The Sweetness of Offerings
“She softly pours the green tea into the treasured porcelain cup, its honey steam rising to meet her nose. The fragrance is sweet nut, rich butter, and she salivates in response. She sets it upon the raw wooden tray in the garden window, places a shiney penny near it, and reaches aside to open a jar of sweet anise seed. Finding the perfect licorice star within the jar, scent wafting upwards, she closed the lid and places the seed of perfection alongside the cup. Then she closes her eyes and visualizes a stream of light connecting her from nadir to zenith, a great great column of light, she within it. She reaches out with her hands over the tray and visualizes its cleansing, its being made pure, divine food. She feels the pulsing of energy around her, feels the wisp of spirit caress her as she calls for them, her allies and guides. It has been a year of offering, and life has become ever so sweet…this food now feeds her as much as she gives it away, a hundred fold sweeter returned to her…”
What are offerings? And why are they so important? What can they do?
We are surrounded by pulsing energy. This energy some may call spirit, or the Great Spirit of All. Materialists and atheists would just say it is just the soup of radiation and nano-particles and chemical components in our atmosphere, dark matter and dark energy in space, this “energy” surrounds us, and that viewpoint is fine too. We are bathed in it, of it, swimming in it, part of it, made of it. It is our true food, since it is the purest form of what we are. It is a great bounty of energy, a huge banquet, and yet ironically we can feel starved, bereft of nourishment within it.
Some may say that there are living spirits within this energy soup, condensed focal points of that energy soup, conscious entities with power to assist us, to harm us, beings we may also assist or offend. We stand inside their banquet, we are part of the great All, and often we do not acknowledge them as a matter of daily living. We “bump shoulders” with them regularly and do not attempt to say hello or give apology. Most of us do not even think of them or even believe they exist. “But I don’t even see them!” you say. I know that has happened to me in physical life too, not seeing friends on the street, and they are still hurt when I do not see them or notice them, do not say hi when they are attempting to gain my attention.
We are part of a tremendous party with party-goers all ’round. And if we simply reach out and acknowledge the others “in the room,” they will become as in regular physical life our friends and allies, our helpers. More fantastically, they will become our helpers unaware, us not even seeing all the aid they bring.
Belief does not matter. Just experiment. Just try it for 6 months. See what happens in your life, giving offering daily, even if you feel all you are offering to is the pulsing energy surrounding you that you desire to see and understand, even if you view life scientifically. Just do an experiment on your own life, a detached observation of what happens in life when you make offerings to what you cannot see.
The Practice: The easiest way to make life go more smoothly and feel more connected to the All is to set out offerings daily. This can be as simple as a clean cup of water, or a splash of tea or coffee in another small cup when you pour yours for the day. Feel your connection to all the energy around you, feel yourself reaching out in energetic body, connecting in all directions around you. Then look at your offering cup or plate, and “see” it being made pure. Better is to see it aflame, then blown clear of flame, then washed with a column of water to be made clean. And then “see” it multiply to become a vast banquet, made innumerable in quantity, and say a short statement, something like “Come come all spirits around! Please accept this offering, may it become that which you desire, and may it maintain peace between me and thee.”
Or if you are atheist? Say something simpler such as “I offer this in essence to all those points of energy surrounding me, as a reflection of what I am and can be, as a reflection of my connection to all the pulsing energy in which I exist.”
Why does this work? I will write more on this, but the simplest way to understand is to imagine hosting a dinner, and what do you feel when someone shows up with a small token gift as thank you upon entry? You feel grateful, some sense of obligation to them, an understanding that they are thankful for your work and effort to host them in your home.
There are more elaborate practices, but this is the simplest, the most direct, and if starting from a place of not having done offerings before, this will give you great gains in life. You will not even notice the difference at first, so try this daily for 6 months. Journal your life briefly every day for these 6 months, to make the experiment fair. When you look back at those 6 months, after a time of “ramping up” and becoming consistent so that Spirit (or Energy) around you understands you are reaching out to connect and being consistent, most will see that things just seemed to go much more smoothly, synchronicities start to happen, things are just “done” for you. Things just happen easier for you. You have become a great guest, and the Great All That Is will start to feed you in return.