G is for Gate Ritual

         G is for Gate Ritual


“When you enter the forest, you carry the city. If you do not continue with respect and leave the city behind, then you may travel throughout the whole forest without having left the city.” anon


The Gate Ritual is an important one. I will teach it to you by personal anecdote because it makes a difference. Where I grew up was a septeniary spiral on a Celtic barrow mound. It is a holy site with intense earth energies. The barrow has a wild ring grove around its embankments and a pine plantation on the top. A local old boy farmer told me that as a child her cut hay from the field and transported it to the farm by horse drawn cart. The Pines are more recent and I have grown up with them; as a boy I got their lower branches stuck in my hair and down the back of my shirt by crawling beneath them on hands and knees. Now they are tall and proud and their lower branches are higher than I can jump up to. It is the heart of my world and the world of my heart is this forest.

Most of the wild trees are deformed, not in a negative way, mutated by the high amount of crude natural yellow-white quartz pebbles in the land, what I instinctively called merlinstone ever since childhood although there is a different gemstone of that name. I sincerely believe the man-made landmass, marked ‘earthwork’ on the maps, has a Stonehenge beneath it. I have heard them singing at night when the sun and stars, and my perceptions, are right. It is the development of these perceptions that the Gate Ritual is all about.

Upon entering the forest there are natural energy Gates. Identifying them is not easy unless you know what to feel for. Usually, to make life easier, there will be a bird or perhaps a spider, located at such a place. A sign of nature. If you go charging headlong forward and ignore the test, you will startle the bird; it will call out to the forest announcing ‘idiot!’ or ‘danger!’ or ‘city virus’ or whatever the word means when translated into human concepts. And it will fly away. Or you will blank the spider from your awareness, perhaps break its thread or tread on it.

The proper respectful thing to do is to wait, quietly and patiently. It helps to send out positive peaceful thought vibrations that you mean no harm  and are passing through respectfully, intending to be a part of the forest for a while. This is the key concept. A forest is a living being. It is more than the sum of its tree’s. It has soul, it has spirit. In the same way that a city has soul and spirit, however the forest is more natural and tends to escalate upwards wheras the city tends to escalate downwards. I may have to describe that in more detail.

The forest will judge you and hopefully, accept you. You are welcome. At this time you will feel and perhaps be given some sign that it is safe for you now to move on. The bird will not shriek and fly away. It will be pleased, curious, accept you as a normal wild forest creature. Often, and with most small woodlands that are a pale remnant, fragment of the once great forest that covered the whole entire land as one powerful singularity, before tree-feller built urban and ships, and made space for agriculture, farm animals, and planted hedgerows; often this one Gate is enough, and you will traverse at a higher frequency, on a higher plane. The forest will watch you and integrate you, harmoniously. This is when you can soak up the forests energy, and rejuvenate. Contemplate the word ‘For-Rest’.

There are times when you will be presented with a second Gate. An opportunity, if you are cleanse and pure, chilled and natural enough, to go higher, deeper into the domain. Many people claim that there are only three levels of depth to any energy source. And for most extents and purposes, that rule is sufficient and true. Certainly to access the third level is a rare honor, during which mythic events occur. Normal urban measured time and space are left behind because the forest generates its own reality, its own physics. They are the wild laws of nature and even the most devout of druids cannot fathom them all, for the quest is a part of the Path.

I grew up on a septeniary spiral. This indicates seven gates, and suggests an eighth plane. Of course it is possible to associate these levels with the chakra’s, which is a very pleasant system of describing the occurrences of each level although in practice I have found that it does not pan out in connection with the reality experience.

I began to apply the Gate Ritual while dwelling in the city. It helps. It makes mockery of what I said earlier about the city being a downward spiral while nature is an upward spiral. Use of the Gate Ritual develops for us a deeper involvement with the planes. The best way I can describe the worlds between the Gates, is to call them Planes. Only the nature of the experiences varies between forest and city location. Cities are for Humanity, in all our dirty glory. The Mayans call the Fifth Age, that which you will be aware of as the age of Aquarius, the Itza age. The word Itza means city. Contemplating this has caused me to re-assess what a City actually is. The urban environment of grafitti, money-chasers, concrete, toxic air, locked doors, chemicals and trash heaps, the scent of shit that we don’t even notice because your nasal senses that control your minds perceptory levels are so accustomed to it that it is invisible. But the urban environment is also the Human zone. And this is the realm of emotion, tamed. While the city confronts us with opportunities to learn harsh lessons in life experiences of living with other humans… 

                             ‘In Lakesh’ - I am another yourself (Pleiadian)

…and human culture, it is only once applying the Gate Ritual do we begin to master its strange ways. Remember how much landscape affects us, steers us. And that ‘urban’ is its own deity, with plans for its denizens. At this stage a study of the kabala begins to make sense, referring to the planes as levels of experience to teach us on our path. We can be Aware, and respectful, and make ritual in honor of the ascending path, or we can ignore it and drag our trash throughout our whole lives and deny that higher planes are real because we never see them in our ignorance. You won’t know until you try it. It is the gentle way of stillness, of peace. Such souls do not cut down nature and build megalopolis. They garden.