Looking Everywhere But Here

You have my permission to laugh at me about this. I am SUCH a dork!

So I was talking about how, a few days ago, I got very frustrated about how I just don't find 'corroboration' of my weird 'the Four' and 'the Consortium' experiences anywhere, still don't know where it comes from or why it's so incredibly consistent for 15 years now, etc.

I had ordered myself a book I got several days ago (Multidimensional Mind: Remote Viewing in Hyperspace, by Jean Millay), had read a tiny bit and put it down. I put off reading it further so instead, I could do a couple days of googling about the above in my sudden wish to see if I could find anything that might make me feel a little better about it. After two days of a ton of complex, confusing and assumptive stuff, I was grouchy and not much helped at all.

The irony is, I was about 4 pages in my book from coming on this following text. Which was perfect timing; my desire would have felt like I called it up (as often happens when I am reading books). I even FELT like I shouldn't really be doing the googling. But did I go back to reading? Noooo. Ironically one of my friends/clients is a founder of this school and field, which probably would have made me pay even more attention to this. But I was ignoring my gut and my book both, so I missed this until now. Emphasis in original text:

At the International Transpersonal Psychology (ITP) confererence in Prague in 1992, one of the founders, James Fadiman, PhD, [...] reviewed some of the historical theories about personality, such as the idea that we are a single unified being; the idea that there is no self; the idea that we are merely a collection of behaviors; or the idea that we are all multiples. Dr. Fadiman said:

There is a model of the mind which seems to fit both historical experiences of every early people and seems to fit the experiences of most people I meet (except for psychologically trained professionals). [Ed. note: There is much laughter from psychology professionals present.] And the model is that *we are multiples.* Pantheism is a representation of our internal state, and it is not a surprise that psychiatry has used the Greek myths to suggest many aspects of the self because the Greek Pantheon is a more normal representation of who you actually are. So the self, I suggest, does exist. It is not unified. It is a collection of personalities. And the model says that if you work on yourself for many, many years, and take psychedelics, and go to India, etc. etc., that you will become a collection of selves, not unified, but that the collection of selves will be better behaved and you will get into less trouble.... When I listened to Ram Dass's talk, and heard about the demons that used to be large and dark and now are small and friendly, it suggested that as one improves in mental health, one gains a better understanding of the totality of one's multiplicity and is more likely to have the correct Being at the correct time. ...

The other thing that I keep totally boring my friend on the phone about is my brain-crunching over Nedlund being about 'sound', and my trying to imagine the different kinds or levels of 'sound' that make up my experience/self/reality. In the book is this really big scale of sound, never seen anything like that before, very cool.

I mean seriously, I would have considered the book and its timing to be totally synchronous, more than coincidence, right in line with my inquiry of the moment. If I had been reading it, like I'd planned to be. But since I was busy ignoring my gut feeling and googling instead... well I guess that is a good example of how reality experience can differ so greatly at one point, based on some seemingly trivial decision made at another point!

PJ

Gnostics and Armchairs

I meant to post this yesterday but hadn't finished with it. (I mention this because it was this post that actually led into the sex magick post that appeared here earlier. I was reading on gnostic stuff that led to magick stuff that led to that topic and I got opinionated.)

I don't much like labels when it comes to experiential things, like spirituality. I think as long as you're sitting in the armchair of intellectualism, as long as you're talking about theology or philosophy or whatever, then fine, we can wax poetic all day, and glue-stick labels onto things right and left. But the moment one gets into the genuine experience of the thing, it's another story. At that point, those labels aren't doorways, they are no longer marking the opening to the infinite one road at a time, but rather, stuffing into uniformity and expectation all truly creative and spontaneous experience.

From wiki:

Jung saw the Gnostics not as syncretic schools of mixed theological doctrines, but as genuine visionaries, and saw their imagery not as myths but as records of inner experience. He wrote that "The explanation of Gnostic ideas 'in terms of themselves,' i.e., in terms of their historical foundations, is futile, for in that way they are reduced only to their less developed forestages but not understood in their actual significance."

I would agree with that. Labeling and categorizing experiential-spirituality is like taking art, real art, the "it moved my soul through the night so I created this" art, and reducing it to an intellectual essay on the form and style, in such a convoluted, footnoted way that the artist themselves would be lucky to even recognize it from that perspective.

Yet if I don't use labels, it is difficult to communicate. Most people do not want an 'introduction' that requires reading a book's worth of material from someone's inner life. They expect a sound-bite.

OK, so:

• I am a Gnostic.
• I am a Thelemite.
• I have an experiential leaning toward Christian Mysticism, not related to the doctrines of Christianity, but related to the deities of such.

That is another way of saying I respect and have had experiences with 'identities', from Angels to Jesus, from Egyptian stuff to the Abramelin entities, from an 'inner soul-being' some might call HGA or Atman, to the conglomerate of Aspect Psychology that Roberts called Psychic Politics. From Kabbalah to Christianity, from Shamanism to Occult magick of a variety of traditions, I've had experiences, insights, and symbols, that seem to cover a little bit of it all. Frankly that has made it confusing that it seemed like "everything and nothing" was true -- no single model has seemed to contain my experiences, but most models contain room for some of them.

I have no serious interest in the various religious doctrines or histories which surround all those identities or models. If I have a vision or dream and I meet entity-X in environment-Y, and interact, then to me, that's XY. If someone later points me to stuff others have written about XY, I do find that mildly interesting sometimes, but only sometimes and only as food-for-thought or trivia, except in rare cases where -- like the Four and the Consortium -- I go out and search in an attempt to get an idea of whether someone's written this stuff down before and what "context" it was found in, if so.

I don't really feel that my experience with XY needs to be measured by, compared to, or evaluated against, anybody else's experience, or anybody's intellectual opinion or doctrine as written down throughout time. I will judge XY and our interaction based on my own experience and prayer. It is not particularly relevant to me whether this or that doctrine has assigned some entity or some activity to being holy, or to being black magick, or to being a 7th branch, French offshoot, of lineage-Z of some philosophy first recorded (that we know of) 140 years ago by someone I never heard of.

I'm not saying that education and study don't have value, because they do. It is that those are easy for me, and I have come to believe, due to my own weak tendency to 'think about living' more than 'living', that what matters if anything is that one most go 'through, not around' spiritual experience if it is to be anything more than armchair philosophy. I used to be so much more ... linear, than I am now. I've worked hard to shift.

I believe that sincere and regular prayer to God, whatever God might really be, that "genuinely good intentions", held with interest, a sense of humor, and a model of sharing and healing and joy, and the most minimum bias for or against or concerning 'the assumed value of a certain thing', that these will take a person through the experiences that provide "education from the inside" about oneself and spirit.

Moving on --

Trivia: I was skimming a tiny part of Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky, 1922), a chart TABLE OF THE FOUR FORMS OF THE MANIFESTATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. This wasn't any analogy to 'the Four' but rather, a sort of "four-stages-of-development". It was peripherally interesting, no big deal, and I speed-read. But there was this one line in it which for some reason felt like it reached out and slapped me upside the head and made me STOP and think. Under 'forms of consciousness', the third of four stages, one of the descriptions said:

The moment when further evolution can be conscious only.

(The fourth stage was then: The commencement of self-consciousness. Ecstatic states. Transitions to cosmic consciousness.) I felt like some part of me pulled out that line and emphasized it inside me, as if it arrived with the sound of a gong and the light of spirit and a logical typed-out business-report answer to some question.

I think this is "why." This is why the weird stuff. The Four, the Consortium of 12, even some of the confusion of my 'Bewilderness' period all those years ago. Because there comes a point in every energy-conglomerate's development when further evolution must be conscious. Where you are no longer able to unconsciously just drift along in oblivious darkness, when it no longer happens at a slow but automatic pace, where basically the escalator has come to an end and if you want to continue you've got to take the stairs.

And since it's new to 'conscious realization', it's just as confusing as the world is to a baby, in some respects. Learning how to even perceive, then how to remember, then how to correctly categorize, then how to understand, then how to consciously modify or interact with, each energy, thing, identity, dynamic, whatever, is a whole development of its own. 'Mysticism' is born and we spend a big chunk of our life then trying to accomplish one or more of these things in one or more areas.

Ironically the point is to get to where it's all a no-brainer background-info, because the larger focus is always communion-with-God, at least that is my perspective. All the rest is like... getting to know the culture and home of your soulmate.

So I was googling, as my friend L had done, trying to find any reference to the four, the twelve, a group soul, etc. I thought this following excerpt was a great left-brain description of The Four as I perceive them/us/etc. -- although I suspect it was not intended to be used for that. It even perfectly matches the bizarre but deep concept of "the tree of life in 3-D" that the Four once showed me we are, and that we "compose the universe", each of us a certain kind of energy that contributes to the makeup of things, although it was more person-based in my perception than... elemental, as it sounds here, but I can imagine that might have been a limit of my perception at the time. Check this out:

...Hasidic philosophy explains that the Merkaba is a multi-layered analogy...

...The four Chayot angels represent the basic archetypes that God used to create the current nature of the world. Ofannim, which means "ways", are the ways these archetypes combine to create actual entities that exist in the world. For instance, in the basic elements of the world, the lion represents fire, the ox/earth, the man/water, and the eagle/air. However, in practice, everything in the world is some combination of all four, and the particular combination of each element that exist in each thing are its particular Ofannim or ways. In another example, the four Chayot represent spring, summer, winter and fall. These four types of weather are the archetypal forms. The Ofannim would be the combination of weather that exists on a particular day, which may be a winter-like day within the summer or a summer like day within the winter.

For some reason this reminds me of the day that I had an 'insight' that Feng Shui is 'localized astrology' -- that wood in a fire region was like virgo in scorpio, an energy 'transit', or whatever.

...A person should strive to be like a Merkaba, that is to say, he should realize all the different qualities, talents and inclinations he has (his angels). They may seem to contradict, but when one directs his life to a higher goal such as doing God's will (the man on the chair driving the chariot) he will see how they all can work together and even complement each other. Ultimately, we should strive to realize how all of the forces in the world, though they may seem to conflict can unite when one knows how to use them all to fulfill a higher purpose, namely to serve God.

Cool. I am not-quite going to qualify as Hasidic though! If that does have some relationship to my experience, then the idea of some ignorant goya like me stumbling over the experientially-real spirituality of their occult philosophies would probably horrify all those serious hasidic scholars. (I remember being Jewish in another life. Does that count?? OK, probably not!)

In googling on 'the Four' I find (of course) many refs to the four elements. I wonder if I should work to find a way to incorporate this into something? Meditation?

Is there a way to apply Feng Shui to the soul? hahahaha!

This is a seemingly channeled page (feels that way to me) on 'soul clusters'. (Later: yes, it's channeled.) Though if I'm going to look at any channeling I would first prefer Seth via Jane Roberts, and I'm not fond of the topic in general and tend to dislike and distrust it (and yes I'm aware my conversations with Aeons sound very similar to exactly that. Sorry, that's just how it keeps working out).

"...A soul group is a circle with an eye, a soul, in the middle and four souls representing each direction. The direction is not necessarily that of nature as on earth, but as in the universe. In our reality as humans on earth it is the four directions with each responsible of the energy and power of the four directions. Each soul that occupies the position of a direction is also an eye or center of their own soul group as well. These soul groups are constantly moving and rotating around each other and through each other..."

Interesting they chose four, yeah? I mean, why that number, why not some other? I guess it doesn't prove anything (like why I get the Four or the Consortium), and I found some of the articles on the same site/source questionable, but I found it an interesting coincidence.

I wrote about the four and our 'pattern of four' and the 'larger patterns' back during my Bewilderness days, calling it "The Linoleum Theory" initially, then expanding it to "The Rainbow of Soul". My original TLT writings said something like:

When I look down at the square tiles in public buildings, I often see that every tile has a 'pattern'. It's all based on each tile being a singular pattern, one of four primary natures. Then, four tiles together are a pattern. And each of those four tiles is a part of yet-larger patterns that have it in different placements within those patterns. And the whole room is a larger, more complex pattern.

To me, 'The Linoleum Theory' described The Four pretty well. The Rainbow of Soul is better, though. I'm glad I came up with a less retarded name and model eventually.

PJ

Putting Together the Puzzle

Oh man. I just remembered a bunch of what I talked with Nedmund about last night and then had like epiphany after epiphany and weirdly, ended up back where I began, but with this gigantically larger, deeper understanding of everything that's been going on with me internally for over a year now.

Heavy duty metaphysics.

This is another blog post I need to write but nobody needs to read because it's going to be LONG I can just feel it. I just need to walk through the words and get it fleshed out through myself so I better understand.

***

Last night, Nedmund told me that he dealt with -- this is hard to explain since it was a 'feeling, intuitive understanding-transfer' and not 'words' -- he dealt with all the energies for me that are in the spectrum of 'sound'.

This fried my brain a little trying to comprehend it, immediately. I'd just never thought of any guide 'dividing up reality' that way.

Me: You mean... you mean that the whole 'frequency bandwidth' that I associate with sound, you as an identity basically... constitute my... relationship with that.

Nedmund: ...basically. (I had the feeling he would have elaborated but I was not hearing very well and he didn't think I'd get any of it if he tried.)

Me: That's something I never even thought of.

I just sat quietly for a bit. This was a way of dividing up me and the universe I had not considered. So he was sound? What, was some other guide 'sight' or 'all things blue' or 'all things strawberry' or... ??

Me: Is it possible that "bandwidths of frequency" that constitute OTHER physical senses, are managed--I feel it's more accurate to say, 'are summed up in, for me'--by a so-called "Guide"?

Nedmund: Yes.

I meant, like some guide relates to vision and another smell and another touch. There are nearly 20 documented human senses already and probably hundreds more subcategories within those not to mention a bazillion 'subtle' senses that get into energy/psi-stuff. So... any of this energy spectrum can be cumulated as an 'identity' and interacted with, and I become more 'aware' of that part of myself when doing so. That is a much more... literal understanding than I had of guides before.

As for what they helped with, somehow, I had only considered 'concepts' before. Like guide-x might "help with a certain kind of relationships" for example. But this "implies" that guide-x is SEPARATE FROM both you, the other-thing, and the relationship, as if guide-x were an advisor of some kind.

But everything the guides tell me intuitively and literally, suggests that they are "quite literally the manifested energy OF all this". That means the me, the thing, the relationship, and (I hadn't thought until today) the senses, and the meaning-mapping for the brain, that is part of those things.

This is... different. I feel like I have to really THINK clearly to delineate this, as if normal levels of thinking are too course and fuzzy to get it, and I'm trying to 'turn up the focus' on the clarity of my mind.

***

I had never before considered that "a chunk of me + my-awareness-of + my-understanding-of + my-external reality" combined together could "be" an identity, a guide. I mean I I guess they keep telling me this but I never "got it" until now. And I still feel resistance and fuzziness about it. Now, that IS a little bit of how I understand archetypes. But guides seem like... more of "ME" whereas archetypes seem like more of "relationship between me and something else".

I saw a concept, "identity" like a chessboard of black and white men, black and white squares, and I could be any of the men I chose, or the board, or a square, or the air, or any percentage or combination... it was totally irrelevant: all identity is just a game: it is an arbitrary collection of consciousness assigned a title: it is form, which is actually not-form, it is all actually Nothingness.

from 'Bewilderness'

In my brain I'm so used to thinking of everything as 'representative'--separate. If I say 'the sun' the words are merely representative of the-actual-thing-the-sun.

If I have an archetype of my relationship with sun, the arch is the manifestation of the actual energies that make up 'our relationship'--which includes some of me and some of the sun quite literally but is dominantly the-relationship as a-thing.

But I had not thought of my guides in a way that fit with how they present themselves, that is kind of like archetypes except in a way more literal or perhaps more tied to the 'manifested-being' that includes every facet of my body, energy body, etc.

I had thought of them as overlapping with me, sharing energy. Mostly metaphysically. In fact I intuitively thought of it rather like I'd perceived me and the Four once, how all our chakras had merged and we had become 'that tree-of-life thing, in 3-D'. I thought, "OK, it's like the four of us comprise the human-spectrum of my universe" as that is what it seems with our relationships for various reasons.

So when they started introducing the guides, and it seemed almost like a geometry, a star-pattern, orbits-as-relationships, I thought that the Guides were probably other 'chunks-of', or other 'aspects-of', the universe. And actually I think this is so, it's just very different than I had thought of it because my definition of "me" in that universe had been both far too separate, and far too small. I AM the universe, I think, is what is trying to get through my brain. It's entirely possible that part of the planet Venus and part of a certain kind of jazz and part of things with an S-curve shape in them are all, actually, the SAME energy as is part of my elbow or my throat chakra.

(Semi-unrelated trivia I just thought of: I once had the distinct impression, years ago when I was experiencing things in this area, that Crowley upon death had deliberately and very literally become 'part of' a ton of identities. People who upon growing up, eventually were convinced they were 'him' in some previous life because, in effect, they all were. Just not 'entirely'. So we all dream of being some little part of him or some era of him. We all have relationships with Rose and Israel or at least most of us, because of it. We are all drawn to his work and "recognize it within us" because it's a tiny part of us. Once I understood that, I quit taking it so seriously. I no longer thought it had some profound meaning or that my current-life destiny needed to have any part of that. He is part of me like my elbow is part of me, and I like my elbow just fine and respect its place in my larger identity, but the decisions I make in this life belong to ME. He is a small welcome part of that, but I don't need to become a flippin weirdo, a power hungry control freak, or a ceremonial magickian, to evolve; those were his choices, I'm drawn to them because of the part of him inside me, but they are not my choices. I explored a little of all of those and then continued on my own way.)

Back to shared-energy and guides: Identity-wise, it's like 'my liver' as an identity is 'my liver', but "I" am also my liver (in part); that energy 'overlaps'--the liver-identity and the PJ-identity both "share" it. But I had not thought of Guides as being, for example, the energy of the liver, or even something more huge like the frequency bandwidth we categorize as sound, ye gods I can't even conceptualize what all that really means!--it overlaps with my body, but so much more.

I had thought of them as metaphysical, mostly. Like "Yea, and on some grand soul-level, there is more energy out there, and we both have part of it."

But I blogged just earlier and was reminded as part of it that I met a guide that was literally the combined energy of 'my eyes'. A GUIDE. A man. With an accent and personality of his own. A body-guide I called it and I relegated it to a completely different mental category than the guides I am meeting now. But he was basically the cumulative energy of a part of my body and he was a GUIDE, not an archetype.

I know. "Identity is an arbitrary collection of consciousness assigned a title." Still! This is so brain-crunching.

***

Now the idea seems to be that as I become more consciously familiar with these 'guides', that as they are kind of part of me -- important to realize, not limited to me, and existing in their own right, but "overlapping" enough in "shared energy" that it amounts to them also being "part of the larger me" -- that I become more aware of, and cognizantly able to deal with, "my fuller self". Or at least, parts of myself I didn't have awareness of in the past.

I've been kind of thinking of this in woo-woo metaphysical terms. Not bodily terms. But the body is just one energy. The energy body is so many others. And there are sheaths of energy body that extend from us. And probably whole dimensions that extend within us as well, popping out like physics bubbles that manifest and collapse like the freakily-different spontaneous dream-lings inside archetype meditations. So if Guides can be 'manifest of' the energy that is also our body, then. . .

I think part of this realization is that they are not separate. My psi, my rapport with Ganymede, and -- Jesus H. I just realized I actually have an ancient blog post called "My Liver Does RV." Some part of me in a tiny thread of way actually got this a long time ago. That my body and my reality and my psi [and quite possibly even the thing I am being psychic about (this part, obviously, would change with the target)] are a spectrum of the same thing.

***

IG said this was what I really, truly wanted (the Guides) despite my panicked avoidance of the 'awareness and introduction'. I recently read a lot of the Red Cairo and My Psiche blog histories (felt impelled to for some reason and I'm glad because there was so much I had forgotten), and the one thing that I see I have asked for repeatedly, and probably the only thing, is greater awareness, specifically greater psychic awareness. (Well ok and some related to my body/health/weight.)

So... I hadn't put it in this context or model before, but... maybe psi really IS physiologically-based, MUCH more than we give it credit for being. Not because the information necessarily is but rather, because even if a 'sense' exists in us, if we are oblivious to it, it's useless.

And even when we're aware of it, if we use it with the subtlety of a grizzy bear, then we're not going to get very much from it at all or we're likely to over-stereotype any data received from it (the 'pieces' of info are 'too gross/large' basically).

We only learned to see and hear and touch and taste and smell well because we grew up in a reality where we gradually were taught to perceive from those senses -- but only to limited degrees. Everything that was "outside the boundaries" of what our parents considered "reality" we were indirectly taught to NOT see (not pay attention to) as we modeled them. Some things in life, whether it's childhood or military combat or other unique threatening experiences, can open up our perception as a form of survival skill, either temporarily, or repeatedly enough to become habit. Even the existing senses (let alone many others that may "perceive and interpret and communicate to the brain, which then maps that energy to meaning") can hugely increase in scope and intensity under the right conditions (combat conditions and smell for example).

I've written somewhere before -- oh, in Bewilderness:

If you give a very young child a number of large colored beads and paste to make a picture with, you'll end up with a picture where the colors and sizes of the beads are intermixed; mostly just a glob of sticky beads. The child thinks it's a picture, but it doesn't look like one. Give these materials to a slightly older child, and they will usually separate the beads and use the contrast of color and size as part of the picture. The difference is not only physical coordination, but that the older children have had more training in how to differentiate and categorize the data they perceive. In this case, color and size. Because most people in our society can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, we are able to (whether deliberately or merely by association) educate our children into sharing the same interpretation of their perception as everybody else, and categorizing what they perceive appropriately. Confusing or multiple streams of data eventually become linear, recognizable sequences, quite separate from each other. [...some data about people perceiving 'aliens and entities' and being considered crazy for it, and sometimes genuinely clearly having problems...] But the point I am trying to make here is that whether the perception being twisted is regular eyesight or "astral" communication, the problem may not be with the perception nor the validity of the thing perceived, but rather the interpretive abilities of the receiver.

I have been more than aware that my nervous system is involved in remote viewing. I can literally feel myself 'shunting energy off' with physical abreactions at times. And feel parts of my body 'reacting' to data in some fashion.

Just in the last year with the guides I've started to feel the odd sense sometimes that something like interest or enthusiasm is "in" my body. It reminds me vaguely of when I first wanted to try squats (for weight lifting) and I was much heavier than I am now, and "my knees felt scared." Not my mind 'for' my knees; the fear quite literally seemed to be IN the knees; that was just so weird. I've sometimes had fear I clearly felt in one or more areas of my torso. Well I'm starting to feel a little more of that 'awareness' over time, as if maybe it has always been that way, but my internal model of emotions doesn't "allow" my knees to have them, so normally it would 'assign it' to some nebulous sense of "I" instead.

Or, rather like how my guides and I overlap and it's "seamless" so I usually think it is "me" thinking or talking when really it is as-much-them, I just didn't have my knees recognized as being their own identity of a sort. You almost have to have that concept before your brain can even conceptualize your knees feeling anything. Despite that even science will tell us that there is essentially "thoughts and feelings" -- the physiological elements that make up those things -- everywhere in the body, still we persist in thinking of all this as if they are all in some abstracted non-location. Not until I recognized that-part-of-myself as an-identity named Nero was I able to just sit down and have a conversation with it, send loving energy to it, etc.

A previous post from March 2008, "Psychic Pods" is where I explored, based on something I'd read in Ingo Swann's work, the idea that I had 'sensory receptors' for psi information inside me. It worked well enough to make me think there was something to it. I didn't have any idea what these might be but the archetype was pretty 'organic' in nature. Suggesting something physical and not just 'metaphysical'. Both McMoneagle and Swann have referred (in different ways) to psychic functioning being physiologically based. (And that obviously doesn't mean one has to be healthy since JM has had endless medical issues stemming from his long duration as a combat soldier, and other things. It isn't that general.)

Back in September 2008, "Taan and a Hostile Moment" is where I had this conversation (with Nero, about Taan):

Me: Well what's he really do?
Nero: He deals with your perception of self in relation to the world. How your energy interacts with the larger world and how you perceive yourself as related to that world.
Me: I thought he worked with my body. I had the feeling like, what it looked like, sort of.
Nero: That amounts to the same thing.
Me: It does not! Those are two completely different things!

What if they are not two different things? What if the definition of "me" and the definition of "the parts of me that do sensing" and the definition of "the sensing" and the definition of "the meaning/translation of the sensing" -- are, in fact, ALL basically just a rainbow-spectrum of the same thing? And so my body, and how it interacts, and how I perceive it interacting, are the same thing. It's energy. It only looks physical to our 5-senses that are in the same vibrational frequency. There's a larger spectrum of everything than what we perceive.

What if I'm not really separate from anything (whether it is 'sound' or 'psi-data-from-thingX-over-there'), but have just been physically and culturally geared to think of all this like a linear, multi-piece assembly-line of experience-in-separate-blocks, rather than just a 'spectrum' which is in fact all part of ME?

You can't control anything you consider separate from you. You have to 'bring it into you' and then you understand that the power and authority is yours. To the degree we consider ourselves separate from something we abandon our power over it. That's why archetype work is so powerful; when we accept it enough to really properly merge, we lose the 'separation' which is generally what is causing problems in our bodies, realities, etc.

***

I don't feel like I'm articulating this right. Let me try again with something simple and physical.

Let's say there is me. And there is... my guitar. And there is how I perceive the guitar, which relies both on physical senses, and on brain-mapping to interpret those senses. And there is how I play the guitar, and write songs on it, which call in all kinds of other slightly different areas, relating to everything from senses to creativity to physiology. And there is guitar as an archetype, music at large and as an archetype, on and on. Well I think of "me" as thing-1, the "guitar" as thing-2, my "physical senses" as thing-3, my "brain-mapping-of-senses" as thing-4, my "creative-interaction-with" it as thing-5, and there's like a dozen other steps in here (things6-18) that I'm leaving out that are more subtle (or I am insufficiently caffeinated to think of them).

Now let's say I pray to learn to better play, understand, whatever, my guitar. And along comes a guide who says they are here to help me better deal with this area.

I have been thinking of the guide as like, thing-19. An addition provided for me like a counselor or coach. They were 'part of me' in some cosmic sense like "I'm this huge invisible entity, and PJ's-body is just one teeeeny little speck in that, and they are part of some other, nebulously- abstracted- elsewhere-, part of the larger me, which can help."

But maybe the guide IS "the arbitrary collection of consciousness assigned a title" -- LITERALLY, "the combination of Things 1-18." Not just figuratively. Not representationally. But, like archetypes, that literal THING. Ignore that it seems like the guitar is there and I'm here so nothing could be both. We are nothing but energy, there is no time and no space, there is only that energy having a relationship with itself in some geometric pattern that makes it seem like it's a wooden object over there and I'm an organic object over here but really it's all just energy in one point of space and one point of time; reality is about 'relationships'.

Maybe the guide's name is allegedly Peter and he looks like a surfer dude and god-only-knows why, but the fact remains that he is not just overlapping with me/my energy in some abstract metaphysical way... he is literally, like an archetype but different, the SINGULAR-MANIFESTATION of that arbitrary-collection-of-consciousness (energy).

Jesus. Maybe I am really just the liver duct of someone way larger. HAHAHA.

***

I wouldn't have seen this if I hadn't written the long post earlier. It set up my brain in some respects and then after that I happened to be inspired to give someone a link to a page of Ingo quotes I collected and I reread them while I was at it.

He was talking about the "sensory receptors" as well as "sensory mapping". He's not necessarily talking about the 5 senses here, or even the nearly-20 or hundreds by other measures, but about whatever actual 'sensory perceptors' allow psychic functioning (which may be those, or others, or some combination, who knows). Here's a few quotes:

# The remote-viewing discovery work uncovered very delicate sense receptors which, when properly transduced into accurate intellect meaning resulted in controlled remote viewing. Thus, if perhaps not exactly so, the discoveries of the delicate sense receptors and proper sensory transducers must closely resemble the knowledge of the ancient Yogins and their concepts of the distant-seeing sidhi.

# Largely speaking, even the basic five senses are useless unless their sensory inputs are mitigated and analyzed by the intellect or some other analyzing part of the biomind -- after which a great deal seems to depend on the loads of information accumulated and actively contained in the intellect at the individual level and via which the sensory inputs are analyzed. . . The meaning here is that one's sensory receptors may indeed be receiving certain kinds of signals. But if one's intellect is not prepared to deal with their information loads, then the signals will remain invisible -- at least to one's non-sensitized, unaware cognitive intellect.

# [T]he thoughts one experiences are the end-products of the processes that produce them, and few are ever really aware of those processes. It is quite probable that the products of one's thinking processes are based exclusively in whatever sensory transducers have been formatted -- or NOT been formatted. The processes are therefore invisible and, usually intangible.

# [It] has often been deduced that people are trapped in the limits of their perceptions. But such is not actually the case. They are trapped within the sensory transducers which apparently produce the meanings which have been assigned to what they perceive -- and then only if they perceive it and actually have assigned some kind of meaning to the perceptions.

# Beginning somewhere before the 1970s, various researchers began to understand that the not only the neural nets of the brain process information. It increasingly became understood that the neurological networks throughout the whole bio-body itself also process information. And since the 1970s it has become understood that certain kinds of information are processed at the cellular level throughout the surface and internal organs of the bio-body.

# [Our] mental information processing grids must have information points consisting not only of sensory transducers, but also consisting of meaning transducers. If it is a case of becoming aware of gross and subtle signals, then appropriate meaning transducers must be established to cope with both kinds. And it must follow that the lack of such meaning transducers will leave what might be called "experiential holes or pits" in one's mental information processing grids. I prefer to call these "meaning defaults," though. . . . It is meaning which governs our understanding. . . . And meaning defaults will "mean" that we will not know or understand what has been experienced -- or we will either not experience it or perhaps know that we have.

# If we think only in terms of senses and/or sensing systems, then in very subtle ways we may be distinguishing between them and ourselves. It is true that we do "have" or "possess" senses and sensing systems. But something else is also true, and it is very important that it should be grasped. We ARE our sensing systems. And what we call "WE" or "US" or "SELF" is in some full part neither no more nor no less than our sensing systems are acknowledged, developed, and utilized.
-- Ingo Swann

I think the part that finally broke through my puny little mind was the idea that the sensing systems are as much "us" as anything else. I have often myself said that I think our bodies are as much spiritually us as anything else--we do not inhabit a shell (this is not a prison!), we "continually re-manifest an interface". That the energy of my knees is just as spiritual and specific as the energy of my heart chakra. (So, if I am fat, I am recreating this constantly; figuring out why or how to stop doing that, would result in a change in my physical experience.)

I thought of Nedmund talking about frequencies of sound and him being the guide for that, which almost cracked me trying to understand;
Then I remembered Nero suggesting that my actual body AND how I felt about myself related to others "were the same thing";
Then I remembered the meditation of the "psychic pods inside me" and the idea of those being psi-based sensory receptors but they were physical;
and then it all just hit me in a blinding flash that THIS IS WHY the Guides.

This is what they ARE: a vastly greater 'extension' of my fuller 'self' -- and more -- that I'll need to have rapport with in order to more effectively deal with psi.

So they aren't just me in metaphysical terms. They aren't just me in some cosmic star-pattern of greater identity (although it really does amount to that, it's much more literal and personal and physical and immediate). My projecting them into metaphysics is the equivalent of people projecting God into some guy on a cloud who is really nice as long as you don't piss him off and he'll give you a harp later if you do everything right. In short: it's a separation philosophy.

I should have realized how opposite that was. Everything they have been and even the Four are, is an INTEGRATION philosophy. They aren't introducing me to something new and different and elsewhere. They are introducing me to parts of MYSELF. They are the parts of me that I need to develop a relationship with because that's what I've been praying for: to be aware, to perceive, to interpret/translate. And as for appearing to be people and fairies and horses or whatever, I don't have an answer for this, except that (a) for all I know in some reality they really are, and (b) the whole point of a 'Guide' at all is for a RELATIONSHIP. So, somehow, it must relate.

"Personalization" as I've written about before. I cannot have a 'relationship' with some abstracted sense of nervous system components affected by a certain frequency of energy that is not perceivable to me consciously, which might literally be an element of psychic perception. Seriously! How obscure is that! But if all of that combines itself and shows up and says his name is Fred, THAT, I can have a 'relationship' with.

There could be literally infinite numbers of 'guides'. It's not like there are just me with 'The Four' and then some multiplication of that. I mean that IS real, but it's an "arbitrary division/compilation of consciousness" -- so other groupings, divisions, exist. (I knew that; I sensed that in an experience 14 years ago.) Everything exists. Everything is me but I am infinite.

It's not that they are more me than anything else (other guides) could be, so much as that they are more the parts of me that I have consciously chosen to become aware of and hence 'learn to better perceive/live through' -- because I specifically have wanted my primary development to be related to remote viewing (and, also but less often requested, related to my body and making it thinner so I'm not too shy or unable to to do many of the things I'd like to in life). Humorously, it may turn out that my desire for conscious psi functioning and my desire for improving my body have some overlap somewhere.

In fact now that I think about it, The Senior -- the Four -- brought them to me just after I had a very serious talk with them about Remote Viewing and said, in essence, I have paid my dues, I am READY, I deserve this, it is MINE, make it so! I never really grokked the two events as being related.

I just thought... I thought that we were going along just fine together and I was really happy about it, and then one day out of the blue I felt threatened to my very core-identity because all the sudden there were all these other people there that the others of the Four thought I should be getting to know. I didn't know them and didn't WANT to know them. Except now I see that they were me, and IG was right: this is exactly what I wanted to know, to learn, to do, to understand, to interact with.

In short, I prayed for an answer, and got "exactly what I asked for but not what I wanted." Hahaha.

So taking each day to "hold the hands of, concentrate on, imagine sharing energy with," each of my guides, is like attempting to wake up, clean off, sensitize, become aware of, and learn to interpret from, everything that relates to information in a certain range/block/category that guide is manifest-of.

***

Many of these... things, areas, whatever, I am so oblivious even to the existence to, that I could not possibly even ask for them consciously; my mind may not even be able to conceptualize (thanks to cultural conditioning and language limitations) how some things really work, or why, etc. The Guides are a 'conglomerate' of energy though -- just like I am -- they are complex and autonomous in their own right; and they contain, understand, are-OF, "pieces of the spectrum of me", "pieces of the spectrum of the universe".

Now to go back to the original concept I had for them: that they were essentially further, larger divisions of 'me' and 'my universe'. Like the Four are, combined, the human part of the universe (you could model this like the Tree of Life in QBL [Cabala] and its sephiroth); the larger number are, combined, a broader part of the universe. Different aspects of it, different 'ways of dividing and experiencing' it.

Nedmund is about 'sound'. Taan is about 'my body'. But they're not just abstracts or counselors. They are the named-identity comprised of the energies of thing-itself, both as it IS, as it is experienced, as it perceives being experienced, as it interacts as part of experience, because all of these things, from a larger perspective, are the same thing.

It's all just a spectrum of energy of the same thing. We choose to look at white light, and it inherently contains a rainbow of something, and all we see is red and green and purple of that rainbow, so we think it's totally separate things. We don't grok that not only is it 'all one', all part of a spectrum, but that the spectrum itself is part of an even greater one-ness.

I've said before that: The definition of God is I AM. Of the so-called Devil is WE ARE LEGION. Evolution is toward 'Singularity'. Consciousness is an organizing principle. Spiritual growth is like any other growth: you absorb into you what was already you but unrecognized, and you become aware of it, and via love (sympathetic rapport) and will (directed intent) that energy becomes part of your singular sense of identity.

And eventually you're not just a cell you're flesh and then you're not just flesh you're a liver and then you're not just a liver you're a torso and then you're not just a torso you're a whole person and then you're not just a person you're ... you're a Four, or a neighborhood or city, and then you're not just a city you're a continent, and then you're not just a continent you are Gaia, and then you're not just Gaia you are the Galaxy, and then you're not just the Galaxy you're the Universe... And then you hit the 'reset, game over' button and start again as an atom inside the molecule inside the liver of some woman in the Milky Way on Earth in North America in the midwest. Except I've only exampled the physical human spectrum which is just one of an infinite number of ways-of-combining consciousness.

The problem isn't that my perception is limited to that of being a human being. It's that my definition of what a human being 'is', is so profoundly limited, that even remote viewing makes me feel like some totally alien 'creature' that other humans could not possibly understand. The range of a human is utterly vast and diverse compared to what we know of it. I don't know anything but the most trivial, shallow, sliver of myself. When I encounter any aspect of who I really am, it feels alien; separate from the me-I-know-to-define-as-human.

My psychic perception is profoundly limited by the fact that I am oblivious to the physical senses and semi-physical [energy body] senses and maybe other senses I have even to DO the perceiving in the first place. Even if they work fine, I'm as oblivious to them as senses as I am deaf and blind sometimes to people in my inner world trying to talk to me.

And even if I were aware of the senses and the pure energy (information) they perceive, I still need to end up with a brain-mapping that lets me transfer that perceptual sense into meaning that I can communicate.

I want to view, I want to 'wake up and get to know' the parts of me necessary for doing this well, and it just so happens that they are a whole spectrum of "self" that I have considered myself separate from, not known, not wanted to know, been afraid to know because it took me out of my comfortable little 'box' that my reality fit in. I think that's why I've reacted with such strong fear to guides so far. It isn't that I feared them, it's that I feared myself.

I have a safe little boxed identity and expanding to include them wipes out that identity and builds a new one big enough to include them too. So of course the "I" am always afraid; the I is "ego" defending the territory of "identity". That's it's job, it's good at it, and there's a good reason for it to exist. But sometimes that just has to be set aside enough to make a substantial change.

***

Me: Nero?

Nero: I'm here.

Me: Why... why didn't you guys make this clear to me sooner, so I wouldn't fight it so much?

Nero: You have a lot of resistance. It took a substantial amount of our energy to weigh against that. A certain number of us needed to be present in your awareness. That's why IG has been forcing the introductions.

Me: And what do you work with me on again? (I felt myself 'resisting' and 'blocking' in the lower right of my torso. I can't explain how/why I felt it there but I knew I wouldn't be able to "hear" him if he told me. I felt as if he 'changed tactics' upon us mutually realizing this.)

Nero: Maybe some things you would not be able to easily understand even if you were told, even if you had internal concepts that allowed it to be told, and a language base that allowed you to translate it. That is why your guides are identities you can have relationships with on your own terms. Sometimes, they have much energy you will not understand, that you have no model for, or not exactly. In those cases, maybe you see a faery instead of a human, or a horse.

Me: Ohhhhhhhh! {Thinking} So maybe you are a manager of sorts, that I met you first, perceive you most clearly, love you most, and you seem to know a lot about this.

Nero: The way you model things, makes you want me to be that; a sense of authority; something in a pattern of heirarchy.

(I had the sense, not spoken, that if I wanted an authority or manager identity for Guides, I should be looking to Inner Guide or the Senior for that.)

Me: Is it ok that I love you unreasonably for something only in my head?

Nero: {smiling} It's fine.

Me: Can I learn to love all my other guides that much?

Nero: Yes.

I just sat here thinking for awhile, kinda spaced out.

So the guides really ARE, as I first envisioned, "pieces of the universe-which-is-me"; as if I had arbitrarily divided the universe of energy into a puzzle and they were each a piece.

But they are NOT, as I was modeling it, some distant, abstracted, metaphysical thing. They are of my body and my energy body as much as they are of the energies of my reality and my world as much as they are of the energies of astral, mental, and other 'psychic' realms, as much as there are of things I don't even understand.

And, specifically since that was my request, they deal with (a) all the parts of me [including physiological senses] involved in conscious psychic functioning (and how all this interacts with my reality), and (b) the parts of me related to my body (and how all this interacts with my reality).

When I set out to meditate on stuff related to psi sometimes and to tell The Four that I wanted remote viewing as my focus and skill, I guess this is in fact exactly what I needed. It's a great gift. Confusing, a little weird, kind of embarrassing to talk about, but the genuine and powerful expansion of self, or evolution, I wanted.

So it's definitely time to get more proactive about my guides and our relationship.

PJ