I had a sort of epiphany earlier today. I know this isn’t news for most people that also struggle with doing what you think will look bad versus what you’re being led to do. It’s been kind of hanging me up these past few days with this work with the Dead is whether it’s right by other people’s standards. I mean, we kind of need a common consensus with some standards to live practically with other people, but this is more of a modern issue and modern interpretation of spirit “rights”. But not really. Taoists have been theoretically concerned with this for…thousands of years?
Right. So the question is about whether or not what I’m doing is ethically correct. And I’ve been reminded as I’ve been reading today about the fox spirits in particular. Not all foxes are bad, but they can do bad things. Yet, this is still enmeshed with what they’re supposed to be doing according to the Tao.
And that last bit is probably the most important thing that I’ve forgotten.
One thing that I expressed to my friend earlier today was that sometimes I am really dense. It happens and it will continue to happen, but thankfully I do reevaluate. And what I found was that most of the things that I have done in the past with regards to Spirit Keeping have led to the project that I’m now working on with the spirit bolstering. And yet that really isn’t what this article is about.
I read earlier today that when the revolution happened in China and there was the kind of cultural forgetting of spiritual and religious practices, such as Taoism, it is believed by some that the fox spirits, malicious fox spirits, that had been contained inside of some of these tablets and items were then freed when those things were broken or burnt. This is coming from the Tao of Celestial Foxes book that I’m currently reading that I bought on Amazon.
And even then after I read that it didn’t really dawn on me that I had been doing a similar thing with the corks. I had been led to do it and was assured that it was the right thing to do by Hecate and Hel. Even now I have this hang up with is that the right thing to do – to imprison a spirit forcefully -and who am I to do that, even if the determination of whatever guilt wasn’t made by me. I was still performing the action. And I can’t remember reading about it anywhere else until today when I’m reading about it in this book. I mean I knew it wasn’t a unique practice but I’d never seen it been used before to contain spirits like this except on like a one-off level like the supposed Dybbuk box.
And this started some reflection that if it was appropriate thing to do for fox masters and Taoists priest specialists to contain these entities to keep them away from harming other people, then why would that be any different if I were doing the same thing? And here it was just a few days ago that I was approached again about doing a similar sort of thing. Except this time actually bolstering some of these spirit. And Hel and Huxian’s representative came to convince me to start this part of the path. During those past few days, I had started the process because I knew I should. And here I was reading about this today and I was still pretty conflicted as my posts have indicated.
Taken as a whole, then and now, it seems obvious that this is where my path is supposed to go in this area. It doesn’t have to be “right” by everyone else’s standards. I stayed from it before, whether I was supposed to or not, and now it’s been brought back to my attention and I was given the courtesy of a gentle shove in the right direction.
I think I’m at the point now where I can at least be mostly at peace with this and can move forward in a more productive way, maybe even a more aggressive way than I was intending to. I was genuinely concerned that this would somehow be negatively affecting me. I don’t know that I believe in karma the same way that a lot of people do, but I do understand you cultivate what you what you bring into the world and what you send out. And if it was morally okay for that to have been a practice done in the past for the benefit of others rather than the whim of the Taoist then I don’t see why that wouldn’t still apply to me.
That’s really all I’ve got. I mostly just want to type this up to show a sort of progression of thought and reason and not just about ego. If I don’t follow it, I’m turning my back on the path I’m supposed to take, until I’m led down another.
