vajrayana buddhism

10
Apr
2015

Local Spirits: Reasons of Engagement


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Before I start this post proper, can I just take a moment to say how awesome this comic is? Catherine Mason, inspired by my explanation of sadak and shidak did a great little comic on them. Her presentation of Louisiana, NOLA, and Bourbon Street is excellent. Check out more of her art here. Also there will be more work from her to come in this blog because she’s already hilariously illustrated one of my rants about local spirits, so stay tuned for that.
The last few posts have been a bit more Buddhist centric in their sources (but I’d argue fairly universal in application), but the next two posts will be less Buddhist directly. They will also draw on more shamanic practices, witchcraft, ceremonial magick, and personal discoveries. I just wanted to clarify here so what I mention doesn’t get misrepresented as a Buddhist theory or practice.
Now that I’ve laid the framework about local spirits it’s time to talk about engaging them. The thing that so many people ask is “Why bother?” That’s why you can have competent spiritual people engage every spirit in their area, but miss shidak, they don’t see a reason or method to work with them.
There are many reasons to engage the shidak of your areas, first and foremost it’s just a matter of understanding and etiquette. After all you’re living in and on them, you’re a part of them and vice versa, you should be more consciously engaged with them. Tied into that idea, not all shidak are exactly happy with the state of our civilization, we’ve dug into their land, built under it, paved over it, forced out plants and wildlife (another symbiotic part of the shidak), and more or less ignore it. When you work with the shidak, and make offerings to it, you’re showing that you appreciate it, as well as by giving to it you consciously give it access to your life. By giving it energy you help it sustain itself in a more vibrant way. A great deal of pagan and paganesque folks I know understand this on a global level and give thanks to Gaia in this way, but then forget about the spirit that was disrupted to build their house.
On practical levels (because let’s face it beneficence only goes so far) shidaks are great to work with. You exist symbiotically with them, if they’re happy and healthy it makes it easier for you to be happy and healthy. You know when you’ve been to a house of someone who is unwell and you can just feel it in the air, pulling on you? Now imagine that subtly spread all through your area, it would slowly get to you. If the shidak is sick or damaged (and that can happen) then it will filter into your life, and anyone else in their catchment.
Insurance, if you’re on good terms with the shidak and you do something offensive to it without thinking (cutting down that old tree in the back yard, digging in new plumbing) it is more likely to be understanding. Otherwise it might actually retaliate, and yes shidak can and do attack. I’ve seen them weaken people by draining their energy and making them sick, and classically they’re known to cause people to trip and injure themselves. Though I’ve never experienced that, one of my teachers started a retreat without giving offerings to the shidak (which is a huge faux pas) and in the first day tripped on nothing he could find and managed to break his ankle and had to cancel the retreat. If you’re on good terms they’re less likely to lash out.
Influence, you’re part of the shidak, they’re part of you, and so is everyone else in that area. If you need to work on a neighbour, good or bad, the shidak is a place to start. Rowdy loud neighbour, angry with you for no reason, see if the shidak can smooth over the rough edges, or even remove them from the area. Sick neighbour, along with everything else you can work with the shidak to keep the energy of their area healthy and flowing to facilitate their healing. For more concrete actions (getting a raise, or zoning permission) you might be better off with the drongdak (city groupmind spirit), but for interpersonal stuff the shidak is a great ally.
Protection, a shidak can work as a guardian for you, not in a dedicated sense, but if they’re on your side they might have a sense of who and what to redirect for you. Think of it like a friend, if you’re friends with your neighbours they might do something about someone snooping around, or know someone shouldn’t there when you’re not, or know that you don’t want someone there. The shidak is the same, they’re great at dealing with people in that way. Again the trip hazard can occur, I’ve seen shidak utterly disorient people to keep them from getting somewhere, they can drain/intimidate/weaken people who shouldn’t be there. I’ve had the perverse pleasure in watching a shidak paralyze someone with irrational fear about entering the area (a park) to keep them from me. While visiting a friend of mine I felt psychically dead, in a fog, we realized that their shidak wasn’t sure about me so was dampening my senses/abilities, so I couldn’t do anything, they were protecting the friend by inhibiting me.
In Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism it’s fairly uncommon to do any major ritual without addressing the shidak (and all the other classes that might be lumped as local spirits that I mentioned in the first post). Their influence is recognized as something to be courted, they can help and hinder, either just by presence or intention, so they’re often addressed before a ritual, even if only to say “I’m going to be using this space for a while, please don’t interfere.”
Also with a well-developed shidak (as they can be varying degrees of intelligent and active) they can make connections, so even if it isn’t their area to do something, if they have influence over someone or something that can help, they can direct you to meet.
I’ve encountered a theory that a lot of spirits in Solomonic traditions are essentially glorified shidak, and I think that can extend to a lot of collections of spirits. They’re spirits contacted in a certain place, and out of their element elsewhere. (Not to mention the fact that some gods just seem weaker outside of their regions, is that belief, or are they major shidak stretched too far?) I don’t know if I believe it, or believe it completely, but I bring it up because if it is true it shows the range of abilities shidaks can have. And as previously said, if they can’t handle something they sometimes can redirect you, in the same way sometimes one Angelic type will pass your request on to a more appropriate figure.
One final reason to work with shidak is because they’re accessible and present. They aren’t always as effective or efficient as an angel, a demon, a Bodhisattva, or god, or whatever, but they’re easier to quickly engage in most cases. There is no need to summon, to invocate or evocate, no special tools or ingredients required, because the shidak is already there. It’s as easy (when you’ve developed a relationship with them) as setting out an offering (to be polite) and just chatting about what you want.
I’ll stress this again, because I mentioned how there are so many things they can do, they’re not necessarily the best at the job you want and some other spirit might be a better choice, but they’re there and easy to work with. Your friend might not be the best choice to help you replace the bathroom sink, but they’ll do it for free, and are a simple text message away. A professional plumber is a better choice, but then you have to pay, arrange times, set up a contract, and a variety of other bureaucratic issues. A shidak might not be the best choice to help with a love spell, but they’d try.
Get to know them, don’t underestimate them, but don’t overestimate them either.
Next time, how to actually work with them.

Posted by kalagni in blueflamemagick
06
Apr
2015

Local Spirits: Clarifying Sadak and Shidak


A week ago I started defining local spirits and what gets lumped as them. This week I’m going to talk about sadak and shidak in more detail. Last time I mentioned that the Tibetan terms for local spirits are sadak (ས་བདག་) and shidak (གཞི་བདག). Sometimes the terms are used interchangeably, but there is a difference. This might be a bit long, but there is no good place to divide this into multiple posts.
Sadak means Earth Lord. As a spirit the sadak tends to be very limited in scope, and very rooted into the land. While any local spirit could be upset if you started to dig without asking permission, a sadak is so rooted into the land that it thinks of the land as its body, and when you dig you’re actually pulling it apart. If you think of the soil as literally being ensouled, then that’s a sadak. I’ve never heard it said how big sadaks are or could be, but I’ve never encountered one that embodies an area bigger than a house property or two in the city. The average person could stand in the centre of a sadak’s influence and throw a tennis ball well beyond their control. I would also say in my experience that sadaks are not that intelligent, far closer to an animal than a human. (Yes, humans are totally animals, you know what I mean)
Shidak means Ground Lord, and is probably closer to what most people think of as a genius loci. A shidak lives in a certain area, and as a certain area. While tied to the land, they don’t tend to identify in and as the land in the way that a sadak does. The human analogy would be that a sadak is a person who thinks they are their body, and that’s it, while a shidak is a person who knows that the body is a part of them, but one of many.
The shidaks really are a soul of a place, a spirit that lives in and permeates an area. They’re the energy that envelops a region. A shidak is immovable within an area, or perhaps can only move slowly as the land itself changes. Saying they live as an area is meant to imply the level of connection they have to it. While the shidak could be considered the soul, and the area the body, you have to understand everything that makes up the “body.” It’s not as simple as the dirt, any more than our bodies are just as simple as a lump of flesh. The lay of the land, the positive space of hills, and the negative space of valleys are the body. The water of the area, the wind over the place, everything is part of the shidak.
Odd fact about the human body: We’re composed of roughly 1 trillion cells per kilogram, but our gut contains roughly ten times as many bacteria cells as are in the rest of our body. Meaning by the numbers our body is more composed of cells that aren’t us, than cells that are, by the numbers we’re more inhuman than we are human. This is another human parallel. The shidak is the land, the water, but they’re also the grass, the plants, the trees, but one step farther the shidak is in many ways all of the living beings within the space. The shidak is the insects crawling in the dirt or buzzing in the sky, the squirrels and raccoons in the tree, and yes, even us.
This is where a lot of people have issues thinking of shidaks, but we’re part of them, and they’re part of us. I don’t mean we’re an expression or incarnation of the shidak, but when we live in a place we’re connected to it, we’re symbolically linked, and while you might think of yourself as flesh and the shidak as dirt, the division between us can be really hard to find. If you have trouble conceiving how this works think of the shidak as the energy field of a place, rather than a sentient spirit. The energy of our neighbourhood transcends us, it moves through us, and shapes us, as we shape it. We draw on this energy, and we release our energy into it. In a lot of ways the “vibe” of a place is an aspect of the shidak. The bacteria in our gut has different DNA, it’s not us, but it’s in us, and we “feed” it when we eat, and they break down our food so that we can process the chemicals in it to fuel our body, and that makes it oddly tricky to clearly divide us. This isn’t a perfect analogy, as shidaks can and do survive without people, but it illustrates the level of connection we can have, and I feel that there is a quality to a “living” shidak that has an living biological component, and ones that are more barren of life.
Now to make shidaks a bit more nebulous, they come in different sizes and placements. So while only one human can occupy a single point in 3D space, more than one shidak can embody the same spot. I don’t necessarily mean a complete one for one, but an overlapping pattern. It’s less a clear cut map, and more a sequence of catchment areas. A shidak has a “core” area, but along the fringes, where their presence is less defined they can actually overlap with another shidak, both living in and as the same place. To go back to the human analogy, while physically only one person can occupy a single space, if two people are standing near each other their auras (or radiant heat) will have an area of overlap. So in the same spot you can actually be able to engage several shidaks of the same magnitude.
Magnitude? Did I just introduce another layer of complexity? Damn straight. Not all shidaks are the same size, and there is even more overlap when this is taken into consideration. Shidaks can be as small as single plot of land, or as large as a continent, and everywhere in between. So it’s not a simple matter of similar sized spirits overlapping in influence, but also larger and larger spirits controlling more land which encompasses even more shidaks. Think of it like a piece of paper with all sorts of different circles on it, different sizes, some overlap, some big circles contain an entire smaller circle, or only part of that area.
In this sense shidaks can be like the Russian nesting dolls, each one contained in a bigger and bigger version. Another way to look at it is place and identity. (Sorry for all the analogies, but it’s the easiest way to make the sense of this clear) Depending on scale, I could say I live in Canada, or Ontario, or Southern Ontario, or the St. Lawrence Lowlands, or the Golden Horseshoe, or the GTA, or Toronto, or Scarborough, or the Bluffs, or my street name, or my house number. All of these are right, it’s just an issue of size. Shidaks have a similar thing of overlapping each other in scale.
But while the larger ones are bigger and more “powerful” in that sense, they’re also less present. The larger shidaks are spread over so much that they’re hard to engage or sense, because you’re always in them and they cover so much, the smaller shidaks are more accessible. Like getting help, in a big city you have a politician in charge of your ward, who reports to someone above him, who reports to someone above her, who reports to another person and so on until you get to the mayor, but then above mayor is the Premier, and above them is the Prime Minister. Well if there is an issue with zoning in my area I can’t complain to the Prime Minister, he’s too distant (and he’s a worthless zealot Christian robot), but my local politician could help. Depending on what you’re doing with shidaks, you might be below their notice or reasonable ability to influence, and if you want something they may be too far removed to be of us, so the smaller more local ones are more practical to engage and sense.
Next week I’ll talk about why it is useful to deal with shidaks, and how to do so. I also plan on touching on the structure of shidaks, and more detailed methods of working with and influencing, and working with shidak and drongdak (the city spirits) in unison, as well as some of my personal work with them.

Posted by kalagni in blueflamemagick