Spiritual Alchemy

Announcer 0:28

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.

John Moore 0:48

Hello, hello, hello. It has been a minute since I've done one of these. Well, I know that's the expression. My kids use that all the time. It's been well over a year, and I thought I would get back into it with something. Hopefully you find interesting. We're going to talk today about spiritual alchemy. What is it? Why do we care? Why would we be interested in this? How does it relate to traditional laboratory alchemy? I'm talking all about that today. And I'm going to give you a rather simplified model of alchemy, a four phase model of alchemy rather than a seven phase. I will say this, I'm currently teaching a 28 day course. This isn't a sales pitch, you can sign up for it right now on spiritual alchemy, particularly energy body alchemy. And I I'm working on a much longer one I'm working on, I don't know how long it's going to be yet long term spiritual alchemy course, on something called ApoE Theosis, which is raising oneself to the level of the Divine or being raised to a level of divine but in this case, you would be raising yourself. So let's get into it. Let's talk about alchemy and what's going on with that in and you may or may not have heard of spiritual alchemy. But undoubtedly, you are aware of traditional laboratory alchemy, where, you know, people were working in labs, ostensibly to do things like turn, lead into gold. And that was part of that was part of it. And that's what people outside of alchemy focused on. Why because, hey, if I can take this, you know, cheap lead and turn it into this gold, I can get really rich, and there are stories of alchemists actually being able to do this. I don't know the truth of it could be myth could be legend. But we're going to talk a little tiny bit of history, a little bit of mythology, but we're gonna get into the spiritual work of it. And I'm gonna say this, that the original alchemists, there wasn't a division between spirit and material, right. However, they did, you know, processes with materials to get to the spirit of the material. And in many alchemy labs in Europe, and I'm going to talk specifically about Western alchemy, I don't know enough about Eastern alchemy to really speak to it. I know that there are processes called alchemy, say amongst the Daoists, and probably other spiritual, physical systems in Asia, I just don't know enough about it to talk about it. Maybe someday, maybe we'll take courses or something and learn about it or find a teacher. But I'm going to talk about Western alchemy because that's what I know about. And so these guys that were working in these labs, and there are big ones in say, Vienna and Prague that was, you know, the center of alchemy during medieval and Renaissance times. You know, you could get a license to practice alchemy. So, John D, for example, the famous CT magician, an astrologer of Queen Elizabeth, the person whose code name was double oh seven where Ian Fleming got the name for James Bond and who coined the term the British Empire and is highly highly responsible, yet unknown for much of the way the western world is today. For for better or for worse, right. He was definitely an imperialist before him England was just this little, you know, this little island nation with no real aspirations other than to save themselves from the Spanish. And he's like, No, we're gonna go take over the New World, we're gonna go take over India, we're going to take over Africa. And that sparked all of that colonialism. And, you know, again, colonialism, it is what it is, right? Lots of evils came out of that lots of you know, slavery and genocide and all kinds of stuff. But we live in a world that was greatly shaped by this guy who was amongst many things truly a Renaissance man, an alchemist. He was, you know, he had a license, you had to, in most places, you had to have a license to practice alchemy. And it wasn't necessarily considered black magic, than it wasn't something unless you didn't have a license that could get you in trouble with the law, say, or hunger, that sort of thing. And Dee was practicing magic for sure, he came up with the with considered like the Nokian system. These days, although I don't think that's what he called it. But they were working on summoning angels, he really wanted to bring in the apocalypse. Right and, and create a new world order with Queen Elizabeth, the first as the head of the world, basically, that was his plan. And, um, and he was very influential in the court of Queen Elizabeth. And so you know, that gave birth to a lot of things in the English language, and in the English speaking world, and is responsible for a lot of the world speaking English, and a lot of what the, you know, became of the US, even though the Enlightenment era really had a lot to do with that, too. But that's just a little tiny bit of history. So, in these labs, in Europe, you would have, you know, all of the equipment, you would have a furnace for, you know, burning things, and heating things, and barrels of supplies and all kinds of stuff. In some part of this, sometimes in the center of these labs, there would be like a little tent. And that tent was called a tabernacle. And if you've heard that word before, you know that that was the word for the tent, or the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. Right, this was, this was a holy place where the was considered the home of God, basically. And so the alchemist would go into the tabernacle, and pray and meditate and do whatever. Because the idea was that he had to be in the right state of spirit, right, purity of spirit, or his physical experiments would fail. And so, as they were transmuting, things they were, you know, and I'm going to talk about, I'm gonna talk about a simplified model of alchemy in this podcast, because no need to get too complex with this for for now. But they would, you know, they would ferment and burn and distill and purify and elevate, and then, you know, merge opposites. And if you look at alchemical what they called alchemical emblems, or, you know, the drawings by Alchemist and stuff, really obscure mythological, metaphoric information hidden there. And it can take a lot to suss out what they're doing. And in fact, I can, you know, there are alchemical emblems, I look at him like, I don't know what's going on here. But there is a some symbolism to it. And it can be understood by those in the know and part of that was to obscure the knowledge from the uninitiated. And part of that was to convey significant amounts of knowledge. There's a particular alchemical emblem, you know, painting that I'm thinking of, that is rather complex and alchemists would sit in front of it and meditate on it. Now, that sounds very much like a Buddhist or Hindu practice of using you know, looking at a Tonka which is, you know, a painting of Buddha or or Buddha's or gods or what have you, or, you know, looking at a mandala or that sort of thing. So, there is there is an alchemical monde Law you wouldn't look at it necessarily recognize it as a mandala. But they would stare at this, you know full of rich metaphoric symbolism, in order to awaken unconscious parts of themselves and parts of their spirit to communicate with the unconscious aspects of themselves. Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst took a lot from alchemy. Right? He,

you know, wrote a lot about alchemy and how it was this pursuit this integration of the unconscious and conscious particularly integrating the shadow material, which happens in the the, the first phase, kind of the first phase of alchemy. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about the four phase model of alchemy, as opposed to the seven or nine or 12 phase. Traditionally think is seven, but we'll go through this four phase alchemy and each one is color coded with a Latin word, and I'll explain what they mean and kind of what's going on there. Okay. So, the first phase is called the Negredo and that means blackening. This is the blackening phase. And in physical alchemy, this would be you know, you put your material in a flask or whatever, and you burn it down to black and ash. Okay, and then you know, the symbols of the new Greta phase include things like crows or a black son, or, you know, there are lots and lots of metaphoric symbols here. Birds show up a lot in alchemy. Which to me is an interesting thing because birds show up a lot in shamanism as well, with headdresses and, you know, there were Swan, you know, shamanic Swan cults in very, very ancient times, all kinds of stuff like that. But birds show up and alchemy, quite a bit in alchemical symbolism and sort of other, you know, Mythological Beings and, you know, regular creatures and they mean different things. But we'll say so there's the integrado. And in the integrado, we can in spiritual alchemy, we can think of this as passing through a dark night of the soul or the initial phase of initiation, where things get very dark all of a sudden, and you delve into to come out of it, you delve into your shadow. And I've done whole episodes on the shadow and I've done videos on YouTube on the shadow, check out my YouTube channel shamans tent. There's, besides this podcasts, which is on YouTube, they're there. I don't know how many videos couple 100 Maybe, and they do more all the time. So then the great Oh phase we are dealing with shadow material, we're dealing with the dark aspects, we are pulling those up so that we can you know, so that we can work with them. This is stuff that has gone into our unconscious all throughout our life but is hidden away from us. And here we are, we are diving in or passing through a dark night of the soul in which you might feel all is lost and this is very frequent in shamanic initiation. One of my interests in in alchemy and spiritual alchemy is how it relates to shamanic initiation and that sort of thing. So that is the integrado phase. The second phase of spiritual alchemy is known as the albedo phase. The albedo means albedo means whitening. You might know that an egg white is the albumin. Right? So this is, you know, this is the whitening phase. And in the whitening phase, we're dealing with purification. Now that we've burned down the material to ash, we want to sweep away all of the things that are not the prima materia, the material that we want to work with, spiritually, we work on spiritual purity now pause for a second because a lot of what we're taught about spiritual purity are just rules and laws that people came up with that or you know, don't have sex outside of marriage don't eat certain things don't work after certain times of day. So all of these prohibitions, all these dogma, we're not talking about that. And if you do those things in your spiritually, that's totally fine. That's just not what we're talking about. We're talking about peeling away those things that aren't us those things that we've picked up from culture, and that might include rules or dogma or that sort of thing. All right. So that's, you know, that's the that's the kind of thing that we work on in this phase, we work on peeling things away. Take a brief pause, we're back at it. So we're in the albedo phase. And we're doing purification work, prayer, meditation, examination, you lots of, you know, exercises, maybe we're, you know, doing energy body work, maybe we're, I don't know, maybe we're imbibing things don't imbibe things. But we're talking about alchemists here. But for your spiritual alchemy work, not necessarily all that important. Right, and we are in we are trying to purify ourselves to move to the next stage. What's the next stage you ask? The next stage is called see trainee tasks. You might recognize this as you know, having the same route as Citrine, or citrus. This is the yellowing phase. The yellowing phase is about advancement and lighten meant raising ourselves up now that we have purified now that we've burned away the you know, the part we've reduced ourselves to our component parts and cleared away the stuff that isn't us. What's left is us at our purest sense. And now we want to elevate that. We want to raise that stuff up. And this is actually the phase in laboratory alchemy, where we would produce yellow gold. And I'll tell you that it you know, even though you might think so producing yellow gold is not the ultimate feat of laboratory alchemy. We'll talk about that in a moment. So we've burned away we've purified and now we are elevating, were elevating our consciousness to become, you know, enlightened to have spiritual awareness. In spiritual alchemy, this is about becoming more than what we were before. Right, raising ourselves up through the Plains or whatever you want to however you want to do it. All right, sorry. I just took another brief brief pause I last time I did one of these podcasts. I didn't have a dog and I have a dog now and she craves attention. And so anytime I get on a call, or I'm working with a client or whatever, she decides she needs to go out a couple times. So I've let her out. I've let her in. She's in she's playing with a cat. Excuse me. I normally don't pause enormous normally. Normally, normally. Wow. I'm out of practice, folks. What can I say? My tongue stopped working. My mouth stopped working. My voice is a little bit hoarse this morning. If you couldn't tell. I'm stuffing. But I did want to talk to you all. So we're in the Citroen atoss phase which is about enlightenment and in many systems enlightenment is the end goal. Right raising the consciousness. But not so in this system of alchemy. This just means that we are now we're now tapped into divine wisdom. We're now channeling Spirit clearly in shamanism we have become the hollow bone that's the term in shamanism for becoming a clear channel for Spirit at this phase in alchemy Yeah, you can you know turn lead into gold and you know in laboratory alchemy interesting character from alchemy. If you're ever want to find a story, look up Nicholas Flamel. Their stories about him becoming immortal about turning, you know, lead into gold. One thing is for sure he was an alchemist. And he did become incredibly, incredibly wealthy all of a sudden. And when he died, this as the story goes, people dug up his grave and to find it to be empty. That's the story anyway, that he he faked his death that he was actually in Immortal he found the philosopher's stone which the philosopher's stone comes in the last phase of alchemy, which is the rubedo. In this model in the rubedo rubedo means the reddening isn't that interesting? We went from, you know, black to white to gold to red. I'm thinking of the traditional colors of the medicine wheel.

Black, white, red and yellow. Hey, you know, maybe there's a relation there, maybe not. But it is interesting. It's interesting how this set of colors why no blue? Why no green, you know, why not? Turquoise or purple. But this is the rubedo it's the reddening. The reddening is about merging of opposites. What, you know, if I were to slap a word on this phase, it would be non duality becoming completely non dual. Now, there is no difference between spirit and matter, they're interchangeable. There's no difference between you and divinity, you are divinity. Right, this is my, my upcoming long term course, is called APO Theosis. Quest, the quest for raising oneself to a divine level. And it is about recognizing the non not just recognizing but living from that non dual nature. In some Eastern systems that I'm aware of, you know, this is the, what we might call the, the rainbow body which happens in like Tibetan Buddhism, when the physical body transforms into light. You, you know, you, it is the stage of enlightenment, it's after the initial enlightenment, the spiritual, mental enlightenment. You know, the body turns into rainbow light, the physical body, and just, you know, dissipates, disappears for all intents and purposes. So it's interesting, so that, you know, it's interesting when I say, usually, when I say that's interesting, it's because there are parallels, there are true this, that, although they're spoken about in different terms, there they are, you know, they're, they're talking about the same thing, from different cultural perspectives, different cultural viewpoints. And to me, that's one of the things that points out a spiritual truth. Right? So the Golden Rule Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, or, you know, words to that effect. Well, you know, in the Bible, Jesus speaks those words, but those words were also spoken by Buddha 600 years earlier, and, you know, come out in other ways in other spiritual systems from other spiritual leaders. Right, and, you know, in cultural terms, the Norse for example, had rules about hospitality, welcoming, you know, welcoming people into your home who just showed up. Why, because you would need like, if you were wandering around in the icy cold, and you came upon a home, you wouldn't want to be turned away. Right? So that rule, the the idea of that is, in my opinion, a universal truth. It's given different words because words are limited, language is limited. Language is powerful, but it is limited in expressing truth. Right, particularly things like principles and laws, we try to we really try to define these things.

So

anyway, there we go. So that that is the rubedo phase, which is the final phase of alchemy. Now, in my experience, because I've gone through practices in these phases spiritually and gone through longer practice. It says and lighten up practices and stuff. It tends to be cyclical. What it's interesting. So I'm doing, I'm in the middle of teaching this 20 day, you know, four week class in alchemy, and each week is dedicated to a different phase. And so at the end of the Negredo fate, well, in the beginning of the albedo phase, one of my students, you know, said, Well, geez, I still have shadow material coming up. I guess I'm not done with integrato phase. And I said, Yeah, you know, a week of Shadow Work is not going to clear out many lifetimes of shadow material, or even one lifetime of shadow material, you've got work to do. But this is cyclical, you'll go back to it, or it will come up and you'll you know, you'll be doing Negredo while you're in albedo and sutra to us. And then when you're done with the rubedo, you can go back and start over again. And things will become more intense. Because you can handle them, you've gone through a transformation, which will allow you to handle more intense spiritual experiences it initiation people frequently think of, I'm done, I've been initiated. I am, you know, I'm, I'm not finished my work. I tell people, I tell my students to tell my clients, I tell you, folks, I will never be done. I have never, you know, well, I'll take I'll say it this way. There have been times of my life where I'm like, I'm done. Thank goodness, I don't have to go through that, again. What a surprise when I have to go through that all over again. So I don't ever tell myself that I'm done doing my work. And so I think there's this idea that spiritual teachers need to be at a certain plane of being or whatever. And that's okay, right? Like, you want to learn something from somebody who knows, something you don't or has been through experiences, you haven't or can guide you through experiences, you haven't. But this idea that teachers cannot also be human cannot also be going through their own stuff, I think is a dangerous one. It causes us to put teachers up on pedestals they don't belong on. And quite frankly, pedicels I'm not comfortable with I remember teaching a live class years ago, and one of the students said, oh, you know, I'm, you know, I view you like, I used to view the priests in my church, and you know, I should bow down before your wedding or something along those lines. I'm like, no, no, no, no, stop, right? They're not comfortable with that. You're not putting me on a pedestal. I'm here as a guide. That's it. I'm not here to show you that I know more than you or that I'm more powerful than you or I've reached a level I'm not here for that. I am here to show you how much you already know how powerful you already are. I'm here to guide you through experiences. So that you can grow. And that's it. You know, and I know there are the guru worshipers and all that out there. And that's fine. If that's part of your path. It's just it's not mine. It's not me. It's not who I am. And I learned stuff from my students. Because there I cannot know everything that any other person knows. You can't know everything I know. And I can't know everything that you know, I happen to have focused a good portion of my life, on spiritual development and teaching and I can guide people through some pretty powerful experiences. That's what I do. If you're looking for more than that, if you're looking for sunlight to shine out of my butt, that's not going to happen. I'm sorry. You know, and I know there are teachers who do Shakti pot, right where you just sit in their presence and their energy raises your energy and I do try to do something very similar with my, my students and my clients. But I don't want that to be the focus where we just sit there and look at each other. There are times where that is the practice. There are times where that may be the practice. Way. they're few and far between For me, it's not the main part of my practice. The main part of my practice is teaching. Just like this, just like I'm talking to you today. I talk to people, I guide them through experiences, I have them do things that are going to lead them through other worlds, to have experiences to open their awareness. That's it. And there's, that's, you know, my part of the alchemy. Right. So, along with that is I have to do my own work. Continuously, I would not be in integrity if I don't continuously do my own work. Right? If I'm not continuously journeying, meditating, journaling, studying. So if I could boil alchemy, down to a single phrase, it is the art and science of transformation. What are we transforming? Well, in laboratory alchemy, we are transforming material things. And spiritual alchemy, we're transforming ourselves, our spirit and spirit is deep. And eventually, the becomes no difference between the physical and the spiritual. The duality of the physical world and the spiritual world is basically a false one. So it's not something that you know, it's not something that we want to cling to. This isn't to say the physical world isn't real. But it is just really one way of looking at his just really dense spiritual material. I'm gonna grab this book off the shelf behind me. It's a good one, so far, haven't gone through it, because it is a one. It's a book that you're supposed to read over a year. It's called it's by John Michael Greer, who writes a lot about magic and the occult, and that sort of thing. I really like him. I like his writing. I've listened to him on podcasts. And this is called the occult philosophy workbook was a one year course in the secret wisdom, and they're talking a lot about. I mean, I haven't been that far through it. But I'm gonna talk about the very first, the very first lesson, there are a bunch of lessons, I think there are enough like to do one a week for a year or something along those lines. The very first lesson is about there being a visible and an invisible world. Right? We would define that maybe into physical and spiritual, but they are overlapping. And so there are exercises that there's a bunch of number lessons about material versus spiritual things. So we're starting out in in duality a little bit and I understand why. Right? You can't necessarily start out and just say, okay, just, you know, become non dual. Right, it takes a while. It's working up to it. But the affirmation, there's an affirmation, and each at the end of each chapter, and this one is, in the heart of matter is a spark of spirit, in the heart of spirit, is the seed of matter. Isn't that interesting? There is matter in spirit and there is spirit and matter. And ultimately, there's no pulling one from the other. In my view, if spiritual reality didn't exist, material reality wouldn't exist. Right there. They're tied together. This material world has a spiritual underpinning everything you see, I guess that's really an animist view of things. And with that,

with that, my dear friends, I'm going to leave you this is a shorter episode than I have done in the past. I'm going to experiment a little with different lengths of things. And hopefully, you know, we get to tune in some more and reach out to me And check out my website at Main shaman.com meineshaman.com.

Announcer: 35:35

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore For more info or to contact John go to mainesharmin.com That's maineshman.com