I considered that my OBE last month could have been greatly helped by a visualization exercise that I found in a pack of tarot cards. The booklet accompanying Stephanie Pui-Mun Law’s Shadowscapes tarot cards, provides instructions for a meditation: to pick one card, admire it, to “Look at it for so long that you can see it with your eyes closed. Then close your eyes, still seeing the card. Step into the image. Imagine how it feels, how it smells, how it sounds. Experience it. If you’re feeling adventurous, interact with a figure in the image.”
It’s a contemporary deck, one of an artist rather than a spiritualist, I think. Still, because I’ve learned the significance of the symbols in every card (at least in the Rider Waite Smith system, because I’m a wishy-washy sheep like that,) as pertains to its divinatory definition in the tarot reading system, I’m very impressed by how P-ML could keep the soul of the piece after such a drastic overhaul of the traditional template. And kept up with that sort of creative re-interpretation for seventy-eight paintings!
The paranormal significance of the tarot aside, the Shadowscapes are works of art that one really could get lost in. The images on her website, due to backlighting, just don’t do justice to how masterfully P-ML uses tone to suggest perspective and depth. To look at any of these cards, I feel as if I could fall right into them.
And as I said, the night that I had my first OBE in three years, I had been doing a visualization to enter the Shadowscapes’ eight of chalices.
This card seemed to recur in several of the first readings. The suit of chalices refer to the hidden worlds: of emotions, and dreams, of the invisible societal forces of relationships between people, and of spirituality. The eights of any suit tend to represent a distillation of their kind. In buying the deck to read, I’d taken my first major steps back to the paranormal and psychic, and I took this card recurring as a “Welcome, welcome back.”
I would do the meditation as described, but just like with the Fool meditation with the Marseilles, I blanked out. It wasn't the journey by active visualization itself that did it, I think, but the way that meditating upon the image influenced a shift in mood.
When another card began to recur in readings, I would meditate to "enter" that card. The Nine of Pentacles seemed to hold me to itself in my own imagination, long after the meditation ended: I would drift off into a daydream, and the stained glass window between the tree branches would be there. The Tower gave me a dream of itself, instead of letting me blank out. At one point, the seven of swords had been recurring, but I simply felt a personal resistance to exploring it and I went for the second-most recurring card instead, Justice. Another attempt at entering the Eight of Chalices, brought back a painful childhood memory of mine-- instead of an out-of-body experience. The reversed Five of Chalices lent me no lasting visions, but momentarily lifted me out of some unreasonable sadness, and the reversed High Priestess... did not have any noticeable effect at all whatsoever.
I didn't pathwork this way through all the cards in the deck, not even through all the major arcana. But I did several, and somewhere in those exercises I did eventually get around to giving the seven of swords like attention-- and then I moved on to the five of pentacles, a week or so later the Queen of Chalices, a few days afterwards the six of swords, the Hermit... none had as remarkable an effect, to me, as that first meditation on the eight of chalices.
Until, that is, the following events:
2012/05/18
I've been composing music. A studio picked up one of my songs for development. It was a good thing to happen, a big thing for me. Sibling had been discouraging me from pursuing music because she only knows failed rock stars who live in their parents' basement, and was really pushing for me to enter clothing design. I was telling her that, after my composition had been accepted, I felt that I was accomplished enough with music to stop for now, and, yeah, sure, why don't I now get into what she suggested, about clothi--
“Any idiot can do that!” Sibling burst out. Those were her exact words. Though what follows are not her exact words, she basically went on to rant: "Any idiot can write a song, what the fuck do you mean 'accomplished'? That's nothing, you're nothing except for what I tell you to be, you're a child and you're selfish/ignorant/irrational but I've been working so hard and I know what's going on..." She obviously wasn't listening to what I was saying, preferring to focus on cutting someone else down to make herself feel better. It's been very difficult for her since our mother died almost two years past, but she tends to spread that difficulty around and blow it up unnecessarily.
In any case, the moment her outburst started... a masked, shirtless masculine figure, with a shock of blond hair and a pair of black feathered wings, came down like a lightning bolt between Sibling and I. He landed heavily on his scaled hind legs, straightened up, and held his sword as if standing guard.
It had to be my imagination. Sibling couldn’t see him, after all. But, I hadn’t meant to imagine it. If I imagined it, he would be joking and dancing about like a Halloween imp. This was the very vision of an evil, wicked entity— the figure from the Shadowscapes seven of swords.
But I was so glad that he was there. Once upon a time, a remark like Sibling had just tossed out, would leave me reeling for weeks and starving myself. Instead, now, I was… all right. Except for the hallucination. And because of it. Something about witnessing that presence, made me feel completely safe from her.
(Well, maybe not completely. Rather than devastated, the conversation left me dissatisfied with my accomplishment... and formulating plans to max out my musical skills at the exclusion of all other goals— especially fashion school.)
2012/06/06
So, I named the Seven of Swords angel... muse... wingthing? I like wingthing. I nicknamed him "Timmy." Psychic spiritualists make a big deal about the Real And True Name of the ghosts, gods, or demons-- but, by my experience, those mostly invisible intangible nonhuman people, if they're maybe just in my head, they definitely have no physical lungs or vocal cords, so they're not exactly hooked on phonics. I give them names. If the name that I give doesn't suit them, or doesn't make sense to them, then they naturally won't come when called.
Timmy, on the other hand, won't leave me alone. There's no poltergeist activity or anything like that. It's just that, I've stopped "playing at" something, so I figured that this entity, who would be symbolic of that defense mechanism in the psychological paradigm, would fade away.
Instead, while I feel both more like myself again, and free to be myself for the first time... Timmy's gotten more protective than ever. It's like there are fumes coming off of him, and he's poised and wound up and ready to strike anytime. He also doesn't communicate directly, except maybe for the projected sense of a more focused presence that I take as a courtesy of saying, "Here I am." But I also take it as a "Spidey senses tingling plus Hulk pre-smash plus WINTER IS COMING." I get the sense that Timmy is puffing up, like a spooked cat. But he never talks.
I just have to guess at his strange new... whatever it is... it's not strange new behavior, he's been doing the same thing as always, it's just that he seems to be really working at it now.
2012/06/11
In my lucid dreams and meditations, I've forged two swords. One is a katana with a white handle, that I named Mercy. The other is an accompanying wakizashi, named Justice. Even in my dreams, I don't like fighting, so it doesn't usually happen, but-- just in case. As a matter of exploring my psychology or coping with my hallucinations, they've been very useful. If I've watched a scary movie, for example, and an image is lasting longer than is constructive, then I just imagine my slashing my big sword across the image...ined threat. The threats usually become threatened themselves, and go somewhere else. If the enemy happens to be a manifestation of an issue in my life that I need to process-- then I stab it through the heart with Justice, and we're done. It isn't the simple act of stabbing with an imaginary weapon-- it only works, of course, if I do that in the spirit of objective consideration of the facts and consequences-- for great justice. Basically. When it doesn't work, when the enemy laughs or sticks around or attacks some more, then I know I've done it wrong.
My imaginary friend Shadow Elly and I, have had a lot of figurative duels. I imagined that she would naturally be identically armed, with Ignorance and Spite, so she was. She's far more under my conscious control, which is why I call her my imaginary friend. I suppose that she's more like a psychic telephone with a direct line to my subconscious, than a real entity. I mean, I considered Timmy a real entity, despite clearly being from the Shadowscapes tarot... remembering Regan McNeg, and the Demon Wall from the Tomb of Raithwall in Final Fantasy XII but without the wall.
Other than Shadow Elly, I don't believe that I've really had contact with spiritual/psychological entities consistently enough to consider any of them "spirit guides." They've helped when they have, but none have really taken my hand for every step of the way to the meaning of life, or really any deep epiphanies.
Until, that is, two nights ago.
I dreamed that a man made out of water, that I'd met before, also in a dream, and named Eddy-- he laid four swords before me. I certainly recognized the swords.
Eddy asked me if I could tell the difference between the two black-handled wakizashi, Justice and Spite. It was like the ritual for locating the Dalai Lama, where a bunch of toys and other items would be laid before an infant, and if he selected the items that used to belong to the previous Dalai Lama, then he must be a reincarnation because he was drawn to what was familiar.
I couldn't do it with my own weapons, in this life. It might have ended there, with me just having to admit that I simply do not know something as basic as Right from Wrong, but when I felt the compulsion to tidy up, I picked up Justice and Spite and held them together. They melded into a single weapon, which gave me an epiphany.
"I forged these as part of a psychic sort of symbolic fighting style that I envisioned," I explained to Eddy. "It came from the conviction that mercy and justice are one and the same thing, if given that the entire conflict is fully understood. Mercy without justice is not true mercy, because coddling will enfeeble the receiver of such a virtue when real virtue will not do such harm; likewise, merciless justice is unjust because it only perpetuates violence and corruption of power. A full, true kind of Understanding shows a middle way, a course of action that incorporates both, so that both can truly be their respective virtues. I thought that they lacked one another, and that separation and subtraction was the illusion.
"I thought that I could keep them as separate parts, than when brought together dispel illusion and create a whole. Some illusions are necessary, if a subject's capacity to understand is rudimentary--" I went ahem and pointed at myself, "-- so there were times to implement Mercy alone, or Justice alone, for a needed and/or satisfactory outcome. Now I see that, that these virtues are not merely incomplete when they are separated-- they are infected.
"Mercy without consideration of consequences, is Ignorance, necessarily it is willful ignorance. Justice alone is necessarily spiteful-- consider the phrase 'brutal honesty,' honesty does not necessitate brutality, it necessitates truth, so if somebody is brutally honest, then the aim is not to be honest but to be brutal."
To sum it all up, "I will never perfect the fighting style that I envisioned-- not with these weapons. Phooey."
Eddy nodded, unimpressed, and I sensed that whatever test or trial that I'd been dropped into unprepared-- was over, for now. I also got the impression that there is no right or wrong answer in something like this, but there was just my answer. Still, I couldn't help feeling disappointed, as if there should have been some great double gates that opened up somewhere to symbolize my graduating to a higher spiritual level.
Well, I did keep the swords, because samurai swords are just wicked cool. Perhaps there would have been pomp and circumstance if I'd given them up for a slingshot named Insight, or a rocket launcher named Awesome or something.
When I woke up, Timmy’s head had imploded. Where his mouth used to be, was a gray swirling vortex like a CGI tornado. A sound, like screaming, filled the air, except that I realized it was just the vacuum where his head used to be— swirling with such a great force that it drew the air past my ears. The sight and sound of it all, was horrifying.
And then I woke up again, and Timmy was gone.
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