By Drena Griffith
"...However a truth cannot be fully buried, and there remained and remains to our current time a residual awareness of a primal connection to each other, to otherworlds and to the etheric parts of the whole human. . ."—Jeremy Berg, Faerie Blood
Five years ago Jeremy Berg, Lorian priest and author of The Gathering Light:An Exploration into the Incarnational Way, was invited into partnership with the Sidhe. This otherwordly, yet ever-practical collaboration between Jeremy, David Spangler and a small team of Sidhe led to the creation of the Card Deck of the Sidhe, as well as an active relationship between Lorian Association and the "people of peace." As part of this ongoing connection, Jeremy facilitates workshops (online and face-to-face) offering interested groups of people the opportunity to attune to the collaborative energies of Lorian's Sidhe colleagues. Recently Jeremy shared with me some of his insights.
Drena G: How is connecting with the Sidhe different than connecting with other beings in the subtle world?
Jeremy B: Conceptually I think it’s different in that the Sidhe occupy another state of matter that would be equivalent to our physical, etheric, emotional, meta matter. Except they have more of a protoplasmic view. For example: if you have a glass of water that has a lot of particulates in it--maybe oil and sand-- and they’re shaken together, if you let them settle together you'll have stratification. I think that’s more like the world we live in. The world they live in is still amalgam, more ancient.
An angelic presence has a kind of awe, an uplifting nature to it and there’s a kind of widening, opening and spaciousness that I don’t necessarily experience with the Sidhe in that same way. And a nature being has more of the flavor of nature. With the Sidhe there’s this sense of creativity, of song, flow, a heightening of awareness of the beauty of the world. It doesn’t draw me out to other worlds as much as to be more appreciate of this one.
Drena: How would you describe the Sidhe point of view?
Jeremy: What would you call the Chinese point of view? I don’t know that they have a single point of view. I think the Sidhe we’ve been in contact with have an interest in building a bridge between humanity and themselves and trying to create the beginnings of a flow between us. What the end game on that is, I’m not sure, but I think in the long term what they’re interested in is re-establishing real contact with us.
In some ways what’s been going on between us and the Sidhe…well, this is strictly a metaphor, but say beings from another planet tried to contact us. The stage we’re currently at is we’ve made contact and we’ve had some communication back and worth between us. And we’ve had insights and video of what their life is like, but I think the longer term vision is a real re-establishment of relationships that go deep and wide and that bridge the two worlds closer together-- like two ships that have been apart and their goal is to meet on an island. But that’s just my speculation. That could be a long time in the future, maybe 300, 400, 500 years.
Drena: I think one of the dangers of working with the Sidhe, as well as other subtle beings, is getting caught up in the glamour trap.
Jeremy: Personally I don’t think of the Sidhe as all that glamorous. To me they are interesting in the way that anyone is interesting. They occupy a state of matter that creates different conditions for them, a different set of physics, so their natural experience is different than ours. And I think there are aspects of that experience that may seem glamorous to us. If we stepped into their world we would experience it as very magical because it’s different from what we already have. . .but that’s also true in the post-mortem realm. Things work differently there. You make a thought, you move. You can project yourself, essentially fly. From our point of view it's a different set of conditions that allows certain things to happen more easily, but some things are harder. I think holding an identity separate from one’s environment is hard. It’s easy to hold your identity here in a way because everything around you is holding its. Here you don’t walk by a tree and automatically blend with it, but in some realms you do.
Drena: So it's a matter of perspective. Why is it important for us to connect with the Sidhe at this time?
Jeremy: Well because our experience in this domain is not complete anymore than theirs is. One of the things that struck me is when Mariel said that when the worlds separated between the Sidhe and Humanity, a certain amount of magic went out of our world and got sucked in with them.
In the beginning, when we first started working with the Sidhe, David and I had a meeting and felt that we didn’t want the Sidhe tail to wag the Incarnational dog. Over time, though, it’s become fairly clear that what the Sidhe are really talking about is a whole humanity. And if Incarnational Spirituality is about anything, it’s the new wholeness of humanity and what it means to be fully incarnated.
And if there is a part of us that’s like a golden shadow--an unmanifest Sidhe part of us-- and that part of us was reintegrated into the full human, we would have a much more dynamic being. That’s pretty integral to Incarnational Spirituality, not just a sidebar. If the world needs anything, it’s a more whole humanity. Humanity is not doing so good on its own. If there’s any support that would give us a boost and help us redefine ourselves as more integrated with the living ecology of the world, then I’m all for it.
So if being human includes the Sidhe as the deepest part of humanity, which I believe they are, then it’s something we need to integrate,like that golden shadow where you have something there, but it’s not recognized and integrated--and because of that lots of odd things happen.
Drena: If that’s the case, then aren’t we the Sidhe’s shadow?
Jeremy: Yes, I think that’s true. We’re the unrecognized potential of each other.
On June 24 and 26, Jeremy will lead a workshop entitled Kinship with the Sidhe: Exploring our Links with the Faerie Otherwords at the Faerie and Human Relations Congress.