"An' It Harm None, Do What You Will"
Eight simple words. They even sound a little "fluffy
bunny"18 at first glance. The Wiccan Rede is simplistic when taken
at face value, as happens when new converts or those outside our religion
reduce it to the commonism "Harm None"—though even this much of the Rede,
if universally embraced, would solve 99% of the ills that plague humanity.
But when explored deeply, in it's entirety, the Wiccan Rede is revealed
to contain within it a complete moral and metaphysical system of thought,
action and being. The Rede is our key to understanding the world
around us and our rightful place within it.
"An' It Harm None..."
The first question we must ask when exploring the
deeper meaning of the Wiccan Rede is, "what is IT?" What is being referred
to in the second word of the Rede? IT, here, refers to the action
one is contemplating taking – the "DO" of the second half of the Rede.
It might sound nit-picky to define a word as small and common as"It," but
it matters here to show that to reduce the Rede to Harm None is to render
it meaningless by removing completely from consideration the actual "It"
one intends to "Do." It's the same as reducing the sentence "She
ran for President" to "She ran." She ran? Toward something?
Away from someone? Cutting the sentence in half like that makes understanding
the speaker's original meaning impossible. All context is lost.
All questions are answered when the sentence is considered in its entirety,
and, to be fully understood, the Rede must be contemplated in exactly the
same way, as a whole.
Obviously, the Rede does instruct us to "Harm None."
But that is easier said than done. The Wiccan Rede requires us to
think longer and harder than non-Wiccans do about our every deed, to cultivate
the habit of considering the effects of everything we do and say, on ourselves
and on those around us, and to take responsibility for making conscious
choices in even the least sig-nificant of our actions each day.
Each of us, over the course of a lifetime, does
a tremendous amount of unintentional harm to the people around us, to our
planet and the beings who share it with us, and to ourselves. We
do this harm because we don't stop to think deeply about the ramifications
of what we do, think, feel, and say. This does not happen because
people are evil, or because life is suffering, or because the Devil is
working mischief, or for any of the other blaming reasons some non-Wiccan
religions teach. It happens because our untrained minds are not constructed
to think the events of our lives through, to grant us easy insight into
the long-range effects of our actions upon ourselves and the world.
And because we human beings are essentially pleasure-seeking
creatures, we are not naturally driven to do the work necessary to develop
this kind of insight. It takes work, usually a great deal of work,
and the Wiccan Rede calls us to accept responsibility to do the work necessary
to not only become aware of the ramifications of all our actions, but to
cultivate a habit of such awareness – essentially to wake up from our sleep
of easy unconcern, of reacting to life rather than acting upon it, and
to do the work necessary to change the structure of our minds so that awakened,
present-moment awareness becomes natural to us.
"An' it harm none..." calls us to become fully
conscious beings, as there is no other way to fulfill this command.
We may never fulfill it completely, and that may well not be the real goal,
anyway. Truly harming none is not possible for creatures who must
eat to live, for example. In order for each of us to survive, other
beings, even if they be "only" plants, must die. The only person
who truly does no harm in this world is a dead person, and so we do not
take this part of the Rede to extremes. But it does call us to work
hard to consciously reduce the damage we do to ourselves, to others and
to Mother Earth by first cultivating conscious awareness, and then by acting
on the fruit of that awareness – and not willy nilly, as our whims direct
us, either – but, rather, through active conscious choice, through the
purposeful development and direction of our individual WILL, a concept
which is explored in the second half of the Rede:
"... DO WHAT YOU WILL"
At first glance, this half of the Rede seems to be advising
the Wiccan practitioner to "Do Anything You Want." Not so.
Probably nothing has done more damage to the public image of Wicca in recent
years than the proliferation of Hollywod-esque "weekend witches" who dress
all in black, don Pentacles as fashion statements, and announce loudly
at drunken revelries that they can do anything (and anyone) they please
with-out moral conflict because (by the Goddess!) they're witches, and
the Wiccan Rede says "DO WHAT YOU WILL!" The "fluffier" members of
this sorry Coolness Cabal may occasionally whisper, "... as long as I don't
hurt anybody...," at the end of such pronouncements, but seldom loudly
enough to actually be overheard, as such a "peacenick" stance would make
being a "witch" far less scary, and therefore not nearly as "cool."
In reality, though, just as "An' It Harm None" implies far more to the
thoughtful Wiccan practitioner than the simple "Don't Hurt Anybody," the
injunction to "Do What You Will" compacts an entire system of thought,
morality and spiritual direction into four little words.
Let's isolate and explore just one of them, the
core "word of power" around which the entire Wiccan Rede revolves:
"DO"
What does it mean to "DO" something? Seems
pretty obvious, doesn't it? But one of the lessons you quickly learn
when you pursue a magickal life through the practice of Wicca or any other
metaphysical religion is that "obvious" meanings nearly always turn out
to be deceiving. Behind most of life's "simple truths" lie complex,
some-times hidden19 realities.
Here's a scientifically-proven fact for you to
consider: The signals transmitted from your sensory organs (eyes, ears,
nose, tongue, skin) to your brain travel very fast, indeed, but not infinitely
so. There is, in fact, a brief lag – approximately 1/10,000th of
a second – between the time your sense organs take in information about
the world around you, and the time your brain receives that information
and turns it into a recognizable sight, sound, smell, taste or sens-ation.
1/10,000th of a second? Big deal, right?
Wrong. It matters because reality as we experience it,
as opposed to how it actually is, beyond the scope of our ability to perceive
it with our five limited senses, is a sensually-vivid, three-dimensional
"hologram" constructed inside our brains out of the sensory signals we
collect, and which is presented to us in such a way that we experience
the world as "out there," or "universal," with us three-dimensionally "inside"
and interracting with it, when in fact, the version of reality we have
constructed is entirely "personal" or "in here," happening only inside
our own brains. Our personal-reality-holograms may or may not bear
any resemblance to the full or objective reality surrounding us – no one
is sure on that point. This "personal-reality-hologram" business may seem
strange, but believe me, it is not some New Age metaphor – it's basic brain
physiology.
What that 1/10,000th of a second lag in sensory
signal speed really means is that we only become aware of the world around
us, and of ourselves thinking, feeling, acting, making choices, etc. within
and in relation to that world, one ten-thousandth of a second after the
fact. We find out what we have done, said and felt, one ten-thousandth
of a second after those actions, words or feelings have already occurred.
This means, quite simply, that we do not really
"DO" anything – our life literally "happens" to us, and we find out about
it later. Not very much later, a mere 1/10,000th of a second, but
later nonetheless. Our lives feel to us as if they are happening
in the "here and now," that we are making our own choices and steering
our own destinies, but that feeling is largely an illusion created by the
convincing nature of our personal-reality-holograms.20
I say "largely" an illusion instead of "abso-lutely"
one in the previous sentence because the questions of how we experience
our lives, of consciousness and free will, etc. are far more complex than
any one scientific observation, taken alone, can answer absolutely.
But it's food for thought.
Our inability to genuinely "DO" anything remains
a fact, and inescapable, so long as we remain centered in our normal state
of conscious-ness, our brains shifting automatically from a focused, waking
Beta state, to Alpha state daydreaming, to Delta dream sleep and back again
without interjecting will into the process, without ever working to take
the reins of consciousness away from the auto-pilot Nature has supplied
us with in order to allow us to eat, sleep, procreate and work without
hurting ourselves.
Taking the reins of consciousness, learning to
shift willfully between brain states and to use such shifts as tools for
creating and shaping reality, is both a tremendous responsibility and a
terrible risk. It is also pretty much what we mean when we use the
word Magick.
And Magick, most classically defined by Thelemic
magician Aleister Crowley as "…the science and art of causing change to
occur in conform-ity to will"21 is the naturally-flowering fruit of a life
of conscious eclecticism, lived in awakened personal relationship with
the super-conscious intelligence of the Earth and Moon and planets and
Sun and stars, and wholly devoted to spiral-ing, evolutionary growth up
the ladder of being toward eventual union with the Great Cosmic Goddess.
Which, thealogically speaking, is a pretty good
definition of Wicca from which to begin our great work of envisioning and
calling into being a Wiccan World – for the benefit of all Humanity, of
our mother, the Earth (and all her many children), and of the Universal
Goddess embodied in all Nature, within whose Divine Cosmic Being we are
all already one.