🌿 The God Beyond the Frames

From Chaos and Awen to the Deeper Magic

My journey with the Divine began when I was very young — perhaps around eight years old. Even then, I sensed that there was something vast and alive moving beneath the surface of ordinary life. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but I knew there was a Presence that connected everything — a quiet awareness that spoke through nature, through intuition, and through those rare moments of stillness when the world seemed to hold its breath. I used to go walking out into nature (grew up in the countryside) and just sing the feeling and connection I felt.

For years I explored that mystery instinctively, through books, questions, and experience. I was drawn to the hidden and the mystical, fascinated by the idea that reality might be more fluid than we are taught to believe. By my twenties, that lifelong fascination had become an intentional search for understanding — and that is when I wrote Llyfr o Cythrawl a Awen (The Book of Chaos and Inspiration).

Llyfr wasn’t the beginning of my journey; it was the first time I felt compelled to give it form. It was my attempt to share something that had already been part of me for nearly two decades: the sense that creation itself is alive with divine intelligence. In that book, I wrote of Cythrawl — the fertile chaos from which life arises — and Awen — the breath of inspiration that gives it shape. Looking back, I see that I was trying to describe Presence: the living current that moves through everything.

Since then, I have walked through many frames in search of that same Presence — Christianity, Druidry, the magical arts, the psychological and mystical disciplines that explore the mind and spirit. Each offered something essential. The God of the church taught me devotion. The gods of the grove taught me wonder. The magician’s path taught me creative will. And the mystic’s silence taught me how to listen. Over time, I realised that these were not competing truths, but different languages describing one reality — the sacred movement of life itself.

Running alongside all of this was my exploration of changework — hypnosis, NLP, and the study of human transformation. At first, I treated it as something separate from spirituality: a craft of communication and psychology rather than a spiritual path. But I soon began to see the parallels. The principles of changework — awareness, focus, reframing, and alignment — are the same movements found in contemplative practice and prayer. Both aim to dissolve resistance and restore connection with the deeper intelligence that guides us.

In time, hypnosis and NLP became a form of spiritual practice for me. They revealed how thought, emotion, and intention create our experience, and how awareness — Presence — is the catalyst for transformation. The language of the subconscious and the language of the soul turned out to be two expressions of the same mystery. I began to see changework not as manipulation of the mind, but as cooperation with the divine design — the art of helping the human self remember its wholeness.

Then, a few months ago, another piece of the puzzle fell into place. For the first time, I sat down and read C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. When Aslan speaks of the “Deeper Magic from before the dawn of time,” something resonated powerfully within me. It was as though Lewis had articulated, in story, what I had always felt but never named: that love is the original law of the universe, older than any structure or theology, and that every true act of transformation draws its power from that love.

That idea — the Deeper Magic — brought everything together. It linked the mythic vision of Llyfr, the contemplative Presence of Caim, and the practical understanding of changework. Each of these paths points toward the same revelation: transformation is not imposed, but allowed; not forced, but received through alignment with love.

At the time of writing my fiftieth year around the sun is a month away, it feels like a natural time to integrate everything that has shaped me. This Deeper Magic year is not another spiritual system but a synthesis of the mystic’s stillness, the magician’s creativity, and the changeworker’s understanding of human transformation. It draws on the Celtic rhythm that sees God, or Presence, in every moment of life, and it invites me to live that truth consciously and consistently.

Ancient Whispers and Caim both emerged from this same current. Ancient Whispers gave voice to what I had learned through prayer and Presence: that love and belonging are the essence of the divine. Caim offered a framework for living that awareness in community — a circle of balance, rooted in Celtic spirituality yet open to all who seek wholeness.

If I no longer describe myself as a Christian in the conventional sense, it is because the Presence I know refuses confinement. It is the stillness at the centre of all things, the intelligence that shapes life, the love that transforms. It is what the mystics glimpsed, what the psychologists measure in experience, and what every spiritual tradition has sought to name.

In truth, I am simply continuing the journey that began when I was a child — the same curiosity, the same hunger to understand what breathes behind reality. The words have changed, and the understanding has deepened, but the current remains the same. It is the Deeper Magic that Lewis wrote of, the Presence that Brother Lawrence felt in his kitchen, the living awareness that infuses every act of creation.

And so I step forward — not as someone who has arrived, but as one still listening. The work, the words, the changework practice, the stillness, the circle of Caim — they all belong together. They are all ways of walking with the same Presence that has never once left my side.

So I step forward again — imperfect, uncertain, but faithful to the mystery that has never once let me go.

Love is real.
Presence is near.
And the path itself is holy.

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