Book Talk, TIGM/es 04

Post 4 in a series related to Edwin Steinbrecher's book "The Inner Guide Meditation."

This is the last post on "Part One" of the book.

This is actually a defensive post not about archetype work, but about channeling. Except at the end.

ES seriously disses a couple identities I'm very fond of and grateful to. However, I'm working to open my mind to the idea that maybe he is right, and these are things I should consider seriously. So far... I'm more argumentative than musing, though. If there are good points to be made against my POV I would love them as comments. This is a subject that has a ton of superstition and little intelligent discourse, in my observation, and it's interesting and deserves better.

Jane Roberts was a woman, a writer and poet, who in the 1960's began experimenting with psychic functioning, initially with a Ouija board, and ended up -- after awhile -- 'channeling' an entity that called himself 'Seth.' There are many books written by Jane 'channeling' Seth, and by her-as-her. She had health issues for a very long time and finally died in the 1980s. Whatever else she might have been, she was very intelligent, very open minded, yet a critical thinker too (rare and invaluable to find that combo in people!), and one of the best poets I've ever read.

Seth, over time, said that Jane was an Aspect of him -- not the other way around which I believe is the norm for (healthy) channeling. She had a burning desire to know, he was a teacher, she looked inward and called for answers, and he answered the call. She was skeptical of this, fascinated but reserved especially initially, was always wondering if he could be caught in something inconsistent, and she and her mate Rob took and kept extensive notes on everything. In fact if you read a Seth book I recommend ignoring all the notes. They had such detail about their tracking him that it kinda distracts from the information in a way.

Her successful work with Seth was followed, shortly in, by a whole wave of channeling popularity that included some entities and channelers that, shall we say, are part of the reason modern channeling has such a bad name.

I might add that some of the most powerful works of occult literature in our time, including most all of Alice A. Bailey's work, The Urantia Book, and A Course in Miracles, are channeled materials. Also some occultists write "in the spirit" at times which means about the same thing -- channeling 'information/energy' as opposed to 'with identity included'. These people, these entities, and this information, is almost incomprehensibly different than the burbling crap you find in new-age bookstores -- the latter stuff being from the cosmic alien channeled through the walk-in telling you why you're an indigo child and special, and that'll be only $399 for that next conference on why the stars say this is a special time for special people like you.

I personally felt -- maybe still feel -- that most "identity" channeling amounts to voluntary temporary possession. However I think whether one is bringing forth "an aspect of themselves", vs. "the wandering dead guy I met during the Seance" -- or even "the person in focus in this remote viewing session" -- I think this is a different thing, in both experience and in result. I am not really saying any are good or bad, I'm just saying that "opening to a part of yourself" is not quite the same as "hosting someone you don't know" in my opinion. One is evoking-from, one is invoking-into.

And I think the hosting of a stranger, if you were doing it on purpose, may be a useful means to an end if it works (eg for psi info). Whether it is bad or dangerous I don't know. Maybe a little of both. But so is eating donuts, crossing against the light, and running with scissors, and sometimes we do those things with full awareness for our own reasons.

I am often "sitting in on" other identities, in dreams and sometimes not-dreams, without even trying, and I am often "feeling energy move through me", which I think makes me a little more blasé about the topic--as some degree of these things occur with me natively (naturally) anyway.

I believe that most channeling is "information/energy" channeling and does not come with the 'skin of identity'. I once knew a woman who channeled who only sometimes even spoke. The planes in her face would change and the energy in the room would change, sometimes radically, and that was the point of it. The whole funky pay-a-zillion for Ramtha's-cosmic-insight seems hilarious to me. I know this was a big thing especially when Steinbrecher was publishing this book. I sometimes feel I am channeling, as if information is 'coming through me'. And sometimes when the Aeons are talking to me, I'm sorta translating and I feel it amounts to channeling even though to me it's more like 'subtle conversation I am recording'.

Back to Jane and Seth.

Seth's book "The Nature of Personal Reality" is IMO one of the most important spiritual contributions to several generations. It's a bit cerebral. There are smaller simpler books by them most people would like better.

Jane and Seth are part of the reason I'm a normal person exploring myself instead of drugged in a straightjacket somewhere. I found them at just the right time. My whole life followed the book I finally (reluctantly, I was very biased against channeling) agreed to read, me having ongoing 'experiences' and 'ideas' that the book would then explain and annotate shortly after. If you allow it, Seth books can be an 'experience' not just a read. I had no mental models or frameworks to handle my spontaneous experiences, I had no vocabulary to treat it as something sane, rational, and able to be integrated. They gave me that. I am still grateful.

In a world full of left-brainiacs who want to vomit over most woo-woo channeling, Seth and Jane singlehandedly redeemed the entire genre. They made a critical philosophical 'doorway' a lot more accessible to much of our culture. He was consistent; brilliant; insightful; humorous. He was not a guru by ego, only by result.

Seth's message, from start to finish, woven inextricably through everything he ever did for the public, was:

* You create your own reality-experience.

* What you perceive as reality is your belief systems manifested.

* "You get what you focus upon. There is no other main rule. [session 617]" (I have this, in calligraphy and frame, on my bedroom wall.)

* Your beliefs about reality are "about" it, they are not IT.

* The point of power is NOW.

* You have the ability to commune with yourself. Don't live in fear of 'hidden subconscious' stuff. Trust that if you truly inquire, anything you want to know about yourself is available.

Everything Seth did was about personal empowerment and an individual's ability to get to know themselves and intentionally shape their reality.

In short, everything that was Seth's message, is a total confirmation and support for inner guide / archetype work.

And as a matter of fact, Seth provided many exercises over time, several of which are incredibly like archetype work.


Another point:

Jane's mate, Rob, once felt he 'saw' Seth and painted a portrait of him.

ES says that portrait clearly looks like Jane's third house guide, hence obviously Seth was the false inner guide.

This has so many problems, where to begin?

1. The painting is by Rob, not Jane. SHE did not describe him that way; she didn't 'see' him. At least that I recall. Why on earth do we assume that "how Rob perceives" some entity is exactly what that entity looks like for Jane? Saturn looks different to me than to my friends. Why not any other totally nonphysical identity??

Is not one major lesson of the inner world that perception and reality are both totally subjective, that the same thing can be many things from many perspectives? The whole judgement on Seth, based on what he looks like "to Rob," compared to what he is allegedly "supposed to be for Jane," makes no sense at all to me as a result.

2. I respect ES's work and perspective but I do not yet know that an IG 'must' be 9th house match. But I am not taking this point seriously in the Seth debate -- as I do not care to dispute it because maybe he is right -- the above and following points are more relevant to this topic anyway.

3. Jane never said that Seth was her inner guide. Seth said that Jane was an aspect of him. ES seems to assume there is no other possible role that anything, anyone, could have to a human being. There's you, there's IG, and that's it. Everything else in existence, if it isn't you and it isn't IG, must be a false-IG! Come on already. I think that is taking the I-have-a-hammer way too far.

Steinbrecher accidentally almost created a religion here. Let's look at what we have. A method for talking to 'the divine/wise/guide/spirit/etc.' A description of what the good guy (IG-as-Messiah in this analogy) 'is'. A clear warning about how everything that is not the good guy, is bad. A specific model/map grafted onto it all of how-this-really-is. OK we have a few more bullet points before true religion is reached, I admit, but still, he was walking a pretty good road toward a doctrine there. At the least, it's a clear paradigm. And I wouldn't care because you have to believe SOMETHING based on experience, except for his seeming to think everyone else's experiences no matter how different, were to be judged by the framework of his own preference.

Seth said he was a teacher, he and Jane were connected, she asked, he answered. I'm having a hard time figuring out what part of this is inherently bad.


Next: ES suggests that if Seth hadn't been a 'false inner guide' that his information would have been (wait for it): "more spiritual but less clever."

Since Seth's entire message was always of individual reality and individual empowerment to change that, the 'not-spiritual-enough' accusation confuses me. If he had used flowery words and talked about scorpio and karma would he have been better accepted by Edwin? Is that spiritual? Inner Guide work is all about the exact same inner-world topics Seth addressed, amazingly. Which part was the 'not-spiritual-but-clever'? Was the fact that Seth basically dumped 99.99% of the mumbo jumbo BS out the window and discussed 'the nature of reality' as if it were a reasonable thing, was that too "clever but unspiritual" because it didn't have any spiritual terminology involved?

Was the fact that Seth did it without invoking astrology or tarot the real problem?

Or was it just that being 'a channeled' identity was the judgement? I mean for all the ranting about those in the channeling field, the aliens and the make-me-a-gurus and so on, none of that applies to Jane and Seth.

It is like taking someone who does doubleblind remote viewing, quietly, and then dissing them because there are these bozos on late night radio using that term and making worse than a mockery of it as its alleged 'representatives' to millions. Yes there are stupid people and wannabes but what does that have to do with Jane and Seth, who were close to the polar opposite of that? It's completely injust to judge them by behaviors, issues and circumstance they had nothing to do with. It's a hand-waving assignment of everything-obnoxious-about-new-age-channeling, glue-sticked onto Jane as if she bears the responsibility for everyone else.

Yep, she met him through Ouija (sorta indirectly or at least not as the initial meeting). Yep, she was a 'trance channeler'. Yep, the energy was very strong and the timing and volume (and accent) of the delivery quite odd, but there may be perfectly logical reasons for that; on its own I see no reason to judge that in any direction. Yes, she had other people in her living room a few times a week and sometimes, for some classes, Seth would talk with them on some topic or answer questions for various people. Did she charge big sums of money? No. She was a down to earth person. She had issues, everyone has issues, she had longstanding health problems, but she managed this despite that. That doesn't make Seth a bad guy because she failed to be perfect and Ascend Into The Light or whatever.

Maybe there is more to 'identity' and its merged-multiplicity than the simple "one person, one guide" model allows for.

Maybe ES was right about Seth being some "third house guide". Maybe, if so, "so what?" Personally if we were talking about identities, entities, which are part of us, I have a hard time grokking why part 9 is good but every other possible part is bad. Might this be because ES associated his experiences with part 9, so everything after that was expected to follow that model? Or is it that ES simply only looks for things that fit in the IG model, so anything else is wrong?

Sudden idea: 12 houses? Is there supposed to be a 'guide' in each house? What if they each have some specialization, and the 9th house is the IG specialization, but the others have... others?


Next: ES implied that Jane's illness that eventually killed her was something that Seth should have saved her from if he'd been her "real inner guide." This point has a lot of problems too.

First: he wasn't her IG. Nobody, not her or him or anybody else, ever claimed that he was her IG. So the repetition on "he was not her true IG!" as if this is some hugely important statement that officially damns them, is just ridiculous to me.

For the record let me state that my Four, my Consortium of 12, my child, my cat, my friends, and my dream characters, and my favorite deities, are not my IG. If this statement alone implies something bad about them I might as well take it right up top.

Second: she could have worked with her IG in addition to Seth. It's not like her work with Seth made work with any other source of energy, spirit, info, etc. impossible. If she did not choose to work with her IG, that is her life issue, not Seth's; she was not his puppet. He gave her all kinds of advice some of which she openly ignored.

(Actually, I feel that Jane was hugely experimental. A lot of her writing that is not official books is like a "varying % of her vs. Seth". Some people have been disillusioned by this, as if it put all of Seth's work, which they found otherwise stellar, suddenly in doubt for them. I however feel that this was part of her own learning and processing of identity.)

Perhaps Steinbrecher was right that working with her IG on her health might have saved her. But you know, I read an original, prior to publishing version of what became the book that went up to her death. Seth was trying to save her ass until the last minute, literally. (I bawled helplessly all day about it.) It was so pitiful. I think blaming Seth is really SO injust there.

Maybe--I don't know, so I'm open to this--maybe something about the energy of their work together actually did make her more vulnerable to something that affected her health. Mind you she had issues aside from him but maybe her work with him really did have an effect on her health. Maybe that kind of work does have a certain cost. Hell, even if it did something minor like deplete potassium and vitamin D for some reason (which even ordinary activities can do), if done consistently without compensating that could greatly gear someone toward low immunity and disease.

Maybe she could have done things, including IG work, to resolve it. But even if all of that is true, in what way does that make Seth inherently bad, false, distractive, dangerous, or whatever? EVERYTHING is a trade-off of energy. Everything, and everybody. The Private Oracle told me that but I believe it for my own reasons. My Aeons, my Four, the private oracle, inner guide, everything, everyone, every "interaction" is an energy trade of some kind.

Learning what identities are best suited for what, and learning what it "costs" us for that and whether we choose that, seems like the task of the century.

Maybe Jane was unbalanced because she had so much 3rd-house-guide energy and so little every-other-house-guide energy. I imagine there are some risks to everything. Some people die doing daring skiing, or from eating too much of one thing and not enough of another. If that contributed to her death, that sucks, but I don't think it is appropriate to blame Seth for it. If she did not choose to save herself, not via Seth's advice and not via working with other entities more geared to direct-healing, if for whatever reason her soul chose to check out of this frequency, then you know -- that is her choice.

Sometimes the most exceptional people in some areas are the most torqued in some other. Suggesting that she might not have died if he'd been different seems unfair; with this logic, anybody doing IG meditations should have eternal life, right? So where is Edwin? Dead. Granted he was 71 when he died in 2002, but if I extend his logic, nothing besides old age at 115+ should kill someone with the proper inner guide relationship -- at least, as he is projecting it (unfairly in my mind) toward Jane and Seth in this instance.

I'm not arguing ES's claim that Seth (a) was not Jane's "true inner guide" or that (b) was Jane's "third house guide". I don't think the former is even relevant as that was not what she was questing for anyway. And I think the latter, even if true, simply makes the topic of "sources of information" even more interesting to me. I don't consider Seth some kind of negative entity of darkness. I have a huge respect and appreciation and gratitude for him. So if he is representative of "third house guides", which so-far have been relegated solely to the dismissive category as "false inner guides" (in other words not-a-9th-house-guide), then that doesn't make me think, "Oooh, bad, avoid that!" -- instead, it makes me want to understand more about that kind of identity. So it's not IG... I get that. Not everything in my internal universe has to be IG. My IG rocks and is unique... nobody else could be her anyway! That doesn't mean they don't have value for whatever they are.


I think that Edwin Steinbrecher's model for Inner Guide as used in archetype work is very cool and insightful. I think his mapping all this with tarot and astrology as the most (obvious and powerful) archetypes is also very cool and insightful. I think he was a smart guy with a questing mind and I respect him a lot.

But I think there are many more questions to be answered in this work and certainly his groundbreaking, very cool book is the alpha, not the omega. Like:

* What else can IG do, besides bring us archetypes, Aeons (or according to ES, talk to the dead)? I have the gut feeling there is a lot of powerful potential there that we have never even thought to ask about, have not even considered.

* Do the energy relationships in us manifest in our body too? Are there certain 'mappings' of the internal world that would do better for health-related work?

* If IG is a 9th-house guide, and 3rd-house guides are known and recognizeable for different qualities (of behavior not just appearance), is it possible that all one's houses have guides?

* If all one's astro houses have an equivalent 'guide' in the archetypal realm for the asking, is it possible they each have a specialized function/area that we have not explored yet?

* Is it possible that often the 3rd-house guide comes forward for a good reason, like maybe in our culture that's a part of ourself we actually tend to lean toward more? (Eg more logical and verbally communicative.)

* What other 'maps of the internal universe' besides astrology and tarot can be utilized in an archetype model? How about:

• the i ching?
• The Tree of Life?
• Feng Shui?
• Power-animals?
• What about colors, numbers, and other elements of "correspondence" that qabala also uses?
• (What about Enochian entities? I'm not trying it...)
• What about 'elementals'?
• What about body-parts -- what role does my liver really have on a larger scale?
• What about astronomy, and not just the major planets but other things too (major moons in the system, rings, the galaxy, the asteroid belt)?
• What about the zillion heirarchical angelic troops delineated (ad nauseum) in The Urantia Book?

The universe is infinitely divisible so is the inner archetypal realm the same?

I'll head into part 2 in awhile, might take a reading break for a few days.

PJ

Book Talk, TIGM/es 03

Post 3 in a series related to Edwin Steinbrecher's book "The Inner Guide Meditation."

ES feels that the archetypal energies are "collective" entities. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I guess I kind of agree. I do feel that 'archetypes' by nature are singular in-themselves. What I mean is, the archetype of green is always the-archetype-of-green no matter who is asking for them. Whether Jane's interaction with green affects Howard's interaction with green--a truly "collective" result for green--now that part, I do not know. (Given the bazillions of humans now, previous and later, how on earth could we ever evaluate such a thing anyway.)

I think that a person's unique relationship with green would make the archetype they experienced--not to be confused with some master/universal archetype--unique to them, at least in some respects.

From the beginning ES had tied the arch work to his astro work. He spoke of introducing others, talking on this publicly, getting people to work with him and give him feedback about their experiences, which is much of what went into this book, the conclusions that brought him to.

I find that very interesting, though I think it's worth considering that him as the point of commonality makes the alleged separate-ness of all the experiences in question. That doesn't mean it invalidates it. Just that I would be intrigued to hear the results of someone with a different paradigm doing the same work.

It occurred to me that perhaps others could contact their inner guides, so I began trying to get others to their guides at the conclusion of my horoscope readings. [...] I began to get a concept of the archetypal forces as collective entities.

Which got a great deal more 'doctrinal / predictable' once he decided the experiences of the people he was leading into 'introduction' to their guides, and/or working with, matched his own and each others':

I began to notice a remarkable similarity between one area of the horoscopes of the individuals I worked with and their descriptions of the Guides they contacted in their inner world. I discovered that the personality and physical appearance of one's first inner guide always corresponds to the ninth house (...) of the natal pattern (...Koch...). This is traditionally the section called The House of God and Religion and the area describing your philosophical and spiritual views, as well as your own ability to act as a guide or way-shower for others. [...] That we are so completely programmed, internally as well as externally, came as an astronishing revelation. [later, ES writes:] The guide's ascendant or first house (what he looks like and what his personality is like) is the ninth house of your chart.

I admit this makes my brain hurt. It does seem possible that it's this way, that all first IG's match the 9th natal Koch house. That's amazing if so! I mean that it's so... universal, or predictable. But other things seem to be like that sometimes, so why not that.

I guess the part that concerns me here is that it is so easy to build anything into religion. Here we are with this mostly-freeform "exploratory" experience, right, unique as your dreams, then bam before you know it we have pre-decided what everybody's personal inner guide is going to look like and act like and anything that doesn't fit that mold...

So you know what's coming next, right. Once we define the good guys, that makes everything ELSE... well. You can take the religion out of people raised in the judeochristian model, but you cannot exorcise it from their personalities. (I'm one of 'em, I should know.) If there is a good, there's got to be an evil, and it's probably lurking behind doorways hoping to ensnare you at every turn.

Not saying this does not exist, mind you. Just saying it seems to get more focus than it should sometimes... it's a big universe, so when we limit the 'good' to what we already have a label for, that sure leaves a big universe of stuff to be bad.

In addition, "false" guides ... were also described in the natal pattern by the third house. [...] this new insight gave the ability to distinguish the true guide from the false to anyone versed in astrology.

More is coming on that topic a bit later.

The thing I often warn people about with archmeds, is that once your psychology really and truly "groks" -- understands -- just how powerful, how profound, how fundamentally and reality-changing this process can be, the mind gets completely resistant. This takes the 'change=death' to new levels that nothing else in life can touch.

Most people are resistant even to changing software in their job. Imagine how resistant most people are to something that fundamentally changes their entire self and reality! And so, you're going along meditating and feeling delighted with how amazing it all is, and then all the sudden -- you can't "get around to it". The resistance that develops is ridiculous. ES also mentions that:

These sudden outer changes initially produced a common reaction in those experiencing them, including myself. It all seemed "too fast". A resistance to sitting down to work with the Guides and the archetypes would develop and last until our egos got used to the outer changese and assimilated them.

The following point is a dilemma for me, the kind I mentioned in my first post. Let me give an analogy before I give the detail.

In the QBL (cabala), there is a 'tree of life' with 10 (ok technically 11) Sephiroth. This basically "composes the universe". It breaks it down into major categories of energy, is one way to put it. Eons ago when I had an 'astral college' experience for awhile, there were 3 crystals each with 10 prismic 'sections' and those were each a world. The Enochian Aethyrs also number 30. My so-called "Linoleum Theory" divided 'the universe of my soul' into Four.

I suppose "every number is infinite" is the reality of this. Some people use Tarot. They may use just the 22 trumps. Or they may use all 78 cards like in Thoth. Or they may use astrology and divide it into 12, or many other forms of division which number 12, or the 7 of a rainbow or octave, those are common numbers in metaphysical stuff. Or they may use the 22 Trumps of Tarot plus the 12 signs of the zodiac plus 7-9 planets. It is my personal suspicion that ALL of these ways of "dividing up the energy of the universe" are valid, and probably many more. I do think some are ancient, perhaps created with 'insight', and as a thoughtform, then, may carry a great deal more power -- tarot, astrology, the Tree, being primary examples.

I totally agree that you can use any of these systems as a "map" -- of the soul, of the universe, whatever. But I'm not sure that it's the ONLY map. And every map, just like every model, does come with some assumptions. Not saying that makes them bad. Just saying that assigning "one" map as if that is the only thing, the literal thing, the whole thing, tends to result in doctrine. I know it probably sounds like I'm being pedantic here, but actually I'm actually trying to be semantic instead: I think it's important for the mental models, for genuine creativity and freedom, for me to think of this as "a" model or "one possible model of many". I think if I set it in stone like THE model, it will paralyze my inner world into certain pre-set patterns. I'm willing to bet we could use the i Ching or chinese year-animals or whatever to address archetypes and that would work just as well.

It also showed that the horoscope is a literal road map of the inner world's inhabitants, geography and physics, and a tool which can be verified by your own personal psyche.

Yes. But I am willing to bet that any 'road map' one chooses to use, particularly that ties into worldwide archetypes like tarot, astrology, or sephiroth, will work and could be verified by personal experience.

That the archetype meditation model actually works is totally brain-crunching up close. ES did a nice job exampling this:

...if I could meditate in a chair in ... New Mexico, working on an archetypal energy within me that corresponded to my oldest brother in my horoscopic pattern, and have that brothr go through sudden positive change fifteen hundred miles away at the same time that the archetype that I project on him (according to astrological theory) changes in my inner world, something is erroneous in the way we've been taught that reality works. Somehow the energies I carry are making the world I occupy and experience. Not "I," the current ego, but "I" as a totality.

In my own mental model (subject to change), there are infinite variations of his brother, all equal, some manifested some not depending on his brother, and what changed was 'the version of his brother that his reality was associated with'. A prettier way to put it might be like this:

Imagine an infinite kaleidascope universe, with infinite patterns. I'm a fractal flower with lots of petals, leaves, and associations with other patterns around me. The process of the energy work causes me to basically decide that instead of being THIS flower, I'm going be THAT flower now, which is mostly identical except that one leaf (the brother) is a different color in this new pattern. All the pieces and patterns are still just as existent. Nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing appeared or vanished. My ATTENTION shifted, and when it did, of course, my sense of identity moved with it. Now I am 'paying attention to' being pattern-B rather than pattern-A. The only difference I notice is the part of the pattern that is "mapped to my brother" (and probably some other things too).

Does this make sense to anybody but me? I'd like to come up with a way of putting this stuff in words that makes it less, not more, confusing!

Anyway I agree with him in general: we are obviously creating our reality-experience, even when it sucks, which is very frustrating when some part of it sucks and the road to how to change it is not immediately clear. I mean it seems obvious to all of us how to fix a given problem... as long as it's someone else's. :-)

Back to the dark side:

False guides ... become a problem because of our naive ignorance about "inner speakers" and a lack of clear definition of who is who on the inner planes.

I agree that we have this 'naive ignorance'. What I'm not sure about is -- well, it seems to me he is implying, with the book, that we have now figured it all out thanks to Astrology, Tarot and the Inner Guide, and it's all mapped out and a 'known', so there is no more 'ignorance' about what I would call the universe or the jungian-stew of what's inside us.

I'm not sure I'd agree we are anywhere near that happy place. I tend to think we are all still wandering the masculine polarity of the universe (which refuses to ask for directions...) and while we have found a few 'things that can be mapped' on that universe, I don't really feel like we have THE answer yet.

This matters to the topic at hand. Think about it this way: if you decide that entity-type-1 is good, and you know nothing about entity-types-2 through 29, but you have a few reports on entities 2-4 (which were unpleasant) and 11-14 (which were confusing), it is easy to make it insta-doctrine and say, "entity 1 is good. All other entities are not-good." Because your map has a little legend or annotation with entity 1 on it and who-the-hell-knows who all those other entities might be or what their nefarious purposes might be.

Historically, man-made religion is so quick to do this. I'm reluctant to assume anything is wrong, bad, misleading, black magick, evil, etc. without some personal experience and consideration. For all we know, entity #19 is completely useless for most things, literally harmful for some things, but an ass-kickingly powerful perfect for some other thing. How are we ever going to learn this if we're assuming the whole universe inside us that isn't IG is "a false IG" and hence bad??

...the test of love is the test of the true guide. If there is no consistent feeling of love and total acceptance from a figure you think might be your inner guide, you are probably working with a false guide.

I don't remember my first guide much except that I was new to this and nothing including IG seemed like more than crap-I-was-making-up back then, until I adapted to the habit and did them real deep altered state.

The next guides I've had, when I met them I felt shy, and felt they were in a big judgement of me (and not necessarily a good one), silent but ... a sort of 'has an opinion, keeps his mouth shut, is waiting for me to 'prove' myself, has a pre-existing hard opinion about me' sort of feeling. Yes I know that people with resistance to this may manifest all kinds of dark-side/scary things so maybe it's hard to tell.

I keep a positive intent and I pray (literally to God) so the way I see it, if it wasn't the right IG to start with, my intent and prayer would shift it into being so pretty shortly. If it didn't, if prayer had no value, and interior energy/focus had no value, then WTF are we doing here anyway...

I prefer 'dominant males' and I respond to authority, so I suspect that is part of my own psychology; part of my respect for him assigns him some of those qualities, and some father-energy which is not perfect for me. But definitely I was not feeling love and light pouring out of my guides when I met them. Later, I developed that relationship. To start with? Nope. If I'd been using this as a map of what was real I'd have had some real problems at this point and would have thought everything was 'false'.

I do not for a moment believe that my past guides which felt like this initially, were 'false' guides. I suspect that allowing is on the part of the person, not the IG. Much like Nero and Taan told me that channeled info 'style' is based on the channeler not whatever energy they are in contact with, maybe our emotional reaction to the ultimate inner authority(s) is more about us than it is about them.

I might add I never felt that 'prove yourself' feeling with my current IG. She felt compassionate and understanding -- about my trauma of having to give up the previous IG, and me not wanting her -- from the start. I thought it would take me a couple years even to learn to like her. But I ended up crazy in love with her almost right away. She's been quite different for me in several respects than the previous guides.

I often feel like the work she and I do is an 'opportunity' for both of us but her too. As if she is... like a creative soundtrack composer. And when we work together it's a chance for her to see what neat things she can accomplish. And I often feel the urge to work with her solely for this reason -- like because she is very cool and I want to see what she can come up with for me. I didn't have that with any other guide.

ES suggests if you don't feel love/acceptance for your guide that you look to his right and there will be the 'real' guide. That sounds like a programmed belief to me. If you can make people believe this, it would probably work. Of course it might be true, too. Still.

ES has some good general advice about what might constitute a 'true' guide. All the examples he gives of 'warning signs' that a guide is a 'false' guide--ok most of them anyway--are pretty obvious and I would be concerned had I ever perceived those in an IG. The kind of entities he's talking about remind me of the sort most people get from Ouija boards or 'lite' channeling (he actually says the same, later) -- egocentric, pontificating, highly polarized, ego-flattering sorts. Or simply 'other identities' -- which may not be an inner guide, though I don't know for sure that this indicates they are necessarily bad, as just not what we're looking for in this case.

ES has (well, had when he was alive) an organization that uses his theories and astrology and he suggests if there is question to send info to them. He suggests you include this whole long list of physical attributes about your guide. I really laughed about that. I have NEVER seen my inner guides clearly except when I had worked with them for quite awhile and even then I usually see them in pieces, like at one moment I'm aware of their height or their hair and eyes or whatever. When I do get a full-sense of them it's usually a 'sense' more than real visual. But then later on the same page he adds:

When a true inner guide is initially contacted in the visualization procss, it is usually difficult to see his face clearly, while the face of a false guide is usually quite clear. Why this is, I have no idea. Maybe we see the true guide's face when we stop trying to make up a face for him.

I agree, but... well how are you supposed to use the physical appearance of your guide to determine he is the 9th Koch house appearance, if you can't see the bleeping guy? Am I being picky? I am not worried personally, but I feel like people just starting this who are reading the book fiercely and trying to do it "right" would be understandably confused here.

ES gives his traits that define the 'true' inner guides:
1) A feeling of love for the individuals they teach and guide;
2) Never volunteer information unless first asked;
3) Generally don't make predictions for you or others;
4) Don't judge you or anyone else, nor do they take sides in disagreements;
5) Will not contact the dead for anyone but the individual whose Guide they are;
6) Will not give information about other people;
7) Do not manifest through automatic writing, ouija boards, channeling or trance states;
8) Are always accepting of where you are emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually;
9) Don't lie or give inaccurate information, nor are they inconsistent;
10) Often answer questions with questions, teaching in the Socratic mode.

I've already addressed my hesitance about 1) and 4) above; with those caveats I agree on those. I have to admit that 2), 3), 4), 9), 10) have always been true for my guides so far.

5) Will not contact the dead for anyone but.... I beg your pardon?! You're telling me IG will contact the dead for me?! Holy crap! Well here I was recently wondering what else she might be able to do. Now if only I knew someone dead I wanted contacted. Exactly what good would this do, I wonder?

Honestly I am a skeptic on this. I don't mean I disbelieve it's possible. I mean that I think you could work with 'someone dead' as if they were an archetype, including 'via' IG, and how would you know if it was your-archetype-of-the-dead-guy or really IG-contacting-the-dead-guy-for-you? I mean I imagine that people sensing a deep loss from someone they loved having died, could probably use archmeds well to this end, but whether it's really THE dead person vs. something akin to the archetypal energy of the dead person? Who knows?

Maybe it doesn't really matter and that's just quibbling on semantics. But it won't be ME telling people that my IG talks to dead people. :-) For now, anyway.

6) Info on others -- I have never asked for info about other people so I don't know. Actually I have seldom asked for info from IG at all, in part because I so seldom see or hear IG clearly enough to get an answer, and often when I do it is not informative (more a question or feeling and I'm often still wondering), so have kind of adapted away from communication being primary. I talk 'to' IG but it's very rare I actually get talking back. Sometimes, usually in impressions.

2) Never volunteers information unless asked, and 8) are always accepting of where you are... well yes. But my current IG will stuff Aeons down my throat at every opportunity it appears, when I refused to go to the Tower with the Four where they were being urged on me, so it's not like she doesn't have her own opinion on things.

7) Doesn't manifest through autowriting, channeling, trance states. Now this is an interesting one. I would say that generally, yes, IG will not spontaneously arrive via at least those first two states. Mostly because one is not ASKING for him to manifest through those states. Intent is everything. To me this is like saying, "When you look at your astrology chart you won't see Tarot symbols on it." Well... yeah... that's because that's not what it is designed for. That doesn't mean that one or the other are invalid or bad. Just that these things are different. In fact I'm confused about why he seems to insist the entire universe of human spirituality come through his doorway instead of any other.

I think I dispute the assumption in this one. Once one IS connected consciously I think IG could manifest any way IG wanted. Maybe IG would never want to do that. I don't know. But much like IG being human, I think some things are so more because of US than because of IG.

As for trance states, ES seems to have some kind of polarized view of this and judgement about it ('related to channeling eww ick ptooie!') but that's IMO the wrong thing to include. Archmeds are often done in trance states because trance is merely varying degrees of brainwave states and the most powerful inner work tends to be in pretty altered state.

ES gives traits for false guides:
1) Volunteer information freely, some of which may be valid. They are often very long-winded.
2) Judge you or other, or try to make you feel evil, wrong, or guilty.
3) Communicate often in terms of separation and polarization, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, good guys vs. bad guys.
4) May make you uncomfortable or ill, or draw illness and unfortunate outer-world circumstances into your life.
5) Inflate the ego. They often may make you feel that you are a "chosen one," a "walk in," better, higher, more special or more spiritual than others.
6) Are often figures from your own reality, e.g. famous gurus, saints, dead relatives, historical figures, or figures from your fantasy system, e.g. entities claiming to be from outer space or other galaxies, or they may be disincarnate entities or one of the archetypes, the latter being quite dangerous to sanity. In order to work with the archetypes safely, it is absolutely necessary to have the true inner guide, who has the ability to protect you from an overwhelming archetypal energy or to pull you out of the situation if necessary.
7) Make the conditions of your life worsen.
8) Will lie or exaggerate, or are inconsistent.
9) Will flatter and agree with your ego's opinions; usually they are definite Yes-men or -women.
10) Are usually quite theatrical, making grandiose claims about themselves, and, when channeled, speak with strange accents and gesticulate in bizarre ways or cause strange body movements to occur in the naive channeler, who is generally sincerely ignorant of who or what is being channeled or the danger of the process he or she is involved in.

I don't dispute ES's definition of true or false guides. However, I do want to address a couple things. I think that he, like everyone, has certain paradigms and they tend to overlap a little with this subject.

1) Maybe he is right and IG is not an elaborate communicator. I don't necessarily judge any identity that might be as bad, though. Just that maybe they aren't your IG.

4) and 7) How would you know if your 'guide' was making you ill or giving you bad outer circumstance? Isn't the entire point of all this to grok that outer reality is a reflection of inner self? This line item seems like an unprovable tenet. I'm not saying that it is inaccurate; it might be true; I'm saying that there is no clear way I can see for people to evaluate this, since if WE create our outer reality experience via inner energetic relationships, I can't see how anybody would know whether to "blame it on the false-IG!" vs. consider it part of oneself. In fact, geez, I'd think the tendency to blame it on someone else might be worrisome.

10) I consider this whole point another bias-against-channeling issue. I'm happy to agree that one's IG is unlikely to be a pontificating channeled entity. However, (a) you are unlikely to expect IG to be that, or such entities to be IG, anyway, so what's the point here, and (b) all his other comments are not about IG, they are about his negative opinions on channeling. I think that is a separate topic. I could address the issues of channelers, accents and more, but I just don't think that has anything to do with inner guide / archetype meditation work.

I also might add that he seems to ASSUME that any identity anybody works with in any fashion whatever just HAS to be an archetype or your inner guide. Anything else -- say, channeled info -- falls into the category of "false inner-guide." Well that's ridiculous! I mean if someone is channeling and he's going, "Hey! That's not their inner guide!" I feel like, "Er, so? Who said it was?! Who said that IG is the ONLY source of info, energy or interaction anybody is allowed to have?"

It's like Inner Guide became his Jesus. Everything else is not-jesus and hence by definition, bad.

Even good and smart people have biases sometimes. Sometimes they are just, sometimes not. Remote Viewing has taught me a lot about that over the years. What most people have as their definition of psychic or remote viewing or the people doing it, have little in common with reality. If my definition were the same as theirs, I'd be as dismissive as they are. Much of one's evaluation of anything depends on exposure to what's real, vs. the media hype and late night radio bozos. I agree that most 'new age' stuff is eye-rollingly stupid, but, like religion, that is man-made, not of spirit. Here's hoping no part of spirit judges me by someone else in my neighborhood just because I am sometimes found in their company.

A few other points:

ES says that all inner guides are human, always. They are always humans who lived in some prior time. And they are always dressed according to their prior life. They never have any "godlike powers," although of course they have full control in the inner world.

OK, all my IG's have been human, I'll admit. However, I think I expected that, so that might be part of why. But on the last IG (which I think was my... third?) it gradually became clear that his human form was designed 'for' me. That his "true nature" was something different and more... amphibian. I ASKED to see him as he really was and to 'truly' know him better. He was a giant creature I've never seen before, couldn't get clearly, our closest concept here being a frog but not that. I imagine if I had not pushed for that he would always have seemed like a normal human to me. So was it that he was some faker and I gradually got more observant of the tiny clues, once I started to gradually be able to perceive him more clearly? Or is it that he, and all guides, appear in human form always by default, because WE are human, not because they are?

I don't mean to be picky but there is a big difference. Since if it's the former, it "implies" that someone like that is "a false guide", and if it's the latter, it implies that maybe we don't know everything we think we know about sentience. I loved him beyond all reason in a way I believe only an IG could inspire, and he was nothing but good in my view, and it was the Four especially Senior that made me let him go and adopt the new IG, which makes me trust him utterly.

Now I can see that the way Steinbrecher put this has some advantages. People will not believe projections they might make of a current guru. They won't believe any alien (or guru) that shows up psychically to claim the role. They won't over-interpret anything like clothing to have some significance it does not (e.g. 'dressed like an egyptian I think it was a god'). Or that it's something from the future which also implies some god-like (at least in information terms) qualities. So there are benefits to insisting that IG will always be 'a normal human not from this time'. I don't think he wrote that to soften the possible wrong-turns for newbs though, he appears to simply believe it is always that way with no exceptions. Whether it is as literally true--given my last IG's eventual revelation--as the book indicates, I am not sure.

ES says the first three guides are male, the 4th is always female.

This seems to have worked out for me too, actually. I think. I have lost count. I think she is 4th. Although I will mention that while I had zero conscious memory of this detail, I am certain I read that 15 years ago, so who knows what prior expectations might have set up.

PJ

Book Talk, TIGM/es 02

Post 2 in a series related to Edwin Steinbrecher's book "The Inner Guide Meditation."

ES began this road in 1969. He was using 'Active Imagination' with a Jungian psychologist and then on his own. The psych "...emphasized the dangers of the AI process..." to him. (No expectations there! Although in fairness, some of this is powerful and the result can be ass-kicking at times.) ES was an astrologer so he was working with astrology and tarot archetypes on his own. He writes:

I had also at the time just finished reading Wilhem's translation of {Jung's} ... The Secret of the Golden Flower, in which the secret seemed to be to "circulate the light backwards", or, as I interpreted it, to force the mental energy back along the same channels or nerve pathways that the projection energy flowed out on.

I attempted to do this in my imagination by inventing a staircase that would take me within to those archetypal images I was seeking. And it worked! I reached a room at the bottom of my stairway, thought of the High Priestess, and she was there, a living presence in that inner world, different from the picture on the tarot card, but without a doubt the High Priestess as a reality within me. And the experience seemed to be happening there, in some other dimension or reality, totally unconnected with the here of the normally experienced outer world.

I was delighted with my new toy. It had a reality and freshness I hadn't experienced since childhood, and there was no doubt about the experiential "realness" of it. I was with the Sun, and my body became warm and relaxed. The Magician taught me things I had never heard in my outer reality. The presence of the Fool would cause a 'pins and needles' sensation in my limbs.

But then I had an experience that acutely demonstrated the analyst's warnings about the dangers of active imagination as it is practiced in analytical psychology. I was inside the room where I came into contact with the archetypal forms when an image of Old Pan or Devil appeared, unsummoned and unwanted. It was a classic Christian devil with an emanation of "evil" as real as the beneficence I had felt when interacting with the archetype of the Sun.

He goes on to describe an experience so overwhelmed with fear that he was literally paralyzed and it took quite awhile and a feat of Will to break out of. He decided he would never again do such a process without an analyst with him. He continues:

A few months passed. Fear weakened with this passage of time, and curiosity increased. There had to be some safe way to go back "down there" without having to be dependent on an analyst's presence. It was so like a foreign country whose laws and customs I did not know. This analogy triggered the thought that perhaps "guides" existed there as they do in other foreign countries, their roles being created in response to traveler's needs. Throughout the myths, poetry, fairy tales and spiritual literature of the world, guides in some form have been spoken of or referred to [...] Perhaps if I attempted the descent once more...

He looked for and found a 'guide' who seemed loving and wise. He asked the guide if he'd help:

He stated simply that he had always tried to guide and protect me and always would if I requested and allowed him to do so. And so began the inner adventure and the beginnings of true choice and freedom in my life.

This coming up with the idea of a guide was really quite brilliant. Although in my view, it was one probability; it didn't have to arrive that way, of course. I think someone else might have come up with that idea as a logical follow-on to the inner work.

What I mean is, ES was thinking of the archetypal "realm" as so literal, in terms of, "existing archetypes like tarot or astrology were there." As if they'd been living there and he'd stumbled on their housing tract. He wasn't (or doesn't say he was) looking at it with the much larger mental-model of this being an area where he could "create" ANY thoughtform "as an archetype" and work with it. If he had been, he might have thought of "creating a guide" in the same way you can create anything else.

That is apparently not how it happened, but I think this demonstrates a little bit of the difference in mental model to start with; he perceived his "guide" as being "there" as pre-existing-ly as the other "official archetypes" of tarot and astrology were. Not like he had the ability to 'allow into focus' any energies he wanted there; more like it was a secret inner garden where those just happened to be lurking. And what do you know, a guide was lurking there too.

He was a creative guy, that Edwin, "management at heart" as I put it:

Perhaps one could resolve the energy conflicts described in the horoscope by arbitrating the "quarrels" (astrological 'hard angles' and polarization) between the archetypal energies in the inner world, by allowing antagonistic energy systems to begin touching each other and restructuring their relationships and energy flows.

This is when he stumbled more powerfully into what I call the semi-autonomous and seemingly fully autonomous nature of the archetypes in deep-state. I might add that this is greatly, and I mean hugely, affected by the state of mind in which you do these meditations. If you get yourself in a solid Focus 12 as TMI would call it, or even deeper into more theta, archetype work is both easier and far more powerful.

I think the reason is because the 'dreaming' part of your mind is much freer, making the experience much more independent, and your conscious resistance much less developed. So sometimes the intensity of experience is less about the archetype than about the state of mind, in my opinion. Even high alpha state (very alert, just closed eyes) work that you don't "feel" much with can be surprisingly effective--I don't worry much about this--but the deeper your brainwave state, the more powerful it feels and often the more radical the reality-change in terms of degree, scope, and speed.

When I was learning to do archetype meditations, my teacher was a woman who ran small classes in her living room on a variety of things. Hands-on energy work and archetype meditation were the primary focii. She had this ability to project a brainwave state, or energy, like nobody else I have ever to this day met. When I first started working with her, despite years of intense self-hypnosis and very-deep-trance work, she knocked me unconscious every time. The other few (long-term) students would step over my snoring body as they left. I learned to adapt, and as my chakras and my own meditation and energy work developed (radically), I began to be a lot more 'aware' of what she was doing energetically.

It was her ability to do a great job of putting locals in a state of mind for doing this, that made a great deal of my early experiences possible. I was very skeptical, very left-brained (so to speak), very judgemental, and this stuff was very difficult for me to allow, let alone to validate. But in addition to "state of mind" having a huge effect, awareness of energy does too, so the constant chakra and energy-work that I was doing outside of these, also contributed.

The thing I consider the BEST experience in archetype work is "surprise". The more surprising, and the more extensive the experience of surprise, the better a meditation I consider it, and the more seriously I take it. I guess I validate it more because it is obvious to me that at least consciously I am definitely not just inventing it all. I have no proof of this but I suspect that the more surprise involved, the more powerful the result, at least sometimes. Surprise seems to be more common in altered-state work.

It makes you realize, the hard way sometimes, that you are not nearly as in control of it all as initially suspected. To me this part was where it really started frying my brain -- forcing serious revision of my mental models about myself and reality. ES wrote:

My imagination took on a life of its own. Conflicting archetypal forms would not be pushed into agreement or easy reconciliations. Where I had supposed, "I'm making most of this up," I soon found experiences full of surprises. It became dramatically clear to me that these were living entities I was dealing with [. . .] they seemed to be separate, sometimes alien, entities totally unlike any familiar aspect of myself. They had their own likes and dislikes, interests and aversions, moods and temperaments. Their behaviors, as I observed and interacted with them, were often completely unpredictable. Occasionally they were hostile to me. Sometimes they totally ignored my presence, and only with the greatest effort could I attract their attention and get them to communicate with me.

I had forgotten this part until now! :

To get behavior change or cooperation from them, I usually had to agree to make changes in my outer world, modify my behavior or agree on new actions.

Bargaining with the archetypes. "What do you want from me?" Not just in 'energy trade' but in actions.

Nowdays I feel differently about this. I still consider it valid, but I consider it just an option; I wouldn't pull it out but for drastic need. To me, now, it reminds me of when I was a kid, praying to God to save me from some impending doom in my tiny little life, promising him that I swear I will not say 'shit' or 'damn' ever again if only he'd keep me from getting caught for something. I don't think this kind of negotiation is necessary. I think energetic relationships can be dealt with via energetic means, without me having to promise certain behavior which I'm usually unlikely to follow through on anyway since if I wanted to behave that way I already would be.

Also, I recall when doing this that my expectations seemed to affect the answers I got, e.g. they all seemed to request some 'healthier or more-spiritual' behavior that I expected something 'spiritual' to want from me. This made my left-brain doubt this part of the process. If they were to volunteer it when I was in a deep rapport, if it was surprising, I would take it seriously. Otherwise I started to consider it a sort of religious 'modeling' I was imposing on the process.

To me, regularly creating some new behavior I am supposed to follow, only creates yet-more guilt about how imperfect I am in my daily life. I have enough of that crappy guilt about the food I eat, the exercise I don't do, the cleaning and home/land improvement I don't do enough of already, without adding a dozen requirements imposed on me from internal identities. I'm willing to take seriously requests The Four and The Consortium might have, but not every archetype. And the 4 and C had better just ask, as I'm unlikely to be volunteering.

And so ES began to realize the "reality-changing power" that this work has, as everyone who does it seriously for awhile does:

I began to notice a new phenomena occuring in my outer world. Those people in my life whom my ego regarded as negative or destructive began to change for the better or go out of my life. It seemed that everyone around me was suddenly beginning to "get it together" as I continued to do the inner work. Problems that had been with me since childhood began to drop away. There was usually no high drama in this; I would just notice one day that a life-long problem had not occurred for a long time, and as more time passed, there was no more recurrence of it. It had quietly disappeared.

As one of the most powerful, long-term relationship examples in my own life: My father, who had been a good deal of jerk to me (when not just abandoning me to the psychotic women he married) from my age 10 (when I had a significant internal energy change) until age 26 (when I began doing this work), was a topic I chose to work on. I worked literally day and night on meditations concerning him for weeks.

The result was so drastic, on both him and his wife no less, that friends of theirs spontaneously commented to me on their changes, and I am not kidding when I say that the next half dozen times I met with either or both of them, I literally thought "they were putting me on" -- that they were pretending or being sarcastic in some kind of fake niceness, and I watched them warily, as if they were kidding, and any minute their REAL intent would become clear.

They weren't kidding. But their behavior was so radically different, so positive, so proactively kind -- when it had been so hostile and reluctantly, resentfully evasive before, that I had an honestly difficult time wrapping my brain around it. That is a very key role and a very long time of someone's consistent behavior, to have change THAT much, THAT fast.


As one of the 'combined life-dramas' for example, at this time I was in a period where I had no vehicle, only a part-time job, and no place to live. I was living with my teacher and doing this work in a really major way. It was my spiritual equivalent of the Beatles in Germany hahaha. Before long I had a luxury car ('company car'), a good job (best pay ever and great position), and the nicest, large apartment I'd ever had.

I got so used to the shocking way things would manifest in my life that I made a list on my wall of the things that I wanted, that I EXPECTED that reality would "give" me if I merely had a positive intent, expectation, and relaxed, let it go and 'allowed' it. Now I should mention that a bit before this I'd had a kundalini experience, blown my crown chakra apparently, and so a lot of this manifestation was likely related to that (it's one of the predictable side-effects of that). But a lot was due to the archetype work also, and maybe those two were not unrelated.


Here's another much more detailed example, the kind of thing that is "real world daily life" of a specific problem person and situation. I had this coworker, an attorney and the company VP, who was such a coworker-from-hell that it's the kind of thing black comedy would be written about. He was seemingly the staunch cornerstone of the company, aside from the CEO who was the salesman, chairman and inventor of the (specialized) technology.

I worked for the CEO, but he wanted to believe I worked for him. I managed all the small company that wasn't engineering or legal, but to him as a woman I was a secretary to the bone, and his no less. He'd been diapered all the way through law school by family money alone, and it showed. He was incapable of keeping track of the majority of his job, this had gone on for years and snowballed into the present, and my role as hired was greatly as CEO's troubleshooter for everything that wasn't engineering--the CEO had begun to realize a lot of stuff was really a mess--so my projects were constantly putting me in the VP's realm. Like anybody of this type, he was paranoid and self-protective, and evasive, rather than helpful.

At one point, I pointed that out that he had no filing system for finding anything, and he plead his misery of not having a secretary (as apparently being organized requires a woman) (the men I work with today would dump this guy out a window into the garden as compost! it's shocking how much MEN have changed--improved--in the business world, as a result of the improvement in women's role in that world, I have noticed. Ability to type, file, and function with computers is a huge part of that I think).

I spent several days taking off my normal work just to make him an extensive filing system and get the past filed into it, in a tall lateral cabinet right behind his desk, so as I showed him, he could literally swivel his chair and roll two feet and find or return anything. This was not because it was my job (at all). It was because he was a moron and it was complicating MY life frankly, so it was worth my time to help him.

I come back to his office a couple days later and stare in disbelief. There's like 150 file folders, contents everywhere, all over the floor. It looked like a three year old had been there. He's rolling over them in his chair, which is a given because the filing cabinet is so CLOSE to his chair that there isn't room for those all over the floor. As I stared at it in soundless astonishment, he says with a dismissive shrug, "Oh, file those."

As if I existed but for no reason but to sweep up behind his sloppy incompetence. As if all my efforts were merely the setup for servitude, and worse, in something that wasn't just unnecessary but actually unprofessionally abusive. He looked at me again, apparently taking in that my look of disbelief had turned to profound insult, and he says (I am not making this up. He though he was being nice! He had some religious beliefs related to this): "Really, you should not see this work as any kind of insult. As a woman, it should be an honor to serve."

This is one of the few times I've been rendered utterly speechless in my life. I considered beating him up on the spot--oh, the temptation! he was a wimp and I knew I could do it--then turned on my heel and left and refused to go anywhere near his office again the rest of the day.

I talked with my teacher about it that night. I was shaking with repressed rage. I could not envision any possible way this could improve. The man was the VP and attorney. The corp didn't have a lot of money, not enough to outsource the latter job. He had been there eight years. Worse, he had spent much of that undermining the CEO's credibility with the investors while selling them on how it was ok because "he" was the "rational" one.

He had made such a disaster of both finance and stock and bonds that not only were we in trouble in two countries and three states with several kinds of authorities including tax, but we were missing half the records needed, and I'd just discovered that for 'financial statements' he had--seriously now--just totally made up the numbers he wanted to be there. They had no relationship to reality at all. I had not yet presented any of this to the CEO but I knew that even if I did, (a) he could not act against the guy without killing his company as the investors kept it alive, and (b) his primary response to me would be, "Fix it for me!"

But the VP had wrangled all this around, in his self-protective guile, in a way that would send my CEO to white collar prison if it all came out--not him. The CEO was a self-made man, a brilliant inventor and a master salesman, but not a businessman; he hired other people to handle that because he had serious ADD and just couldn't function well in that realm. At this point the VP was indirectly using a lot of the problems he himself created and maintained as leverage against the CEO, both for personal resentments and to keep himself employed in a way that gave him title and money but required no actual effort (well it did, but he didn't make any). He knew he was incompetent and passive-aggressive of course, so for years he'd been deviously self-protective as well.

My teacher felt that the archmeds would help in some way, at least a little. She talked me into taking it seriously and focusing totally on various aspects of this problem. We worked on meditations related to this that night, and Saturday, and Sunday.

Monday morning when I went into the office, my boss (the CEO) had gotten there early. He'd brought in some guy from a temp agency to help him physically. They had already moved the VP's office completely out and filled it with engineering equipment. I mean his DESK was gone, his computer -- there was no place for him to even sit. Apparently over the weekend the CEO, talking with the lead investor, about something maybe unrelated, had some kind of epiphany, had some kind of last-straw experience, and damn the consequences, he up and fired the guy! Holy shit!

As an example of personality, the man actually showed up anyway, ignoring that he had been fired (!) in his arrogant nonchalance that he had control and the CEO "wouldn't dare." There was no place for him to sit. Sorry, your computer is gone and the desk is underneath a machine in the warehouse. He was livid and he stomped off in a tirade of huffy threats.

And that was that. I mean literally. It was a seemingly impossible situation but 2.5 days of about a dozen deeply altered-state archetype meditations and he was just GONE from my life entirely.

That is how much of archetype results work, when you are addressing specific things: either a situation or person would improve greatly in their relationship to me, or they would "fall out" of my life with a shocking speed.

(I should be doing them much more 'in combination' like I did then, and much more altered state, if I really want to fix some life issues. I've been thinking about that lately.)

Of course I spent the next two years, crying with my head in my hands in worry and despair, working till 2am, working weekends, paying a nearby CPA cash and lunches for "talk advice", trying to keep my boss out of prison for crap that I knew he didn't even know about at the time and couldn't solve himself. He had so much stress just trying to keep us alive in an investor-dependent company already. (He'd had this R&D tech corp that a huge NZ financier bought. Then Black Tuesday hit and they dumped it, resulting in NO tech ready for anything, and 10 million (!!) in debt. That he kept it alive at all is a miracle.)

I spent much of that time negotiating with the IRS, with all kinds of official entities, trying to recreate history, fix problems, bring stock and bonds for hundreds of entities into some semblance of reality and organization -- I knew nothing of finance, or stock, or bonds, or several kinds of business taxes, but I learned fast the hard way -- and then getting to the point where we could do an official audit prior to acquiring an engineering manufacturer and rolling into a clean shell for an IPO. Which was partly also a result of developing a relationship with the investors who finally felt, despite my lack of being an attorney (I was a corporate officer at that point but so what), that someone was finally 'taking care of things' in a way they felt good about.

So I've wondered if maybe as part of this meditation, it wasn't merely about me and that guy, but on some level, perhaps my energy was working out a future, and a promise, with the CEO that he could depend on me to 'fix it' for him, that he could lean on me and letting go of the VP would be ok and not a disaster for him or his company.

Maybe there were "commitments" on my part that I didn't even know about, is what I'm saying. And those 'trades' might have been the energy that made significant change with my boss and the investors, that could not have happened without that.

So what I'm also saying is that while we are "dealing with" problem-energy-X, we may also be making substantial changes in our future on other levels, with other people, in other areas, that we are not aware of at that time. I say that I am not promising an archetype that I will say, drink more water; but maybe on some unconscious level I am promising an archetype that I will make the decision to do a certain thing. And in my conscious life I may think that decision is free conscious will... but maybe it's really not.

PJ

Book Talk, TIGM/es 01

Post 1 in a series related to Edwin Steinbrecher's book "The Inner Guide Meditation."

I may ramble about related stuff or other thoughts through this. But I'm going to walk through my current re-reading of the book (last time was about 15 years ago) and thoughts I have. This stuff is key to the inner work I do -- though in my opinion, the inner work has no real limits and the book of course does -- and key to others understanding more of the down to earth structure of this kind of work, and maybe more of the ideas that it rides in on. Not all of which may be accurate, of course. I don't think anybody has all the final answers.

Re-reading is a dilemma of sorts, though not as much as some books can be. It's like this: on one hand, he is brilliant, and insightful, and has documented important stuff, and is worth quoting and modeling. On the other hand, perhaps because we are not the same person, I don't agree with him on every point.

Most the areas where I start differing, are when I sense that he has a paradigm, or that he created one while thinking he was 'objective' because multiple people were involved in the shared experience-set he used to map out 'what happened, when, where, etc.'. My remote viewing and hypnosis background both lean heavily on the idea that we influence others when we work with them; and that expectations can and will do so; and there is even some evidence scientifically that whomever is in charge of, or considered the expert for, a given group-effort, will have an undue influence on the 'spontaneous experience' that others have--yes, even if those others don't know their views.

You only have to see how a tasker's intent affects double-blind viewing to understand that these things happen without regard to whether other people know about something; energetic connection apparently exists below that. He on the other hand, seems oblivious to this point. So if he is the central person with a given belief, and others intentionally working with his ideas to report back to him for the sake of his work and writing the book, have experiences falling into his existing belief or his own prior experience, he considers this proof that "that's the way it must be for everybody," because he considers the two experiences to be unrelated and therefore objective. I don't.

Steinbrecher was also a serious astrologer, which seems to have given him the tendency to think that there is a map and the options and details and what they mean are the same for everybody, even though 'which' of those details are called varies based on the person. I respect astrology, thanks to a friend I respect very much who has been seriously involved with it for many decades. And I think it is great used in conjunction with shamanic archetype work. And maybe Edwin is right about some of the ways he applies it (eg he insists that what your guide looks like, depends on a specific thing in astrology). But I don't think any 'framework', including that one, should be used to seal the record on what is allowed to 'be' or 'be valid', and in places it seems like that's in danger of happening.

So when I see stuff that I doubt, or feel I've experienced differently, I'll be talking about it.

But it should be stated here in this intro post that I think Steinbrecher did fabulous work with all this, very important work that lets ordinary western folk take a combination of ancient shamanism, jungian psychology, and work it into something anybody can use to directly affect change in themselves and their reality -- the definition of 'magick'.

Israel Regardie wrote of this book:

This book will go down in occult history as one of the most significant contributions to meditation in modern times.

Regardie was probably the most knowledgeable occultist of his era or close enough, and I have respect for his opinion.

Also, he has been in a few of my "deep dreams", the sort that seem more like 'spiritual experiences' than 'dreams' if you know what I mean. So I am biased in his favor for that. I think I only recorded one with him in it, and I couldn't find a date on the doc that google desktop found this in, but here's an example:

The Dream of Israel's Portrait of Alistor
and our Entwining "Tripod of Consciousness"

I was minding my own business. I haven't been even remotely involved with anything related to official magick in some time, I mean as far as reading, talking, studying, practicing goes. So dreaming about it was out of the blue.

Last night I found myself face to face -- close up -- with this painting: a portrait of Crowley.

Not so much that it looked like he ever did; tough to explain.

It was truly amazingly done, it managed to convey a huge amount of emotion and information and depth. Done in thick paints like the days of old, it had real texture as well as visuals. Yet it was dominantly in these odd greens and angles that gave it this rather Saturn-like, weird feeling, a bit of cold, impersonal and unearthly feeling as one of the many overtones.

I turned to Israel (Regardie, who created it) and I said, "Israel, it's beautiful. You've captured so much of his energy it's like the portrait is alive. You always did have such a gift for empathic insight, and this is real art. And yet, I think the greens are partly your own interpretation of him; I would have used less of those, and a bit more deep blues."

And he admitted that was likely the case, and then he reached out for me and we became like long ribbons, or maybe snakes or strings, and we wound around each other like a candy cane all the way out to the ends. It felt so strange, it was amazing! It was like I could feel my (astral?) body just thinning out and wrapping around his in a vortex-like spiral. He was a tremendously warm soul, and he gave me this feeling of real "maturity" is the only word I can put to it; I relaxed into him with a mix of gratitude and sensuousness and decided it had been too long and I'd really missed him.

Later in the dream, after Israel and I had been winding around each other, always going upward, having a tremendously good time (strangely close; not really sexual, I mean we didn't have normal bodies, but so intensely intimate it defies words) Alistor showed up to take a look at the portrait and comment on it.

I had missed him and reached out to him, and he took my hand and somehow was connected to Israel as well when he did. He didn't seem surprised that Israel and I were old friends any more than that he and I seemed to be, and he swirled in with us, and we contemplated the portrait as a "joined tripod unit of consciousness" for a bit.

Then Alistor pulled back so he was an individual and said "Yes, Israel, right about the blues. I see more of them in me than you do, but it's always been that way." And Israel and I directed our long swirled-entwined strings of bodies over closer to the portrait and looked at it again for awhile.

I decided that he is far more understanding of Crowley now than he had been when he was alive; or rather, that he now has fewer personal issues in the way of expressing his insight.

I woke up feeling like I had partly merged with Israel and was now not entirely the same person I had been before I went to sleep.

As trivia, I once had a remote viewing session that has a vague resemblance to one point in this. I was using Win Winger's "Image-Streaming" technique as an experiment on a couple targets.

IS is very good for warmup/state of mind. Horrible for viewing as, like archetype work, it's imaginally-based. RV is greatly harmed by too much of that energy. In fact one reason RV is such a nebulous skill is because like many things, it uses the imagination (and memory) as "the tool for delivery of information", but you want the absolute minimum of imagination (and memory) to be active, ironically. Yet you can't suppress it all or you'd have nothing.

On one side you have memory, and the more you know or even suspect about a target (no matter how subtly), the more memory comes into play, feeding your subtle data based on both static memory and the projections one's analytical mind -- even at the below-conscious level -- create based on that. On the other side you have imagination, and the less you know about a target, the more any data you do get (even if 100% accurate and psychically-derived), because it has absolutely no model, framework, scale, perspective, for the brain to hang something on, the more imagination affects it.

These two polarities of imagination and memory + extrapolation are constantly functioning (as they are meant to do in normal life) through the RV session. The problem is that while these are necessary to functional human life, more than the absolute minimum (it appears) is terrible for RV. One has to hold a state of mind that is kind of 'in the middle' between those points, 'open' and allowing the tools to provide or translate info based on your intended target (for which you have only a random number), yet not going in either direction, and attempting to learn to recognize when you have, when the subtle data is your own translation or assumption, or when it's symbolic etc.

Anyway, in the IS-based RV session, I was sitting back in a recliner, eyes closed, using a tape recorder for data. I suddenly found myself standing right up next to a painting, far too close, and it took me a moment to realize it was a painting because it seemed real for a moment first. The painting was life-sized and had such thick paint it gave a 3D effect. (I had a friend tell me fine old art is like that. But I have only seen prints. I'm sorry I'm uneducated about art. Never lived near a museum or visited, to see 'real' classic art.)

In the painting was a full size skeleton, with one arm up holding something that flashed through rifle/sword/scythe (scythe like the archetypal 'death' carries), and the skull tilted back with the mouth open I felt screaming though in silence. It was shocking, like some archetype work done in a deeply altered state, and I was reacting and literally falling back to escape it so close as I realized it was a painting and got farther away from it, then feeling I was standing on the carpeted, railed balcony of a 2nd story, inside a house or something, looking at it on the wall.

Then I found myself just outside something like a hospital, 'sensed' and only seen in translation like an energy (like an X-ray visual almost, but 3D and subtler), and people were going up the elevator inside it, but many just continued, as if for them the elevator went upward indefinitely.

That was not much data and heavily symbolic, obviously. The target turned out to be the setup for a (in)famous civil war battle. And although it is normal to get data that is key to the existence of a given target (e.g., if the target is welding a WWII airplane, you're likely to get some war data and airplane data before your mind 'settles in' to the focus of some guy up against a metal wall with a welding iron, assuming it ever does), this didn't have enough data to get around to that, so was not any success as a session.

That kind of session in some (not many but some) contexts still might have potential value, but it is neither specific nor accurate about 'the focus'. One of the differences between RV and 'traditional' psi is the very specific targeting (ask a specific question/directive), the specific focus on, to the degree possible, only data which answers that intent (as opposed to 'anything which might be accurate about anything related to this'), and of course that RV is supposed to be done in a double-blind protocol (where neither the viewer, nor anybody with any form of physical proximity to them, knows the nature or detail of the 'intended data' they are to acquire. And in a perfect world, knows nothing about the target 'context' either, but in the real world, sometimes they do). Anyway it was a failure as a session but was still interesting as an experience.

The incredible painting reminds me of that dream. I don't remember the dates but I'm pretty sure the dream came first.

Anyway on my next post I'm going to start at the beginning, and when I run into something I'll be quoting some stuff and writing about it. This is in part my attempt to give more credit to ES and pay more attention to his book than I ever did in the first place. And in my part my attempt to really 'think through' what it is I allegedly believe--and why--and how those paradigms might be, even now, pre-shaping my experiences without my being aware of it.

PS The funny thing about that tripod-of-consciousness dream is that I had completely forgotten about this until writing this. I recently had a super-'lite' version of that... nothing as intense as the dream. And my ex had once told me of this powerful dream he'd had about being three-in-one. But I'd forgotten this one until now. Funny it would come up right after talking about that.

PJ