There's a new Psiche post on the new version of the blog!
http://www.palyne.com/blog.psiche/the-fountain-of-crown/
Don't forget this blog has changed addresses! The RSS feeds are now:
RSS for Posts for the new blog:
http://www.palyne.com/blog.psiche/feed/
RSS for Comments for the new blog:
http://www.palyne.com/blog.psiche/comments/feed/
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Blog Upgrade - New Address
I'm moving my cheap-free blogs to better software on my own home domain.
Puhleeeeeze update your visit or RSS addresses! to the following:
Visit the new blog (design/links still construction):
http://www.palyne.com/blog.psiche/
RSS for Posts for the new blog:
http://www.palyne.com/blog.psiche/feed/
RSS for Comments for the new blog:
http://www.palyne.com/blog.psiche/comments/feed/
I'd already done such laborious work moving all the posts and comments and such and then went to enter a new post and realized... I need to do that over there! It's not perfect yet for design and crosslinks to other blogs and things like that, but it's coming along. Hey I went to see Avatar in 3D last night. Wow! That movie rocks!
PJ
Puhleeeeeze update your visit or RSS addresses! to the following:
Visit the new blog (design/links still construction):
http://www.palyne.com/blog.psiche/
RSS for Posts for the new blog:
http://www.palyne.com/blog.psiche/feed/
RSS for Comments for the new blog:
http://www.palyne.com/blog.psiche/comments/feed/
I'd already done such laborious work moving all the posts and comments and such and then went to enter a new post and realized... I need to do that over there! It's not perfect yet for design and crosslinks to other blogs and things like that, but it's coming along. Hey I went to see Avatar in 3D last night. Wow! That movie rocks!
PJ
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Re-Incarnation or what?
My friend K commented (on The Cold Soul):
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My own relationship to this concept was an odd way coming. I thought that it began in adulthood, when I started intellectually struggling with the details and how I felt about them. But now I see that it pinged me off and on through my life. I have several of the moments written down so I will put them here as a sort of linear overview.
Like when I was nine, I dreamed one morning shortly before getting up for school that my mother had died, and she came and talked to me about it, and it was ok. And it was "present but in the back of my head." I had the feeling that something should come up related to her that day or night, but it didn't. Nor the next day. But the next night, I went grocery shopping with my father, who detoured to a drive up on this tall hill in our city that had a lighted cross. And he told my mother had died the morning before. I felt so calm about it, like I had known that of course, and it was ok. Except the minute dad told me, he broke down sobbing. I cried because he cried and because it seemed like I should. But I had an odd sense of calm knowing about it. (I more than made up for the tears with my grief since that day, that's for sure.)
I think that experience was like that. Present in me but in the back of my head, never pulled forward for thinking about. My official religious beliefs at age 12 involved heaven/hell which had no place for that, obviously.
When I was 15, we were studying WWI in the best history class I ever had. I had a rather unusual lunch period one day.
Later, studying hypnosis, I was introduced to the idea of 'past life regressions'. I was a medical-model skeptic to match that of the official school I eventually went to for that. It was considered a projection; a "doctor, my friend has this problem..." kind of thing. People who could not handle their emotions or issues in the current framework, would invent another one that allowed them to act out those feelings. That seemed reasonable to me. And as I watched hundreds of PLRs on videotape as well as many in person, it became clear why they believed this; it really did seem to be so.
Except. Except the few. There was always just that one, here and there, that was different. The trance was so deep the session was boring as dirt, long delays and brief responses. The person never seemed to have an interesting life; they would be some nobody peasant in the 1500s who died in the snow or something. I had the mocking scoffer attitude that "everyone is cleopatra" but this cured me of that. The thing was, you could FEEL inside you that something was different about these sessions.
I couldn't put my finger on it but I realized it consciously and watched some of them several times on video, trying to figure it out. Why did that one seem utterly convincing while another didn't? Especially when there was far less data and fluency in the one that "got you inside." And after the session, the subjects were different. The more people talked, the more it was 'imaginal'. (And you know I validate imaginal stuff now, haha! But that is not the same as revivification.) Those sessions that really "felt real," the subjects could hardly speak at all afterward. They were too blown away by it, a shell-shock of the soul.
This profoundly trashes fundamental belief systems and should never be done outside a therapy context and even then with careful consideration of the person's base. Bringing people in off the street to do these for fun (as my school actually did!), I am totally against that as irresponsible and sometimes damaging. You can f--k up a Christian for life with one of these that really causes them to revivify something.
I only genuinely "revivified" something one time. It was a spontaneous memory when I was just sitting calmly one day in the early 90's. This was right around the time I had a kundalini experience and was doing a lot of energy work, so it might have been sparked by that.
Sometimes I still have little "flashes of other lives" even when I am wide awake and going about my daily life. These are usually super brief, like two seconds long or so.
I gradually came up with a theory (on my own initially) that perhaps living a life "left an energy imprint" of some kind in our physics- and metaphysics universe. Something that people could "tune into" -- like a library book or something. Maybe that didn't mean it was them. Maybe it had some "resonance" with them, so they were drawn to it. Or, in a more Christian context, maybe that's just what God chose for you to experience for his own reasons, to help you learn something. Who knows.
On occasion you find skeptics in any field who are caught between worlds: on one hand they find that they intuitively believe the experience. But they don't believe the standard reasoning especially since it's usually religious or woo-woo. Those people would say that PLR's were "genetic memory." This is impossible unfortunately--because most of the time, the first experience people tune into is a death experience. Pretty sure people are not having children after they are dead. So whatever the explanation is, it isn't that.
Ian Stevenson has some good books on this topic I am told. He was a legit psych guy who basically threw his career to the winds to study the topic, he found it so fascinating.
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Later, I encountered Seth's works, and so far, I think his model fits my comfort best. This is because Seth's stuff is "a framework without doctrine" for the most part. His view on reincarnation was a little different.
First, he said time is perceptual not literal--it doesn't really exist. I believe that, especially thanks to psi and some anomalous experiences. So the idea of being born "into one life at a time in linear order" really makes no sense. It is "zero point" physics and metaphysics both: all space is here, all time is now. So... one is simultaneously everything.
This kills the concept of karma, which is one of the things people get stuck on about this model of multiple lives.
I believe the original concept of karma was borne in a valid spiritual truism: that we are composed of energy, that energy is ideas, those ideas are beliefs. That our "composition" attracts energy that "fits it" like a puzzle piece. So if we have a certain belief, such as in victimization, we will both act-out that pattern, and we will draw to us that pattern or its match. That is in line with Seth's ideas.
But the doctrine of karma has been horribly corrupted over time, as well as reduced to a spoon-fed sound-byte more apropo for five year olds. Best-case now, it is seen as something that "adjusts" you, not quite like "punishment" but serving a similar purpose. (I can't tell you how many people I've met in the 'metaphysical' field that are certain they were "very bad" in some past life and that this probably explains their present life.) Worst-case now, it says if you piss off a Hindu clergyman you're coming back as a cockroach or untouchable and you're screwed.
Emily Saliers of The Indigo Girls has two cool songs that involve reincarnation, on their "Rites of Passage" album. Some lyrics (excerpts specific to the topic):
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Seth's model of "other lives" is different in more ways than just the "time" issue (which as a side-effect kinda nullifies, in a way (sorta), the karma issue). My own experiences have led me to believe that this particular model is probably the most reasonable for me anyway:
Humans are composite, conglomerates of energy. Lots of it. We "source" from something larger that you could, for lack of a better term, call a "group-soul." It is NOT that we don't have individual souls, we do. It's that our individual souls are a lot larger than we think, and are in turn part of something larger still.
As an analogy, let's take Jane the Good Wife. There's more to Jane than that. It might turn out that she is a good piano player, a good judo fighter, a good executive, a good many things. All of those things are equally part of her. Maybe in some periods she lives out one or some of them; and others, not until or not after some other era in life. She is not any more or less Jane when she is being an executive versus a piano player. It's all part of her.
Well I think this is one way of modeling the 'larger soul' concept. Right now I am a certain [Seth's term] "focus personality." I am one particular collection and arrangement of energy from the whole. But there can be other collections and arrangements, and those have different "focus personalities." They are all equally me, my soul. I am no more or less me than any other "lifetime/personality".
So on one hand, one can say there are many lives (in this model), and they are not ordered by time. On the other hand, there is a detail here: there is no such thing as exactly the same person in multiple lives. SOME -- maybe even most -- of the energy in that soul might be the same energy as was used in another. But there is always at least *some* difference (and the body is always at least a bit different and as an integrated symbiote with the soul it is also a key part of any given focus-personality). So we do NOT actually 'live other lives' in entirety. I-as-me, this focus personality, is NOT living multiple lives. Much of the energy which composes me however, arranged in other personalities, is.
You might think of it like a song. I can play a song in A minor and that is one song; I can play another song which is also in A minor and might even just be "variations on the same theme". But it is a different song. If that song were sentient, it might "recognize or remember" the many notes/chords/sequence/timing of it that "is also in" another song. That would not make it the same song. That would simply make it "aware of parts of it which are also present in another song."
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It's not quite the same thing. The "linear time-based karmic-based reincarnation model" is specific to organized religion. It is the alternative to heaven or hell and it is the "power play" of carrot vs. club that religious leaders have used for millennia to control the masses. You can be born as a princess or as an untouchable and, original sin and karma being what it is in those religions, it's all your fault either way. It's prejudice you might call "reincarnation-ism". If you're born with a clubfoot, you must have done something bad to deserve it. Personally I find this particular model childish and vile.
In my model (insert "in my opinion only" here so I don't have to caveat every sentence), which is based on Seth's model of creating-reality (obviously, that latter model has ancient roots), it's more a matter of the energy you hold:
One's larger soul is, you might say, a certain fractal or pattern. One explores all the things one is, and all the things one is not, within that pattern. A geometry; it's all binary, 0/1. A personality living in 1218 might be vastly more spiritually advanced than one living in 1992, there is no rule about that. It just depends on what the soul is exploring in any given focus-life. Because in this one it is being a piano player and in that one it is being an executive and they each have different challenges, lessons and opportunities.
Because the "source soul" is the same for the different personalities, there is 'shared energy'. If it's really a problem, any personality that happens to be sharing that particular energy will deal with it also. But the good news is any of them can resolve it, too. And when either happens, "different probabilities" are invoked for the lives sharing that energy, based on the changes. I guess another way of saying this is that one can redeem the energy for many lives, when they deal with a given issue in their NOW. Maybe that is truly evolution on a cosmic or planetary level.
So one could see that as karma -- sorta. But not about, "You screwed up X so now you suffer Y." More like, "You are dealing with energy X, which is causing consequences in every personality your soul is manifesting; in this one, it's causing Y." But it's not a punishment. That's ridiculous, that's the religion-as-a-bedtime-story superstition version I think, that is the common way of modeling it though.
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The most important part of this deals with the "awareness of, and access to, the core energy, for fixing it." Traditional 'karma' models make people helpless children. You were ghengis khan over a century ago and now you're screwed! But Seth always insisted that everything that was part of us was available in us and to us, and none of it is totally hidden away so we were helpless. He insisted that all energy we were manifesting (in fact especially what we were manifesting in some obvious way, like problems) is based on energy plenty near the surface--that we have access to.
This makes sense, experientially and logically: the universe is holographic. Everything that is a pattern at one level is also showing up on myriad others. Figuring that out might be work, of course. Some patterns are just so close we don't even see them, or realize it's a pattern at all! But every time I have actually found one of the patterns of energy that was a problem for me, it has been like this: replicated through every area of my life; not hidden at all. Although until I understood it, it certainly seemed to be.
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Anyway, I think this is a tough subject. It's a lot to wrap the brain around because it messes with several different core constructs including identity and karma on top of the "multiple lives" concept itself. Every person has to wade through it themselves and decide what works for them as a belief system. I've adapted mostly by adopting a belief system where on one hand, it validates "past life memories" totally, yet on the other hand, it does NOT actually mean that I-the-I-that-I-know-this-minute is living multiple lives--only part of my energy, not all of it--and that does not lock me into helpless victim of past life in a karmic sense, geez; and that actually offers an opportunity to see that 'improvement' in any problem can help all related lives.
Maybe I'm pollyanna or something, but this is the only variant of the idea I'm able to swallow!
PJ
I hate the thought of reincarnation, though more and more things nudge me to admit that it's a strong possibility, for this very reason. You might be living your life as best you can, thinking you are a relatively good person, but in actuality, you aren't and you weren't and you're going to have to deal with something nasty "you" did thousands of years ago. Except you don't remember any of it, so you can't react in a way that provides long-term (across lifetimes) benefit because you have no idea what the hell is going on.I totally know what you mean!! I wanted to respond but wanted to make it something larger than a comment.
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My own relationship to this concept was an odd way coming. I thought that it began in adulthood, when I started intellectually struggling with the details and how I felt about them. But now I see that it pinged me off and on through my life. I have several of the moments written down so I will put them here as a sort of linear overview.
Despite that experience, I didn't "think about it." I didn't accept it intellectually; I didn't even review it intellectually. I think it was almost like a dream-understanding that you keep under the surface.Around age 12 ... I had gone with my older sister to the beach. I was swimming in the ocean, where the waves were delightfully ferocious on occasion. All us children and teenagers in the water shouted gleefully at the biggest waves, and we would dive underneath them to avoid their breaking on us.
This went on for some time, and after awhile the waves had grown calmer. I was looking toward shore to see my sister when I heard my water-mates shout "MONSTER WAVE!" I turned, realized a gigantic wave was about to crash right on me, took as deep a breath as I could and quickly dove deeply under the water to escape.
The sound of several tons of water crashing down on you is loud, even from underwater. I hadn't dived nearly soon enough. The wave abruptly got me, but this time it was different than when this sometimes happened. Suddenly, one second the sound and force was just unbelievable --
-- and the next micro-second, the vast crashing-roaring sound had totally vanished. Everything was absolutely still; absolutely peaceful; and I felt an absolute calm. I don't think I had ever in my life experienced such a *complete* lack of sound or physical sensories. I was just "there," in a there-ness that seemed to have no sound, no motion, and no time. I was distantly aware that my body was a few feet over to the left of where "I" was.
Into my mind came the clearest thought and understanding, the most calm realization I had ever had, an accepted recognition. I said:
Oh. I'm dead again.
I vaguely remembered having been "dead" many times, over what seemed like an impossible measure of time. This was just another time. They all seemed the same to me in some way. Natural and unremarkable. My life was as interesting but as temporal, as transitional, and as fleeting as a book I had just finished reading.
Perhaps half a second later, I "shifted back into" my body. There was this incredibly distant sound, as if it were millions of miles away yet I could hear a whisper of it. The sound "rushed toward me" at an indescribable speed, getting louder and nearer and seemingly larger until suddenly WOW! -- it was all around me and I was twirling underwater, realizing I was in my body and the worst part of the wave had passed. My feet scrambled to find the ocean bottom and I pushed to the surface of the water.
Coughing a bit from the water, I looked around. Everything was as it should be. Children and teenagers laughing and calling in the swells. I could see my sister sunbathing on the beach. Nothing seemed different on the outside. And yet, I felt markedly different. The profound sense of knowing was so much "fuller" than anything I had ever experienced. A kind of knowing that no intellectual assumption about the word can begin to describe. I understood that I was "I" -- and that "I" was a lot more than I seemed, or could even describe.
I was moved to silence. I quietly swam to shore and curled up on a towel in the sun until my sister decided we'd go home.
I didn't tell anybody about it. It was personal in a way nothing had ever been to me. I didn't really even think about it. It was such a given that I felt no wonder, no curiosity, no confusion about it. I understood. That's just the way things were.
(Small note of humor: A movie some years ago had the interesting title, "Dead Again." It was about reincarnation. Since then I have wondered if others have had the same "realization" I did, and if that's where that title came from.)
Like when I was nine, I dreamed one morning shortly before getting up for school that my mother had died, and she came and talked to me about it, and it was ok. And it was "present but in the back of my head." I had the feeling that something should come up related to her that day or night, but it didn't. Nor the next day. But the next night, I went grocery shopping with my father, who detoured to a drive up on this tall hill in our city that had a lighted cross. And he told my mother had died the morning before. I felt so calm about it, like I had known that of course, and it was ok. Except the minute dad told me, he broke down sobbing. I cried because he cried and because it seemed like I should. But I had an odd sense of calm knowing about it. (I more than made up for the tears with my grief since that day, that's for sure.)
I think that experience was like that. Present in me but in the back of my head, never pulled forward for thinking about. My official religious beliefs at age 12 involved heaven/hell which had no place for that, obviously.
When I was 15, we were studying WWI in the best history class I ever had. I had a rather unusual lunch period one day.
I was running. I was running so hard, so fast, until my chest ached. My feet felt heavy and I could feel my heart pounding like it weighed 10 pounds and was going to burst out of my chest. I was carrying a large gun, running through trees, it was very hot and I wasn't wearing a shirt, and I wasn't thinking about anything except my very intense focus on getting away. I knew I was in the rear of "my" guys running but I didn't see any others.
Finally I felt I'd likely run far enough; I didn't hear anybody pursuing me. I knew I had to stop and rest. I looked around, and backed up against a tree; I stood with my shoulders back against it, the thinnest profile I could make, my gun high against my body, ready to shoot at the slightest motion. I breathed hard but as quietly as I could. And then this -- this feeling at my throat -- cold and yet hot at the same time, and my peripheral vision in that moment registered an arm had just come around the tree and sliced a knife across my throat.
I looked down as if at my throat but I saw the ground, and I think I might have taken a step forward; thoughts ran through my head so quickly... I was going to die... I couldn't possibly die, no, I couldn't believe it... this should hurt terribly or will soon... and as I saw the ground coming toward me, the overriding feeling was mostly one of pure astonishment.
That was it. One minute you're dying in a jungle or forest and the next minute the school bell rings. Talk about a reality shift.
It was such an odd experience I didn't even process it for quite some time. I knew I was a young man, in the experience... there is a lot of information that is "known" in these, like some kind of electromagnetic cloud of information one exists within, that you don't have to think of consciously yet still somehow you are aware of without being consciously-aware of it. It is difficult to explain... I just have to say that such experiences, for me, have been very "conceptual".
It was weeks, at least, before I gave it conscious thought. I understood I had been a soldier in a war and had died. Wildly guessing, I figured Korea or Vietnam, given the landscape.I have always been unusually drawn to and sympathetic to soldiers, if that relates at all.
The problem was, though I wasn't religious, I went to a Baptist church, and there wasn't really any space in that model for having lived another life. Allegedly, I lived this life, and either I did not belong to the appropriate church and would burn tormented in hell forever, or my church was indeed the "right" one, and I would go into some endless bliss with God. There wasn't any middle ground.
Though I had actually realized earlier that I was sort of open to this (multiple lives) idea, that wasn't the same as experiencing it: I really hadn't thought about it consciously much, and hadn't at that time really been exposed to religions and philosophies that include "multiples lives" as a concept. Having no idea how to think about this reasonably, I just didn't. I couldn't process it, so I just forgot for some time.
It was the same history class that seemed to later spark another of that kind of experience:I found myself looking at a group of people. I knew we were in a small room and they were "my" people and we were in a terrible situation. We were all so thin... we were so miserable there are just no words for the degree of it. I knew we were all going to die. Maybe that day. Maybe in 10 minutes. Maybe tomorrow. But soon. It seemed inevitable, the way the sun going down seems inevitable, and as horrible as it was, some part of me fought to just accept it, for my own sanity... in a way, hope hurt on a moment-to-moment basis.
A door opened and I turned to look -- I know there was a man there but I don't remember what he looked like -- I just remember thinking so powerfully then that it seemed to burst in my chest and black out vision: now was the time we would die. It was just such a terrible feeling of grief. Not even fear anymore. Just such profound grief for the whole horrible inevitable situation.
As I recorded it previously: Then it was past. It hadn't been as "intense" in physical-feeling as the first experience had been; I hadn't felt much with "my body"; but I had more than made up for it by the degree of emotion.
It was a few weeks later when we got to the first pictures and films of the Jews (and others) in concentration camps. I knew the minute I saw the first film that this was what my weird "reliving-memory" had been about. That I had been there... that I remembered. I remember sitting in class watching this grainy, black and white movie, sort of in a state of shock... yet acceptance. Oddly enough, the black and white films seemed closer to the feeling I'd had in the experience than color would have: my whole existence had seemed so bleak and colorless that the grainy movies were almost an appropriate confirmation to the experience.
Later, studying hypnosis, I was introduced to the idea of 'past life regressions'. I was a medical-model skeptic to match that of the official school I eventually went to for that. It was considered a projection; a "doctor, my friend has this problem..." kind of thing. People who could not handle their emotions or issues in the current framework, would invent another one that allowed them to act out those feelings. That seemed reasonable to me. And as I watched hundreds of PLRs on videotape as well as many in person, it became clear why they believed this; it really did seem to be so.
Except. Except the few. There was always just that one, here and there, that was different. The trance was so deep the session was boring as dirt, long delays and brief responses. The person never seemed to have an interesting life; they would be some nobody peasant in the 1500s who died in the snow or something. I had the mocking scoffer attitude that "everyone is cleopatra" but this cured me of that. The thing was, you could FEEL inside you that something was different about these sessions.
I couldn't put my finger on it but I realized it consciously and watched some of them several times on video, trying to figure it out. Why did that one seem utterly convincing while another didn't? Especially when there was far less data and fluency in the one that "got you inside." And after the session, the subjects were different. The more people talked, the more it was 'imaginal'. (And you know I validate imaginal stuff now, haha! But that is not the same as revivification.) Those sessions that really "felt real," the subjects could hardly speak at all afterward. They were too blown away by it, a shell-shock of the soul.
This profoundly trashes fundamental belief systems and should never be done outside a therapy context and even then with careful consideration of the person's base. Bringing people in off the street to do these for fun (as my school actually did!), I am totally against that as irresponsible and sometimes damaging. You can f--k up a Christian for life with one of these that really causes them to revivify something.
I only genuinely "revivified" something one time. It was a spontaneous memory when I was just sitting calmly one day in the early 90's. This was right around the time I had a kundalini experience and was doing a lot of energy work, so it might have been sparked by that.
I had always sworn I would never had children, had zero interest in them, and was terrified of childbirth. But one day I just slid into this memory... but reLIVED as opposed to reMEMBERED... I knew it was just a mental-thing at the time, I mean I knew I was also sitting in my chair, but the revivification was very intense.Sometimes I've had dreams that involve "other lives." This is common with the Four. When the female and I are together, one of us is "dominant" in the body and the other is like... "equally there but acting as an extension or guide". Sorta. This is one from the Bewilderness era:
I had just given birth to a child. It was my second child, and I was marveling over how much easier it had been giving birth the second time, than the first one I'd had (in my memory-inside-the-memory of my earlier life). I was in a small, narrow bed close to the floor that had some kind of dark metal-type thing as a headboard, and I was alone.My lower back ached so intensely I couldn't believe it. I came out of the re-lived-memory, my eyes wide and my back aching. I had to get on the floor and do slow stretching for about 15 minutes to make the ache go away.
But it had a profound effect on me. It was like both my reluctance and my fear of childbirth was washed away. I felt like it was a 'known' in my psychology now: I had already done it. To this day I wonder if I would have the child I now do, had it not been for that experience.
I thought it was so WEIRD how I just recognized as "of course" that someone in the other life was someone in this one.I had such a vivid dream that I -- another aspect of I (not this I, but the tall dark haired female aspect of I), was a daughter of someone in power in some Russian-type country, like old, old Russia, or maybe one of the regions near there. We (father and his men and servants and I/her) had traveled, I had the impression Westward, for some official occasion. While there, I/she met a man who I recognized, in the dream, as being my brother (in this life). He was passionately in love with her. But he was a poor nobody, and a foreigner to boot, there was simply no chance.
They determined to meet anyway. Somehow our father found out about it. She and the man (my brother) were to meet at this place secretly. I (somehow) was both part of her and yet actually wandering outside to keep an eye out for our father. And he came. He came storming toward me, he was bald but strong, muscled like a sword-fighting soldier, and the look on his face was grim and very bad news. He didn't see me and walked right through me. Then I woke up.
Huh. I don't know about all this. How come she gets to be a princess and I get to be a proletarian?
Sometimes I still have little "flashes of other lives" even when I am wide awake and going about my daily life. These are usually super brief, like two seconds long or so.
Notice anything odd about this so far? Well, how could I be a guy in a concentration camp and also be a WWI-era Nazi officer? That kind of blows the linear "reborn/reincarnation" theories all to hell, doesn't it.I was working on my computer, my monitor actually hung from a wall mount a couple feet above my desk. At one point, I was looking at something on my desk, and then I looked up at my monitor -- but as I looked up, I was in a room, there was a desk in front of a window to the right where a man of rank sat, and the door was to the left behind me, and another German Officer of higher rank than I had just come into the room toward where I was facing. (I didn't consciously think of it but knew from context I was in Germany just prior to or during the second World War.)
I admired this man a good deal, and considered him a friend. An intriguing aspect of this was, as I looked up "here", I was just lifting my head and looking up at him "there", like the exact same motion in tandem in two worlds. 'There', I lifted and clicked my heels together and saluted in a fluid motion totally comfortable to me.
Now here's the odd part... I "knew" -- I clearly recognized him although he was a completely different person in a different time -- that this man was a man who I know now, in 'this' world -- a brilliant scientist who is, coincidentally yet ironically, Jewish. The vision or perception vanished and I was looking at my computer screen in astonishment thinking, "Holy moley! That was HIM! We were THERE!"
And I couldn't decide which seemed more strange -- that my Jewish friend had been a German officer, or that I had so clearly 'recognized' someone who was 'here' in some 'other life'. It also seemed interesting to me that we had a vaguely similar relationship: in both situations, he was a man I admired a good deal and saw as somewhat more skilled or educated ('superior' -- I looked up to him) although he was much closer to my own age in the 'vision'.
I gradually came up with a theory (on my own initially) that perhaps living a life "left an energy imprint" of some kind in our physics- and metaphysics universe. Something that people could "tune into" -- like a library book or something. Maybe that didn't mean it was them. Maybe it had some "resonance" with them, so they were drawn to it. Or, in a more Christian context, maybe that's just what God chose for you to experience for his own reasons, to help you learn something. Who knows.
On occasion you find skeptics in any field who are caught between worlds: on one hand they find that they intuitively believe the experience. But they don't believe the standard reasoning especially since it's usually religious or woo-woo. Those people would say that PLR's were "genetic memory." This is impossible unfortunately--because most of the time, the first experience people tune into is a death experience. Pretty sure people are not having children after they are dead. So whatever the explanation is, it isn't that.
Ian Stevenson has some good books on this topic I am told. He was a legit psych guy who basically threw his career to the winds to study the topic, he found it so fascinating.
*
Later, I encountered Seth's works, and so far, I think his model fits my comfort best. This is because Seth's stuff is "a framework without doctrine" for the most part. His view on reincarnation was a little different.
First, he said time is perceptual not literal--it doesn't really exist. I believe that, especially thanks to psi and some anomalous experiences. So the idea of being born "into one life at a time in linear order" really makes no sense. It is "zero point" physics and metaphysics both: all space is here, all time is now. So... one is simultaneously everything.
This kills the concept of karma, which is one of the things people get stuck on about this model of multiple lives.
I believe the original concept of karma was borne in a valid spiritual truism: that we are composed of energy, that energy is ideas, those ideas are beliefs. That our "composition" attracts energy that "fits it" like a puzzle piece. So if we have a certain belief, such as in victimization, we will both act-out that pattern, and we will draw to us that pattern or its match. That is in line with Seth's ideas.
But the doctrine of karma has been horribly corrupted over time, as well as reduced to a spoon-fed sound-byte more apropo for five year olds. Best-case now, it is seen as something that "adjusts" you, not quite like "punishment" but serving a similar purpose. (I can't tell you how many people I've met in the 'metaphysical' field that are certain they were "very bad" in some past life and that this probably explains their present life.) Worst-case now, it says if you piss off a Hindu clergyman you're coming back as a cockroach or untouchable and you're screwed.
Emily Saliers of The Indigo Girls has two cool songs that involve reincarnation, on their "Rites of Passage" album. Some lyrics (excerpts specific to the topic):
from "Galileo"That's a good song by the way, acoustic guitar and harmony. That one and this one:
...And as the bombshells of my daily fears explode
I try to trace them to my youth
And then you had to bring up reincarnation
Over a couple of beers the other night
And now I'm serving time for mistakes made by another
In another lifetime
How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach that kind of light...
I think about my fear of motion
Which I never could explain
Some other fool across the ocean years ago
Must have crashed his little airplane
How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach that kind of light...
I offer thanks to those before me that's all I've got to say
Cause maybe you squandered big bucks in your lifetime
Now I have to pay
But then again it feels like some sort of inspiration
To let the next life off the hook
Or she'll say
Look what I had to overcome from my last life
I think I'll write a book
from "Virginia Woolf"One day when I was in the midst of tons of upheaval, living in my van circa 1994, I was listening to this song while lying on my couch in there, and I just burst into tears, and sang it and cried, over and over. It was like all the sudden the "it's all right" that repeats at the end was like a lullaby, exactly what I needed to hear for some reason.
They published your diary and that's how I got to know you
Key to the room of your own and a mind without end
And here's a young girl on a kind of a telephone line through time
And the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend
So I know I'm all right life will come and life will go
Still I feel it's alright cause I just got a letter to my soul
When my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
Empty pages for the no longer young
The apathy of time laughs in my face
You said, "Each life has its place"
... If you need to know that you weathered the storm of cruel mortality
A hundred years later I'm sitting here living proof
So you know you're alright life will come and life will go
Still you feel it's alright someone'll get a letter to your soul...
...And so it was for you when the river eclipsed your life
And sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me and it was my rebirth
So we know we're alright
Though life will come and life will go
Still you'll feel it's alright
Someone'll get a letter to your soul
And you hear dry your eyes
And you know it's alright
Though life will come and life will go
Someone gets your soul
When my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
Empty pages for the no longer young
You said
Each life has it's place
It'll be alright
*
Seth's model of "other lives" is different in more ways than just the "time" issue (which as a side-effect kinda nullifies, in a way (sorta), the karma issue). My own experiences have led me to believe that this particular model is probably the most reasonable for me anyway:
Humans are composite, conglomerates of energy. Lots of it. We "source" from something larger that you could, for lack of a better term, call a "group-soul." It is NOT that we don't have individual souls, we do. It's that our individual souls are a lot larger than we think, and are in turn part of something larger still.
As an analogy, let's take Jane the Good Wife. There's more to Jane than that. It might turn out that she is a good piano player, a good judo fighter, a good executive, a good many things. All of those things are equally part of her. Maybe in some periods she lives out one or some of them; and others, not until or not after some other era in life. She is not any more or less Jane when she is being an executive versus a piano player. It's all part of her.
Well I think this is one way of modeling the 'larger soul' concept. Right now I am a certain [Seth's term] "focus personality." I am one particular collection and arrangement of energy from the whole. But there can be other collections and arrangements, and those have different "focus personalities." They are all equally me, my soul. I am no more or less me than any other "lifetime/personality".
So on one hand, one can say there are many lives (in this model), and they are not ordered by time. On the other hand, there is a detail here: there is no such thing as exactly the same person in multiple lives. SOME -- maybe even most -- of the energy in that soul might be the same energy as was used in another. But there is always at least *some* difference (and the body is always at least a bit different and as an integrated symbiote with the soul it is also a key part of any given focus-personality). So we do NOT actually 'live other lives' in entirety. I-as-me, this focus personality, is NOT living multiple lives. Much of the energy which composes me however, arranged in other personalities, is.
You might think of it like a song. I can play a song in A minor and that is one song; I can play another song which is also in A minor and might even just be "variations on the same theme". But it is a different song. If that song were sentient, it might "recognize or remember" the many notes/chords/sequence/timing of it that "is also in" another song. That would not make it the same song. That would simply make it "aware of parts of it which are also present in another song."
*
It's not quite the same thing. The "linear time-based karmic-based reincarnation model" is specific to organized religion. It is the alternative to heaven or hell and it is the "power play" of carrot vs. club that religious leaders have used for millennia to control the masses. You can be born as a princess or as an untouchable and, original sin and karma being what it is in those religions, it's all your fault either way. It's prejudice you might call "reincarnation-ism". If you're born with a clubfoot, you must have done something bad to deserve it. Personally I find this particular model childish and vile.
In my model (insert "in my opinion only" here so I don't have to caveat every sentence), which is based on Seth's model of creating-reality (obviously, that latter model has ancient roots), it's more a matter of the energy you hold:
One's larger soul is, you might say, a certain fractal or pattern. One explores all the things one is, and all the things one is not, within that pattern. A geometry; it's all binary, 0/1. A personality living in 1218 might be vastly more spiritually advanced than one living in 1992, there is no rule about that. It just depends on what the soul is exploring in any given focus-life. Because in this one it is being a piano player and in that one it is being an executive and they each have different challenges, lessons and opportunities.
Because the "source soul" is the same for the different personalities, there is 'shared energy'. If it's really a problem, any personality that happens to be sharing that particular energy will deal with it also. But the good news is any of them can resolve it, too. And when either happens, "different probabilities" are invoked for the lives sharing that energy, based on the changes. I guess another way of saying this is that one can redeem the energy for many lives, when they deal with a given issue in their NOW. Maybe that is truly evolution on a cosmic or planetary level.
So one could see that as karma -- sorta. But not about, "You screwed up X so now you suffer Y." More like, "You are dealing with energy X, which is causing consequences in every personality your soul is manifesting; in this one, it's causing Y." But it's not a punishment. That's ridiculous, that's the religion-as-a-bedtime-story superstition version I think, that is the common way of modeling it though.
*
The most important part of this deals with the "awareness of, and access to, the core energy, for fixing it." Traditional 'karma' models make people helpless children. You were ghengis khan over a century ago and now you're screwed! But Seth always insisted that everything that was part of us was available in us and to us, and none of it is totally hidden away so we were helpless. He insisted that all energy we were manifesting (in fact especially what we were manifesting in some obvious way, like problems) is based on energy plenty near the surface--that we have access to.
This makes sense, experientially and logically: the universe is holographic. Everything that is a pattern at one level is also showing up on myriad others. Figuring that out might be work, of course. Some patterns are just so close we don't even see them, or realize it's a pattern at all! But every time I have actually found one of the patterns of energy that was a problem for me, it has been like this: replicated through every area of my life; not hidden at all. Although until I understood it, it certainly seemed to be.
*
Anyway, I think this is a tough subject. It's a lot to wrap the brain around because it messes with several different core constructs including identity and karma on top of the "multiple lives" concept itself. Every person has to wade through it themselves and decide what works for them as a belief system. I've adapted mostly by adopting a belief system where on one hand, it validates "past life memories" totally, yet on the other hand, it does NOT actually mean that I-the-I-that-I-know-this-minute is living multiple lives--only part of my energy, not all of it--and that does not lock me into helpless victim of past life in a karmic sense, geez; and that actually offers an opportunity to see that 'improvement' in any problem can help all related lives.
Maybe I'm pollyanna or something, but this is the only variant of the idea I'm able to swallow!
PJ
Rambling 16Dec09
topics today:
Things as they really are
Lucid dreaming
Meditating when it sucks
I'm mutating!
Messianic BS
Things as they really are
I was half-awake. Some interactive half-dream surprised me in some way. I woke up fully with a sudden idea. Dear God (and everyone else), I prayed. Please help me to see things as they truly are.
After a few minutes of unusual in-my-head activity, I was asked by some part of me, What makes you think you are capable of understanding things as they truly are?
I wasn't sure how to answer that. Why not? I finally negotiated.
Worlds went onward in my head. You think the answer is a square? I was asked, after a series of activity that led me to that satisfied conclusion. Then I saw: it was a cube. There was an entire 'dimension of understanding' I had left out. All things have this extra dimensionality.
And then I felt like I learned something, but I forget what. I am SO useless!
Lucid Dreaming
I took a nap on an early lunch and woke up lucid in my dream. How cool, I thought, been awhile since this! I decided to "go with" the dream out of curiosity. I took shortcuts though. I went through walls and such, though I knew well enough (I lucid dreamed very regularly until I was around age 18) that I needed to "space out" just before hitting the wall so I could get through it; if I am thinking and conscious of it being a wall it will be sticky or even slightly too solid. My only problem was not remembering the last part of the dream before my alarm woke me up, darn. Anyway, I wish I had thought to call in my Aeons or Four and see if it worked more clearly in dream state or something!
Meditating when it sucks
My friend recently says, "Man, I had a terrible meditation last night, because..." and I said dryly, "Welcome to MY world."
Then I realized: He doesn't know that. I don't blog about what doesn't work! So my blog probably makes it sound like this is all really easy and vivid and so on. Geez I need to clarify that lest I be giving the wrong impression by far.
Sometimes I can't see well. I either give up, or put in 80% of the work instead of the normal 50% if I'm desperate. Usually what I do is just "sit with" whatever area or guide I'm working with, sometimes talking with them. Sometimes it gets better.
Sometimes I can't hear well. Or my IG doesn't talk to me, NO guide will talk to me, or they try and I can't hear them at all. I tell them I'm having trouble and sometimes ask for info in other ways.
Sometimes I feel "actively bored," or somewhat angry and frustrated, or other emotions that make it difficult, or unsatisfying, though usually the emotion is something that needs dealing with inside as part of that meditation.
Sometimes I have such issues with avoidance of an energy that I instantly space out, turn off, fall into daydreams, or fall asleep. At best I can bring myself back to it. In moderation it just means sometimes I sleep through something. At worst this can happen repeatedly so I can spend HOURS working something, multiple days, and still not getting through it. I just keep trying.
Sometimes it's frightening or gross and is invoking strong emotion and I have a problem with courage or facing it. When that happens I may shift and for awhile, have IG bring in my planets or fave archs and whomever IG thinks is best, and hug them and try to merge with them first. I might also have them stay with me, and I might hold their hands on each side of me. A couple of times I have literally hidden behind them, peeking out! I do whatever is needed to make it work.
Sometimes it takes days to get through a single meditation, for the above reasons. Sometimes a working has to be split into separate pieces and those have to be worked individually over a period of time. Sometimes I have to do these in the daytime standing up with my eyes open. This requires more imaginative effort on my part to project the visual but if the archetype is that terrifying or the meditation is that hard to hold onto, that's just the way it is. Sometimes I write something down and sit or stand with that so when I lose track of what the hell I'm doing I look down at the paper and it reminds me. My mind does a lot of stuff to throw me off the hard ones. You just have to adapt and figure out how to get around it and through it.
This isn't always easy for me. In fact often it's very hard and very frustrating. But I keep on it, hold the faith, hold the line, and eventually get through it.
When I blog, there's no point or inspiration for me to talk about the three times it didn't work, or was so 'vague' I just sat around 'communing' instead of doing what I planned, or to go on about how it took me three times to not fall asleep. Once in awhile I mention something but not usually.
So don't think it's easy and vivid for me. Sometimes people tell me, "Oh I'd love to do that stuff but you know, it's just not there for me." This stuff is like chakra work. You have to do it when it is NOT there, consistently over time, and that part of you 'develops' to where it IS there a heck of a lot more often. Still not always... But usually.
I'm mutating!
My feelings about a lot of things are changing. I've been praying a lot more. I've been stopping to shut my mouth and ask myself, "How do I feel?" when talking about any topic, or to any person.
I have been reading just a little, some stuff I already had bookmarked to look at. Asking myself, how do I feel about this? Is there an answer inside me?
I am seeing things -- people, groups, things on paper, even people I have known for years -- in a different light. As if nothing changed in them, but how I perceive them has changed.
I never noticed before the degree to which the occult field is a uniform of its own. It's the punk rock of religion, except nobody seems to grok that the official orgs of authority are like music marketing executives planning the great rock & roll scandal. If I were talking about officially known demons, angels, rituals, and everything in enochian or hebrew, I'd be cool, I'd be validating that system. But my experiences are mine, and the entities I talk to are part of me and not official entities from some official cosmology. Not only are the names of the identities not part of something already written down by someone else, but I even get English letters for them--you'd think this was unheard of. People either act like I'm an actual threat to the doctrine or something, or like I'm a complete idiot, maybe a schizophrenic who wandered into their terrain. They can talk about the exact same stuff and it's normal, but that's because they all agree on how it's supposed to happen and under what conditions.
When I have a question I pray about it, rather than applying to the writings or doctrine of something or someone else. It came up in one place about Crowley and Thelema and I said you know, it was dreams that brought me to all this/that; I am a part of that innately, probably some tiny fragment of me overlapped with AC; but he got to live his life, and I get to live mine. I don't need to do all that this time. That isn't what feels right to me. I think "Christ" is amazing and cool. I'd much rather talk to Jesus than Baphomet any day. I'm like the social outcast of the Thelemic world. How did I get there to begin with, for goddsakes, I now wonder.
*
I think whatever the structure of soul turns out to be (and maybe it's a variable, and maybe it's irrelevant to most people's growth. As the Aeons have told me, for most people this is "seamless." Maybe it's not for me solely because I wouldn't validate or recognize it if it was.), I feel that this is accessible to everyone, even if it came through them in other formats. I don't think anything official is required. No initiations, no having to learn to command X-zillion angels and demons of realm-Z. I don't get the attraction to this. Now, if it turns out that claiming the parts of oneself comes down to that, ok, but that is certainly not the model that is being used, the model of gradually understanding oneself.
When reading stuff, it feels like it often has in remote viewing: as if it's a whole field of people trying to get to the inside of experience through the outside. Labrinthian anal-retentive obsession with 'form', leaving whole volumes of debate about trivial things while you honestly wonder, "has this person ever had a genuine experience in their life?" -- because you feel none of the life, none of the truth, in what they're saying. Not truth like accuracy, but truth like IS-ness, that thread of something experiential that can tell you in your gut and heart that you share that with someone, even when every outer detail is unrecognizeable. Like it's as dry as the paper it's written on, like it's totally cerebral and surface-flotsam, even if it's technically 'accurate'.
*
It reminds me of when I was 12 and went to church for the first time since I was 5. I had been talking to God in my head since I was around 5 and the preacher had tried to frighten us by telling us God heard our every thought. I took him literally. It was the best friend in my head for years. I talked to him all the time. Cried on him and told him jokes and asked questions. No, I didn't get word responses, but usually if I really wanted to know I'd have a pretty strong gut feeling about it before long. I didn't even think about this much. Then my stepmom took us to church, out of the blue. And I watched the people with a surreal fascination. Many of them seemed to have no real relationship with God at all. They talked to him formally and only at proscribed times. It was a formula: Dear God. You're so cool. Can I have something? I'm done with you now. Official Jesus-signature of approval, Amen. I didn't remember anything of visiting church aside from that one event that stuck in my head, so even the concept of group prayer was something I hadn't thought about.
But then the minute they were done praying, somehow all that wish for blessings and glory to God and so on vanished. 30 seconds later they were in the hallway gossiping about someone or otherwise moving on. I just didn't understand why they thought they needed a formal ritual to pray. God was always in your head! Wasn't he?? Later I came to appreciate ritual (hugely) and group intent, but at the time, it was the weirdest thing to me. The part that bothered me most was the people with whom I felt no kinship. As if their religion was about something on paper, a formal dogma with rules, and that was what mattered.
I was very close to my church for a couple of years. I memorized entire bible chapters (granted, the psalms). I sang every sunday, solos, I was the Poster Child For Jesus. I spent the entire time praying fiercely to believe in Jesus the way they did. I believed he'd been a "holy man." I believed in that "loving energy" I later came to call the "christ" energy. I just didn't have the gut connection with him being quite what the church had him officially lined up to me. I prayed fiercely and constantly about this, to better understand the truth, for a couple years. At the end of that if anything I felt 10x stronger than I had to begin with. I realized that either I needed to accept the answer I was getting as an answer, or I needed to stop wasting time praying if I could not rely on that much sincere prayer to give me a legit answer for something so important.
(Ironically I am now a bigger fan of Jesus than many Christians, but I don't have the dogma he is "packaged in" by churches as part of it, which is apparently a bit unusual and I find many people have a hard time wrapping their brain around--as if, how could you admire the entity without buying the doctrine about him?)
Anyway, my growing secret inner angst was taken care of one day when, on a Wednesday night, they refused to let me come into the sanctuary to pray because I was not wearing a dress. (Southern Baptist here.) I told the deacons plainly how retarded I thought that was, how I personally knew that God would rather have my sincere prayers than any particular kind of clothing, how this was completely biased against women who (particular on Wed nights when we did physical work around the pastor's house, and played sports) were just as likely to wear pants as men and nobody was keeping the men out of the sanctuary for lack of a skirt. They held fast and that was it for me. I was profoundly offended, even at the age of 13. As I stood there by the doorway, it suddenly occurred to me that whatever God I'd been talking to constantly in my head for the previous 8 years, these people didn't know that guy. Maybe we were just confused because they all had the same name.
I later, age 15, joined an 'american baptist' church. They were less uptight (dancing was not the devil, haha), and I really liked the people and the music. I went on my own, my next stepmother was already insane, thank god she was not religious on top of that. When I later discovered by accident that all the things I "innately believed" -- without ever having even given them thought -- such as that everything is alive, is sentient, that we all live many lives, etc. -- was in fact sacrilege... well that kinda did it for me in that church, as well. Which was too bad. I was as disappointed as the pastors (six!) were. I worked in the church office, sang in the choir, was a core member of the very active youth group, etc. I had accepted that my view on Jesus was different and I just wasn't going to mention that since I liked the love-based model. But unfortunately, the discovery that nearly everything I believed was the opposite of what official doctrine said, that just didn't fly. It took a pretty short time of quoting scripture before it was obvious to all the pastors that my belief had nothing to do with what someone's book said.
*
That reminds me, that although I think much of the bible is 'inspired', I don't buy it as a doctrine at all. The last time the Jehovah's came to my door I said kindly, "Thank you so much. But I don't consider the bible to be a source of authority." That literally left them gaping at me. I don't think anybody ever said that to them before. That pretty much wipes out everything they had planned, since "look here it says so in the book" is used as justification for everything.
My theory is: pray. Ask God. Ask Jesus. Ask whomever it is you take to truly be divine. Just pray devoutly and regularly and ask for it to become clear in you. I believe that this results in answers. It's always odd to me how many people who are total believers in some religion based on prayer, act like prayer is a bizarre way to approach things. Like prayer is a ritual; but if you want to know the truth about something, you should ask the official expert or look it up in the official doctrine. The only real truth comes 'through' you. If what those things say has truth, that will come through you. If it doesn't, well, take it up with God.
The more I pray, the more I feel like some of the things I read, such as the Enochian stuff, is just... "not for me." Like it's not bad enough the cat-eyed lizard guy 'guardians' show up when I do. Like it's not bad enough they sometimes tempt me to some kind of commitment in dreams that leaves me shouting refusal at them about my being 'of Michael'. Like it's not bad enough that the Call of the Aethyrs translated is not something I feel ok about. But on top of that, I just feel like the entire spectrum of it -- I mean literally the half of me that has stood calmly in occultism, basically -- that this is just... it's just not for me. I am not afraid of it, I am not against it intellectually, and I find the "mystical kabbalah" to be fascinating and related to my own experiences, though I am not educated enough to properly understand the "how". But the ancient system of that is not the same thing as the modern 'field/genre' of study.
It's like I am finding myself, and as I do, I realize I'm on a different road than I thought. It isn't so much that I am changing my mind about what path I am going to walk. It is more like I am just realizing that I am not on that path at all, period, and maybe never was except in my external confusion, letting myself be led by people who seemed to know more than me, whom I assumed were wise because I felt I wasn't, and I found that interesting so I walked that way.
But self-insight in terms of working with the Four and my Consortium has turned out to be a little like practicing psi. When you do it enough, you come to a comfort in yourself. You no longer consider people experts solely because they have got down the "patter" of complex-sounding terminology and they act like they know it all. You start to validate your own experience, and as a result, you start to measure incoming information from others based on how you feel inside, how you relate to that, how well it "resonates" with what you "know" -- based on experience, not based on book-study or talking. You feel it inside you and maybe, just maybe, you start to realize that all those alleged experts, in some cases, they're just a bunch of dusty armchair wannabe intellectuals. They aren't pulling the Truth through them, through the genuine experience. They're just good at pontificating. Once you really start tuning into the core of experiential stuff yourself, you start to feel the difference.
And you're standing in the middle of a road that once felt like home, thinking, what am I doing here? These people are not of me. This path is not of me. This focus does not hold the Truth I feel in me. This is pretty much what I went through concerning Remote Viewing, though differently than how I am feeling it about 'spirituality' now.
I guess I'm just on my own with it for now. Aside from the partial funky "sync" with that ancient 'gnostic' thing I found on wiki when I searched '12 Aeons', I find nothing else that seems to match the model that has spontaneously unfolded inside me--despite my resistance I might add. Maybe it's different for everyone, you know, maybe we are all different "patterns" or fractals and that is just mine and it doesn't need to be anybody else's. But it IS mine, apparently. At least, this is as much as I know about it for now. The Four are integrally part of me, and any doctrine, dogma, or system that is incapable of recognizing or at least allowing this, I just am not going to have any common ground with. Which means, for now, there is no road at all for me but the one unfolding inside step by step. Oh well.
Messianic BS
In the course of my experiences, I sometimes get some model, comment, framework, or indication that has a sort of you-are-destined tone to it. After seeing a little more of it in my recent review, I thought maybe I should say something about how I feel about that.
I think it's crap. I don't buy it. Every time something or someone tells me I am specially destined, I think "schizophrenia is leaning on my doorbell!" I am willing to accept that from the perspective of my insides, where the whole world really DOES revolve around me, that it might legitimately feel like that to some part of me. But I never take it literally. I don't think it has any true indicator of anything in the shared-reality world.
So don't worry. I occasionally get a little on the religious side for 10 minutes, but that passes, and the various aren't-I-special symbolisms, I take with a huge grain of salt and sense of humor.
PJ
Things as they really are
Lucid dreaming
Meditating when it sucks
I'm mutating!
Messianic BS
Things as they really are
I was half-awake. Some interactive half-dream surprised me in some way. I woke up fully with a sudden idea. Dear God (and everyone else), I prayed. Please help me to see things as they truly are.
After a few minutes of unusual in-my-head activity, I was asked by some part of me, What makes you think you are capable of understanding things as they truly are?
I wasn't sure how to answer that. Why not? I finally negotiated.
Worlds went onward in my head. You think the answer is a square? I was asked, after a series of activity that led me to that satisfied conclusion. Then I saw: it was a cube. There was an entire 'dimension of understanding' I had left out. All things have this extra dimensionality.
And then I felt like I learned something, but I forget what. I am SO useless!
Lucid Dreaming
I took a nap on an early lunch and woke up lucid in my dream. How cool, I thought, been awhile since this! I decided to "go with" the dream out of curiosity. I took shortcuts though. I went through walls and such, though I knew well enough (I lucid dreamed very regularly until I was around age 18) that I needed to "space out" just before hitting the wall so I could get through it; if I am thinking and conscious of it being a wall it will be sticky or even slightly too solid. My only problem was not remembering the last part of the dream before my alarm woke me up, darn. Anyway, I wish I had thought to call in my Aeons or Four and see if it worked more clearly in dream state or something!
Meditating when it sucks
My friend recently says, "Man, I had a terrible meditation last night, because..." and I said dryly, "Welcome to MY world."
Then I realized: He doesn't know that. I don't blog about what doesn't work! So my blog probably makes it sound like this is all really easy and vivid and so on. Geez I need to clarify that lest I be giving the wrong impression by far.
Sometimes I can't see well. I either give up, or put in 80% of the work instead of the normal 50% if I'm desperate. Usually what I do is just "sit with" whatever area or guide I'm working with, sometimes talking with them. Sometimes it gets better.
Sometimes I can't hear well. Or my IG doesn't talk to me, NO guide will talk to me, or they try and I can't hear them at all. I tell them I'm having trouble and sometimes ask for info in other ways.
Sometimes I feel "actively bored," or somewhat angry and frustrated, or other emotions that make it difficult, or unsatisfying, though usually the emotion is something that needs dealing with inside as part of that meditation.
Sometimes I have such issues with avoidance of an energy that I instantly space out, turn off, fall into daydreams, or fall asleep. At best I can bring myself back to it. In moderation it just means sometimes I sleep through something. At worst this can happen repeatedly so I can spend HOURS working something, multiple days, and still not getting through it. I just keep trying.
Sometimes it's frightening or gross and is invoking strong emotion and I have a problem with courage or facing it. When that happens I may shift and for awhile, have IG bring in my planets or fave archs and whomever IG thinks is best, and hug them and try to merge with them first. I might also have them stay with me, and I might hold their hands on each side of me. A couple of times I have literally hidden behind them, peeking out! I do whatever is needed to make it work.
Sometimes it takes days to get through a single meditation, for the above reasons. Sometimes a working has to be split into separate pieces and those have to be worked individually over a period of time. Sometimes I have to do these in the daytime standing up with my eyes open. This requires more imaginative effort on my part to project the visual but if the archetype is that terrifying or the meditation is that hard to hold onto, that's just the way it is. Sometimes I write something down and sit or stand with that so when I lose track of what the hell I'm doing I look down at the paper and it reminds me. My mind does a lot of stuff to throw me off the hard ones. You just have to adapt and figure out how to get around it and through it.
This isn't always easy for me. In fact often it's very hard and very frustrating. But I keep on it, hold the faith, hold the line, and eventually get through it.
When I blog, there's no point or inspiration for me to talk about the three times it didn't work, or was so 'vague' I just sat around 'communing' instead of doing what I planned, or to go on about how it took me three times to not fall asleep. Once in awhile I mention something but not usually.
So don't think it's easy and vivid for me. Sometimes people tell me, "Oh I'd love to do that stuff but you know, it's just not there for me." This stuff is like chakra work. You have to do it when it is NOT there, consistently over time, and that part of you 'develops' to where it IS there a heck of a lot more often. Still not always... But usually.
I'm mutating!
My feelings about a lot of things are changing. I've been praying a lot more. I've been stopping to shut my mouth and ask myself, "How do I feel?" when talking about any topic, or to any person.
I have been reading just a little, some stuff I already had bookmarked to look at. Asking myself, how do I feel about this? Is there an answer inside me?
I am seeing things -- people, groups, things on paper, even people I have known for years -- in a different light. As if nothing changed in them, but how I perceive them has changed.
I never noticed before the degree to which the occult field is a uniform of its own. It's the punk rock of religion, except nobody seems to grok that the official orgs of authority are like music marketing executives planning the great rock & roll scandal. If I were talking about officially known demons, angels, rituals, and everything in enochian or hebrew, I'd be cool, I'd be validating that system. But my experiences are mine, and the entities I talk to are part of me and not official entities from some official cosmology. Not only are the names of the identities not part of something already written down by someone else, but I even get English letters for them--you'd think this was unheard of. People either act like I'm an actual threat to the doctrine or something, or like I'm a complete idiot, maybe a schizophrenic who wandered into their terrain. They can talk about the exact same stuff and it's normal, but that's because they all agree on how it's supposed to happen and under what conditions.
When I have a question I pray about it, rather than applying to the writings or doctrine of something or someone else. It came up in one place about Crowley and Thelema and I said you know, it was dreams that brought me to all this/that; I am a part of that innately, probably some tiny fragment of me overlapped with AC; but he got to live his life, and I get to live mine. I don't need to do all that this time. That isn't what feels right to me. I think "Christ" is amazing and cool. I'd much rather talk to Jesus than Baphomet any day. I'm like the social outcast of the Thelemic world. How did I get there to begin with, for goddsakes, I now wonder.
*
I think whatever the structure of soul turns out to be (and maybe it's a variable, and maybe it's irrelevant to most people's growth. As the Aeons have told me, for most people this is "seamless." Maybe it's not for me solely because I wouldn't validate or recognize it if it was.), I feel that this is accessible to everyone, even if it came through them in other formats. I don't think anything official is required. No initiations, no having to learn to command X-zillion angels and demons of realm-Z. I don't get the attraction to this. Now, if it turns out that claiming the parts of oneself comes down to that, ok, but that is certainly not the model that is being used, the model of gradually understanding oneself.
When reading stuff, it feels like it often has in remote viewing: as if it's a whole field of people trying to get to the inside of experience through the outside. Labrinthian anal-retentive obsession with 'form', leaving whole volumes of debate about trivial things while you honestly wonder, "has this person ever had a genuine experience in their life?" -- because you feel none of the life, none of the truth, in what they're saying. Not truth like accuracy, but truth like IS-ness, that thread of something experiential that can tell you in your gut and heart that you share that with someone, even when every outer detail is unrecognizeable. Like it's as dry as the paper it's written on, like it's totally cerebral and surface-flotsam, even if it's technically 'accurate'.
*
It reminds me of when I was 12 and went to church for the first time since I was 5. I had been talking to God in my head since I was around 5 and the preacher had tried to frighten us by telling us God heard our every thought. I took him literally. It was the best friend in my head for years. I talked to him all the time. Cried on him and told him jokes and asked questions. No, I didn't get word responses, but usually if I really wanted to know I'd have a pretty strong gut feeling about it before long. I didn't even think about this much. Then my stepmom took us to church, out of the blue. And I watched the people with a surreal fascination. Many of them seemed to have no real relationship with God at all. They talked to him formally and only at proscribed times. It was a formula: Dear God. You're so cool. Can I have something? I'm done with you now. Official Jesus-signature of approval, Amen. I didn't remember anything of visiting church aside from that one event that stuck in my head, so even the concept of group prayer was something I hadn't thought about.
But then the minute they were done praying, somehow all that wish for blessings and glory to God and so on vanished. 30 seconds later they were in the hallway gossiping about someone or otherwise moving on. I just didn't understand why they thought they needed a formal ritual to pray. God was always in your head! Wasn't he?? Later I came to appreciate ritual (hugely) and group intent, but at the time, it was the weirdest thing to me. The part that bothered me most was the people with whom I felt no kinship. As if their religion was about something on paper, a formal dogma with rules, and that was what mattered.
I was very close to my church for a couple of years. I memorized entire bible chapters (granted, the psalms). I sang every sunday, solos, I was the Poster Child For Jesus. I spent the entire time praying fiercely to believe in Jesus the way they did. I believed he'd been a "holy man." I believed in that "loving energy" I later came to call the "christ" energy. I just didn't have the gut connection with him being quite what the church had him officially lined up to me. I prayed fiercely and constantly about this, to better understand the truth, for a couple years. At the end of that if anything I felt 10x stronger than I had to begin with. I realized that either I needed to accept the answer I was getting as an answer, or I needed to stop wasting time praying if I could not rely on that much sincere prayer to give me a legit answer for something so important.
(Ironically I am now a bigger fan of Jesus than many Christians, but I don't have the dogma he is "packaged in" by churches as part of it, which is apparently a bit unusual and I find many people have a hard time wrapping their brain around--as if, how could you admire the entity without buying the doctrine about him?)
Anyway, my growing secret inner angst was taken care of one day when, on a Wednesday night, they refused to let me come into the sanctuary to pray because I was not wearing a dress. (Southern Baptist here.) I told the deacons plainly how retarded I thought that was, how I personally knew that God would rather have my sincere prayers than any particular kind of clothing, how this was completely biased against women who (particular on Wed nights when we did physical work around the pastor's house, and played sports) were just as likely to wear pants as men and nobody was keeping the men out of the sanctuary for lack of a skirt. They held fast and that was it for me. I was profoundly offended, even at the age of 13. As I stood there by the doorway, it suddenly occurred to me that whatever God I'd been talking to constantly in my head for the previous 8 years, these people didn't know that guy. Maybe we were just confused because they all had the same name.
I later, age 15, joined an 'american baptist' church. They were less uptight (dancing was not the devil, haha), and I really liked the people and the music. I went on my own, my next stepmother was already insane, thank god she was not religious on top of that. When I later discovered by accident that all the things I "innately believed" -- without ever having even given them thought -- such as that everything is alive, is sentient, that we all live many lives, etc. -- was in fact sacrilege... well that kinda did it for me in that church, as well. Which was too bad. I was as disappointed as the pastors (six!) were. I worked in the church office, sang in the choir, was a core member of the very active youth group, etc. I had accepted that my view on Jesus was different and I just wasn't going to mention that since I liked the love-based model. But unfortunately, the discovery that nearly everything I believed was the opposite of what official doctrine said, that just didn't fly. It took a pretty short time of quoting scripture before it was obvious to all the pastors that my belief had nothing to do with what someone's book said.
*
That reminds me, that although I think much of the bible is 'inspired', I don't buy it as a doctrine at all. The last time the Jehovah's came to my door I said kindly, "Thank you so much. But I don't consider the bible to be a source of authority." That literally left them gaping at me. I don't think anybody ever said that to them before. That pretty much wipes out everything they had planned, since "look here it says so in the book" is used as justification for everything.
My theory is: pray. Ask God. Ask Jesus. Ask whomever it is you take to truly be divine. Just pray devoutly and regularly and ask for it to become clear in you. I believe that this results in answers. It's always odd to me how many people who are total believers in some religion based on prayer, act like prayer is a bizarre way to approach things. Like prayer is a ritual; but if you want to know the truth about something, you should ask the official expert or look it up in the official doctrine. The only real truth comes 'through' you. If what those things say has truth, that will come through you. If it doesn't, well, take it up with God.
The more I pray, the more I feel like some of the things I read, such as the Enochian stuff, is just... "not for me." Like it's not bad enough the cat-eyed lizard guy 'guardians' show up when I do. Like it's not bad enough they sometimes tempt me to some kind of commitment in dreams that leaves me shouting refusal at them about my being 'of Michael'. Like it's not bad enough that the Call of the Aethyrs translated is not something I feel ok about. But on top of that, I just feel like the entire spectrum of it -- I mean literally the half of me that has stood calmly in occultism, basically -- that this is just... it's just not for me. I am not afraid of it, I am not against it intellectually, and I find the "mystical kabbalah" to be fascinating and related to my own experiences, though I am not educated enough to properly understand the "how". But the ancient system of that is not the same thing as the modern 'field/genre' of study.
It's like I am finding myself, and as I do, I realize I'm on a different road than I thought. It isn't so much that I am changing my mind about what path I am going to walk. It is more like I am just realizing that I am not on that path at all, period, and maybe never was except in my external confusion, letting myself be led by people who seemed to know more than me, whom I assumed were wise because I felt I wasn't, and I found that interesting so I walked that way.
But self-insight in terms of working with the Four and my Consortium has turned out to be a little like practicing psi. When you do it enough, you come to a comfort in yourself. You no longer consider people experts solely because they have got down the "patter" of complex-sounding terminology and they act like they know it all. You start to validate your own experience, and as a result, you start to measure incoming information from others based on how you feel inside, how you relate to that, how well it "resonates" with what you "know" -- based on experience, not based on book-study or talking. You feel it inside you and maybe, just maybe, you start to realize that all those alleged experts, in some cases, they're just a bunch of dusty armchair wannabe intellectuals. They aren't pulling the Truth through them, through the genuine experience. They're just good at pontificating. Once you really start tuning into the core of experiential stuff yourself, you start to feel the difference.
And you're standing in the middle of a road that once felt like home, thinking, what am I doing here? These people are not of me. This path is not of me. This focus does not hold the Truth I feel in me. This is pretty much what I went through concerning Remote Viewing, though differently than how I am feeling it about 'spirituality' now.
I guess I'm just on my own with it for now. Aside from the partial funky "sync" with that ancient 'gnostic' thing I found on wiki when I searched '12 Aeons', I find nothing else that seems to match the model that has spontaneously unfolded inside me--despite my resistance I might add. Maybe it's different for everyone, you know, maybe we are all different "patterns" or fractals and that is just mine and it doesn't need to be anybody else's. But it IS mine, apparently. At least, this is as much as I know about it for now. The Four are integrally part of me, and any doctrine, dogma, or system that is incapable of recognizing or at least allowing this, I just am not going to have any common ground with. Which means, for now, there is no road at all for me but the one unfolding inside step by step. Oh well.
Messianic BS
In the course of my experiences, I sometimes get some model, comment, framework, or indication that has a sort of you-are-destined tone to it. After seeing a little more of it in my recent review, I thought maybe I should say something about how I feel about that.
I think it's crap. I don't buy it. Every time something or someone tells me I am specially destined, I think "schizophrenia is leaning on my doorbell!" I am willing to accept that from the perspective of my insides, where the whole world really DOES revolve around me, that it might legitimately feel like that to some part of me. But I never take it literally. I don't think it has any true indicator of anything in the shared-reality world.
So don't worry. I occasionally get a little on the religious side for 10 minutes, but that passes, and the various aren't-I-special symbolisms, I take with a huge grain of salt and sense of humor.
PJ
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Focus Med: Ithikah
I hadn't meditated in a few days, and the Aeons were calling so I did the round. But I've been thinking about how I used to meditate sometimes: just "go in there" and hang around, talk to guides, follow where things lead. I haven't done that in a long time because I simply forgot about it. Yet many of my most amazing and spontaneous experiences happened during those casual focus times, much like the best songs you write may happen "by spontaneous accident" during the casual practice you do daily.
I decided that I should just start at the beginning (Ithikah is at the top of the round) and one by one, go through each Aeon, and just spend some quality time with them. I imagined "that-energy" being integrated with mine in great detail from above my head to below my feet, slowly going through the whole body with it, which took awhile. I said a variety of spontaneous prayers. I talked to him, though I wasn't getting much conversation back. Then I hung around "being" with him.
The impressions I got were a little like symbolic remote viewing data. I don't know what any of them mean. But I trust if I record this, then eventually experience will cumulate and I will begin to see what the previous symbols meant. Of course... it's unlikely I'm going to make nearly this much effort in the documentation as I am with this first example LOL.
The following images are the things I saw/sensed and a little bit of text.
I need to go back to the 3rd environ as an arch and finish that.
As for what it all means, your guess is as good as mine.
It could be "mental flotsam" like some stress dreams for all I know.
I'm just hoping that if I go in with a good intent, and record it, that over time, I will begin to see the patterns and some meanings, eventually, that are not clear right now. Much like I have from even the written accounts I reviewed last weekend, except perhaps more clear for making note of colors, symbols, numbers, etc.
So this is just as time consuming and often lacking closure as RV is. Somehow I've managed to come up with nearly the same process yet make accomplishing even less with it feel more ok. It figures. I love RV but it's for masochists.
Tonight it should be Bolehren's turn.
PJ
I decided that I should just start at the beginning (Ithikah is at the top of the round) and one by one, go through each Aeon, and just spend some quality time with them. I imagined "that-energy" being integrated with mine in great detail from above my head to below my feet, slowly going through the whole body with it, which took awhile. I said a variety of spontaneous prayers. I talked to him, though I wasn't getting much conversation back. Then I hung around "being" with him.
The impressions I got were a little like symbolic remote viewing data. I don't know what any of them mean. But I trust if I record this, then eventually experience will cumulate and I will begin to see what the previous symbols meant. Of course... it's unlikely I'm going to make nearly this much effort in the documentation as I am with this first example LOL.
The following images are the things I saw/sensed and a little bit of text.
I need to go back to the 3rd environ as an arch and finish that.
As for what it all means, your guess is as good as mine.
It could be "mental flotsam" like some stress dreams for all I know.
I'm just hoping that if I go in with a good intent, and record it, that over time, I will begin to see the patterns and some meanings, eventually, that are not clear right now. Much like I have from even the written accounts I reviewed last weekend, except perhaps more clear for making note of colors, symbols, numbers, etc.
So this is just as time consuming and often lacking closure as RV is. Somehow I've managed to come up with nearly the same process yet make accomplishing even less with it feel more ok. It figures. I love RV but it's for masochists.
Tonight it should be Bolehren's turn.
PJ
Astral Geeks
Today I feel like an idiot. It only just became clear to me that even during my most focused, vivid and dedicated meditation periods, I've been like a fool stumbling down the high wire, oblivious and too lazily disorganized to bother learning anything from any of the previous steps.
Since my efforts are like nothing-nothing-nothing-OBSESS!-nothing in cycles, every year or two I have a 'period' that almost stands alone for experience. It is so separated from other periods, and my recall is so quickly iffy on this stuff anyway, that it's like a bad alzheimers joke. ("New guides every day!") Outside of the Four and IG, I'm lucky to remember anything at all.
I get very clearly from my recent 'review' that the energy of the Senior is a 'symbol' that repeats. When I see black, or rectangles, it's his energy. I tripped over a whole variety of dreams where thick rectangles were involved, over meditations where archetypes had a rectangle sticking out of their head, stuff like that. Did I get it? Of course not. Because I've never really tried to keep track of different symbols and associations. That would make sense. We wouldn't want that!
I also tripped over all kinds of stuff that lacked useful detail. "And a cat..." or "And this big monster-thing..." Yeah? What kind? What color? I didn't think to write that down. Geez, in an entire universe operating on SYMBOL -- sounds, colors, textures, shapes -- details matter, for godssakes! (The viewer in me just grabbed me by the throat and shook me when I realized all this. "No duh!") WHY have I not made an effort to correlate the symbols I get?
Turns out I've had "rubber" as a texture in several archmeds. I also had it in a psi experience with a distant healer and his team about a decade ago. On at least three occasions I have specifically been told, seen, or understood, that this represents non-conductivity, a 'block or barrier' to energy. It's not just energy with issues; in fact it is never the energy itself in fact; it's the complete "protection" from that energy having interaction with me. Whatever is behind it is not something I'm unintegrated with and trying to keep out; it's energy already part of me that I'm trying to "block off".
I've also repeatedly had "cone-shapes" in the inner world. In every case it has played a similar role to rubber, of "dividing" something, protecting/concealing. Once even like a traffic cone, there's some extra symbol for the obvious. To prevent yourself from feeling, I was once told when the shape was in my body. So far, cones have only turned up in two textures: rubber (always but once) and something like lucite/glass (once).
Bolehran was completely separated from me by a huge rubber Galosha. It was invisible initially. Jared was trapped in a glass-like cone -- maybe the symbol there is that I could see through it, but it was still the same kind of block. Half a dozen body meds have had small rubber cones inside my body like little energy blocks. A lake arch had two big rubber cones poking in from underwater in a bad area. There's more but the point is, if I knew this, if I were paying attention, I would see a cone in the inner world and say to myself, "That is hiding something from me, telling me to avoid it, pseudo-protection." I would feel rubber and I would say to myself, "This is a nonconductive energy block."
It doesn't matter what or where it is. I don't need to think about it, wonder, pace and ponder, ask for help. There is no question about it. Rubber is fundamentally non-conductive and in my inner world it is always a 'block' and needs to be dealt with. It is never 'the' archetype, entity, or primary energy. It is in front of that, blocking it. I could have saved myself a lot of confused wondering and uncertainty if I had realized this.
And I would have known it, if I had kept track of anything. How hard would that be? A notebook with a section for color, for textures, for symbols or numbers or letters, for shapes. A freakin collection of post-its for godssakes, this IS NOT HARD. Anybody with even half an organizing whit would have done this 15 years ago. I'm a librarian-geek, a "documentarian", a relational database freak, and yet I of all people managed to not even think of this! It boggles the mind.
I feel -- in my gut, not just in my head -- that I'm at the point where this matters more now. Where I need to be able to, for example, meet up with an energy and know something about it by the fact that it's a certain shape or color or number or texture.
It's possible that knowing something about the Four and the Aeons will tell me who could be the most help in dealing with something or someone. Or tell me the nature of something I've run into. Or tell me how important something is. Or tell me when what I'm perceiving is a block, not the thing behind that block. I'm sure there's 101 things I'm not even thinking of. Since I've never had the advantage of having A SINGLE FREAKING CLUE about my inner world, I've never had the chance to see the possible advantages of having one!
In the imaginal inner world, just like in psychic work, certain mindsets create side-effects. Even though you can develop a skill for not putting too much of yourself in (I mean restricting the % of intentional imagination; letting the subconscious take an equal role), you can still have your experience be influenced by yourself. It's not so much that it shows you something 'not real' (whatever that is, in this model!), as that something will be a lot less perceptible than it would have been otherwise because you're not accepting it.
A lot like in psi work, the more accurate understanding you have once you're "in the zone," often the better the rest works for you, whereas if you're still lost in space, or convinced it's something else, that is going to cause issues. Knowing a couple key things about the 'nature' of what you're working with inside, is like sensing the gestalt or context of a viewing target once you're well into session. If you're right, it helps hugely. If you're wrong you're screwed.
In RV expectations that are wrong can cause no-data or wrong or filtered data (guessing--nobody really knows this answer for sure). (To deal with this, you spend most your session time trying desperately to not believe anything lest it be wrong, but to record everything lest it be right. Sheesh.) In meditation it sure does work like that though: it causes reduced or removed perception, or sometimes a different symbol-form, one which is much less effective for your interaction or innate understanding, than the spontaneous original might have been.
I have spent 15 years in a country of "inner world" where I have refused to make any effort to learn the native language. How anybody who spent over a decade immersed in hypnosis, who is well aware of the symbolic nature of the mind, who was even introduced to gematria and the correspondences, could somehow have failed to absorb that it's a whole world with a whole language which suggests one might want to LEARN the language if they're going to operate there -- honestly it's beyond me. I am the biggest geek I know. An astral geek! I bet my Aeons tell jokes about me when I'm not around.
PJ
Since my efforts are like nothing-nothing-nothing-OBSESS!-nothing in cycles, every year or two I have a 'period' that almost stands alone for experience. It is so separated from other periods, and my recall is so quickly iffy on this stuff anyway, that it's like a bad alzheimers joke. ("New guides every day!") Outside of the Four and IG, I'm lucky to remember anything at all.
I get very clearly from my recent 'review' that the energy of the Senior is a 'symbol' that repeats. When I see black, or rectangles, it's his energy. I tripped over a whole variety of dreams where thick rectangles were involved, over meditations where archetypes had a rectangle sticking out of their head, stuff like that. Did I get it? Of course not. Because I've never really tried to keep track of different symbols and associations. That would make sense. We wouldn't want that!
I also tripped over all kinds of stuff that lacked useful detail. "And a cat..." or "And this big monster-thing..." Yeah? What kind? What color? I didn't think to write that down. Geez, in an entire universe operating on SYMBOL -- sounds, colors, textures, shapes -- details matter, for godssakes! (The viewer in me just grabbed me by the throat and shook me when I realized all this. "No duh!") WHY have I not made an effort to correlate the symbols I get?
Turns out I've had "rubber" as a texture in several archmeds. I also had it in a psi experience with a distant healer and his team about a decade ago. On at least three occasions I have specifically been told, seen, or understood, that this represents non-conductivity, a 'block or barrier' to energy. It's not just energy with issues; in fact it is never the energy itself in fact; it's the complete "protection" from that energy having interaction with me. Whatever is behind it is not something I'm unintegrated with and trying to keep out; it's energy already part of me that I'm trying to "block off".
I've also repeatedly had "cone-shapes" in the inner world. In every case it has played a similar role to rubber, of "dividing" something, protecting/concealing. Once even like a traffic cone, there's some extra symbol for the obvious. To prevent yourself from feeling, I was once told when the shape was in my body. So far, cones have only turned up in two textures: rubber (always but once) and something like lucite/glass (once).
Bolehran was completely separated from me by a huge rubber Galosha. It was invisible initially. Jared was trapped in a glass-like cone -- maybe the symbol there is that I could see through it, but it was still the same kind of block. Half a dozen body meds have had small rubber cones inside my body like little energy blocks. A lake arch had two big rubber cones poking in from underwater in a bad area. There's more but the point is, if I knew this, if I were paying attention, I would see a cone in the inner world and say to myself, "That is hiding something from me, telling me to avoid it, pseudo-protection." I would feel rubber and I would say to myself, "This is a nonconductive energy block."
It doesn't matter what or where it is. I don't need to think about it, wonder, pace and ponder, ask for help. There is no question about it. Rubber is fundamentally non-conductive and in my inner world it is always a 'block' and needs to be dealt with. It is never 'the' archetype, entity, or primary energy. It is in front of that, blocking it. I could have saved myself a lot of confused wondering and uncertainty if I had realized this.
And I would have known it, if I had kept track of anything. How hard would that be? A notebook with a section for color, for textures, for symbols or numbers or letters, for shapes. A freakin collection of post-its for godssakes, this IS NOT HARD. Anybody with even half an organizing whit would have done this 15 years ago. I'm a librarian-geek, a "documentarian", a relational database freak, and yet I of all people managed to not even think of this! It boggles the mind.
I feel -- in my gut, not just in my head -- that I'm at the point where this matters more now. Where I need to be able to, for example, meet up with an energy and know something about it by the fact that it's a certain shape or color or number or texture.
It's possible that knowing something about the Four and the Aeons will tell me who could be the most help in dealing with something or someone. Or tell me the nature of something I've run into. Or tell me how important something is. Or tell me when what I'm perceiving is a block, not the thing behind that block. I'm sure there's 101 things I'm not even thinking of. Since I've never had the advantage of having A SINGLE FREAKING CLUE about my inner world, I've never had the chance to see the possible advantages of having one!
In the imaginal inner world, just like in psychic work, certain mindsets create side-effects. Even though you can develop a skill for not putting too much of yourself in (I mean restricting the % of intentional imagination; letting the subconscious take an equal role), you can still have your experience be influenced by yourself. It's not so much that it shows you something 'not real' (whatever that is, in this model!), as that something will be a lot less perceptible than it would have been otherwise because you're not accepting it.
A lot like in psi work, the more accurate understanding you have once you're "in the zone," often the better the rest works for you, whereas if you're still lost in space, or convinced it's something else, that is going to cause issues. Knowing a couple key things about the 'nature' of what you're working with inside, is like sensing the gestalt or context of a viewing target once you're well into session. If you're right, it helps hugely. If you're wrong you're screwed.
In RV expectations that are wrong can cause no-data or wrong or filtered data (guessing--nobody really knows this answer for sure). (To deal with this, you spend most your session time trying desperately to not believe anything lest it be wrong, but to record everything lest it be right. Sheesh.) In meditation it sure does work like that though: it causes reduced or removed perception, or sometimes a different symbol-form, one which is much less effective for your interaction or innate understanding, than the spontaneous original might have been.
I have spent 15 years in a country of "inner world" where I have refused to make any effort to learn the native language. How anybody who spent over a decade immersed in hypnosis, who is well aware of the symbolic nature of the mind, who was even introduced to gematria and the correspondences, could somehow have failed to absorb that it's a whole world with a whole language which suggests one might want to LEARN the language if they're going to operate there -- honestly it's beyond me. I am the biggest geek I know. An astral geek! I bet my Aeons tell jokes about me when I'm not around.
PJ
Monday, December 14, 2009
Rambling 14Dec09
Thoughts/questions/experiences sparked by recent materials I found and a couple exercises.
*
What is really the difference between the archetype of an energy and the energy? I know officially it is 'my relationship' with that thing; not that-thing-itself. But how could I perceive it without my relationship in the way anyway? Is it impossible to truly perceive any thing as it truly is?
The-thing-itself, I suspect, would always be a geometry. Does that mean that everything manifest that doesn't come across like an 11-D geometric shape is, actually, an 'archetype'? A symbol or translation? So we are walking around an entire landscape of "symbols not things"? Skyscrapers and flowers and cats and cars... no different than if they were green cubes and yellow tetrahedrons that chirped?
Is it that we acclimatize to the symbols and so we hard-wire the neural perception like a shortcut to meaning, and we start thinking that every thing IS instead the symbol?
Do the QBL (Kabbalah) "correspondences" have validity because everything we perceive is not a 'thing' but 'an archetype/symbol'? So it's not that there are things, and then symbolic meaning; it's that everything is symbolic meaning. It's not that we have a viewing target of the Eiffel Tower and get symbolic data; it's that the target itself IS symbolic, because everything is. There is no such thing as literal data only matching-symbols. Hmmn. That might give a different idea regarding RV data if I think about it enough.
Does a geometry found 'within' the tiny span of filtered frequencies our biological bodies inhabit, look like "a rose" not just because of our personal relationship to that energy, but because of its relationship to the "aery worlds" of the frequency 'layers' it's perceived from within? So we see it not only as we are, but as the combined energy of those layered worlds (a combined identity we loosely call "reality") is, as well?
And what if the worlds we inhabit are themselves an interpretive framework? So we are interacting not just with that thing (rose), not just with our own thing (subjective perspective down to energy-level, which makes whatever we perceive "our archetype"), but also with that place which itself is a living-consciousness?
Maybe things look different to me "inside" than outside in part because those aery worlds I perceive within 'there' have a different context-interpretation-quality of their own, which changes the aspect-nature of the thing perceived? Totally apart from whatever effect or perspective is contributed by 'me'? (Like how some people would be 'different' depending on whether they were in a judo match vs. helping their grandmother carry groceries, even with the same motion their energy is totally different and if we looked at their energy not just their body we might see them differently.)
And: do we blend with the frequencies our perception is spanning?, so we -- just like what we perceive -- are different in different contexts?
So our 'identity' is always "a composition" and "fluid" even based on "the environment of our consciousness"? Like the diff between pouring blue ink (symbol for 'us' here) into clear water, or red vinegar, or black oil? That it "blends with" the "environment" and then is itself different?
*
So back to: is every 'layer' a world (yes, I believe); I call them "aers" (as opposed to Ether or Aethyr) (aer sounds kinda like layer but doesn't evoke enochian framework and works for me).
So... there's lots and lots of layers/aers in the 'spectrum' we perceive as reality. And of course just like any identity, it can be arbitrarily grouped, and the whole span of it is also one identity. So does our... world-of-perception... have a representative identity? The "Deva of our Reality"?
Gosh this reminds me of the time I had this really powerful dream that "our world's" KING (literally in a spiritual sense) was a Tree, and he was talking to the KING of this nearby world which was a Dragon. They were both just gigantic entities. Yet they only felt like powerful authority entities to me, not so much like holy entities, as more like a planetary entity, yet they didn't feel like Earth or Ganymede have felt to me. Huh. I hadn't thought of this until now.
If we call on a tarot archetypal identity, or the collective energy-form of something to better integrate and understand... then why not call on the deva of our perceptual reality, the deva of our physical reality? If consciousness can be arbitrarily combined and divided, and is more powerful when more 'dense' ("inclusive span"), why not? Those sound like great identities to me.
I have the subtle feeling I am not inventing this. I think some concept of this may exist in QBL and a decade ago I passed it 'skimming' and it simply did not sink in for useful consideration until now.
*
I was working on letting outer-world things show themselves to me inside. I was sitting in a subway sandwich shop at the front of walmart. I was asking various things I heard to give me their inside-me experience.
It was hard. My mind automatically slams down on imagination in my ordinary world. It was like arm-wrestling with myself in my head. The slightest sound or visual or feeling in my head that was not matching my outer reality was slammed out before it could even fully form. Geez. Now I know why I've managed to be so "functional" when other people with my experiences are often ravingly crazy. My brain has a definition set for "objective reality" and it holds to those shapes ruthlessly.
*
I just dozed off rereading this. I had the feeling when I woke up that my thoughts had a pattern, and my head, which was totally leaning to the side, was affecting my thoughts. Then I had this insight that this is literal and relates to the crown chakra and its role in understanding: I have seen even birds and dogs and cats "tilt their head" to the side when attempting to understand something.
I could "sense" for a few moments as I awoke that there is this... space-collection of energy that is very strong-dense, like from a foot above our head and it goes down like to the top of the chest, and it's a straight line that is cohesive and connected, and there is a sense of a sort of brightness at top and bottom, and of the 'geometry' of it changing when you tilt your head.
I sense that it's an attempt to slightly shift the energy-flow and literally "point" the top of it in a slightly different direction with the motion -- akin to 'squinting' but on some energetic-understanding level -- like how you move your straw when the liquid in your glass is nearly gone -- except that is looking to 'find' something at the bottom, and this is just opposite that (at the top instead) -- but it's the same sort of dynamic, of like... sucking in something slightly different.
Like we understand things ever so slightly differently sometimes depending on "where" the very top of our crown chakra is located. I sense this is actually more about our imperfectly open crown chakras. That if we were totally (healthy spiritually by which I mean 'fully realized') it would have equal access to everything. But like a radio, some areas of the dial/frequency come in more clearly than others for us.
*
Back to getting inside me what is outside me recently:
One odd thing: everything that I 'saw' and asked myself for, I got as a sound. But everything I 'heard' and asked myself for, I got as a visual. Go figure!
The soda machine had a constant low churning motor sound. It felt like a brown-grey slightly sticky irregular moving bulbuous cloud-shape that was 2-3.5 foot high. It was like a sort of thick but airy swamp effect filling the place. These colors in my inner world mean things ignored and repressed and the sticky generally means something slightly unhealthy depending on degree of thickness and stickyness (this was thin and only slightly sticky). Occasional tiny, ultra-thin 'thread flares', just for an instant, of various colors would spark near the top of the cloud or sometimes a few to many feet above, so brief I nearly missed them. I was trying to figure out what on earth that would be when I realized it might be harmonics I didn't consciously hear.
The handicapped chairs at walmart make this really loud piercing long-beeping sound when they back up. Someone was doing that shortly after I walked into the store. These shapes flew all over about 5-6 feet high, like a... like 'burst of a quiver of arrows' that went to every person and "more transparent" shorter versions went to people farther away. They were pencil-sized in shape, sharp at front and slim and straight, about an inch in diameter, and had a funky 'stretch' effect, as if instead of just 'being' a certain shape, they began about 6" long but then as they flew rapidly they elongated/grew with a 'rubbery-stretch' feel into something about 6 foot long. They went sharply and fast right through the middle of people's heads!, beginning to dissipate a few feet from their head, as if it was flying into something dissolving it so it got shorter until only a ghost of it about 6" long again, faded away super fast.
I laughed inside. An arrow through the head, that's a good symbol, it feels like that too!
Sitting in subway, I became aware of the insane amount of noise even when it is allegedly quiet. When I closed my eyes and asked for a 'casual feel' of everything, ye gods, it was like being lost in a colorful, irregular, but kind of ugly and chaotic kaleidascope of fogs that varied in shape and density and motion.
Glad we don't have to operate inside that. We'd be grossed out, as well as confused and lost. Guess that's one reason we don't normally 'let ourselves' perceive things inside us. Much of the word is just friggin ugly.
That reminds me that recently in a med in the aer with worlds in bubbles I was hanging out 'in' some whale-like creature deep underwater, and there was some visual but mostly it was like a whole world of sound, and as much small and subtle with that as we get with vision.
Hmmn. Do you suppose this is Nedlund, the Aeon who allegedly relates to "sound" he told me, integrating a little more with me.
*
My dad mentioned someone having a really old computer. I had this insight that the 'dynamic' of technology's rapid growth in our world reflects a dynamic of our own growth as a species, and that this is speeding up, gaining momentum.
We are oblivious to this change in ourselves at large, and this ... increase in novelty ... and resultant devaluing of the more immediate past ... and greater need for [hard to translate] 'component flexibility for integral but partial gradual upgrade' ... is becoming more important to individuals and to whole cultures and to the whole planet. There's more, but essentially, that this whole thing about technology's rapid growth is itself a "symbol".
I hadn't thought about issues and dynamics in the greater world at large as being symbols too, when I asked to be 'shown inside' stuff on the outside.
I was thinking like, what does a blue truck or that person look like inside me? Now I realize how shallow I tend to think!
*
I was standing in the aisle in walmart looking at chocolate chips. Christmas baking time! Low carb and gluten free has taken a hike. I will repent once all the symptoms hit but for now I agreed with my kid we could do some as we are really doing a low-key holiday this year.
I'm thinking (semi-sweet or white?) about my friend who recently 'met' what he is certain is 'my soul-angel'. Apparently those creatures are of a similar species since they seem to look pretty similar for many different people. White hair and ultra blue eyes but as much light-being as human, though in ~human form.
I wonder to myself, "And if I 'let my mind give me a symbol of this', would I see it like that, or would I see something different?" I looked to my right, where a woman stood looking at the bagged baking chopped nuts. She was about 140# overweight and looked very uncomfortable, in pantyhose and business style skirt. I closed my eyes while facing her direction and told my mind, 'show me her angel-of-soul.'
The surprising thing was how EASY it was for this to totally pop right into my visual field.
I mean I usually have to provide a little bit more "help" to the imaginative visualization of something brand new -- like the things noted above -- not 'making' it you understand, but almost like a helping foot-up in imaginative-energy. (Actually that's impossible to describe, so either the reader does this stuff, and gets it, or never will.) But BAM this was right there.
It was slightly diff for me; more soft-opaque light-being than I think they probably are, at least as my symbol or perception goes.
I was startled because it instantly turned and looked right at me.
I love being startled by things built by imagination as to me that validates a little bit of them; if it genuinely surprises me I don't feel I made that part up.
Of course I'm just imagining this, I tell myself. I notice there "is too much going on in the knee to foot area" just like I've noticed like in a super-brief flash I once got in a db RV session on Archangel Michael, as if it's just not as well defined or it's something we don't really grok and the only translation is sort of a thick feathery solid area sorta. But not in detail. I'm going on about this too much, that was only an instant indirect observation.
The woman bends over to get something from a bottom shelf and I was surprised because I thought what I was seeing would bend too, but it didn't. I guess I was thinking of it like some kind of X-ray of the soul like a skeleton or something that would move in every way she did. I thought that was funny then, I'm so ridiculous, as if the angel is going to be doing jumping jacks with you in the morning? hahaha! It *could* but I don't think it would. The whole idea almost made me giggle out loud!
It was more like it just sort of glided/existed 'in the center of her gravity' or something. I had the feeling that it could move 'with' her if it chose, lay down with her, but it was a sort of generality, it was usually standing, sitting or lying, and other motion was trivial-peripheral on her part... definitely the feel that orientation in space and gravity doesn't mean jack.
It was still looking at me. I felt such... "sweetness" in me all the sudden.
What can I do for her? I ask it, having the sudden desire to do something genuinely good for her.
Just be kind, it says. (I really didn't have a gender perception.)
I needed some macademia nuts anyway. So I asked her to help me find them, and I made a point to really look at her and smile sincerely and 'see the holiness in her' as I did. She really smiled in response, like really warmly and real, and I had the oddly sad impression that it had been too long since someone had made that kind of connection with her.
*
Coming out the end of the row a woman is bitching at her small child. He says something in response and I smile sweetly at him, thinking how adorable he is, and as she is turning away, she sees me doing that, and her voice gets kinder, and I realize that when I see the "adorable" in her child, it helps HER to be reminded to see the adorable in him too. And I think of how often that has actually happened with children and parents in stores, I've noticed it before but never thought too much about it.
It occurred to me that maybe if we were able to see the angel in everybody and interact like that, that maybe other people would see the angel better in them too subconsciously, and people might be a little bit nicer. I thought maybe that is part of our creating a joint-reality in some ways. That what we see is not just about what we see on our own, but what we are constantly reminded, in subtle ways, that others see.
I am really fat, and this has a huge (no pun intended) effect on how 'social culture' reacts to me as an individual. I was pretty normal until my early 20s saw a super rapid drastic weight gain, so I got a good view of the drastic "change" in how people reacted to me at 130# vs. 350#. Depending on the person and environ, suddenly I was invisible-er, stupid-er, geeky-er, gross-er, unworthy-er, a whole variety of the "cultural prejudice" that I'm sure anybody who is a minority race or has anything unusual about their appearance has run into to varying degrees. Anyway I only mention this because it makes me think that this is actually at the root of human prejudice. That we see people not just as they are but as we are to begin with, but on top of that, we are constantly affected, subconsciously even, by how we perceive what other-people-perceive. As if it is a "psychic collusion" to "agree on reality" and we are always unconsciously 'adjusting' ourselves to 'conform' with the 'consensus reality' around us. It takes actual "conscious individuality" for people NOT to do that. Not to treat fat people, race-X people, midget people, or whatever, in the way that the people around them, those on "auto-pilot adjust to conform to consensus reality" do. This last paragraph is my own idea, not an 'insight'.
*
We continued out and were walking down the side of the store with all the meat. It's a big area, divided down the middle by 3' high frozen/refrigerated structures that hold turkeys and frozen burritos and sales and so on. It was busy, lots of shoppers, so there were quite a few people throughout the length of the store on both sides.
I thought to myself, as I pondered whether a sirloin petite at the side looked ok, I wonder if everyone's angel looks different, or if people have different sorts, or maybe some are brighter or darker, bigger or smaller? I was actually only 'generally wondering to myself'.
But when I picked up the meat and turned toward my basket, every person from me to the far wall had that humanish lightish white form in them! --which somehow I could see clearly even though I also saw their bodies clearly.
--I might add that is an effect I've never had before. Even in my imagination right now I cannot make two completely opaque visuals occupy the same space and yet both be perceived clearly. It's almost like the "extra-dimensionality of sound" that I've talked about where no sound can replicate the depth and multiple-inclusion of one I hear/feel on the inside; with sound you have to stretch it out in time in 'this' reality, which makes it so... thin and wrong. With vision you have to stretch it out in space. But somehow on the inside you can get things that are 'together' without any contradiction or occlusion of the other.
Immediately every one of them turned and LOOKED at me! All at the same time, like orchestrated motion. In my head I sort of did a mental intake-of-breath in surprise. I mean it was like every one of them 'knew I was looking at them' the instant I was.
I had the feeling inside me of such FUN. Like light-joy-delight. Like they were... they were wearing their people... hahaha! -- like it was all this fabulously fun experiment... the way that we would treat theme park racing track-cars or bumper cars or something we "sat in and operated within pre-designed major limits." As if you could bump into someone hard and that would be as neat an experience as speeding along or going over a waterfall in a log-boat or spinning in a teacup or anything else. It was all this hilariously delightful really "sweet" feeling grand adventure.
*
Later, talking to my friend on the phone about this, it occurred to me:
Humans = "Angels in Suits"
*
"Mom, why did God make bugs?" Ry has asked more than once. Funny as I've asked the same question.
Meditation and recent review of it made me realize I actually had the answer to that. Bugs exist because of us; we create our reality and they are the "rejected and feared and denied" energy. They are poisonous because that's the effect the energy has on us when we refuse it, it causes a "bad reaction" like inflammation and rejection. They have many legs and move many directions because that perfectly describes the way a certain kind of energy IS, offshoots in many directions and very flexible in motion and 'sense of balance'. They actually come in many colors - white, yellow, tan, clear, red, orange, striped spotted, as well as the brown and black that we stereotype them with. They come in quite a few shapes and textures as well. They vary in how they move and how they web.
I once moved a kid's big backyard playground-thing while mowing, and about 60 black and white striped "jumping spiders" went nuts, jumping all over the place. I nearly had a freaking heart attack and that was AFTER I was a lot more comfy with them haha! But I had to admit, later, that they were actually really COOL! Boys/men who are often for some reason less afraid of spiders than girls, culturally, seem to appreciate that more, I've noticed.
I wondered briefly, if we didn't reject that particular energy, what might they be like, instead of deadly and gross?
And I remembered the two times I have perceived a spider deva, once spontaneously and once in a dream, and both time, they were just beautiful, amazing, astounding, holy, "glory" is the word that comes to mind. There was zero sense of grossness.
I used to have a genuine, pay-a-psychologist-level phobia of spiders. I could not even hear the word without having a full-on panic attack. Even when I knew it was coming like a friend teasing and just whispering it. When I was 18 and my father and I moved out from his 4th (psychotic) wife, I set out to take on everything I was afraid of and not be afraid of it anymore. I took up martial arts and firearms so I could kill the next person stupid enough to beat up on me or frankly torment me in any way. And I took up dealing with my fear about that bug.
I conditioned myself out 'most of' my fear, though it took a long time and serious work. I would see one and get as close as I could (like... as far away as physically possible, so it was so distant I could barely see it, hahaha) and then I would force myself to slowly get closer and closer to it, telling myself it was one of God's creatures, it was very small, it was probably more scared of me than I of it if it even perceived me at all, that it was really quite wondrous in build as a nature technology, and so on and so forth. I would try to get as close to it as I could, which initially was "at least 10 feet away back pressed to opposite wall" and eventually was up close enough that I could study it carefully and in detail, and notice its texture and unique shaping and pretty coloring sometimes and so on.
I still do not like seeing them by surprise and I definitely don't want them touching my body, but I will catch them in a plastic storage dish and scoot a paper plate under, and put them outside, when I find them in the house, so they are not killed.
I had a really interesting experience with a couple spiders (and a deva) back in the 90s here, for those interested.
So maybe instead of biting us, they wouldn't, or maybe it just literally would have no toxic effect on us at all -- after all, the degree of deadly in bugs is about how our bodies react to them -- if our bodies were different, they wouldn't be so deadly. Maybe instead of seeming gross and scary they would look nicer, and we would perceive them as nicer. We would "see their glory" -- their angel inside, like the deva! -- rather than what we perceive it like now.
Like how beautiful flowers are. Maybe they didn't start as flowers. Or way fewer of them. Maybe they are small energies that we really adore but haven't totally integrated--or that did not choose to be integrated and we haven't forced the issue--and so we perceive them as beautiful in color and form and smell, the jewels of the plant world. More positive relationship with trees, more flowers... more negative relationship with dandelions, more spiky weeds. :-)
*
The meditation (from past journals) where I pulled the energy together that was miles of yucky bugs, and when it reached a certain point everything flash-changed and was a forest with a myriad of creatures, with varying degrees of sentience, ranging from bugs (still) to trees and large animals, made me realize that animals are part of us too.
They are a lot more "independent in identity and autonomy" of course.
I once woke up in the morning, back when I lived in my RV-van-conversion with sailboard, guitars and Jimi posters :-) -- and happened to look at my black kitten, Polo. (I had two, Polo and Seti.) I was awake, but sleepy.
And when I looked at her, my god! -- what I actually saw, "inhabiting the same space as her" now that I think about it, like the light-beings in people in the store -- was this other cat, a few times her size, with HUGE eyes, that were totally sentient, in a way foreign to me. The eyes were actually larger and more slanted than most cat's eyes actually are, on this creature. Oh yeah, and the eyes and most of it was actually really *gold* even though polo was black.
(It suddenly occurs to me why Praying Mantis bugs are so freaky-but-cool: their eyes are actually a lot more like a deva than most critters' are. When they look at you, you actually feel as if they are intelligent and if you're open to it, you see the sentience and the foreignness of it at the same time. It's disturbing, and yet fascinating.)
The cat-soul of Polo looked at me, way-smart and way-foreign, and I imagine my eyes and mouth were open wide in astonishment. I closed my eyes tight, thinking I was imagining it, and opened them again, and it was just Polo, looking at me like most cats do... like they simply cannot care less unless you're going to feed or wait on them. :-)
Anyway -- so I was going to say, that animals represent energy that is part of us too, maybe "at large." By that I mean, maybe it's a sort of "collective species energy" that we pointedly make not-us, and that energy makes "cats" and their variants, just like other energy makes spiders and their variants.
I am not actually intending to convey that they are just 'a rejected part of us'. NO. They are a valid part of the universe of energy all on their own. They deserve respect as that, they are just like we are in that regard. It's just that we have not integrated them AND they have not integrated us.
I think maybe when an animal goes extinct it is either because we have truly integrated it, or more likely, because our interaction with it has literally changed the form it is going to take.
So for example, we have no more of a certain kind of buffalo, which were harmless to us for the most part, but now maybe we have, say... a certain sub-type of animal that is more hostile to us... or insect.... or Kudzu, taking over and destroying landscapes and human efforts the way white men took over and destroyed the buffalo's habitat.
Like energy's "social geometry", buffalo=A, and any combination of things that "equals A" could be created to 'balance that' in our reality. Maybe it takes a small animal, a bug, and kudzu, to kind of split up the energy into certain genres of 'meaning-form'.
Thinking out loud here. I think the energy say of cats, has a much more positive relationship to us, and is a lot more developed within us, maybe that is why it is in larger form than a bug, and why it has a positive perception for us. Most of us. Maybe the control freaks-of-nature that don't like cats (sorry, I'm a cat person!) actually have an issue with 'that energy' -- not really cats but the energy which cats are based on. Their fractal formula, you might say.
When we have something really well developed but not fully accepted, maybe it comes across as something we admire, something very sentient, but something potentially deadly to us -- like a cougar or polar bear.
I think our horrifying treatment of animals in our farming food supply -- I do not mean the eating them, I mean the conditions of breeding them for that we allow -- as well as the horrifying destruction of entire ecosystems that agriculture creates -- is a big sign of how we are treating a fairly major and otherwise positive energy in us. We're making it more negative, that relationship.
I imagine when wolves began to domesticate into man's best friend the dog, it reflected in part a change in human energetic relationship with the wolves. Not 100% or there would not be any wolves left. But partly. Our hunting the Auk to extinction, and it harmless to us, well that energy doesn't just disappear, energy never goes anywhere it just changes form. So where did all the energy of the Auk go? I don't know.
Maybe when we have fairly advanced energies we are so separate from we can barely perceive them, really foreign and alien to us, they live in the sea far from us, like the giant squid that after thousands of years we just recently even realized was real and not just some rare sailor superstition.
*
That makes me wonder. If everything in our reality is really a symbol... that means everything has meaning, even color, form, etc.. Yes, Seth told me this 10 years ago but I'm just starting to grok it in new ways now!
I used to take out my trash while visualizing that all the bad and dark and yucky energies of me were being taken into that bag and I would carry it out and throw it into the can and give myself a great sense of relief like it was a formal energy cleansing.
Maybe panthers are black for a reason. Maybe the King's energy, his color black, is part of them, and part of everything black in our experiential universe. Hmmmn. I guess the cabalists would probably say that is so.
*
I got this great light that is a cubic rectangle, a tall japanese shoji light, few years ago. I was really having awesome meditations then. In one, the "four rectangle panels of light" were sort of 'reflected' and that was a key thing of import. Not until recently when I saw the Gnostic doctrine that suggests "the Four" are "the Four Aeons of Light" did I suspect what that meant.
Later, I quit meditating for eons, barely ever at all, and have ignored the Senior for a long time though he has flatly commanded me to come to the Tower. Curiously, that light died. I haven't been able to figure out how to fix it all this time. It was fine, then every time I tried to plug it in, it sparked and threw the whole breaker.
It makes me think that Seth was right. Like me getting LASIK within two months of the massive change in my eye/I that the body-intelligence/deva showed me. Our physical reality including the "dynamics and issues and situations", are symbols for what is inside us. Maybe my light died, leaving only the empty dark forms of it, because it's a reflection.
I have a socket for the light, with a long cord and plug. I have -- or at least had -- the metal thing that stands upright (using a couple thumb-flybolts tightened) in this piece of wood in the middle. I have everything I need. But I cannot figure out how to get the light socket's power-cord/plug, "through" the metal thing that maintains it upright inside the four panels that fold up to the cubic rectangle. In order to get the connecting cord between light socket and plug 'through' that metal thing, it seems obvious that the cord would need to be cut and put through it, and then re-connected. Or that when it was built, it just started that way and the plug wasn't added until it was already through. I have both pieces, I just can't get it integrated so that the "supporting structure" can hold the light inside.
Shit. I just can't get integrated so that the supporting structure can hold the light inside. Should I pretend that was not so blindingly obvious a metaphysical and psychological parallel to my life? I have been refusing to take the King's energy, and refusing to "let myself make this a religion" or "delude myself into believing all this is more than entertaining imagination" so I've been unable to solidify it into a structure of practice and attention and allowance that would really let me... er, shine.
PJ
*
What is really the difference between the archetype of an energy and the energy? I know officially it is 'my relationship' with that thing; not that-thing-itself. But how could I perceive it without my relationship in the way anyway? Is it impossible to truly perceive any thing as it truly is?
The-thing-itself, I suspect, would always be a geometry. Does that mean that everything manifest that doesn't come across like an 11-D geometric shape is, actually, an 'archetype'? A symbol or translation? So we are walking around an entire landscape of "symbols not things"? Skyscrapers and flowers and cats and cars... no different than if they were green cubes and yellow tetrahedrons that chirped?
Is it that we acclimatize to the symbols and so we hard-wire the neural perception like a shortcut to meaning, and we start thinking that every thing IS instead the symbol?
Do the QBL (Kabbalah) "correspondences" have validity because everything we perceive is not a 'thing' but 'an archetype/symbol'? So it's not that there are things, and then symbolic meaning; it's that everything is symbolic meaning. It's not that we have a viewing target of the Eiffel Tower and get symbolic data; it's that the target itself IS symbolic, because everything is. There is no such thing as literal data only matching-symbols. Hmmn. That might give a different idea regarding RV data if I think about it enough.
Does a geometry found 'within' the tiny span of filtered frequencies our biological bodies inhabit, look like "a rose" not just because of our personal relationship to that energy, but because of its relationship to the "aery worlds" of the frequency 'layers' it's perceived from within? So we see it not only as we are, but as the combined energy of those layered worlds (a combined identity we loosely call "reality") is, as well?
And what if the worlds we inhabit are themselves an interpretive framework? So we are interacting not just with that thing (rose), not just with our own thing (subjective perspective down to energy-level, which makes whatever we perceive "our archetype"), but also with that place which itself is a living-consciousness?
Maybe things look different to me "inside" than outside in part because those aery worlds I perceive within 'there' have a different context-interpretation-quality of their own, which changes the aspect-nature of the thing perceived? Totally apart from whatever effect or perspective is contributed by 'me'? (Like how some people would be 'different' depending on whether they were in a judo match vs. helping their grandmother carry groceries, even with the same motion their energy is totally different and if we looked at their energy not just their body we might see them differently.)
And: do we blend with the frequencies our perception is spanning?, so we -- just like what we perceive -- are different in different contexts?
So our 'identity' is always "a composition" and "fluid" even based on "the environment of our consciousness"? Like the diff between pouring blue ink (symbol for 'us' here) into clear water, or red vinegar, or black oil? That it "blends with" the "environment" and then is itself different?
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So back to: is every 'layer' a world (yes, I believe); I call them "aers" (as opposed to Ether or Aethyr) (aer sounds kinda like layer but doesn't evoke enochian framework and works for me).
So... there's lots and lots of layers/aers in the 'spectrum' we perceive as reality. And of course just like any identity, it can be arbitrarily grouped, and the whole span of it is also one identity. So does our... world-of-perception... have a representative identity? The "Deva of our Reality"?
Gosh this reminds me of the time I had this really powerful dream that "our world's" KING (literally in a spiritual sense) was a Tree, and he was talking to the KING of this nearby world which was a Dragon. They were both just gigantic entities. Yet they only felt like powerful authority entities to me, not so much like holy entities, as more like a planetary entity, yet they didn't feel like Earth or Ganymede have felt to me. Huh. I hadn't thought of this until now.
If we call on a tarot archetypal identity, or the collective energy-form of something to better integrate and understand... then why not call on the deva of our perceptual reality, the deva of our physical reality? If consciousness can be arbitrarily combined and divided, and is more powerful when more 'dense' ("inclusive span"), why not? Those sound like great identities to me.
I have the subtle feeling I am not inventing this. I think some concept of this may exist in QBL and a decade ago I passed it 'skimming' and it simply did not sink in for useful consideration until now.
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I was working on letting outer-world things show themselves to me inside. I was sitting in a subway sandwich shop at the front of walmart. I was asking various things I heard to give me their inside-me experience.
It was hard. My mind automatically slams down on imagination in my ordinary world. It was like arm-wrestling with myself in my head. The slightest sound or visual or feeling in my head that was not matching my outer reality was slammed out before it could even fully form. Geez. Now I know why I've managed to be so "functional" when other people with my experiences are often ravingly crazy. My brain has a definition set for "objective reality" and it holds to those shapes ruthlessly.
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I just dozed off rereading this. I had the feeling when I woke up that my thoughts had a pattern, and my head, which was totally leaning to the side, was affecting my thoughts. Then I had this insight that this is literal and relates to the crown chakra and its role in understanding: I have seen even birds and dogs and cats "tilt their head" to the side when attempting to understand something.
I could "sense" for a few moments as I awoke that there is this... space-collection of energy that is very strong-dense, like from a foot above our head and it goes down like to the top of the chest, and it's a straight line that is cohesive and connected, and there is a sense of a sort of brightness at top and bottom, and of the 'geometry' of it changing when you tilt your head.
I sense that it's an attempt to slightly shift the energy-flow and literally "point" the top of it in a slightly different direction with the motion -- akin to 'squinting' but on some energetic-understanding level -- like how you move your straw when the liquid in your glass is nearly gone -- except that is looking to 'find' something at the bottom, and this is just opposite that (at the top instead) -- but it's the same sort of dynamic, of like... sucking in something slightly different.
Like we understand things ever so slightly differently sometimes depending on "where" the very top of our crown chakra is located. I sense this is actually more about our imperfectly open crown chakras. That if we were totally (healthy spiritually by which I mean 'fully realized') it would have equal access to everything. But like a radio, some areas of the dial/frequency come in more clearly than others for us.
*
Back to getting inside me what is outside me recently:
One odd thing: everything that I 'saw' and asked myself for, I got as a sound. But everything I 'heard' and asked myself for, I got as a visual. Go figure!
The soda machine had a constant low churning motor sound. It felt like a brown-grey slightly sticky irregular moving bulbuous cloud-shape that was 2-3.5 foot high. It was like a sort of thick but airy swamp effect filling the place. These colors in my inner world mean things ignored and repressed and the sticky generally means something slightly unhealthy depending on degree of thickness and stickyness (this was thin and only slightly sticky). Occasional tiny, ultra-thin 'thread flares', just for an instant, of various colors would spark near the top of the cloud or sometimes a few to many feet above, so brief I nearly missed them. I was trying to figure out what on earth that would be when I realized it might be harmonics I didn't consciously hear.
The handicapped chairs at walmart make this really loud piercing long-beeping sound when they back up. Someone was doing that shortly after I walked into the store. These shapes flew all over about 5-6 feet high, like a... like 'burst of a quiver of arrows' that went to every person and "more transparent" shorter versions went to people farther away. They were pencil-sized in shape, sharp at front and slim and straight, about an inch in diameter, and had a funky 'stretch' effect, as if instead of just 'being' a certain shape, they began about 6" long but then as they flew rapidly they elongated/grew with a 'rubbery-stretch' feel into something about 6 foot long. They went sharply and fast right through the middle of people's heads!, beginning to dissipate a few feet from their head, as if it was flying into something dissolving it so it got shorter until only a ghost of it about 6" long again, faded away super fast.
I laughed inside. An arrow through the head, that's a good symbol, it feels like that too!
Sitting in subway, I became aware of the insane amount of noise even when it is allegedly quiet. When I closed my eyes and asked for a 'casual feel' of everything, ye gods, it was like being lost in a colorful, irregular, but kind of ugly and chaotic kaleidascope of fogs that varied in shape and density and motion.
Glad we don't have to operate inside that. We'd be grossed out, as well as confused and lost. Guess that's one reason we don't normally 'let ourselves' perceive things inside us. Much of the word is just friggin ugly.
That reminds me that recently in a med in the aer with worlds in bubbles I was hanging out 'in' some whale-like creature deep underwater, and there was some visual but mostly it was like a whole world of sound, and as much small and subtle with that as we get with vision.
Hmmn. Do you suppose this is Nedlund, the Aeon who allegedly relates to "sound" he told me, integrating a little more with me.
*
My dad mentioned someone having a really old computer. I had this insight that the 'dynamic' of technology's rapid growth in our world reflects a dynamic of our own growth as a species, and that this is speeding up, gaining momentum.
We are oblivious to this change in ourselves at large, and this ... increase in novelty ... and resultant devaluing of the more immediate past ... and greater need for [hard to translate] 'component flexibility for integral but partial gradual upgrade' ... is becoming more important to individuals and to whole cultures and to the whole planet. There's more, but essentially, that this whole thing about technology's rapid growth is itself a "symbol".
I hadn't thought about issues and dynamics in the greater world at large as being symbols too, when I asked to be 'shown inside' stuff on the outside.
I was thinking like, what does a blue truck or that person look like inside me? Now I realize how shallow I tend to think!
*
I was standing in the aisle in walmart looking at chocolate chips. Christmas baking time! Low carb and gluten free has taken a hike. I will repent once all the symptoms hit but for now I agreed with my kid we could do some as we are really doing a low-key holiday this year.
I'm thinking (semi-sweet or white?) about my friend who recently 'met' what he is certain is 'my soul-angel'. Apparently those creatures are of a similar species since they seem to look pretty similar for many different people. White hair and ultra blue eyes but as much light-being as human, though in ~human form.
I wonder to myself, "And if I 'let my mind give me a symbol of this', would I see it like that, or would I see something different?" I looked to my right, where a woman stood looking at the bagged baking chopped nuts. She was about 140# overweight and looked very uncomfortable, in pantyhose and business style skirt. I closed my eyes while facing her direction and told my mind, 'show me her angel-of-soul.'
The surprising thing was how EASY it was for this to totally pop right into my visual field.
I mean I usually have to provide a little bit more "help" to the imaginative visualization of something brand new -- like the things noted above -- not 'making' it you understand, but almost like a helping foot-up in imaginative-energy. (Actually that's impossible to describe, so either the reader does this stuff, and gets it, or never will.) But BAM this was right there.
It was slightly diff for me; more soft-opaque light-being than I think they probably are, at least as my symbol or perception goes.
I was startled because it instantly turned and looked right at me.
I love being startled by things built by imagination as to me that validates a little bit of them; if it genuinely surprises me I don't feel I made that part up.
Of course I'm just imagining this, I tell myself. I notice there "is too much going on in the knee to foot area" just like I've noticed like in a super-brief flash I once got in a db RV session on Archangel Michael, as if it's just not as well defined or it's something we don't really grok and the only translation is sort of a thick feathery solid area sorta. But not in detail. I'm going on about this too much, that was only an instant indirect observation.
The woman bends over to get something from a bottom shelf and I was surprised because I thought what I was seeing would bend too, but it didn't. I guess I was thinking of it like some kind of X-ray of the soul like a skeleton or something that would move in every way she did. I thought that was funny then, I'm so ridiculous, as if the angel is going to be doing jumping jacks with you in the morning? hahaha! It *could* but I don't think it would. The whole idea almost made me giggle out loud!
It was more like it just sort of glided/existed 'in the center of her gravity' or something. I had the feeling that it could move 'with' her if it chose, lay down with her, but it was a sort of generality, it was usually standing, sitting or lying, and other motion was trivial-peripheral on her part... definitely the feel that orientation in space and gravity doesn't mean jack.
It was still looking at me. I felt such... "sweetness" in me all the sudden.
What can I do for her? I ask it, having the sudden desire to do something genuinely good for her.
Just be kind, it says. (I really didn't have a gender perception.)
I needed some macademia nuts anyway. So I asked her to help me find them, and I made a point to really look at her and smile sincerely and 'see the holiness in her' as I did. She really smiled in response, like really warmly and real, and I had the oddly sad impression that it had been too long since someone had made that kind of connection with her.
*
Coming out the end of the row a woman is bitching at her small child. He says something in response and I smile sweetly at him, thinking how adorable he is, and as she is turning away, she sees me doing that, and her voice gets kinder, and I realize that when I see the "adorable" in her child, it helps HER to be reminded to see the adorable in him too. And I think of how often that has actually happened with children and parents in stores, I've noticed it before but never thought too much about it.
It occurred to me that maybe if we were able to see the angel in everybody and interact like that, that maybe other people would see the angel better in them too subconsciously, and people might be a little bit nicer. I thought maybe that is part of our creating a joint-reality in some ways. That what we see is not just about what we see on our own, but what we are constantly reminded, in subtle ways, that others see.
I am really fat, and this has a huge (no pun intended) effect on how 'social culture' reacts to me as an individual. I was pretty normal until my early 20s saw a super rapid drastic weight gain, so I got a good view of the drastic "change" in how people reacted to me at 130# vs. 350#. Depending on the person and environ, suddenly I was invisible-er, stupid-er, geeky-er, gross-er, unworthy-er, a whole variety of the "cultural prejudice" that I'm sure anybody who is a minority race or has anything unusual about their appearance has run into to varying degrees. Anyway I only mention this because it makes me think that this is actually at the root of human prejudice. That we see people not just as they are but as we are to begin with, but on top of that, we are constantly affected, subconsciously even, by how we perceive what other-people-perceive. As if it is a "psychic collusion" to "agree on reality" and we are always unconsciously 'adjusting' ourselves to 'conform' with the 'consensus reality' around us. It takes actual "conscious individuality" for people NOT to do that. Not to treat fat people, race-X people, midget people, or whatever, in the way that the people around them, those on "auto-pilot adjust to conform to consensus reality" do. This last paragraph is my own idea, not an 'insight'.
*
We continued out and were walking down the side of the store with all the meat. It's a big area, divided down the middle by 3' high frozen/refrigerated structures that hold turkeys and frozen burritos and sales and so on. It was busy, lots of shoppers, so there were quite a few people throughout the length of the store on both sides.
I thought to myself, as I pondered whether a sirloin petite at the side looked ok, I wonder if everyone's angel looks different, or if people have different sorts, or maybe some are brighter or darker, bigger or smaller? I was actually only 'generally wondering to myself'.
But when I picked up the meat and turned toward my basket, every person from me to the far wall had that humanish lightish white form in them! --which somehow I could see clearly even though I also saw their bodies clearly.
--I might add that is an effect I've never had before. Even in my imagination right now I cannot make two completely opaque visuals occupy the same space and yet both be perceived clearly. It's almost like the "extra-dimensionality of sound" that I've talked about where no sound can replicate the depth and multiple-inclusion of one I hear/feel on the inside; with sound you have to stretch it out in time in 'this' reality, which makes it so... thin and wrong. With vision you have to stretch it out in space. But somehow on the inside you can get things that are 'together' without any contradiction or occlusion of the other.
Immediately every one of them turned and LOOKED at me! All at the same time, like orchestrated motion. In my head I sort of did a mental intake-of-breath in surprise. I mean it was like every one of them 'knew I was looking at them' the instant I was.
I had the feeling inside me of such FUN. Like light-joy-delight. Like they were... they were wearing their people... hahaha! -- like it was all this fabulously fun experiment... the way that we would treat theme park racing track-cars or bumper cars or something we "sat in and operated within pre-designed major limits." As if you could bump into someone hard and that would be as neat an experience as speeding along or going over a waterfall in a log-boat or spinning in a teacup or anything else. It was all this hilariously delightful really "sweet" feeling grand adventure.
I remembered this one time in the mid-90s when I was driving down the highway in Camarillo CA and for a moment, I became the entire landscape, I mean "I" contained everything from the distant small mountains/hills on each side to the far behind me and in front of me, the highway, all the cars, the trees and structures and more along the sides, I mean everything. I was ALL of it. Including the "motion" and the "noise" which somehow was just as much an energy as a tree.On the bright side it did answer my question. Yes, they all looked the same. No, they are not dimmer or brighter. But, they actually did all "fit the body" they were in -- their height was the same or maybe a foot higher in some cases than the person they were inside, so there was that variance -- at least as I grokked prior to looking down after just a couple moments, and then looked back up and I had lost the vision, probably because I was already going, You know you must be imagining this, right.
I understood that my "focus point" was carefully "inside the human" who was "inside the car" -- limited on purpose, not because it really was. I had the feeling that I limited my perception down to that tiny little entrapped space, as if I could not perceive (let alone KNOW) everything all around, only because otherwise, driving down the highway was not as much fun unless I did. Seriously. That has always been kind of an anomaly I thought I was grafting my own feeling onto, the "more fun" part, but now I'm thinking maybe there is really something to that.
*
Later, talking to my friend on the phone about this, it occurred to me:
Humans = "Angels in Suits"
*
"Mom, why did God make bugs?" Ry has asked more than once. Funny as I've asked the same question.
Meditation and recent review of it made me realize I actually had the answer to that. Bugs exist because of us; we create our reality and they are the "rejected and feared and denied" energy. They are poisonous because that's the effect the energy has on us when we refuse it, it causes a "bad reaction" like inflammation and rejection. They have many legs and move many directions because that perfectly describes the way a certain kind of energy IS, offshoots in many directions and very flexible in motion and 'sense of balance'. They actually come in many colors - white, yellow, tan, clear, red, orange, striped spotted, as well as the brown and black that we stereotype them with. They come in quite a few shapes and textures as well. They vary in how they move and how they web.
I once moved a kid's big backyard playground-thing while mowing, and about 60 black and white striped "jumping spiders" went nuts, jumping all over the place. I nearly had a freaking heart attack and that was AFTER I was a lot more comfy with them haha! But I had to admit, later, that they were actually really COOL! Boys/men who are often for some reason less afraid of spiders than girls, culturally, seem to appreciate that more, I've noticed.
I wondered briefly, if we didn't reject that particular energy, what might they be like, instead of deadly and gross?
And I remembered the two times I have perceived a spider deva, once spontaneously and once in a dream, and both time, they were just beautiful, amazing, astounding, holy, "glory" is the word that comes to mind. There was zero sense of grossness.
I used to have a genuine, pay-a-psychologist-level phobia of spiders. I could not even hear the word without having a full-on panic attack. Even when I knew it was coming like a friend teasing and just whispering it. When I was 18 and my father and I moved out from his 4th (psychotic) wife, I set out to take on everything I was afraid of and not be afraid of it anymore. I took up martial arts and firearms so I could kill the next person stupid enough to beat up on me or frankly torment me in any way. And I took up dealing with my fear about that bug.
I conditioned myself out 'most of' my fear, though it took a long time and serious work. I would see one and get as close as I could (like... as far away as physically possible, so it was so distant I could barely see it, hahaha) and then I would force myself to slowly get closer and closer to it, telling myself it was one of God's creatures, it was very small, it was probably more scared of me than I of it if it even perceived me at all, that it was really quite wondrous in build as a nature technology, and so on and so forth. I would try to get as close to it as I could, which initially was "at least 10 feet away back pressed to opposite wall" and eventually was up close enough that I could study it carefully and in detail, and notice its texture and unique shaping and pretty coloring sometimes and so on.
I still do not like seeing them by surprise and I definitely don't want them touching my body, but I will catch them in a plastic storage dish and scoot a paper plate under, and put them outside, when I find them in the house, so they are not killed.
I had a really interesting experience with a couple spiders (and a deva) back in the 90s here, for those interested.
So maybe instead of biting us, they wouldn't, or maybe it just literally would have no toxic effect on us at all -- after all, the degree of deadly in bugs is about how our bodies react to them -- if our bodies were different, they wouldn't be so deadly. Maybe instead of seeming gross and scary they would look nicer, and we would perceive them as nicer. We would "see their glory" -- their angel inside, like the deva! -- rather than what we perceive it like now.
Like how beautiful flowers are. Maybe they didn't start as flowers. Or way fewer of them. Maybe they are small energies that we really adore but haven't totally integrated--or that did not choose to be integrated and we haven't forced the issue--and so we perceive them as beautiful in color and form and smell, the jewels of the plant world. More positive relationship with trees, more flowers... more negative relationship with dandelions, more spiky weeds. :-)
*
The meditation (from past journals) where I pulled the energy together that was miles of yucky bugs, and when it reached a certain point everything flash-changed and was a forest with a myriad of creatures, with varying degrees of sentience, ranging from bugs (still) to trees and large animals, made me realize that animals are part of us too.
They are a lot more "independent in identity and autonomy" of course.
I once woke up in the morning, back when I lived in my RV-van-conversion with sailboard, guitars and Jimi posters :-) -- and happened to look at my black kitten, Polo. (I had two, Polo and Seti.) I was awake, but sleepy.
And when I looked at her, my god! -- what I actually saw, "inhabiting the same space as her" now that I think about it, like the light-beings in people in the store -- was this other cat, a few times her size, with HUGE eyes, that were totally sentient, in a way foreign to me. The eyes were actually larger and more slanted than most cat's eyes actually are, on this creature. Oh yeah, and the eyes and most of it was actually really *gold* even though polo was black.
(It suddenly occurs to me why Praying Mantis bugs are so freaky-but-cool: their eyes are actually a lot more like a deva than most critters' are. When they look at you, you actually feel as if they are intelligent and if you're open to it, you see the sentience and the foreignness of it at the same time. It's disturbing, and yet fascinating.)
The cat-soul of Polo looked at me, way-smart and way-foreign, and I imagine my eyes and mouth were open wide in astonishment. I closed my eyes tight, thinking I was imagining it, and opened them again, and it was just Polo, looking at me like most cats do... like they simply cannot care less unless you're going to feed or wait on them. :-)
Anyway -- so I was going to say, that animals represent energy that is part of us too, maybe "at large." By that I mean, maybe it's a sort of "collective species energy" that we pointedly make not-us, and that energy makes "cats" and their variants, just like other energy makes spiders and their variants.
I am not actually intending to convey that they are just 'a rejected part of us'. NO. They are a valid part of the universe of energy all on their own. They deserve respect as that, they are just like we are in that regard. It's just that we have not integrated them AND they have not integrated us.
I think maybe when an animal goes extinct it is either because we have truly integrated it, or more likely, because our interaction with it has literally changed the form it is going to take.
So for example, we have no more of a certain kind of buffalo, which were harmless to us for the most part, but now maybe we have, say... a certain sub-type of animal that is more hostile to us... or insect.... or Kudzu, taking over and destroying landscapes and human efforts the way white men took over and destroyed the buffalo's habitat.
Like energy's "social geometry", buffalo=A, and any combination of things that "equals A" could be created to 'balance that' in our reality. Maybe it takes a small animal, a bug, and kudzu, to kind of split up the energy into certain genres of 'meaning-form'.
Thinking out loud here. I think the energy say of cats, has a much more positive relationship to us, and is a lot more developed within us, maybe that is why it is in larger form than a bug, and why it has a positive perception for us. Most of us. Maybe the control freaks-of-nature that don't like cats (sorry, I'm a cat person!) actually have an issue with 'that energy' -- not really cats but the energy which cats are based on. Their fractal formula, you might say.
When we have something really well developed but not fully accepted, maybe it comes across as something we admire, something very sentient, but something potentially deadly to us -- like a cougar or polar bear.
I think our horrifying treatment of animals in our farming food supply -- I do not mean the eating them, I mean the conditions of breeding them for that we allow -- as well as the horrifying destruction of entire ecosystems that agriculture creates -- is a big sign of how we are treating a fairly major and otherwise positive energy in us. We're making it more negative, that relationship.
I imagine when wolves began to domesticate into man's best friend the dog, it reflected in part a change in human energetic relationship with the wolves. Not 100% or there would not be any wolves left. But partly. Our hunting the Auk to extinction, and it harmless to us, well that energy doesn't just disappear, energy never goes anywhere it just changes form. So where did all the energy of the Auk go? I don't know.
Maybe when we have fairly advanced energies we are so separate from we can barely perceive them, really foreign and alien to us, they live in the sea far from us, like the giant squid that after thousands of years we just recently even realized was real and not just some rare sailor superstition.
*
That makes me wonder. If everything in our reality is really a symbol... that means everything has meaning, even color, form, etc.. Yes, Seth told me this 10 years ago but I'm just starting to grok it in new ways now!
I used to take out my trash while visualizing that all the bad and dark and yucky energies of me were being taken into that bag and I would carry it out and throw it into the can and give myself a great sense of relief like it was a formal energy cleansing.
Maybe panthers are black for a reason. Maybe the King's energy, his color black, is part of them, and part of everything black in our experiential universe. Hmmmn. I guess the cabalists would probably say that is so.
*
I got this great light that is a cubic rectangle, a tall japanese shoji light, few years ago. I was really having awesome meditations then. In one, the "four rectangle panels of light" were sort of 'reflected' and that was a key thing of import. Not until recently when I saw the Gnostic doctrine that suggests "the Four" are "the Four Aeons of Light" did I suspect what that meant.
Later, I quit meditating for eons, barely ever at all, and have ignored the Senior for a long time though he has flatly commanded me to come to the Tower. Curiously, that light died. I haven't been able to figure out how to fix it all this time. It was fine, then every time I tried to plug it in, it sparked and threw the whole breaker.
It makes me think that Seth was right. Like me getting LASIK within two months of the massive change in my eye/I that the body-intelligence/deva showed me. Our physical reality including the "dynamics and issues and situations", are symbols for what is inside us. Maybe my light died, leaving only the empty dark forms of it, because it's a reflection.
I have a socket for the light, with a long cord and plug. I have -- or at least had -- the metal thing that stands upright (using a couple thumb-flybolts tightened) in this piece of wood in the middle. I have everything I need. But I cannot figure out how to get the light socket's power-cord/plug, "through" the metal thing that maintains it upright inside the four panels that fold up to the cubic rectangle. In order to get the connecting cord between light socket and plug 'through' that metal thing, it seems obvious that the cord would need to be cut and put through it, and then re-connected. Or that when it was built, it just started that way and the plug wasn't added until it was already through. I have both pieces, I just can't get it integrated so that the "supporting structure" can hold the light inside.
Shit. I just can't get integrated so that the supporting structure can hold the light inside. Should I pretend that was not so blindingly obvious a metaphysical and psychological parallel to my life? I have been refusing to take the King's energy, and refusing to "let myself make this a religion" or "delude myself into believing all this is more than entertaining imagination" so I've been unable to solidify it into a structure of practice and attention and allowance that would really let me... er, shine.
PJ
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