A student sent me an apparently simple question: ‘I’ve read online about different ways to cast runes, which way do you use to cast the runes?’
My reaction was that brings to the fore the crucial question of ‘Form versus Essence’. Indeed it opens the vast question of the level of consciousness we bring to any piece of spiritual work. Your question is not as simple as it appears.
Having been working in this field for twenty years and also studying and following quite an exceptional number of spiritual paths (due to my having worked on the university-based ethnographic social anthropological field study of spiritual forms new to the West), a central realisation I have come to is that we need to move from lower forms of consciousness to higher forms of consciousness. Specifically to do with using the Runes for divination and using rune-casts, I have taught a number of face to face courses (a rune a week teaching with my partner: healer Maggie Pashley, including Rune Stance and rune Chant or Galdr) and also of course many worldwide distance Runes courses sending sound files on the meaning of each Rune and also a guided path-working/meditation to shamanic drumming. I’ve also written one of my novels about the Runes, I love it and it’s enjoyed by many: Rune Magic (available on Amazon as paperback or kindle).
One of the ways that shifted me personally to a more enlightened viewpoint of my scripts and patterns, and indeed a more enlightened awareness of all phenomena, was kundalini meditation: in other words focus on the ‘third eye’ chakra whist sitting still in Dhyana or focus meditation. Also opening to receiving shaktipat: the Blessing force that pervades the universe, often transmitted through gurus.
Raising our consciousness is not always easy to do and vast issues surround doing it. So that I have witnessed so many failed or dark spiritual teachers. In the case of your question, those spiritual teachers who say ‘there is only one way to cast the Runes’. I also teach Munay Ki Shamanism and I was recently told ‘there is only one way!
There are so many teachers who are illusionary and inflated. So many who are full of ego. So many who are even dark, driven and manipulative, even power-stealers: draining their side-kick followers, feeding off the followers, disempowering them and throwing them scraps of reward when they attack the defined enemy of the moment. Developing a gang around them, basically like nasty kids in the playground, and mutually congratulating each other on their ganging together. We need to be aware of all these issues as we enter magical, meditative, yogic or spiritual pathways.
A key issue is in all this to what extent we value the material realm. I take the view that the material realm must be valued because we came to work with it this time. We came to develop the skills we incarnated with. That is why we were born. Most importantly, we came to reduce and learn about and ‘burn’ our negative (karmic) scripts.
So in other words, the material has great value: but also we have to regard it from the viewpoint of our Higher Self and be aware.
We have to be aware of our scripts, we have to be aware of our material skills and potentials that we incarnated to grow and develop.
We have also to be aware of our darker karmic patterns and work with these.
But – and this is crucial – we also have to be aware of how we are deploying our higher consciousness, and ironically, so many teachers deploy higher consciousness in a way that even totally works against it, and drag their students down – even into ditching their families, even into madness.
So, having set the wider context, now to return to your specific question. I do readings all over the world, linking to people through skype, answering an emailed question or whatever.
The truth is that drawing just one rune or tarot card just before I connect to them can actually totally answer their core question.
Yes, I will then go on to offer an extensive reading using western and vedic astrology and usually including runes or ogham, and also sending afterwards extensive reports, but so often the key question is answered by drawing just one rune.
However, one can then draw another and another to colour in the answer more fully. One example of this is that I answered a question about how a woman’s soul was presenting her with experiences in this life: what gifts and strengths her soul is sending her; what challenges her soul is sending her; what special scripts her soul sent her to work with this time. Basically, Vedic Astrology actually has a chart which depict the soul. It’s called the Navamsha. And if we map the Navamsha into the Vedic Birth chart, there is such a vast and accurate declaration we can then make by quite simply analysing the numerical relationship between the positions of the planets in the soul chart to the planets in the birth chart. And then I draw runes, ogham and or tarot cards to flesh out this statement. It really does work. I couldn’t have done this when I started out giving readings, but now I feel confident and clients confirm its accuracy.
So, you see, we should not be misled by teachers who say there is only one way. They are full of ego, blocks and pride. You can see so much by drawing one rune. You can amplify this by using a three rune spread: past – present and – future. You can beef this out by using a nine rune spread: three for the past, three for the present and three for the future. Or I even use a ten rune spread where the rune positions equate to the Celtic Cross.
It’s not the form that counts, really: it’s the ability to flow through and connect with the essence. The image with this blog post is the Rune Fehu: we have to value ourselves.
