Meeting my Spirit Guides

I had a problem with visualizations. Not a technical problem, it's just that I couldn't believe that psychism should be connected to something so mundane. Visualizations were for thinking where to rearrange furniture, or for trying to remember what a word looks like when it's spelled right. As I read elsewhere, if I had to actively visualize anything, then it must not metaphysically exist. Meditation as I knew it simply involved shutting up most of my mind, maybe drawing my attention to an area, and then waiting for anything to happen. And, the experiences that resulted have far exceeded the expectations that I didn't have.

But for something like centering, I realized, it really did feel like imagination-- that the sensory focus was tactile rather than visual should not make it any less so. After that, I allowed for setting a visual scene with imagination, then letting it take a life of its own. (I guess that's daydreaming, just without my usual micro-managing every detail.) The scene is a ladder in the middle of a field or desert, and the life it takes of its own is that the ladder's rungs break as I climb it. So, I've never met my Higher Self and Spirit Guide at the top, which was the life it was supposed to take.

Auntie J.J. had told me about her spirituality, in which the source of all existence projected our forms into the physical world in order to learn things. The part of the source that knows our life mission is our Higher Self, and the parts that support the higher self are Spirit Guides. Looking around some more, I gleaned ways to contact these forces, such as coincidences-- or signs and synchronicities, since coincidence gained a dismissive connotation-- automatic writing, and meditation.

Perhaps from getting out of practice with blank-mind meditation, or sertraline-induced hypomania, I found that my peripheral thoughts simply wouldn't shut up. To cope with that, I made a variation in this meditation: I imagined a busy restaurant, cast my thoughts as the other customers, ordered a table for two, and instructed the waiter to expect my Higher Self. To my surprise, She arrived, looking like me but much healthier, and emanating a steadfastness that I certainly don't have. None of the other in-meditation characters, even previous ones claiming to be my Higher Self, really emanated anything-- so, that's how I knew She was the one I sought.

The thing is, I thought She'd be desperate to tell me how to get back on the track She set out for us before I was born, but all She did was gaze amiably in my general direction, and nod at my chitchat, and then finally She asked me what I really wanted in life. When I couldn't sincerely answer ("Uhh... to align with whatever You want in life? No? Ah-- to be happy, then dead. No? Money. Fame! Power?") She upped and left, saying I should get back to Her when I could answer that question.

After journaling lots of "Nuh-uh, You get back here, b*tch, and tell my life purpose! What do you think you are, real??" I did get around to a sincere answer, but decided to stop with the daydreaming for the day.

That night, I had a dream that seemed to extend what had happened in that day's meditation.

2009/09/08

I was jogging up flights of stairs. The building itself seemed to be vast as a palace, but all the doors and rooms were narrow and bare. The windowless walls were streaked like an old leaky prison. I seemed to spend more than a third of the dreamtime just finding stairs to climb up, up and further up...

When I reached the top of the tower, four dream characters awaited me. The nearest looked like my mother, but shadowed. The second nearest, like an aunt of mine, but cubist. The one standing in middle distance looked like my sister in a ponytail and a beach dress.

The furthest one, I couldn't see, but she spoke up right away and clearly: she was in charge of my life's trials, she said, and then she vanished. Come to think of it, this one looked like Neil Gaiman's personification of Despair, but somehow less like Regan McNeg.

So these are my spirit guides, I remember thinking, but I didn't become lucid. I suppose I just assumed this was a particularly vivid meditation.

The remaining three gave me gifts. The one looking like my sister said that she returned my clarity of memory, which had improved with waking-life treatments but hadn't yet returned to normal. Still hasn't, but that made this a very very nice dream.

The one looking like a living cubist version of my aunt, told me a story. The dream scene changed as she seemed to narrate it: Once upon a time, a king lived in a swampy forest with a sword he was gifted by Death himself. A challenger came to the king, with a shield made of pure gold filigree. The king dueled, denting the shield easily and ensuring that it would make a useless flying discus weapon, and demonstrated how egoism will fall to Death. "Yet," said the king, "I sleep in the branches of one of these mighty swamp trees, and I would not slice away the trunk with this sword merely because I concern myself with the trunk's new branch."

After the story, I found myself back at the tower. A bed with crisp white sheets and a cloud-soft quilt waited in the middle. This was the last gift: a very good night's sleep.

I'd been boggled recently by not-quite-lucid, not-quite-non-lucid, dreams. Dreams of lucid dreaming, and non-lucid dream control. This may be a matter of course for some dreamers, that stuff picked up in waking life inevitably trickles into the dreaming... but, my dreams really used to be a process all its own before. I could dissect most normal dreams and match each image and event with a waking life influence, but it was always the "background" noise of waking life-- what I told myself I'd dream about, rarely would I actually dream about.


Later, I read What We May Be, by psychotherapist and modern philosopher Piero Ferrucci. Chapter 4 presented the concept of sub-personalities. Ferrucci quotes his teacher, Roberto Assagioli:

We are not unified; we often feel that we are, because [...] one hand doesn't usually hit the other. But, metaphorically, that is exactly what does happen within us. Several subpersonalities are continually scuffling: impulses, desires, principles, aspirations..."

And the exercises that follow, to work with these sub-personalities, sounded a lot to me like Spirit Guide contact meditations. The only difference is, of course, that it's taken from a more psychological standpoint than a spiritual one, and that Ferrucci encourages a mastery of dis-identification (the name for the process through which the patient builds a form and identity for this aspect, separating it from themselves) and re-identification (having this aspect act through one) with these thought-forms at will.


Having been of two minds about most things for so long, though, I look forward more to the journey that takes me to that part of the astral where all the misspelled words and ugly pieces of furniture go.