Learning to think (again)
Becoming a Druid is in part a process of learning to think like a Druid. I’m still a work in progress on this one, I expect I always will be. There are so many assumptions drilled into us by the mainstream, other religions we may have been exposed to, our friends, families… unlearning and relearning can take a long time.
We are taught to want consumer goods and we are told that we need them. A Druid, becoming increasingly aware of the environmental destruction wrought by humans, soon has to question this. What do we really need? How much energy should we be consuming? How sustainable are we? Faced by a society that assumes you must have a car, a refrigerator and freezer, a flat screen television, mobile phone, games consul etc… simply saying ‘no’ is difficult. People fail to understand how you might not want those things. Of course you HAVE to want it, because not to want all the stuff is to challenge their reality. People who have not chosen alternative ways of being tend not to like having their comfortable certainties shaken by those who have. It can lead to conflict.
We are taught to blame and criticise. Television is full of it. Bullying is widespread. People seem to think they have a right to be offensive, hurtful, derogatory and so forth under the guise of ‘free speech’. As we learn to be more compassionate, hate language becomes more uncomfortable, as does the desire the challenge it by being hateful back. We start to see the fear that underlies bigotry, the moral cowardice implicit in all bullying behaviour. There’s no tidy answer to dealing with this.
We are taught ‘one true way’ be it science or religion. Druidry offers us a multiplicity of ways. There are many paths through the forest, many routes up the mountain, many names for deity and truth is always going to be bigger than us. Learning Druidry, we learn to give up on the self-important delusions that tell us we know it all, and start down the amazing path of beginning to appreciate the enormity of all that we do not know. Life is full of mystery. There are wonders, as soon as we can open our eyes and admit our ignorance so that we can start to see properly. This is a liberating process that will confuse the hell out of any ‘normal’ people who happen to be going past.
We are taught to be afraid. Fear of difference, of each other, of strangers, authority, anarchy, oil prices, job security… your life is loaded with messages about scarcity and how afraid you should be. Oh, and you can buy this insurance product and that object to help you feel better about these things… Resisting fear, is something I find tricky. I am also aware that fear is deliberately encouraged and fed to serve the needs of politics and big business. Resistance is essential. While we are locked down in fear of each other, we are not cooperating to make things better. We need to cooperate to overcome the genuine challenges and shatter the illusions of the manufactured ones.
We are taught that we are irrelevant, small, and powerless. We are taught to be cogs in other people’s machines, to be nice and inoffensive, passive acceptors of what is handed down to us. To become a Druid is to become your own authority, to embrace you strengths, whatever they are, and to empower others. We each have our own lives to lead. We all matter. None of us have to be cogs. Druidry is a subversive sort of business. It’s as well our processes are quiet and understated, or we might find a lot more resistance to us in the wider world.
Learning to think differently takes time. It’s so easy to fall back into the old habits. Much of your life will do its best to hang on to you and force you to stay where you were: tame, frightened, easily controlled, biddable, nice… Once you start to replace ‘nice’ with ‘compassionate’ and ‘tame’ with ‘responsible’ everything starts to change.
