Are the Practical and the Hooky-Spooky Related?

 

How do you navigate the waters between the practical and the hooky-spooky?

This is the question I have begun to really focus on of late.  For a long time, I delved deeper and deeper into hooky-spooky resources and ideas.  The Law of Attraction, energy healing, connections to earth energy, and seeking and connecting to source energy all get lumped into this.

There is a lot of bits from each of these ideas that I find I can get behind.  Maybe not the entire practices of in-depth concepts, but aspects of them resonate with me.

But I am also a fan of the practical.  How does one apply any of these notions without sounding like a hippy-crunchy wacked-out flake?  I mean, let’s be honest, I regularly espouse the belief that consciousness creates reality, and I am well aware that this can easily come across as totally wacky-crazy. The way my explanation of practicing Reiki was received, while amusing, also told me to keep that side of my self-identity to a rather limited audience.

However, in the past decade, more and more I am finding who the authentic ME is.  Who I am and what I stand for and how that makes me feel is, admittedly slowly, overcoming whom I desire for people to see me as.

In the interest of sharing my ongoing journey, I began blogging regularly.  As the notion of Pathwalking, and making my own destiny evolved into a deeper exploration of conscious reality creation, I have begun recently to reach another new level of progress.  This entails seeking and finding more practical applications of this notion.

Can the practical and the hooky-spooky coexist?

Short answer: Yes.

Much more involved answer: This is riddled with a large number of paradoxes, belief and faith matters, and trying to bring an apple and an orange into the same orbit, more or less.

Are you familiar with the idea of the unified field theory (aka the Theory of Everything)?  This has been called Einstein’s incomplete theory, which would tie together the ideas of electromagnetism and gravity as different expressions of a single fundamental field.  Two very different scientific precepts unified by…well, something.

Bringing the practical and the hooky-spooky together to coexist is similar.  Combining logic, which is one way to see practicality; and emotion, which is one way to see the hooky-spooky, seems almost impossible.

And yet they can be brought together with a single expression.  Mindfulness.

Both the practical, which includes science and reason, and the hooky-spooky explore mindfulness.  One takes a pretty straightforward and literal approach, while the other tends to be more airy.  Yet they are, in truth, the same.

Take meditation, one of the arguably most fundamental mindfulness practices.  Both believers in the practical and the hooky-spooky employ meditation to be still, and to be present in the moment.  Literally mindful of the here-and-now, focused on the breath.

While they may diverge – in one approach seeking to slow the mind and find calm in order to reset from the stresses of everyday life, and the other seeking a euphoric sense and connection with one’s higher self – both have the same goal.  Awareness of the self.

The practical and the hooky-spooky both reach for awareness

Whether you lean more to the practical or the hooky-spooky, both practices seek clearer awareness.  Why?  Because in being aware, and thus mindful, we gain empowerment, which in turn opens us up to more potential and possibility.

Further, when we are aware, we can better make choices and decision to help us live our lives.  Living in this stressful, fear-based society we share, we need all of the tools to do this that we can find.

Why are the approaches to the same end goal so different?  I believe that this is a matter of perception.  Since no two people see anything the same way, the most appealing approach is going to differ.  If you seek to better your life via the practical or the hooky-spooky, either way you are making a choice to assert what control you can over your life.

This ties into the idea of head and heart, logic versus emotion.  Sometimes they align, but other times they do not.  Overall, the majority of people I know lean more in one way than the other.

Which brings me to another super-important point.  These are not opposites, nor matters of black and white.  Like just about everything in the Universe, these notions truly coexist, because they often are just matters of different language used to seek understanding of the same thing.

However, for a lot of people, logic and emotion, the practical and the hooky-spooky, tend to clash.  People will also shy away from one or the other, in particular if one upsets or embarrasses them.

Which leads to those who decide not to decide.  A lot of people avoid choices and decisions as much as they can.  They seldom apply the practical or the hooky-spooky, because they believe stigmas that exist about both.

Stigmas of the practical and the hooky-spooky

Much of this gets based on our individual cultural experience.  But I expect this will probably be very familiar.

There is, in our current society, a major push towards anti-intellectualism.  People are rejecting good science, practical evidence, and educated, reasoned arguments due to several things.  The reasons include blind faith, religion, and the notion that the educated are keeping people down.  Hearsay and conspiracy theories and unsupported opinions held and spouted by various demagogues and so-called leaders fuel this.

On the other side of the coin, though, there is also a major push away from the hooky-spooky.  People are rejecting the notion of something bigger than themselves, largely in reaction to those who embrace it to the point of neglecting basic human decency.  The notion of flower power hippy-crunchy new-age incense-obsessed gurus is as unappealing as priests, rabbis, and other ministers, and their impractical and sometimes hateful and intolerant messages.

There are, undoubtedly, people who take these matters to extremes.  Always are.  But the vast majority fall somewhere in the middle.  When we work to be more mindful and more aware, we gain the ability to see how much more empowering creating unity over division can be for the whole world.

Whatever perceptions we apply, mindfulness can open us up to tremendous possibility.  But to get there, we need to be less fearful of the unknown, and more aware about how the practical and the hooky-spooky might differ or be the same.  Awareness and mindfulness can make our lives better, and from there we can help to make the world better.

Are you mindful of your thoughts, feelings, and actions, whether from a practical or a hooky-spooky approach?

This is the three-hundred seventy-ninth entry in my series. These weekly posts are ideas for, and my personal experiences with, walking along the path of life to consciously create reality.  I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world along the way, and empower myself and my readers with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me.  Feel free to re-blog and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including some expanded ideas, is available here.

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