This is how I was taught. Look closely at the world of appearances and divine their original nature within the underlying reality behind them. What is shining through their form? Even the formless within the world of appearances has form: abstractions, ideas, spoken words, pure numbers, inspirations, dreams—all are bodies, shadows, of the soul of light—of pure original meaning harking back to the primordial act of creation—existing within the timeless realm of the World Soul.
This is how I was taught. Nature is spirit. Everything has a soul just like oneself. Everything is sacred and is a manifestation of the loving intent of a single living being—is the body of the single creative soul. That this is a living universe is self-evident. That human beings are individuated intents of the One Mind is self-evident. The question real teachers pose is, How to live as a divine being treating all other beings as divine?
This is how I was taught. The path of self-liberation is one of transmuting the heart-mind: spiritualizing the emotions and the thoughts, both; stepping into the mystical without leaving the rational. The path of two eyes: one eye seeing the absolute realm, the other eye seeing the relative realm—by seeing is meant, of course, living in, participating in, as a creative being. In this sense, I can only speak as I was taught—in the language of the ancient diviners, in a poetics of the numinous.
About the Title ~
Shapeshifters are those whose original undifferentiated nature shines through the personality of the present lifetime. They adopt no fixed identity, no fixed form, having identified with aware space and its circulation through all beings, all things, in the living universe.
Almanac simply means a reading for each day of the year, so there are 365 readings. No year actually has 366 days; that is a calendrical correction for the extra quarter-day every year. On leap-years, the reader would simply use the reading for February 28 two days in a row. This fixed form of the almanac is what is meant by a Perennial Calendar.
Kairotic refers to the Greek word kairos, meaning the right time, the critical moment, the opportune moment; in esoteric circles, it has come to mean the divinely inspired, foreordained moment, the magically right moment, and it is in that context that it used in this book.
About Usage ~
The readings for each day can be thought of as contemplations, as meditations of a sort, springboards for one’s own explorations of the imaginal realm of objective psyche.
Those familiar with my previous work will recognize in these readings pointers toward the soul work of aiming collective intent toward living images within the World Soul, the manifestations of which in the material world might benefit all at the same time.
