Gordon White is Alive

So many have shared so much, and so beautifully. I’ve been back and forth as to whether my voice is worth sharing here. Ultimately though, keeping quiet is neither in my nature nor is it an option. Both because of what he means to me, and because of the chance my perspective might be helpful for someone else to hear.

If you’re still in the throes of grief, however, maybe save this for later.

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I wasn’t as close to him as some while he was here on earth, but there can be no measure for the impact he had, and will continue to have, upon my life.

He took the abstract and made it actionable. He gave us the tools to make the unknown our ally instead of our enemy. He weaved ornate ontological tapestries from fabrics most would never consider adding to the same quilt, and they just worked. His Saints course opened up a narrow passage into the grotto of my own troubled ancestral currents of esoteric Christianity, revealed the importance of my work with the dead, and gave me the tools to intimately acquaint myself with the very roots of just about anything under the sun (and moon) that might call to me, without prejudice and with open arms. The power to peer back through time and see the why and more importantly, the who behind ideas, how they’ve carried along through the ages and evolved, while giving them the respect of agency.

He brought thousands of otherwise disparate practitioners together in collective wonder and rapturous curiosity. Nothing was off the table. We were free to explore and it was highly encouraged. And while any community is somewhat troubled, and I find magical ones usually more aggressively so, there was a sense of community which he cultivated, one which I have not found elsewhere since my golden days in the Soup.

For reasons mostly unimportant now, I thought it was best for my own journey of sovereignty to wander outside the self-perceived shadow of the man I considered my teacher (though he would balk at that title, and did) and see what I, myself, actually thought about things, and what I was legitimately capable of achieving. Simply put, this was for the sake of clarity, to unplug from the countless hours of this one single individual’s thinking which I had listened to and adopted in order to know better what I, myself, thought outside of any cloudiness caused by the desire for approval or favor from someone whom I greatly admired. It can be tricky to know if what you think is really yours, and sometimes the only way to achieve that desired clarity is distance. But I always counted on joining the Soup group again after a time, always thought sure it was going to come back around. I always thought I’d meet him in person one day and feel the sharp blade of his wit and the warm glow of his heart together in the same room.

Can’t say I could have done things differently, even if I had known what was to come. And that’s life. It’s difficult to express to others just how significant it is for me to have considered him a teacher, which despite his correction to “facilitator” he was to many. There had been numerous potential practitioners and characters show up in my life as candidates for that role over the years, yet he was the only one who felt worthy of that title to me. Intensely Scorpionic, shadow-peeping me, who always found a deal-breaking flaw in any claimant to wisdom or mastery who wanted to show me how it’s done. Overly-critical, high-expectation me, who felt like the self-aggrandizing tendencies of anyone who thought themselves qualified for such a role as teacher in the lineage-broken West got them too high on their own farts to be trusted.

But Gordon had none of these delusions. He danced with his shadows. He knew what he was. There was no falseness in his words. He never pulled any punches to spare your feelings, precisely because he respected you. He didn’t pretend to be a Saint, and in my opinion that is far more saintly, more profound than the alternative. He was patently human, and yet now elevated well beyond merely that.

It did come back around for me, after all. Just not how I had expected. It is in his passing that I am now forced to put an end cap on that distance and give proper respect and return to a mindful relationship with all that he has given me, and that I am forever changed. And it is immense. It is painful to know that I missed out on the last couple years of any opportunity to be actively engaged with him in a more tangible way.

But that is not the end of this story.

Now that classical grief has had some time to process in the same relative fashion as it does for most humans when they lose someone they loved, it’s time now for me, and maybe you also, to get real.

Gordon often came down hard on the tourists. That is, the practitioners out there who repeat the right talking points, dress the part, and even occasionally do some magic, but who when the chips are down and shit gets real will inevitably revert to a non-magical worldview.

“Do you even believe in magic!?” This was one of the things he would say that stuck with me. Not the clever catch phrases, this. It always cut so deep.

So were you just nodding along when he said to become invincible? Did you really believe it? Did you sit with that?

The passing of Gordon White is gut wrenchingly sad for us, even those who were not among his close friends, or mostly knew him through his books, courses, and what he chose to share with the world. But make no mistake, he is alive and well, free of his mortal chains and adventuring with his spirit friends with whom he tirelessly cultivated relationships while living. This is not the death of some materialist, nor an armchair practitioner. This was the passing of a great wizard into his next adventure.

Gordon became invincible.

The sadness is ours.

When it fades, he’ll still be there in the spirit realms. Right there, in your heart.

The world lost access to future utterances of his unique voice, but for those of us who have taken into our hearts his teachings (and those who will in the future) the countless bits of wisdom and shackle-breaking praxis the clever rapscallion curated from seemingly unrelated points in the world into coherent lessons, and allowed those things to change our stories, for those of us who keep him within our very hearts, we have gained a mighty ancestor of practice.

We have his grimoires in complete form. We have his teachings. We know what he liked and disliked. And many practitioners already know that possibly the best way to start working with an ancestor of practice is to engage with their methods and ways of thinking.

So when we have concluded our sorrows for the friend and the voice we have lost, there are a few things I think might be worth keeping in mind.

Repeated plant medicine ceremonies and out-of-body journey work were the gymnasium in which he acclimated to this transition ahead of time.

There are numerous spirit friends he made along the way who are at his aid now, to teach and guide in this new phase of his journey.

The prayers and tears of thousands have aided him in his coherence and strength.

Consider the death metaphysics of an early or sudden death, in which the potency of the spirit of the deceased is dramatically bolstered by the potential energy of the remainder of their life yet un-lived.

Consider that we all made agreements before we came into this world about how our stories would go, and with whom they would entangle and weave.

Consider his fondness for non-canonical folk saints, his determination to help us help ourselves.

And consider that regardless of how well you knew him, or how much you actually talked, if you loved him, really loved him, now he knows it. Can feel it.

Likewise, if you clung to him for your own social climbing or your affection for him was insincere, he now knows that too.

The truth is now but another open book on a very long table in his vast library, so I hope your intentions were true.

Friends, family, those who truly loved and appreciated him even if only at distance, we now have a folk saint whose teachings have touched us all, and a spirit friend who cares, who is as insatiable now in his desire to learn and explore and help as he was while incarnate. Perhaps even more so.

If he cared for you, he still does.

This adventure is far from over.

He may not be in his former form, but,

Gordon White is alive.