by Searles O'Dubhain
Searles O'Dubhain was a practitioner, teacher, and scholar of Celtic Druidry who ran the Summerlands web archive and taught Celtic Workshops online for many years. This post from September 2003 on alt.religion.druid responds to a seeker — an urban man who had experienced unsolicited shamanic visions over ten years and was looking for context and community. Searles' reply draws on the Celtic concepts of imbas (sudden illumination), the pool of knowledge, and the cosmological model of centers and boundaries to meet the seeker's experience with traditional vocabulary. The dialogue is preserved here for the richness of Searles' teaching.
A seeker wrote to alt.religion.druid describing ten years of unsolicited shamanic experiences — visions without substances, messages of preparation, a sense of being called to a path without knowing its name. Searles O'Dubhain responded:
This happens a lot to people who eventually become Druids or Shamans. I know it happened to me and several friends who are Druids.
For many of us, the experience is called imbas and the "certain path" is known as the Druid Way.
The seeker described visions that "came" without choice — a certainpath to follow.
In the experience I had, I was taken to the "no-place" where everything begins and ends. There I knew that everything is connected. Every question has an answer and every answer has a question (though the last one is actually more difficult to discover than the first one. Maybe this is why the Ogham Ailm is known as the "First and the Last?").
All directions go from the center to the edge and back again, especially on the surface of spheres which are the boundaries of thought. In Celtic society, everything is related to the centers and the boundaries. Now, knowledge is the pool within that sphere that must be experienced by immersion and swimming.
In scientific method, the questions are the hypothesis; the answers are the logic of proof; the sphere is the boundary conditions; the center is the conclusion. In a painting, the canvas is where the experiences are generated; the frame and the colors are the boundary conditions; perception is the questions; blending and organization are the answers; taking a step back and seeing all the colors as one big picture as an integrated whole is the painting itself — and all the meanings and relationships it evokes. Would that modern Pagan folks practiced ritual like a painting!
The seeker described setting words aside and beginning to feel the energy directly.
The answers are first found by realizing that "being here now" as fully and truly as possible is the roots of the tree of understanding.
Words are only symbols. Ideas are only concepts. Experiences are merely sensory descriptions, a part of what actually is. The Druids — and other wise people — have taught techniques over the years for getting preconception and false sensing out of the way, so that one can see.
This has been called a pool of knowledge in Celtic mythology, with streams of wisdom flowing from it.
The seeker described a mushroom that communicated to him.
The mushroom is only a symbol in much the same way that a letter or word is a symbol. The difference between the mushroom and words is that the mushroom communicates chemically while the word communicates through a physiological conditioning of the mind/body rhythms.
Welcome to the Druid Way.
It is a narrow pathway that has infinite vistas and many places for leaving and few for coming back.
The seeker asked about the place of psychedelics in shamanic practice, and whether this related to Searles' own Druidry.
Not using such drugs is not a rejection of them. Advocating other methods is similarly not a rejection of them. These decisions are personal ones — but the societal interfaces through culture, laws and traditions still must be considered, especially in how they affect one's freedoms, one's relationships and even one's health.
That is true for any use of botanicals, chemicals and even ritual techniques.
Knowing oneself is a first step. Being able to explain these understandings is another. Explaining them so that others may begin to understand comes through education, training and skill.
Finally, the seeker asked: how is this related to your practice as a Druid?
The experiences that you've described are the well spring of my own Draíocht. Understanding them; learning to glean deliverable knowledge from them; working within a discipline of mind, body and spirit as well as cultural and traditional systems — all of these are connected at the center; within the boundaries and continuing throughout my own journey along the Druid Way.
— Searles
Colophon
Written by Searles O'Dubhain and posted to alt.religion.druid on 27 September 2003, in reply to a post by "meagain" (Hans Petter Olsen). Original Message-ID: [email protected]
Searles O'Dubhain (1950–2016) was the founder of the Summerlands Celtic pagan archive and a long-time teacher of Celtic traditions and Druidry online. In this post he responds to a seeker's account of shamanic calling with the vocabulary of Celtic cosmology — imbas, the pool of knowledge, centers and boundaries — providing a traditional framework for experiences that arose outside any tradition.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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