Avocation = calling, or that which you find yourself doing even when you intended to do something else. If you feel your body is a gift to use to help others, that may be your calling. Some peoples magnum opus is powerful labour.
Magnum opus? Latin. Great work, and also the term for the spiritual path in hermetic philosophy. You will have your calling without effort. It’s just your nature, but it can be either in balance or out of balance.
When out of balance it seems more like a curse? Exactly. For me, when my avocation was out of balance, the world and people in it seemed very fragile.
Is that like the enneagram? I would say the enneagram is connected to it, but I would encourage self discovery with the help of those systems more than any reliance. But in fact, all the various mystical traditions as well as modern psychology seem to point strongly to “families” of psyches. Psyche is what we use now to refer to mind/personality, but its original meaning was more akin to ki, soul or atman. Whatever term you use. Essence. Sort of like the simplicity of the human genome, we are all very much a part of this reality, and we are not literally self creating. The idea that we are self created, or self defined, is the essence of egotism and what drives it. We are self. We can’t have self or lose self.
So the Role Playing Games (RPGs) where you pick your class and type are kind of real? Indeed they are. You can find your avocation in World of Warcraft. For me it’s warlock, and the term applies in real life too. Out of balance I keep to no oaths, and let my avocation run amuck in what seems to me a very fragile world. In balance, I am selective about what I destroy and destroy with purpose.
When submerged in water one does not feel wet until one gets out of the water. ‘Self’ though, can’t not be separated? Indeed. Self cannot be separate or separated, but self complains of it all the time.
I just want to know “Why?” That is the question I ask about everything, especially when everyone is following the same thing. And I ask “Why is that false, but apparent?” We all ask the world a question. We each have one question we are always asking about life. What is everyone’s question? It is what I will ask. Even the contrarian has a question, they question questioning. The observers question is: “What’s going on?”. The philosophers question is: “What is true?”.
My avocation seems to be focused around other people. It can be. You can be called to people, or animals, or the world, or the other world, or ideas, or just watching things happen, because you are actually seeing things happen. The question of your avocation isn’t static, and can be said to be what leads to your taking your next life. My own avocation taps into chaos. Infinite potential looks like destruction until it settles down.
Does that mean you’re an Ender? Yes, it does. So though it may seem like I’m trying to get you to classify yourself, I’m really not.
I think I may be a Beginner. Yes. To connect your avocation to mythology, you would be a “muse”.
It’s interesting to explore classifications, but not be held by them. You won’t be free of classification until you see how you classify, and you do classify. Everyone has a need to “know stuff”. Even I have a need to know stuff, but because of my avocation I rapidly realize I don’t really know stuff.
If you are unsure how you classify, how do you find out? Is there a quizilla for it? Actually, anyone’s quizzila can work, and yet also none really do, because we live in a sort of collective unconsciousness. So everyone is right, but also a bit off at the same time. The wise have one foot in insanity, and the sane have one foot in the grave.
So you may have always suspected something about yourself, and dismissed it in saying “Ah no, that’s just silly”. Your first impression of yourself was right and the rest has been silly, but you can have that first impression again at any time. Right now, entertain that you have a calling. Feel it inside of yourself. It’s freedom, and realize that every time you felt free, it was because you were on that path and doing that very broad thing. When answering your calling you are in your own reality, the real reality. When out of touch with your calling, life and everything in it seems a bit fake. It isn’t best if your life feels like that, but you aren’t doomed and it isn’t even hard to get back on the path. You get back on the path when you let “the path” go.
I find it interesting how when you can be doing what society expects of you and being “good”, in the sense that most will define it, yet still be incredibly out of balance. That is very true.
People who are out of balance will often see your path as whack. Yes, they will. They will see it as not just whack, but threatening, supernatural. The Taoist sages were seen as huge sorcerers, very mysterious, but they themselves had no mysteries. They didn’t worry about mysteries. When people perceive power in your work they have to invoke Satan. Satan = scary power for them, and they can find that in their very own Bible but they don’t go looking. Jesus said it. It scares them to this day and they are busy being saved. Their own Bible also tells them to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, but they refuse to be afraid. Which I find amusing, because I don’t know of any group that is any more constantly afraid than them. I like fear myself. I would sort of have to. According to the medical priesthood I’m autistic to some degree. This means everything is weird and scary to me. It sort of makes “scary” hard to determine.
They can then see outsiders as sub human and mistreat them. They do that. Crusades anyone? They are even now declaring that Obama is the anti-Christ because he was charismatic. I have to admit I’m a zealot. I will be zealous about nothing, very zealous about that. I believe if you are going to do anything, you might as well do it fully with passion.
It is all about feet. When to walk, and when to not walk. When to stand, and when to sit down. Where to go, or if you should go anywhere. What isn’t about feet?
The big mystery is that there isn’t any mystery, and your guru is earnestly telling you a lie and that’s the honest truth.
Thanks for the presence. I have grown a little talkative, and need presences to see what I’m talking about.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~