I had an interesting conversation today about learning something with more than your brain and reasoning.  The gentleman I was listening to was talking about learning systems that support the practice of acupuncture. He suggested not trying to correlate one system of understanding with another.  When learning a tradition or system of understanding the world, let it be what it is. Do not try to understand it in the context of what you know.  The reason he gave was that too much is missed when your brain is busy correlating one insight or teaching with something you already know, whether or not, in the end, they lead to the same place. Learning takes place in more than our reasoning, it takes place in our bodies.

This spoke to me because in Paganism, we tend to hear two viewpoints:

• There is only one right way, and it’s ours. Everyone else is either wrong or a fake,
• It all boils down to the same thing, anyway.

 I invite you to consider a third option: all true traditions are expressions of the same thing. This does not make them the same thing – in fact it precludes them from being the same thing. The emphasis will be in different places, the forms will vary, each expression will focus differently and have a different movement to it. And this is as it should be.

This same kind of argument – that there is only one truth - regularly gets applied to social structures. People hotly debate what makes a true family. What is marriage? What is the only true appropriate structure in which to live in love? From the perspective of the Silver Branch tradition, the only true appropriate structure in which to live in love is any structure that is a true expression of love. This doesn’t mean anything goes. It means true love and genuine expression of that has to be at the heart of the structure.  This changes the story. The important thing is no longer the shape of the expression but the impulse behind it and the actions that back it up.

In the Silver Branch tradition, we work with universe in terms of expression all the time. Instead of working with stellar worlds/underworld as a pair in polarity, we work with the Earth as a planetary expression of the universe (i.e. the Stellar world), and humanity as an earthly expression of that same spiritual force.  It moves us out of a place of opposition and into a place of understanding how things fit together in the fabric of all that is. 

Both the root of the expression – the impetus driving it – and the multitude of expressions of it are important.  It is the expression of truth that gives us form and context to begin to approach it. And often, by looking too hard and grasping too tightly we lose the truth because we are unwilling to dwell in the expression.