As an Inter Faith Minister and an Elder in several Magickal practices I often get questions from people who have left orthodox Christian churches for other religions that are less focused on guilt and sin and allow for the feminine expression of the divinity. A typical question was this one asked at a meeting of a pagan group. It applies to many.

Q: I used to be a churchgoer because my family thought it was the thing to do. Now I am a pagan and my group sometimes gets together and talk about the bad old days when we were Christians. But although I really enjoy my religion and think it’s the way for me to go, I don’t feel any more spiritual than I did before. Does this mean I’m not making any progress, or what?

Geraint: Most Westerners don’t even begin to evaluate their spiritual progress until they change their religion and have something new and interesting to compare with the stuff they left behind. You probably didn’t even once consider whether you were making spiritual progress before you changed religions. Right?

Q: Now you mention it…that’s true, I didn’t.

Geraint: We are a little short of the three weeks necessary to answer this question properly, but at least we can hit the essentials, and I’ll drop a few hints as to where you can do some contemplation and receive the answers you need, by yourself.

In the world of sports we are all familiar with the days when everything goes well, almost miraculously well for a player or athlete. Such days are often the best of a player’s career and end up in the record books as almost superhuman endeavors. But the players and athletes don’t stay at that level. They reach their ultimate levels of power, speed, coordination and game insight only temporarily. The science of biorhythms has explained a lot about this matter.

In spiritual work the same thing occurs. Hundreds of thousands of people have had peak experiences when the whole universe was one with them. There were no doubts, no questions, no problems, just a sort of ecstatic fullness, often accompanied by various phenomena described in books on the lives of mystics, and usually explained in terms of the religion held at that time by the mystic.

But the experience passed, sometimes in a split second, other times after as long as an hour. The world crept back in and the person was left with a frustrating memory of how things could be. It is usually a positive experience in the sense of a traveler walking up a mountain in darkness during a thunderstorm. A sudden flash of lightning illuminates the whole scene and he sees the road ahead for a moment before the darkness descends again. He has a new confidence that there is a road ahead.

This unity with the universe or with the Goddess or God, this experience of sharing in or being part of the divine consciousness, as distinct from knowing about it, is the ultimate goal of many spiritual practices.

It’s what happened to people like Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, Joel Goldsmith, Muktananda, Lalleshwari, Mirabai, Mohammed, to name a few, and many saints of the Christian Church, both male and female. The difference between those mentioned and the ordinary people is that they found ways to become established in that consciousness so that it was their new and constant experience. The old consciousness, run by its little sidekick the ego, was relegated to the trash bin.

The total screw up that the followers of those beings made, because they had only the words and not the experience, is a matter of history

Apart from a totally tuned in ritual, one of the best ways is to experience the spiritual high is to get hold of some of the novels by those who have been there. Right up there on the first few of the list is Violet Firth, who wrote her stuff under the name Dion Fortune.

She was the psychologist and magician who stunned the English literary world when she said, " A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism." She followed that with the often quoted, "All the goddesses are one goddess, and all the gods are one god, and there is one initiator." She was a member of the Golden Dawn, and she and her husband Penrys, whose magickal name was Merlin, ran a group. They were high priestess and priest.

Doreen Valiente’s favorite three novels by Fortune are the favorites of many magickal folk. They are The Sea Priestess, The Goat-foot God, and Moon Magic. To these I would add The Winged Bull and for Celtic devotees, Avalon of the Heart.

These deal with pagan folk and their spirituality in a way that a text book cannot. Those who have read The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates will know a lot more about Anglo Saxon magick and the runes than if they had read all the manuscripts on which the story was based. It’s obligatory reading for all my rune students.

H. Rider Haggard wrote many apparent adventure stories. He was beyond the 10^{th degree in the Rosicrucian movement. There was more in his stories than could be written as fact because of the Witchcraft Act in England. I had my first magickal epiphany after reading She at the age of seven. When I became a serious student of magick I realized that the title was a pun from the Hebrew, and that every occultist could tell immediately it was about the experience of the Sacred Fire. Read the book. Ignore the trashy movies.}

Algernon Blackwood was a high ranking member of the Golden Dawn. He wrote in novels what could not be said outright because of the Witchcraft Act. The name of my blog comes from an experience I had while reading his book The Centaur. I went consciously through the Gate of Horn.

A little more about Fortune, whose books are more easily accessible than some of the other writers. She was a member of the Golden Dawn, as I said, and her magickal name was Deo non Fortuna, God, not Chance. All the GD folks had Latin magickal names. Say it quickly and it’s Dion Fortune. She founded the Society of the Inner Light, and her best known student is Gareth Knight who has written dozens of great books on Magick. Dion’s aim with her students was the integration of their male and female selves, their individuation, as Jung calls it. When it happens, even momentarily, the feeling of wholeness arises.

Read her stuff when my answer is forgotten. Many of your questions will be answered in her novels, all based on experience. Then ask yourself, "Why does this stuff feel so right to me personally? What is it that resonates?"

That’s your contemplation homework. Now let’s see how to tell if you are making spiritual progress in your new religion.

You are probably pretty honest, but you don’t go around feeling honest. Your ethical and moral values can be deduced from your speech and actions, but you don’t spend time feeling ethical or moral. There isn’t a spiritual feeling either in the one who has attained some level of spirituality.

The only feeling associated with spirituality is the feeling that others get in the presence of a person of great spiritual stature. They feel better around such a person. It is easier for them to drop negativities and stay centered. Things that may seem miraculous just seem to happen around such people without their seeming to do anything.

The very perceptive feel the same that they feel in the presence of a great phenomenon of nature, a storm, or a volcanic eruption. The attained being is more like a law of nature than a person, and without putting on an act. There isn’t anybody who can give them something that they need. They are complete and totally Self-oriented, and the Self is not the little ego that is the illusionary center of the ordinary human personality. It is the Self that does not die, and never has.

But you are not going to feel more spiritual whatever your level of attainment. At the less than top level however there is a simple technique by which you can judge relative progress. Ask yourself, " What used to bug me, and doesn’t bug me now?" If you find that you are more of a witness to life than you once were, and less a helpless reactor to external stimuli, then you are making progress, period. I use a six month lapse of time to examine with this question.

When you reach beyond the point of automatically judging, "This is good. This is bad." You’ve come a long way indeed. If you get to the region where NOTHING is either good or bad, it just is, then you are on the foothills of the last range you have to climb, and you will be getting more than occasional incidents of cosmic consciousness.

All spiritual experience occurs in the NOW. You are every second of your life on a spiritual teeter totter. The left hand side is the past, and exists only in the imagination. The right hand side is the future, and exists only in the imagination. Only in the absolute center can you stay firm and calm no matter how violent the up and down swings may be. Rune students can think of the rune THORN or THURIZAZ depending on which runes you use. The rune placed horizontally is the magician’s teeter totter, and he or she causes things to happen by just a little lean to one side or the other.

Remember the old saying: " The load of yesterday, added to that of tomorrow, and carried today, makes the strongest falter." Stay consciously in the present where all progress occurs.

This question is extracted from my monograph entitled The Wiccan Papers which is a collection of Q/A’s from Celtic, Eclectic and Gardnerian Wiccans over the years. They called me Geraint, from my Celtic initiatory name. This blog will contain others asked over the years by coveners and officers..