ON THE TWO POWERS

When I returned to ADF, the Two Powers meditation was one of the few things I found that hadn't changed much in the six years or so that I'd been out of touch. Before I moved to Philly, I had been working as part of a focused group in Stone Creed Grove in which Ian Corrigan worked out and applied techniques and teaching methods that eventually became part of the first Dedicant Program. The Two Powers was one of the meditations we used religiously (as it were) but real understanding of the Powers and their effects eluded me until I began using the meditation regularly in my devotionals over the last year.

The power of the Underworld is undirected potential: potential matter, potential energy, potential "stuff" that makes up the matrix of everything that is. This "stuff" is unconstrained and chaotic, though; it can't become anything on its own because its inherent chaos has no properties of its own that can organize the potential into any thing.

The power of the Heavens is order and reason, the lines within which you have to keep the crayons, the channels that direct the flow of a stream. By itself, it is only a kind of potential of its own: it has nothing to act on, no metaphorical crayons or water or anything else to exercise its orderly power on.

When the Heavenly power and the Underworld power flow together, the order organizes the chaos of the potential and gives it direction and shape. From undirected potential are formed concepts and matter and comprehensible existence. By their natures, the powers must remain in a dynamic tension; if chaos dominates, everything dissolves back into a slurry of potentiality, and if order exceeds its bounds, the whole becomes static and frozen and ultimately shatters under its own rigidity—although probably into extremely well-organized cubes, I'd venture to guess!

When we meditate on these two powers and focus on feeling their presence within the fabric of our existence, we tap into the primal forces of being. By placing the locus of the powers' commingling within ourselves, we place ourselves at the center of reality, in the crux of the cosmos — we center ourselves in a firm place of strength and power. Ultimately, it is by learning to influence the two powers with our minds' abilities that we can shape reality: the druid's magic.

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