Embrace the Unknown

Episode Transcript:

I’m Bridget Owens and you're listening to the Waxing Soul podcast. Join me on an exploration of mindful modern magic, a journey towards deeper understanding of self and transformative individual spirituality.
It's October 28, 2021, and on today's episode we're celebrating the one year anniversary of The Waxing Soul Podcast with a retrospective, info on the book launch, and lots of other fun stuff you won't want to miss.
Are you ready to grow your soul?

We’ve made it an entire year, everybody! The Waxing Soul is one year old, I started this podcast last year on my birthday, and here we are 50 episodes later. And I have to admit that I didn’t know where this was going to go when I started it. I trusted that I had enough to say to keep making episodes, but beyond that I didn’t really start with an agenda or a set plan. Didn’t even know if anyone would listen.

So I want to thank everyone for listening, for being part of this journey, and I’m really stoked to move into what I’m going to call Season 2 starting next week. That said, though, before I get into looking back at the year of episodes or talking about next year or even the book launch happening today, I want to actually dig into a regular topic, and it’s one that relates quite a bit to some of the episodes from this past year.

I did a whole episode very early on, episode 2, in fact, on opening yourself to infinite possibilities which is very closely related to today’s topic, which is embracing the unknown. And it all centers around manifestation and magic and the fact that we, as human beings, we are capable of more than we think and at the same time we know far less than we imagine. I’ve talked quite a bit about the more capable part, did a whole series of episodes this year on how magic works, talked about spiritual and magical empowerment and all that, but the more important part I want to dig into today is the bit about how we don’t know as much as we like to think as a species. And this was a realization that really shifted some things spiritually for me over the years.

So, I’ve always been a nerd, always really interested in science and little known facts and trivia and stuff, very into knowing things. Understanding things. But I also grew up in a religious context where science wasn’t, like… It was fine to understand basic chemistry and physics and stuff, I was encouraged to be a good student, but when it came to things like evolution and the age of the universe and stuff like that, not so much. And the funny thing that kind of got stuck in my brain around those ideas was that there was some kind of… like, the mysteries of the universe were really just, I don’t know… misunderstandings? Like we were imagining far more unknown than actually existed or something. I didn’t think about that a lot, but it was something of a perception. A limiting perception that I picked up.

But over time, as my understanding shifted, and I ended up seeing things more through the eyes of a science focused atheist. A skeptic. Of course there were mysteries out there we hadn’t solved yet, things about the way the universe worked that we were still working hard to unravel, but by the same token there’s that skeptical, antitheist or skeptical way of thinking that basically says if science can’t explain it, it doesn’t exist.

In a lot of ways it was really easy to just, you know, shift from a worldview that says that just beyond the reaches of our understanding is god to one that says that just beyond the reaches of our understanding is capital T truth. Either way, there’s this perception that anything lying too far beyond our grasp is more or less irrelevant. That either we don’t need to understand it because that’s a realm that’s beyond us, it’s not meant for us, or that it’s all going to be more science just like the science we already know, it’s just a matter of working the right equations and revealing the totally logical underpinnings of reality, nothing really to see here, it’s only going to be fascinating to science geeks. One or the other.

The thing is, the big shift in my understanding, and I’m not saying I’m revealing anything particularly groundbreaking here, for the record. I’m sure there’s lots of you out there just nodding and going, “uh, duh, how long did it take you to realize that?” But stick with me, and for everyone else who maybe hasn’t had this epiphany yet…

The big shift came when I was thinking about the history of humanity. How every single generation of humans has looked at the sum total of their knowledge and considered themselves very advanced. Every generation of humans has reached heights of understanding that their ancestors couldn’t have imagined. And, here’s the important part, every single generation has been wrong about how advanced they were. We’re not slowing our rate of new discoveries and revealed mysteries and better conclusions. Yeah, we know more than those who came before us. We’re closer to understanding the secrets of all reality. But there’s so much out there still to understand! Incomprehensible amounts, right?

And the problem with human perception, the way most of us see the world and the universe is that if we can’t imagine it, if we don’t have a clue about what we don’t know – what we don’t now that we don’t know, we kind of assume it’s not out there to know. Our perception of what lies beyond the limits of our knowledge is probably extremely skewed.

So what does this have to do with magic and manifestation? I’ll get to that next.

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Each week we will dive into a different part of the world of spirituality, magic, and self-evolution.
Check out last week's episode where we talked about the need for action in manifestation, how magic doesn't run on thoughts alone, and what we can do today to nurture profound change in our lives.
And come back next week when we will kick off year two of the podcast by digging into the Overview Effect, how perspective defines our approach to spirituality, and why it's okay that we can't agree on anything.

As you’ve no doubt heard, today is not just the one year anniversary of The Waxing Soul, it’s also launch day for my book, Deep Self Magic. And I’ll get to that more in a bit, but one of the things I talk about a little in the book is this idea that magic or manifestation or whatever you want to call it basically, no matter what your theories on the matter are, basically boil down to setting in motion a chain of events that takes place on the other side of this barrier between what we know and understand and can observe, and the unknown beyond it.

I don’t get super deep into the theory in the book, just enough to understand the related concepts I talk about there, but I got to thinking a while back about how much we limit ourselves just by discounting the extent of the unknown that we can’t anticipate or imagine. And it relates to another thinkg I talk about in the book a little bit, that human evolution has proceeded the way it has because, and this is what makes humans different, because we don’t just pass knowledge from one generation to the next. Each generation, each of us individually, for that matter, learns not just the way other primates do, by being shown skills and imitating what we see, but we also take what we learn, deduce things from what we see and experience, even take things we’re told about and never see firsthand, and we combine all that knowledge to create and imagine new things. To form new ideas and hypotheses. Cumulative cultural evolution. We build on the foundation of what comes before.

On the one hand there’s this amazing potential if you consider all the different bits of knowledge we have and all the potential things we can imagine combining those bits into, right? And I don’t want to crawl down this hole forever because if we get into the exponential nature of innovation and all that we could be here until the end of time.

But the point is that while it’s all amazing to consider how much our current knowledge and understanding and vision makes possible in terms of potential knowledge and understanding and vision, there’s also a limit. In reality, our ancestors had the foundation for everything we know now, but at some point in the past there would have been not enough understanding to allow them to even begin to imagine some of the things we now understand. To them, our reality would have been inconceivable. Not impossible, not unlikely, totally not even imaginable.

When we envision the future, we extrapolate from what we know. That doesn’t mean the future is only going to involve things we have the capacity to imagine, right? What that means is that, when we go about doing magic, when we put our energies into manifestation, there are things we have the potential to manifest and create that we can’t imagine or envision. Nevermind the future, even in our own existence there are things we just don’t have context for envisioning, and that doesn’t mean we can’t manifest them.

What I mean by that on a practical level… It doesn’t just apply to vast universal concepts and the mysteries of reality. Our individual ideas about what is possible, what makes sense, what opportunities can be open to us is limited. And if we limit ourselves to manifesting only what we can envision, then we’re limiting our lives. That’s kind of the whole point of magic, if you think about it. If we had all the answers, if we could crack the code on how to get what we want by just dealing with the things we know and understand, we wouldn’t need to do anything but put our mind to something and work at it. But manifestation can bring us help from people who know things we didn’t know could be known and it can bring us solutions we couldn’t have thought of ourselves in a million years.

But what often happens is that we either don’t really put our energies into manifestation when we can’t envision exactly how a solution will come, or we go through the motions without real intent because not being able to envision possibilities is discouraging, or we put our energies into our magic and then reject what comes our way because it’s not what we expected and feels different from what we thought we wanted. We let the limits of our vision and belief and understanding be a limit on what’s possible.

But we’re just not that advanced. We’re not that enlightened. We can only envision what makes sense given the knowledge we have, and the knowledge we have is not just incomplete, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what there is to know and understand. Truly stepping into our power and potential means embracing the real unknown – the unknown that we don’t know exists. And that means really sitting with the reality that our understanding is incomplete. That we don’t know much.

Knowing we barely know anything is something we often think of as disempowering, but it’s really not. It means there’s practically no end to what we can learn and the ways we can manifest our intentions. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything is possible, but it means we’re terrible judges of what is.

And in a moment we’ll talk about how this idea kind of ties together what we’ve talked about already on the podcast this year and the possibilities for The Waxing Soul and beyond.

If you love The Waxing Soul, connect with me online!
BridgetOwens.com is the central hub for all my projects including books, card decks, and resources. Go there to get my latest book, Deep Self Magic, to connect as a potential podcast guest, and to find out all the latest news.
Also find me on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook as bridgetowensmagic.

The last few episodes I’ve wrapped things up with a reading from my book which comes out today: Deep Self Magic – A Step-By-Step Roadmap to Spiritual Authenticity. But I’m going to be doing the official launch celebration tonight on Facebook Live with Carnelian Moon Publishing and I’ll be reading excerpts and talking about how the book came to be, so join me tonight for that.

Like I said at the top of the episode, I’m incredibly thankful to all the listeners for this first year in existence, this first season is what I’m calling it, and what we’ve already covered, what I’ve been prompted and inspired to bring you. We’ve done a seven-episode series on emotions in spirituality which I think might actually be my favorite. In that series I picked out seven emotions like anger and love and curiosity and talked about the role we often give them, how we treat them in our spiritual lives, and then the actual purpose they serve and how we can embrace them and keep them in the most beneficial spiritual role. And this is really really important because one of the, I think one of the biggest unknowns in our lives boils down to us not being able to envision our own evolution.

I talk in my book definitely about how, you know, evolution isn’t about deciding who we want to be and working to be that person. Because even that is limited. We can’t fully imagine, if we can imagine at all, who we would be and what we would be like if we shifted our relationship with our reactions, our emotions. Changing that about ourselves, shifting the role our emotions play in our spiritual practice, can help us manifest an evolved version of self that is beyond what we can envision or anticipate.

We also this past year did a seven episode series on the basics of magic which dug into the, not the how to basics, but the how it works basics. Where the core of our personal magic comes from, what we’re drawing from, how we use it, what role we play in it. Because that’s how you really master something, by understanding the underpinnings. I think when we learn magic as if it’s just a set of skills and rules, that leaves us even more limited by our ability to envision and imagine things because if we only learn the skills and rules, we are less empowered to adapt and evolve those skills and rules to do things others haven’t done yet.

Which kind of relates to the third series I did on tarot for self growth. It’s all… I’m very much a proponent for making your practice, making your spirituality unique to you, making it what you want it to be because there’s no reason why we should be limited to what our ancestors and teachers did, what they knew, what they understood. If you think about it, human development, human cultural development happens not through instruction. That’s the whole point of what I talked about earlier with cumulative cultural evolution. If all we did was send people to college to learn what their forebears knew, we wouldn’t progress. It takes people willing to take those teachings and experiment, invent, innovate, research, all of that, and come up with new ideas and new skills and things to learn.

And spirituality is the same way. That’s really the core point of my book. Deep Self Magic is about spiritual authenticity, which means that it’s up to us to shape our spiritual practice for ourselves, to learn and then to innovate and evolve. That we have the right and ability and, in fact, the responsibility to do that.

Anyway, if you haven’t been a listener this whole year with the podcast, I encourage you to check out the series and then branch out from there. I don’t have any series planned for the coming year because what I want to do more of is bring on guests because with Deep Self Magic launching, I want to really highlight what spiritual authenticity looks like, what it means to people, and not just bring you my point of view all the time.

I think we spend too much spiritual energy trying to find the right lead to follow, and instead of seeking a specific belief system or structure or practice, it’s more important to seek inspiration. So my plan is to really dig deeper into the concepts in the book over the course of the next turn of the wheel of the year and inbetween those explorations to bring on interesting guests to talk about their own authentic spiritual practices and lessons they’ve learned.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing what comes up in the next 12 months because, of course, I have no idea what’s on the horizon and what’s possible! So thank you all again for listening to The Waxing Soul, and here’s to a year of spiritual growth and evolution, to not just getting a deeper understanding of your deep self and your spiritual needs, but really embodying and feeling empowered to be authentic. I invite you to stick around in the community because lots of fun stuff is coming in conjunction with the book like a workbook, an oracle deck, a coloring book, all of that. I hope you all have a great Samhain celebration if you celebrate, and I’ll see you back here for the beginning of Season 2 on Thursday.

Thank you so much for listening.
New episodes of the Waxing Soul drop every Thursday.
All materials and resources except the music are copyright Bridget Owens.
Many thanks to my readers, listeners, friends, mentors, inspirations, and my framily for riding with me into season two.
Until next week, blessed be and be good to yourself.