spiritual Gift Economy, where I talk about how offerings (gifts) are a universal contact protocol. I've included a link to this episode in the show description as well if you're interested. When it comes to working with spirits of place, this requires more than small gestures like making land acknowledgements and favoring native indigenous plants.

We need to interact directly and involve these spirits in every aspect of our efforts with the land. Fortunately, history provides us many clues to follow as we experiment with this process and navigate the complexities of spiritual engagement. One of my favorite magical historians, Claude LeCouteux, wrote a book called Demons and Spirits of the Land, which I've mentioned before on the show.

The book compiles and compares a wealth of medieval literature and lore about land spirits, Fae and other supernatural beings, and how humans have historically managed coexistence with them. In the book, LeCouteux provides a rough outline of the process of gaining permission to build on land, particularly wild or undeveloped land.

It's a fascinating journey replicated across cultures and time to the point that it can be loosely considered a technique. First, a Divinatory method is used to identify the appropriate place. Offering this up to randomness is key to allow the gods and spirits to weigh in. Next offerings are given in thanks to the spirits who led you to the land and to the benefit of the land as well.

And personally, I recommend continuing this as a regular, ongoing practice. After expressing gratitude, it's also essential to mark the bounds or boundaries circumambulating the property border, in a ritual designed to carve the space out of the wilds, separating it from the spaces governed and guarded by the spirits.

Fire was traditionally used, but suffumigation is a less risky alternative and worked just as well for me. You could also ritually cut the boundaries with an iron blade. By marking the bounds, you're taking responsibility for care of the land and for its protection. Now protective rights are also your responsibility and should be kept up periodically.

Next, sticking to the practice of appeasing the local spirits first before any humans involved, the next step is to construct a home for the spirits on the land, a dedicated space, preferably in a protected wild area, where a Spirit House is constructed and dedicated to the purpose. Constructing buildings for humans repeats several of these themes again for the area of construction, namely, allowing the spot to present itself, giving offering, and circumambulating and marking the bounds. Two additional steps are also added in: enclosing the space and making a sacrifice of a living being as a final payment to the spirit for the right to build on the land.

It's worth noting that the animal does not have to be killed outright per se, but dedicated to the purpose and can be allowed to die a natural death. While this sums up the process of acquiring and settling the land, it is of course not the end of the matter. Regular offerings and prayers should be kept up to maintain the relationship and for the magically operant, it's also a good idea to maintain open lines of communication to address any issues that arise.

Implicit in what I've just described is a process of taking on certain responsibilities and this resembles and is effectively the same as signing a contract in our modern world. These spiritual agreements are often implicit, binding us to certain spiritual debts by virtue of the resources or energy that we consume. Just existing on Earth, which our higher selves deliberately decided to do, in some sense assigns us certain responsibilities by virtue of our participation and drawing from the energy of the field, as beings do, like a metaphysical social contract.

By our actions and our choices, we sign on to other spiritual agreements in the course of living, which we then must carry, sometimes for a time, sometimes until we take some action, and sometimes for our entire life or even many lifetimes. Other spiritual agreements are deliberate. They're entered into with full awareness and intention for the purpose of securing some form of benefit or support from spirits, in exchange for the same. We call these pacts and, though they've gotten a bad rap from the amateur demonologist of the world, it's no riskier to make a deliberate pact with a spirit than an unintentional one, which we do throughout our lives without realizing it. I've heard many, obviously more timid magicians, discourage people from entering into pacts with spirits because of the consequences.

But the risk is not so much that the spirits will trick you, but that you will set yourself up for failure by carelessly signing on for more than you can handle. So like with any important decision, you should enter into a pact with spirits in full awareness and after careful consideration, prayer, and probably divination as well.

How precisely you ritualize entering into a contract with Spirit is up to you. There is no right way, and like all things magical, it's mostly about intention. When designing a ritual, it's useful to consider how you'll convey your intention through words, actions, and metaphor. It's also a good idea to iterate through the specifics of what you're offering and what you want to receive from Spirit in return before ever beginning the ritual. Think of this like a diplomatic negotiation where the details of a treaty are outlined well in advance of the signing ceremony. In our case, we wrote a simple two line agreement, signed it and put it in the jar of jungle dirt that we keep on our altar. We did this with great ceremony, of course, but the negotiations had all taken place long before the actual moment we officially entered into the agreement.

Our agreement outlined our role and what we're petitioning the spirits to provide. We offered stewardship, meaning the dedication of time and resources to increase the biodiversity of the land and helping all of its life to flourish, and we offered to consult with them in any major decisions and to involve them in our design and planning process.

In return, we asked for their blessing, permission, and protection, and the protection of any visitors, workers, et cetera, and their support in navigating the process of acquiring the land, building on it, and transforming it into a cultivated forest and our sanctuary. Of course one is reliant on their internal processes to validate this experience, to confirm that the spirits are indeed in agreement and committing to their part of the deal, but this is just how spirit communication works. It's never straightforward and it requires discernment and validation. The proof is in the results. Our results were immediate and enduring right from the start. We've been blessed with trustworthy people to work with, an extremely patient and helpful seller, neighbors and workers that are helpful and happy to educate us, many of which speak just enough English to make up for my terrible Spanish.

I recently built a road four meters across and about 200 meters long through the jungle for the equivalent of about $3,000 uS with the help of Eduardo, our Mexican neighbor who owns the adjacent lot. I met him one day when I was out at the property making our regular offerings, and he sought me out to see if I wanted to split the cost of a road, a gate, and an electrical transformer; some of the most challenging and expensive aspects of the project ahead. This type of good fortune isn't typical. It's hard to do a lot of things as a foreigner in Mexico, I've been trying to set up a bank account for three months, but we built a road in four days and our journey has been full of stories like this.

Not everything is easy, far from it, but nothing has been difficult either, and what we're doing isn't simple or straightforward. We have no doubt that our good fortune is a result of our spiritual allies and how much energy that we've put into those relationships. So what happens if you don't maintain these relationships, you get lazy or forgetful, or abandon those practices once you get what you want out of the deal? For the answer to that question, we need only look at the modern world. Many projects encounter bad luck and delays. Sometimes people are injured and projects often go over budget due to accidents and mistakes and so on.

And few projects in the modern world are undertaken without significant damage to the environment and the spoiling of whatever life was there previously. This in itself is a great loss, and when taking an aggregate across the globe, it adds up to defamed polycrisis, bemoaned by the globalists so loudly.

But unfortunately for both of them and us, no amount of solutionistic interventions are going to solve the underlying metaphysical problem, our disordering and imbalancing of reality or dis-cohering, if I can be permitted to invent a word for this purpose. Moving out of right relationship causes systemic imbalance, which the cosmos attempts to correct by making often harsh adjustments. Like skin pushing out a splinter, pressure and inflammation build up in the wound until it washes itself clean.

In our subjective experience, this can be quite unfortunate, so it's very important to clean up after oneself energetically, to replenish what is used, and to give in greater percentage to what you take. It's not hard to slip out of right relationship either. We have very bad habits with regards to spirit and fighting the internal programming of materials rational and those progressive as tendencies of the Western framework of mind is not easy to.

it's almost inevitable that you'll make a mistake, commit a minor offense at least. While trying to avoid any major issues, minor ones can usually be resolved with a little humility and a willingness to adjust. This happens in the course of doing business with spirits. Course correcting is a natural part of the process.

In my experience, the land spirits, at least, are fairly forgiving and understanding if your intentions are in the right place. But what does that look like? Well, I just so happen to have a good example of this right now as I've begun clearing brush and small trees and having some preliminary work done before construction begins on our land and the jungle spirits recently had some uncomfortable feedback for me. We just completed building a road, like I mentioned, and carving out a circular driveway right up to our property. A few weeks back we had a survey team out on the property drilling holes to test the ground where we want to build the house, and they unceremoniously carved a path through their big drill, a few hundred feet through the jungle.

It's been quite a busy time on the property recently, and there have been a fair number of small trees cut down or bulldozed in the process. It pales in comparison to what's ahead. I'm afraid. Heavy machinery, noise and destruction are just part of the process, but before this recent work, no one had disturbed this undeveloped land for any, many years. I check in regularly with our jungle spirits to pay tribute and make sure that everyone is comfortable with what's going on, and that they feel like we're holding up our end of the bargain. Most of the time I get a pretty chill vibe, maybe a positive feeling if we're making progress or if it's just been raining in the jungle is happy.

But after the road was built, I stopped by our sacred tree to leave offerings and check in as I do, and the response was quite different. Instead of calm, quiet, or positive vibes, I felt a hesitancy or a sort of reserved awkwardness like, like someone needed to tell me something, but they weren't quite sure how to say it.

Sitting quietly for a few moments, I got the impression that the spirits were concerned about an imbalance of life and death, not so much on the property as in the project itself. I think they weren't so much offended as trying to offer me guidance as I've often requested. But it still stumped me and I wasn't sure how to process the messages I was receiving.

I wondered for a moment if this was my own guilt talking because of the recent damage I'd caused, but I didn't really feel like that was the case since I was, I was pretty proud of myself for managing the project and for knocking this big to-do off of my pre-construction list. So I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

Plus, as is law here in Quintana Roo, we didn't take down any large old trees, just the new growth that mostly wouldn't have lived long enough to become adult trees anyway. The jungle is thick with brush; you can cut a lot down and it'll grow back very quickly, as long as you don't disturb the soil or kill the mother trees (those trees that draw the moisture up to the surface with their deep roots). Obviously building a road disturbs the soil where the road goes and disturbs the microclimate by exposing it to direct sun, but the clearing of the brush I've been doing on our actual property is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

It's also unavoidable because we're eventually going to be building in the places where I've been cutting. Eventually a larger road will be built where I just built a road. The way it works here in Mexico is that the government doesn't get involved until long after there's a good reason to do so. If the residents of an area like this want a road to get built, they're allowed to build roads where the municipality and the local ejido (an assembly of indigenous families have been granted large swaths of land decades ago), outlined in their mutual development plans.

So if the ejido is good with you building a road where one has been designated, you can build a road. All our ducks were in a row. The land was already designated for this purpose, and we were as gentle as we could be, considering, so I felt relatively justified, but this idea of imbalance stuck with me unpleasantly, and so I thank the spirits for their guidance and promise to work to understand and address their concerns.

Obviously, those concerns are inconvenient and difficult to work around in a modern construction. But I can't afford to ignore the input of our jungle spirit, so I had to find out how to bring balance to the project, as well as make sure that I understood all of their message in the first place. The problem is that there's not a lot that I can do to add life to the property at the moment, or even really in the very near future, because we don't live there and we don't have a water supply yet, and it would be irresponsible.

So taking real tangible steps towards adding life isn't really in the cards. But as I mentioned in episode five, the spiritual gift economy, even purely symbolic gifts are meaningful and a genuine gesture of recognition and appreciation will go a long way towards right relationship. Thus, offerings should be a part of my response, but that wasn't quite it either.

The spirits weren't telling me that I'm doing something wrong by building the road or clearing out brush and small trees ahead of construction. All of that is inevitable. What they're telling me is that, for my own sake, I need to take a moment to acknowledge all of the life that has died in the process, recognize that contribution and demonstrate gratitude, and eventually I will need to replace the life to offset the life debt that we're creating in this process.

But that's always been the idea. After leaving my offering, I went back to working on the property and I immediately started thinking about fire management for some reason. I didn't put it together at first that this was another message, I just thought, logistically, I need all this brush outta the way. I don't want to house insects or pests, or to have a fire hazard in the dry summer months that are coming up.

So I started stacking rocks, building a giant fire pit in the middle of the area where we're going to build the house. A few days later, I was listening to a recent room soup episode, and something caught my attention with that spooky sense of mystical awareness. The guest, Harmony Cronin was talking about the praxis of hunting in right relationship and of the importance of witnessing the life and death story of the beings around us, particularly when we're in some kind of a stewardship relationship.

That idea of witnessing life and death as having its own value and importance in the cosmos as being essential to the coherence of that experience for all parties is beautiful and powerful and gave me the perspective I needed to understand why it was that I started building that fire pit. What I realized is that I needed to conduct fire ceremonies, both to clean up the downed wood that I'd created, and also to recognize and show gratitude for the life that had ended to make our progress possible.

Finally, as I was starting to write this episode, I went to my trusty Tarot de Marseille deck to validate the messages I'd received and to check for blind spots in my thinking. I did this with a series of tarot readings by asking direct questions. First I asked, "Will shifting from cutting to fire ceremonies and despachos, or big offerings, address the imbalance of life and death in the jungle project and satisfy the jungle spirits?"

And the answer was no, for various reasons. To clarify, I then asked, "Do the spirits agree that I should do ceremonies and despachos?", and I got it very strong yes. So I wasn't completely off base, I was just missing some of the context. So I asked, do they want me to stop cutting for now? And I got a yes response, but the spread gave me the impression that I was still missing something.

So I followed up with another question. "Do they want me to conserve as much jungle as possible for now and wait for inspiration?" meaning inspiration from the spirits and the jungle. This got a very strong confirmation, but just to be sure I did a final spread for the question. "Do I understand the full message from the spirits now?" and got another strong confirmation.

See, this is why I frequently rely on tarot to navigate more complex interactions with spirits where I feel like I'm potentially missing some part of the picture. The visual language of tarot and my familiarity with it makes it easier to sort out the spirit logic with a combination of broad and then narrow yes / no questions. If nothing else, it's easy to eliminate the wrong answers with tarot, and that's still pretty useful. What does all of this mean for our land and our project? Well, as I've said, I started constructing a fire pit and this feels like the right direction to go in moving from cutting to reclaiming, along with the several fire ceremonies that it will take to clean up all the down brush and trees and such.

Despachos, or big offerings, will also be given to the land in lieu of and in promise of the future life that we'll bring to the property after construction. In addition, there is also the matter of doing it my way versus waiting for inspiration. The results of the tarot reading confirm that the spirits want me to stop cutting for now to preserve as much as possible for a more nuanced and delicate approach.

I wasn't gonna continue cutting aggressively, but just to be safe, I'll just shift away from that completely for this next little bit. But more importantly, the spirit's reminded me of a guarantee that I made to them as part of our pact that I would involve them in the design and ideation of any of the projects on the property.

I found the spot where we're going to build the house originally by asking the spirits to show me the right place. So I started this process on the right foot. But somewhere along the way, I got caught up in the need to make progress and the spirits are just reminding me gently to remember to appreciate the process, to take my time and to let the jungle speak creatively, and honestly, this is probably really good advice.

Things are constantly changing and updating in the project. We're making gradual progress finally so I doubt we'll be on pause for long, but I totally understand and respect the vibes that I'm getting from the jungle spirits, and I have plenty to keep me busy bringing this project back into balance and right relationship.

I benefit far too much from the allyship of these spirits to ignore them, and I know our project would suffer from such an oversight. More importantly, the point of our project of building sanctuary in the jungle in the first place is to move ourselves towards right relationship. So this is just part of doing business with spirits.

Diplomacy (ambassadorship) is often a complex matter trying to balance the goals of parties, which don't necessarily share the same contexts or values. And as ambassadors, we can't allow ourselves the convenience of self-centered thinking. We must acknowledge and seek to understand the needs and motivations of the other often without the benefit of a clear explanation, which brings us back around to per protectivism and why it is so key.

Gods and spirits aren't here to entertain you or just to be conjured for your magical purposes. The spiritual beings that you work with are alive, intelligent, and motivated to their own ends. Where those ends overlap with ours, we can collaborate and there seems to be very good reasons to do so. Both sides can benefit from and recognize the fact, but the process is not without its cultural complexities and must be navigated with caution, care, and a receptive but discerning mind.

That's why this path isn't for everyone. Everyone should acknowledge the spiritual pay tributes to local spirits and so on. It all helps to strengthen the field, but the deeper work of identifying spiritual imbalance and working with spirits to negotiate coexistence, support and protection, blessings, and so on, this is the work of magicians, shamans, and spiritualists. I have a feeling that as society moves further into the despair of decline, more and more people will abandon the cold dead reality of materialist rationalism and at least open their minds to the possibility of a magical cosmos. Magic can thrive in the shadows of the unexplained, but hides itself from anyone too convinced of its impossibility.

But the future that the religion of science promises is to bleak for humanity to abide; we're built to flourish against the odds. And when we're forced into that situation through our own actions and misunderstanding, we'll realize our mistake and course correct. And in so doing humanity will, person by person, slowly realize that we need magical thinking and irrational optimism; they're part of the secret formula for thriving in this universe. We knew this in earlier times when we either lived closer to the earth or we were more desperate for divine intervention, and we'll know it again. But this doesn't mean that everyone in the world becomes a wizard. Magic has always operated in the fringes, not because of exclusivity, but because of its incomprehensibility.

The cosmos is just too damn weird to be perceived without losing your mind a little, and that's just not for everyone. The magically operant have become so willingly. We accept the cost of our sanity and say, fair trade. Ceremony and ritual are everyone's responsibility and privilege, but magicians have to hold ourselves to a higher standard and aim to rebalance and repair the field for everyone, assisting those who don't speak spirit in navigating their interactions with spirit. And in so doing, move humanity gradually to a better relationship with the more than human world. And we have the technology at our disposal: symbolic gifts to appease spirits and establish and maintain relationships, being with and up framing to gain perspective, journeying and divination to interpret messages, ceremonial acknowledgements and pact making, as well as, I gave additional examples for specific purposes like finding and acquiring land, negotiating allyship and stewardship, marking the bounds and so on. Armed with the traditions of the ancient world and enhanced awareness of perspectivism, we can enter into deliberate arrangements with the spirits of the natural world that secure their blessings, protection in favor, and bring balance to the field.

Thanks for tuning in to episode six of The Postmugglism Podcast. I hope this topic gave you lots to think about and some new perspective on spirit engagement. I'd love to hear your thoughts and any feedback that you have on the show in general, if you wanna share it. You can always find me on Twitter as postmugglism, or just email me at postmugglism@gmail.com.

You can find all my content: episodes of this podcast, my monthly lunar mansion guides, and other videos, articles from my blog, updates on our sanctuary building project in the jungle, and more on my website, www.postmugglism.com and you can subscribe to my email newsletter there to get notified whenever I post new content anywhere.

Again, thanks so much for spending your time with me and I'll see you in the next episode.