maria mison: integrated awakenings

a very aquarian take

For most people the religion and culture they’re born with are like their parents: ancestral, locational, and have overarching rituals around community, milestones and even one’s philosophical position for dying the afterlife. Most folks want to “graduate” into a certain level of atheism when they become “modern”; while others often distance themselves from their parent’s religious lineage, as an act of rebellion, or as a natural reaction of most monotheistic religion’s over-authoritarian overtones. We throw the baby out with the bathwater, we would like to figure out things ourselves.

Thus is born a seeker. Maybe one finds God, Light, Wisdom within themselves? Like Rumi we throw the books of scripture into the fountain. 

Which leaves a wild predicament: How does one accept your mother’s prayers? What if you access your other lives and find out that you were once: a yogi, a man, but also a priest? What if you live life completely internally liberated, magickal even, how does one maintain connection or even an openness to more mainstream spiritual traditions? 

I have a simple solution: These Lineages are Tech.

Technology in its most basic definition, is a tool, an invention that helps people achieve things with more ease. When prayer is communal, when it is codified, when it has heriophant/capricorn energy, it is one of the most stable tomes of energy to exist. You don’t need to understand how all the mechanics of the blender happens, you press a button and it goes woosh. You can have a basic idea of how electricity works, or say baptism and sacraments operate; but for most of the part, the blender is so popular and widely juiced and serviced that you don’t really need to make a highly customized set-up. It’s makes you smoothies consistently, you got it for free. It’s convenient plus, it works. 

For the most part, seekers, look for other machines, “ways of doing things” because the blender they got, failed them.

It didn’t accept queer people, it didn’t have an explanation for spontaneous bouts of kundalini awakening and psychosis level of spiritual information. It doesn’t teach you how to defend for psychic attacks, because for the most part, for abrahamic traditions, that’s gatekept behind being an actually inducted priest, with a lot of ceremonies, trainings, and very specifically hidden wards that’s not accessible to their common followers. 

For the most part, energetic-tech speaking, this is how most organized religions work. The engineering for the blender is too complex to put a guidebook, and most folks don’t want to invest too much energy to understand it anyway, so let’s have some people specialize and just enjoy the blender. But even with our everyday items, there is that one person who has a linux, who built their computer set-up from scratch, with specifications that will blow any mass produced computer out of the water. No questions, for someone who understands how machines come together and knows exactly what kind of specifications they need more of, making their desktop from scratch is the obvious and most fulfilling answer. Even widely popular laptops and cellphones, are modified by an average consumer, at least aesthetically, with cases, stickers, grips and frankly a river of accessories. Tech evolves with the demand of the user, and the ingenuity of its designer. The real question is what works for you? What’s your appetite? 

Should you, develop a capacity to pile and cultivate your own energy: Do you really think you can rival your local roman catholic altar without a lineage and regular maintenance? The highest degrees of awakening in multiple lineages (kabbalistic, sufi, tao etc) are said to be given to you by a Grace, and is not “achieved” in exactly the most individualistic boot strappy way possible. Even amidst mystery schools there is usually a “generative phase” and a “completion phase” with regards to enlightenment and they all have different needs, support systems, and philosophical tech to get “all the way there”. See, usually the only thing that generative/preparatory phase cares about is to get you as much energy as meta-physically possible. 

As one yogi put it, the first phase is to blow enough chi in you so that your bubble of personality thins as much as possible, and the scope of what your consciousness can occupy easily blossoms and widens. The second phase is simply to pop it. The technique for a prick/dissolution and energy generation/cultivation; even from a mechanical perspective are very different forces. Some might think that talking about spirituality with a sense of physics and math is non-sensical, but as someone who can directly see these forces (my clairsenses allow me to hear see touch smell a lot of these phenomena), these things do behave in logical even predictable ways. Even crossreferencing vajryana buddhism and taoist esoterics is surprisingly consistent with how it describes: unlocking energies, cultivating it, pumping it, and shielding it for better health etc etc. Even yogic systems describe kriyas as certain installable “energy forms”, compiled tech/information (think of it like a zip file, or an app) that one can be attuned to by a benevolent master. Just like abrahamic religions: we have someone specialize with the tech, we bestow upon the faithful a convenient and often safer version of all this energetic hoopla. 

And when I mean safer I mean this in the most literal sense. Think of your average curse, leech, psychic attack and then maybe think of your household appliances going horribly wrong. It can mess with your internal wiring beyond what you can conceivably know how to repair.

When you cultivate and be able to access way more energy, you are also way more susceptible to attacks and how others would describe “the unspooling/burning of karma is too fast”; yes it will set you free. But only if you are ready for it.

So much of kriyas, blessings, attunements, spellwork, novenas etc are the fruit of lineages worth of labor to cull an energetic phenomena and make it as beneficial and safe as possible to the common people. There’s safety in numbers, some tech “works” stronger in your locale. And also the oldest “tech” are some of the hardiest because they’ve survived timelines. There’s a reason why saints and masters (of every discipline) are so revered, they are keepers of some of the strongest say “vials”/keys of energy, and well, it really is a grace thing for them to entrust it to you.

Think of it like sucking up to a really stingy old uncle, trying to apply for a job as their assistant. You can meet all the requirements, but they’re checking if you’re really aligned with their work space, their vibe, the kind of work that they do. If not, no matter how overqualified you are or how much you beg there is just no getting that job you are asking for. And it is! A job, you are! Holding a piece of the tech should they entrust it to you, and depending on the kind of application it requires maintenance, charging and even some discernment (especially for the more pointy/martian flavored ones). This answers the reason why certain angels, lineages, portals, altars, magickal equipment, prayers and hoopla don’t work on certain people. You don’t match, you don’t meet the qualifications. It’ doesn’t make that god or lineage, defunct/invalid, they’d rather you train with a master you actually match up with. In shamanic lineages, guides/even etheric marriages, are indications of total alignment with a specific energetic field. Teacher era? Owl. Transition era? River goddesses. Compassion and Forgiveness really being your largest area of improvement? Good old legendary Mama Mary. 

To answer the implied question: yes you can make your own tech. Yes new ones are made all the time because the world is so different now! trains, meds, stockmarket, internet, all these words and symbols have such dynamic meanings and powers. Yes you can access tech from other timelines (you need to be able to differentiate timelines solidly though). Putting a safety pin on a slightly too big skirt will not offend your skirt. Yes you can finaggle a way of prayer, contemplation and cultivation that respects your multiple open lineages, most of the time, energetic masters don’t care. They, as ironically as it sounds, check the quality of your heart, and the sanctity of your system. Spirit is rarely a purist if you ask me. Thus we circle back to seekers comprehending organized religion. What if one doesn’t take it personally that there is a whole plethora of ritual energy, tech, “way of doing things” that is so convenient and codified for an en masse of people? This is how cults work! (Both the bad and the good kind). Belonging, social capital, legibility, community-wide ceremony is really helpful and! convenient. 

Re: CULTURE

I know we participate in these things as individual souls, but these religions/lineages live on via culture, historic even economic relevance, and very human influences like the printing press disseminating the bible or boats being able to reach china. The culture you grew up in, like your parents, is a very impactful soup that you most likely didn’t choose on a conscious level, as a baby. You were shaped by it, socialized by it, even you still live in the soup of it, even if you don’t full participate in it, it’s cultural rituals, value systems, are economic and psychic-energetic-web forces that hold a social fabric together. It exists! Stop ignoring it! But also maybe see it in a more objective, dynamic and curious light. 

Ever wonder why so many taoist prayers are so focused on peace as the ultimate? So many of it’s masters were born out of the bloody birth of continuous warring state periods. I live from the philippines, we were too archipelagic to develop an appetite for war. Thus our spiritual ritualists don’t really drone peace mantras all the time. Historically, we were better as animists, herbalists as a people that were surrounded by volcanoes, typhoons, and so many shorelines.

Think of green witches, or the western occult witch canon, wonder why they were so goth?

It’s the black plague, this lineage was born in a time when being able to fend off malevolent illnesses was seen as magickal. It was a dark time, with black death and plague doctors, ofcourse their sigils and charms all look like that. 

Greek priestesses and all these altars to specific Gods in specific temples. Their cultural lore, towards their pantheon is God-centric, rather than praising a small water spirit. Ofcourse their ritual tech is focused on summoning big guns like Dionysus and Apollo. Their culture has such deep grooves and presencing for them. We have vineyards, ofcourse our God loves wine. 

We often engage in this exercise only in social sciences class, and with a bit of a touristy, cultural consumption hat of oh wow how exotic and different, the way they conceived and made holy their life. But I really encourage the reader to consider this cultural lens turned towards your own spiritual culture, your own spiritual life, it’s needs, and notice how your gravitation towards technique, development and value system is influenced by larger forces than you. The history of the land you’re in, economics, an over-culture rife of a thousand inventions and imaginations. Maybe you got into “alternative” traditional chinese medicine, because the Philippines has the oldest chinese immigrant mixing in SouthEast Asia, but also, you could have also had a past life as a practitioner, both can be true! Does the west of participate in cultural exoticism? Any culture is prone to this, especially in it’s hunger of curing it’s own ills. The history of how buddhism travelled around india, china, tibet and how it’s evolved through different locales is some of my favorite lineages/evolutions i love to trace.

You live somewhere! You’re participating, by the Grace of some other, to some degree of Lineage (ancestral, spirital, sacramental etc). When you share it, pray for others, and dream of a better world, we are inter-stitched with the momentum of it’s value system and tech. We even exchange with it, every time we try to learn outside of our “home court”. Filipino catholics and their propensity to self-efface, afro latinos and their culture of easy sensuality and benevolent hedonism, zen buddhist and their discipline to devote long term to a single helpful and beautiful task/craft. There are shapes to us, our energetic lineages, even the matrixes that people tout “getting out of/deprogramming from”. Which matrix are you talking about exactly? Do you even know how these matrices work, or why they work that way? 

Gander a bit of space and curiosity and you’d realize, the capacity to energetically sit and commune, open-up, attune towards different “archons”, and swoops of energetic grids (ley lines, or the lineage kinds ) will really open you up to the realization that we not only live in different realities. Our most internal architecture: some souls and locations have totally different settings. Their blender is a 110? Oh, they’re solar powered? They grow their root chakras THAT large?? astonishing. This is why so many early priests labelled african faith as “black magick’, chrisitianity doesn’t have a strong root chakra discipline. It doesn’t have a relationship with a holy kind of darkness either. Ofcourse it won’t translate. Blender doesn’t understand that a stove operates and plays gladly with fire. 

So much of buddhism talks about rebuilding an etheric body, “architecting”/engineering a vehicle specifically, which I find to be so useful for my core metaphor. What I would like to leave my readers is a reminder to maybe check the user manual you came in, in your default born in soup of culture and tech. Perhaps read up and situate why that tech came in the market, and maybe come home with a better understanding why other appliances exists, and measured advice should you want to DIY some of those things. 

PS: Shamanism also talks about the mastery of shapeshifting

PPSS: Yes aquarius energy i agree. 

This has been your local librarian,

Maria