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