Druids are concerned with the principles of light and how we live and develop according to these principles. The Druid is concerned with the welfare and the evolution of man in a private way and while he is concerned, he minds his own business. If you are making mistakes the Druid will observe them and learn from them but will keep quiet. When your mistakes trouble you enough for you to start asking for solutions, and you ask a Druid, they will give you the answer, otherwise they just observe, record and retain the information for future use. They do not meddle, create laws, or persuade.
The task at hand
The Druid will assist the person to complete the task nearest to them and then the next step will take them automatically to the next task on their path. They do the same with any person and do not attempt to change anyone in the sense of conversion.
We believe who you are and what you are doing is the state that is most beneficial for you to make a beginning, and in that state you must make your own way to your destination, following your own path, though it may be true that all paths lead to the same goal. It is essential that a person should be taken from the point at which they are found and be shown the next step - the only step they can take. The task at hand is part of a sequence of tasks leading you forwards on your journey; these tasks are your opportunities for growth.
The Druid believes that life is good; that it originates in good, continues in good, and that life is a self- rectifying process. That life originates in good is not generally accepted - in the west there is the doctrine of original sin which we do not support. Life is good and it originates in good.
We also acknowledge that people are not very good at living life, and they make mistakes. Our tendency to make errors and life’s tendency to rectify itself causes friction. According to how we feel this friction we call it disease, pain and suffering, but also need and necessity. Disease of the body, or a challenging economic or social situation, are different manifestations of this friction.
Purpose and organisation
Setting up organisations to support a purpose is the story of your life in a different context. You have a purpose and a body to support you, or in marriage you have two bodies supporting one purpose. Different bodies form groups to support an agreed purpose. Whether you succeed or fail will depend more on your patience and tolerance than your skill. Human nature being what it is, you will find that each person involved has a repetitive agenda - we all have one in any sphere of our activities. Some express it blatantly, some subconsciously, but it is always there and without skilled training it is difficult for anyone to leave their subconscious agenda at home when they attend a meeting.
The first thing you will need to express your purpose is an organisation, so you start building it; there are those who have a flair for organising and there are those who think they have, and this needs to be worked on. There are the armchair drivers: they love a good organisation but have only criticism for those who do the work. All this has to be resolved and in resolving it a lot of attention will be paid to the organisation.
In the background is the purpose you are seeking to express, but the organisation tends to become a thing in itself and this happens in the constitution of any body whatsoever, for whatever purpose. Imagine that you have a purpose and the organisation is your body. Then you can see where the diseases and the stress come from. Right from the start you have a life or death race between the organisation which is to express the purpose and the purpose which is to get its expression through the organisation.
It is essential that the organisation starts expressing the purpose as soon as it begins. Do not wait until you have the finished organisation before you begin to use it. Use it from the very beginning, seeking some expression of your purpose through it, even while you still have a jumble of parts. It is a law of nature that when the organisation reaches its peak of perfection, if the purpose has not achieved full expression the purpose dies and the organisation lives on and thrives. You can see this in quite a few organisations today, especially those which claim peace and harmony to be among their chief aims. They end up with a good organisation, good marketing, and usually sufficient funds, and yet they are unwilling to be peaceful except to groups in their own line. They break up into sects and compete with one another for the same space.
That is the future which lies ahead of every attempt to organise anything, and so the purpose must find increasing expression as the organisation gets increasingly efficient, so that the purpose is achieved at the same time as the organisation reaches its peak of perfection. Here you have the story of life.
Teaching
We maintain that man is a three-fold spirit with a three-fold body. The focusing point and the link between them is the mind, not the brain. The organisation of the three-fold body is much more developed than the three-fold spirit at the present time. The body is divided up into parts with different functions and is meant as the vehicle of expression for the spirit which, unable directly to control the body, needs an intermediary, a common ground between the two. Spirit separated from matter has its own purpose and matter separated from spirit also has its own purpose. In reality there is no matter which is separate from spirit, nor spirit from matter - they are just different frequencies on the same scale, in the same way that light, heat and sound are. There is no physical thing without its spiritual origin, nor any spiritual thing that does not have some physical manifestation. The discrepancy comes in the manifestation of the spiritual impulse in the same way that an intention is not always reflected in the results.
If you want to see how it happens, try to express the function of Druidism to a medical doctor. They are limited to that profession, but their intentions and their efforts according to their viewpoint are perfectly good. When you try and expand them a little by introducing Druidism, your intentions are perfectly good too. Both parties speak the English language, but just how much can you convey to that doctor.? And when it comes to the point, do not use the situation to support your own prideful arrogance, because how much are you able to grasp of their point of view? Their situation is difficult: they may be working with limited equipment but they are probably achieving the best they are able, as long as they stick with what they are used to. The one at fault is always the one with more knowledge, either for attempting to communicate something out of time and place, or for not acquiring the skill to make the communication.
So as a consequence the Druid will not teach anybody who does not come seeking. It is useless out of time and place and all you do is aggravate their pride and cause opposition and resentment, making your contribution to the turbulence in the world today. Your intentions are good, but so are the intentions of the other people, according to their lights.
Healing
Who is going to say what is a valid method of healing?
Who is going to say what is a right standard?
The Druid maintains that the person to whom a trouble is brought is the right person to deal with it, whether the trouble is mental, moral or physical. A person comes to you with a problem and the first thing many people think is ‘Oh, so-and-so knows a lot more about it than I do’, and there is a tendency - when money is not involved - to refer them to someone you think knows the subject better. Our approach is that if life brings someone in need to your door, they know their own life better than you do, or are you going to say that you know it better? We have found this in dealing with Druid education, which is a complex subject covering the whole field of human experience. Someone will come with a question to a member who we may consider is not experienced enough to answer it. But maybe that person has the right answer in the right language for the person who asked them. A person who comes to you with a problem, whether mental, moral or physical, has come to the right place by a process of natural law. They are there because they are meant to be there. Therefore you have just what that person needs - you have the temperament, personality and the experience which is appropriate to that person at that time; you have the right language and method which they need. The one with the superior knowledge might not have the right form of speech, or the right method to get past the obstructions which the person in need presents.
The thought, the personality and the body must be unified. If you have a corn on your toe you will have the equivalent on your mind, personality and body. Whichever of the three you change, the other two will have to conform, or the one you have corrected will have to relapse. If you remove the corn from the toe, the mind and soul still have the echo of that corn; if you can keep the toe right, the other two will fall into line. If you are not watchful enough the other two will bring the toe back into line and you call that a relapse. In any patient there is usually one of three ways to which they are most responsive and you have to find it. There is nothing spiritual that does not have a physical manifestation; there is nothing physical that does not have its spiritual origin. There is nothing physical which does not have a thought as its origin; all thoughts express themselves through the material world.
Evolution
The Druid sees man as a stage of evolution. Man is just another species of animal and he has not yet graduated into a human being. The human being has not yet gone into general production, we still have animal man. Animals learn by reacting to external stimulus, they learn through the application of pain or pleasure, fight or flight, praise or ridicule etc. Animals are subject to pride with all of its ramifications (fear, selfishness, greed, avarice, territorial conflict etc). There is nothing wrong with being an animal unless the next stage of evolution for us is to become more human. Learn to love rather than be loved, pay attention rather than get attention. Some will begin to move away from passively allowing life to just happen to them and start to become prime motivators in their life. A section of humanity will move more towards the primitive animal state and the others will move on to the human state. If the life form known as man is successful and learns how to love life rather than have life love them, they will move away from the mass and in time will manage the rest almost like domestic cattle.
Change
When we follow the programme of our evolution from choice, when we do what we see should be done, then things go smoothly. At this stage a mistake and its consequences are superficial, but we see things that should be done and we also know a lot of other people who ought to do them, so we leave it. This happens to us all. Next, the thing comes round to you again dressed up quite differently and this time it is not just something that should be done, it is something that ought to be done. There is a suggestion of a warning or threat in it, we feel in our bones that it ought to be done but we still do not do it. It will come around again and this time we had better do it or else. The first time it is of little consequence whether we manage it successfully or not because it is the endeavour that produces the result. The penalties are slight and ephemeral. At each stage the consequences are more dire and last longer and penetrate deeper into the organism. At the first stage we have an advantage in doing it, later on we can keep out of trouble by doing it in time, but most of us are inflexible and stubborn enough to hold on a little longer until we have to do it. We do it under compulsion, pushed into action through the pain and suffering of a crisis. By this time the consequences have affected the organism. Being forced to do it, our prideful personality tends to react with resentment, which adds to the store of hate. According to the Druids every thought results in an appropriate chemical secretion in the body which produces the results we feel. When our thoughts and feelings are good, not according to the laws and conventions of society but according to natural law, the secretions are beneficial and the body thrives. The secretions resulting from thoughts and feelings are in some cases the sole basis of physical disabilities. In time you learn to secrete fewer of these chemicals, but for now people need physical activity to exhaust those they have secreted as beneficially as possible.
Health
Some explanation of our conception of health may make this plainer. We do not see death as an end and its aftermath as a place of punishment or reward. When you sleep you wake up in the morning in a different body and a different world, cells have died and been replaced. If winter is coming, leaves have fallen off the trees just like your clothes were taken off before you went to sleep. To the Druid the period from death to birth is just a longer night and what we call life is a day in a very long life. Autumn is the same as coming home from work and preparing to go to sleep. What is now called Valentine’s day is about waking and getting out of bed, Spring is leaving for work in the morning. A day is like one year and winter is like one night; a lifetime is like one year or one day and being dead is like being asleep for a night or for a winter. Going to bed is the same as making yourself into a seed and planting yourself in the soil or bed. The seed is placed in a cave/ bed and covered up and in the morning the soil or bedclothes or seed pod is pushed out of the way as you rise for a new day.
At death we shed our various vehicles one by one, like our clothes when we arrive home eventually to retire to bed. First you take off your overcoat, the physical body; then your underclothes and so on. When you have shed your first three physical vehicles, the solid part of you, you carry on to be to be purged from the habits, toxins and thought patterns that are no longer appropriate and you wake in the morning feeling refreshed and ready to go. It is precisely the same in sleep, where you have a form of review and re-experiencing of the essentials of the life that you have led or the day you have had. The tasks that you have undertaken need to be completed, mentally emotionally and physically. You are free from external advice and influences, there are no witnesses, judges and no critics, there is no external praise or people speaking the words you want to hear; you are alone and what passes before you is assessed by you and nobody else. The criterion of judgement and the standard by which that panorama is judged are your own. Just as in the Garden of Eden there are no bushes to hide behind. You have lost your sympathetic nervous system, the appropriate endocrine glands and all the secretions: you can no longer hide behind excuses and explanations, you have lost the means by which you deceived and confused yourself. You are faced by your own life, assessed by your own standards, and if it falls so far below your own standards you call it hell.
You will feel better after shedding the debris of a life. The point is that it is your standard and not that of a priest, VIP or of a more enlightened person. So in this life, in relationship to feelings and thoughts, it is the innate standard you hold yourself which governs their rightness or wrongness, not the law of the land or the preaching of priests. It is a standard, free of excuses and explanations, and it is individual. This should be your attitude to yourself, and when dealing with the people that you meet, you have to try to work out what they want; to try to feel their standard, for that is the pattern of their body and their environment. We have made our bodies and we are the expression of our own past; we always were somewhere and we always will be, and one point in that somewhere we call ‘now’. We are the product of what we have been and we can effect what we shall be, and the only time we can do so is now, so in what you do now you are creating your own future. There is no need for you to follow the old pattern and if you follow a new one you are creating your new self.
Beliefs
Druids do not have beliefs: they either know or they do not know and if they do not know they keep quiet and wait until they find out, and that is why they tend sometimes to speak dogmatically. The work of the Druid is to try to get people to dedicate themselves to this form of life. Once you achieve it you will wonder why you ever lived any other form, but you have to get there first. Being a Druid means you have to live all the everyday things, to plough through so-called unproductive studies (there is no qualification or job or even an end) and spend your spare time trying to understand and correlate them.
Man has an unbelievable scope still available to him in the organism he has: the physical vehicle is the most highly developed, the one of least duration, and the one he sheds most effectively. According to man’s brain it has unlimited scope to be tapped, so all you have to do is keep trying. It becomes common place when everyone else has started, and you are only an eccentric until other people can do it. But remember that there is much beyond what you are working on now and when you meet something you disapprove of, or can’t accept, do not condemn it but lay it aside and let the oddball who is trying to develop it keep on trying. When you condemn them you close a door and if the cycle of your experience brings you around to that point again you will be unable to pick it up - there will be a blockage. If you leave it for the nutcase to play with, when you come to a point again when you are equally nutty you will be able to pick it up.
You can see something from one point of view and someone else may see it from a different point of view. People used to split into factions and fight over the significance of the different viewpoints. Do not fall into the same pit. There are in fact a variety of viewpoints and if you advocate one viewpoint and someone else advocates another, well, let them pursue it because you might then find that when you can see their point of view it fills in a gap in your experience. For this reason Druids are good at minding their own business and do not feel the compulsive need to make laws to control the work of others.
© 2016 The Druid Order an druidh uileach braithreachas
The Druid believes that life is good, that it originates in good and continues in good
The Work of a Druid