Stepping Aside
The stepping aside practice is essential to psychic skills. However, there a few more steps to learn before we get there. Learning to let go in life and in spirituality is the precursor to stepping aside.
Mastery of all the previous skills is needed to practice psychic letting go and stepping aside. You will combine these skills into one effort that will result in you shifting your consciousness into an altered state for another task as you prepare for more advanced psychic skills.
NOTE: The stepping-aside skills assist with increasing the focus needed for advanced psychism and magic.
Letting Go in Psychism
Letting go in psychism differs from letting go in daily life. In psychic letting go, you release your daily consciousness briefly to apply your psychic consciousness to another task. When you use your intuition or listen to your inner self, you let go on a psychic level. You do this by shifting your consciousness to an altered state. This type of letting go is used in ritual, meditation, spell work, channeling, divination, and trance. Stepping aside is needed in dreamwork, trance, and astral travel.
There are paradoxes in letting go. For example, when you give up control, you find control. In letting go of the search for the center, you become centered. Some of us are better at it than others. Knowing how to let go in our everyday life helps maintain our foundation, letting go psychically, allows information to be sent and received. This kind of letting go is a dance between fear and trust on another level because we are dealing with the unknown and the beyond. Keep in mind, these are tools to use when you can, not something you are expected to achieve and sustain to be enlightened. We must always remember we are human and fallible.
By working on the following skills, you prepare for crossing the threshold and are learning to work in liminal space. Liminal space is the space between one space and the next. The liminal spaces psychics work in are the space between one world and the next and beyond even that.
Fear
Any fear or doubt can block the whole process. Some people fear the unknown. Some fear they will not be safe, or they will look ridiculous to others. Some people fear they will not know what to do or are afraid of what may come. Some fear not being in control. Some people are even afraid of silence and space. There are many valid fears and sometimes folks have fears of which they are not even aware. This work will show you those fears.
Moving past them is beneficial in many ways; however, it takes learning what that fear feels like to allow you to mentally step past it. In psychism, we must be able to step beyond our comfort zone and into new experiences. Dealing with trust and fear at this level takes faith and is a fearsome dance between the two.
Faith
Faith is a word for which we all have a different definition. Faith has been defined as an absolute belief and absolute trust. Faith is not having no fear, but rather acting even though you have fear. It is a complete belief in the unseen but somehow known.
With faith, you believe that what you need is going to be there even while taking a risk. This is called stepping out on faith. It requires one to let go completely and trust that no matter what happens the outcome will be what is meant to be.
The best example of stepping out on faith I have ever experienced was some years ago when my family and I were driving up to Mt. Ashland. We were on our way to go sledding and skiing. The road was narrow and curvy. One side was straight uphill, the other side was straight downhill. The only resistance to going over the edge on the downhill side was a three-foot-thick snowbank. On the way up, I hit a patch of ice and the car began to spin.
At first, I was scared. I tried everything to steer and stop the car. Then I heard a voice within say, “Let go of the wheel.” In that moment, I knew there was nothing more I could do. I was stepping out on faith. A calm came over me. I closed my eyes and let go of the wheel.
The car continued to spin at 20 miles an hour for what felt like forever as time seemed to slow down. In my sudden calm, I sat there with my hands up and my eyes closed while my family screamed at me to do something. When the car came to a stop it was surreal. I opened my eyes to see what had happened. The front of the car was two feet deep into the three-foot snowbank on the downhill side. The front wheels were barely touching the ground about to go off the edge.
My family was shaken, and people came to help and make sure we were okay. Surprisingly, I was smiling, extremely grateful, and trembling. I had stepped out on faith knowing that other forces were in play. The people who stopped were able to push our car back onto the road. The car was not damaged, and we were able to go on our way.
That story is a drastic example of stepping out on faith, letting go, and completely stepping aside. I had to put aside everything I had been taught, all my instincts and reactions, and even my thought process. I had to put it all on pause, let go, and step aside to survive. In psychism, magic, and the beyond, our lives are not at stake, but our mental capacity could be. These skills are our protection.
Caution
The act of stepping aside is one of consciously shifting your consciousness to an altered state. This can be a difficult thing for one’s psyche. This work is deeper than the work done in previous chapters and may bring up issues and emotions you will not expect. The work may push you beyond your comfort zone and bring up fears and doubts, all of which need to be addressed while completing the following exercises. This is where we roll up our sleeves and do the gritty work of psychism and magic. Please make sure you have a support system you can rely on in place before doing this work. Before you begin doing the work, I recommend reading through the next section and the exercises and journaling on how the thought of doing this work makes you feel and think.
Stepping aside is a more intense dance between faith, trust, and fear than letting go. It is a conscious act of pushing your ego, fear, and entire personality aside to let the psychic process happen. In my example above, it can take you to the edge and ask you to step off. There is much in psychism that requires you to step outside your comfort zone and continue onward; some call it threshold or precipice work, which is working on the very edge of things. In Psychism, Magic and Witchcraft we often work outside our comfort zone, this work get us ready for that.
The act of stepping aside is the moment when everything in the universe is suspended leaving only total consciousness as you move into a liminal space between two different levels of consciousness. You remove yourself from the equation and let the other side take over.
