There was a faery kingdom under that hill
Some say it is gone; I say it remains still.
A well and its water cannot be separated ultimately; the source and its "products" are one. If we are (as is believed) possessed of two natures- one mortal and aligned to the natural environment of this world, and the other "fetch" or faery-immortal, aligned to the inner world of the Faery-Weird, and further, if it is as some say, that the mortal half of our experience is sprung from the inner world, emerged through the magic of birth into the light of day and the dark of night (that is to say, a world of apparent cycles and duration) from an original a world of perpetuity and wholeness, then we must consider that the mortal and the faery, or the ferth and the fetch, are not ultimately separate things.
We must retool our understandings to accept that the mortal is the all-around uprising of the faery, an unbroken stream of the perpetual, a continuity of the immortal; that the phenomenal experience of mortality is the water drawn from the well of the numinal experience of faery, thus rendering them the same, despite our relentless categorizations to the contrary.
No longer does a far away or divided-away mortal man seek for his Faery-love or fetch-twin, but he must consider himself as the union, already complete, of what is seen and what is unseen. Without this stance of mind, the search may be long and in vain. The immortal nature has not vanished off, leaving a mortal nature to wander about in fruitless searches; the immortal nature has not vanished- it is the world of our senses that has appeared and enchanted one's mind. This very nature must be that faery-nature; something that was immortal has become enchanted and learned to consider itself as mortal.
This fractured state of being can lead to strange madness- one may see many things, in this world and in what would seem to be the "otherworld", and one may wonder if one among these things is the "immortal twin" or faery otherself; it may be that the magical force of the Weird of each of us can, through reflection or projection, show itself as another. But the search does not end until one realizes that the well and the water are not able to be separated, that sources and products are one power experienced as two.
The wholeness of the Weird-world or the perpetual paradise of Faery has not vanished. Wholeness cannot be so divided, ultimately, and so it still maintains its wholeness. Something that is whole has become enchanted and learned to consider itself as less than whole- it has been bewitched (after a manner of speaking) and now interprets its own perceptions in a manner that convinces it that it is less than whole, and, along with itself, that the “world around it” is fatally flawed.
The perpetual power seemingly arises in many ways, and those “arisen parts” can sometimes learn to distinguish themselves as "man" and "woman" or as "searching" and "wandering"- but all is still one unbroken and mystical force, as much faery in "this world" as it ever was in "the other". Something that was immortal learned to be mortal, and has forgotten the vastness of itself. It cannot imagine a time when it was not a limited being.
We have never "left" the faery world; if one wishes to engage the old term "faery nature" as a name for our undying nature, then we are faery-natured beings that still dwell in their natural world, but who have come under the influence of bewitching confusion that has led to the creation of complex fictions regarding who and what we are, where we "came from" and where we are going. Our faery-natured companions who are not so deluded as we are still "here", though we have learned not to see them, and instead accord them existence in an unseen world.
When we perceive death to the bodies of men and women, we are experiencing shape-shifting through Fateful consequence, nothing more- and this process is carried out within the faery-world as well- for if it is a fact of "this" reality, it is a fact of "that one"- for they are one reality.
Our faery stories present the faeries as tricksters of men and women- they are presented as the masters of glamour, and their world as one full of illusions, but now you must understand that these stories are trying to tell us something about the nature of all worlds, including ours. They are one world. Faery trickery and glamour is not only a danger in the faery world, but in this one, for they are one world. It is better to say that "existing as we do, we must accept the glamour that shapes us all and tricks us- and that glamour is a world-creating power." This is the beginning of wisdom, and the key to its "end".
Those beings who have undergone the metamorphosis of mind and perception that free them from this present mortal darkness do not vanish away from this reality, nor do they cease undergoing the shifting of shape ordained by mighty Fate and Weird; they merely incorporate those things into the vaster essence, that vastness of truth for themselves that they have access to- an awareness of reality which marks them as different from we "mortals".
Thus, the Gods of Pagans and the God of churches, the Gods of the Hindu people and the Buddhas of the Orient are truly as all-knowing and perceiving as their followers believe; the Oldest Beings of our own lands, now fallen into the silence of their people's ignorance, are purveyors of wisdom and true sight, just as the old churchmen feared. And we may become like the Oldest Things, the Ancients, if we are cunning.
If there is a metaphysical path to understanding this grand experience that we call our world, we must begin at the end- we must go forward to the destruction of duality and thus, by natural paradox, find ourselves back at the "beginning"- as the faery-natured beings that we are, free of limitation, with those substances we call "numinal" and phenomenal" collapsed into the one wholeness that they are. Then, from that perspective, use language to point out merely how things appear- never must we deal with "the way things are"- only how they appear to be, so long as we consider ourselves as mortals and draw breath here.
