Western culture is predominantly Christian…or agnostic/atheist/spiritual/it’s not important to me…whatever…and so you can stand on a street corner in any city and see a Christian church in pretty much any direction you like. When I lived in the middle of the city there was a church that met in the same strip mall building as the deli/laundromat that I used weekly. 🙂 We have a concept in the general populace of going to a spiritual place to experience the sacred, but it tends not to be in the same, participatory, hanging out with and having a conversation/relationship with that other cultures and spiritualities do.
We no longer goto the Temple of Apollo to speak with the Oracle about the important things in our lives. We also don’t get told riddles that lead to incest and blindness, so there’s that…ahem…We don’t have the feeling that the gods are among us living their own lives of which we are a part, like wisdom teachers who allow us to sit next to them and learn. We have little experience of Hindu temples, of the village god or goddess, of the sacred grove venerated for generations until it becomes a conduit for spiritual energy whether the god/goddess is in residence or not.
What we can and do have are personal altars, personal veneration to the spirits that call to us, a search for that mythology which, like totems or symbols, can help us learn about ourselves and explore our world in new and intimate ways. Not to say that this relationship and practice is bad or limited, it is not. It is a vital part of most spiritualities and religions, but it is not a replacement for direct contact and the larger experience.
In the Akashics we can ask or invite the gods, goddesses, archetypal buildings that we wish to work with or learn from to come and be with us. We can open our hearts and our beings to connection with them, asking them to teach us, guide us, support us in our becoming from intellectual pursuits to healing to growth in our spiritual lives or all or none of the above. Just as we can invite our animal guides or our totems or Librarians or our personal guides to come and speak with us, so we can invite and honor the gods or goddesses such as Hathor, Sekhmet, Thoth, Apollo, Athena, Artemis, etc, etc, etc. Just like anyone else they may choose not to come, they may choose to send someone else, you may be led on an adventure that answers your questions or fulfills your need without them, or you may have direct communication and connection with them. The sky is the limit.
