Sacrificing Yourself at The Altar of Becoming

Offerings as Ancient Human Practice

The giving of offerings and the making of sacrifices, the surrendering of a resource in order to give thanks or to create change, are age-old human practices spanning deep time, going back hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.

When you look at indigenous or traditional cultures, you don’t find a single one that does not have the giving of offerings in some form or another woven into their culture and holding prominence in how the culture itself is structured.

Relationship, Time, and Place

Offerings anchor people into a particular time and place, when we give offerings to the land, when we give offerings at particular seasonal junctures.

Offerings build relationships
to spirits,
to gods,
to natural forces.

Offerings ease tension.
Offerings show gratitude.

To give offerings is a part of being human.

We have been doing it so long that at this point it is part of how we even orient ourselves.

Offerings in the Modern World

In the modern world, offerings are still part of how we relate to one another.

The offering of time.
The offering of a skill.
The offering of a resource at our disposal to aid someone, to open the way, to help someone in dire straits.

At a deeper level of the other-than-conscious mind, what many people call the unconscious, the giving of offerings and the making of sacrifices is a built-in feature.

We instinctually understand that in order to create balance and harmony with others and with the world, we must give and also learn to receive.

Magical Language and the Food Cycle

One can understand this through magical practice, for magical practice is the language of the other-than-conscious mind in action.

It is a symbolic language.
A poetic language.
A language working with the underlying energetic currents of reality.

In relevance to today’s talk, it is important to recognize that we all exist as part of a food cycle.

Where one force dies,
it feeds another force.

All beings, all entities, all discrete energetic packages must take in nourishment.

They must eat.

Indigenous and tribal cultures understood this innately, and the giving of offerings was essential for exchange.

Sacrifice as Fundamental Alchemy

There is another aspect to this that is very pertinent to today’s talk, which is the fundamental alchemy present in the process of giving offerings and making sacrifices.

Sacrifice is a type of death.

Sacrifice is a release, for the action of giving a sacrifice removes something from your current threshold of experience and gives it to another.

What happens is that it creates space.

Expansion, Contraction, and Effort

For with every expansion there is a contraction.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This is a fundamental truth that the other-than-conscious mind understands at a root level.

This is why people must often struggle in order to accept something into their world.

At a deeper level, we understand the process of exerting effort, of doing, of engaging, of paying the price to receive the reward that we seek.

The Primal Memory of Sacrifice

We evolved in the wilderness.

Moving through forests and savannas.
Hunting animals that could easily kill us.
Animals we felt awe and inspiration toward.

All in order to feed our families.

In this world, sacrifice is a core aspect of understanding.

To take a being we feel all around us and kill it in order to feed our family, in a process where it could kill us, is to understand the giving of offerings and the making of sacrifices.

This deep primal rhythm is still with us today.

The Threshold of Becoming

Life is calling you to inhabit a more expanded space of capacity.

The life you sense you came here to lead.
The gifts you know you came here to bring.
The talents at your disposal.

For many people, it feels like they cannot quite get there.

As if it is right at the threshold of possibility.

They know they came here to do more than what they are currently doing.
They want to grow.
And grow.
And grow.

But what they often cannot allow is the contractive process of sacrificing who they currently are.

The Altar of Change

This is to sacrifice yourself as you are now at the altar of becoming.

What is an altar?

An altar is a place of change.
It is in the word to alter.

Whether we are altering our life, altering our relationship with spiritual forces, or altering ourselves, the altar is the place of change.

This does not require an altar in the classical sense of a constructed object.

It is the ongoing place where change is occurring.

Feeding the Altar

To fuel this process, to fuel this altar, we must continuously sacrifice who we currently are for who we are becoming.

The person capable of giving the gifts.
The person who has embodied the values.
The principles.
The practices.
The way of life they are calling in.

Often this is painful.

Like taking a knife and plunging it into the neck of a sacrifice to spread blood over the stones of the altar.

This process is uncomfortable.

Because it is death.
And nothing inherently wants to die.

Compost and Relinquishment

The parts of you that currently exist as they are try to hold on.

The discomfort of actually dying.
Of relinquishing what is.
In order to create compost for the new self.

This is the sacrifice.

We do this not only for ourselves, but for the greater reality calling us forward.

For those who need what you have to give.
For the evolution of the soul at the core of your being.

A soul not fundamentally attached to the temporary iteration of who you are now.

Why People Remain Stuck

This need not be a harsh process.

Truthfully, it requires willingness and courage to allow the death to occur.

If you are already engaging the practices, doing the work, showing up earnestly, calling in a more expanded version of yourself, then often what is required is the willingness to contract the current version.

But most people cannot surrender.
Most people cannot let go.
Most people cannot relinquish.

Old parts sediment.
They concretize.
They grow stale.

Unwilling to break.
Unwilling to shatter.
Unwilling to release.

The Law of the Altar

When that happens, life feels like a perpetual threshold.

Always almost there.
Always just about to change.

But:

Every expansion requires a contraction.
Every birth requires a death.
Every altar requires consistent sacrifice to feed it.

This sacrifice is not only for the life you want to lead.

It is for the life calling you at a deeper level.
At the level of the soul.

Not just for your own evolution, but for what you are here to give others.
What you are here to give the world.

This is the greater sacrifice.

The offering of who we are now
to the altar of the world itself.