Checkpoint!

I get images in my mind, that I believe that are not only true but (independent of me) want to be part of this world instead of my personal spirituality or whatever world it is that I'm looking through in my mind. Far be it for me to presume to add to mythology or add to canon or start my own cult! So, I make it a fiction, and call it "fantasy illustration" or "my NaNo project".

But sometimes it's really fiction, like, "This would look so cool that it must be seen! I have to help this coolness in my mind be seen by other people who are not telepathic but have material vision!" or "That would be so cool if this happened except that it probably wouldn't and can't in any case but it would make a cool story!" And that feels like an entirely different process. Those, I really call "fantasy illustration" or "my NaNo project" but I mean it when I say it about them-- and nothing more. I feel confident that those finished pieces are skillful but are not true beyond themselves.

But maybe it's all one. I'd be very worried if (gods willing) I became a successful animator or novelist, and somebody took products from that latter thought process that I laid out, and told me that parts of it resonated with them so much that I must have been channeling something... and they're off to start a cult. I'd be uncomfortable.

Yet, I do the same myself with other people's fictional works where the creators identify themselves, broker an implicit agreement with the audience that the creators are lying for entertainment purposes, and everyone (except a few dangerously silly people) join in on the agreement that details by which a modern storyteller's ideas and themes are expressed do not exist beyond the body of work.

Phew. And now I must confess, that there's a level and aspect to which I do not agree. And that's silly but I don't believe that I'm dangerous. I'll get to that.


In the meantime, instead of (what I hope comes off as) my usual comfort with ambiguity, I'd like to take a stand and explain, or explain away, some encounters with metaphysical beings that introduced themselves to my experience in the appearance of fictional characters:

The Girl From The Exorcist. A slightly younger Old Hag of Old Hag syndrome. It was just that, the filter of a fictional character may have been what I must see if I see it at all. With more exposure and acceptance, though, I began to see it more clearly. Ergo, the change in shape to something similar but not identical to the first sighting of the entity. Or else, my fears projected a skin and something stuck its hand in and made the mouth move, and then took the skin off and just decided to hang around and be itself.

Final Fantasy XII boss. Human. Definitely polarized towards masculine. Possibly dreaming, or daydreaming, but definitely, to quote Idris from that episode of Doctor Who that Neil Gaiman wrote: "bigger on the inside." I'm slightly taller in my dreams, myself. Eight feet, though, not... twenty storeys. And, lucid or non-lucid, astral or dreaming, I have cosplayed before as Beatrix from Final Fantasy IX and Tiffany Aching if she were a His Dark Materials witch. So, that was just his costume on some metaphysical plane of reality.

Offred or Ofglen, from Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale with her legs sawn off. Hrmm, that and the monk, and the melting wax head, were probably... you could call them my psychospiritual rape-babies, but I prefer Shadows (from yet another work of fiction, but the term I think fits very well. As I said, I'll get to that.) Basically, I think that each of our consciousnesses are a temporary point in the flow of information. That flow, on the metaphysical plane, flows from that point in a different state than it did when it was flowing to that point.

A classmate tells me I'm going to Hell because my mother is unmarried? That crosses over my psyche-spiritual boundaries...which happens all the time, we don't live in a vacuum... but I didn't mean for it to flow out of me into the metaphysical realm as something like an evil silent Gregorian monk. I don't want to be Catholic, but I am, in a way, in some small part.

An old manservant of my mother's family frightens me with his appearance, and the idea is introduced to me that elderly people are closer to death, so I hope he dies soon so that he won't scare me anymore, and then I find out that he did? I feel like my lack of compassion sent him and his melted-wax wrinkled face to the guillotine. Out pops a Shadow!

So, I read The Handmaid's Tale in high school, the first class I enjoyed in the first school that I wasn't bullied in. When my mother lost her job, kept me out of private school, wouldn't let me go to public school or even get a job to help her with basic living expenses while she got back on her feet for the expensive things like rent and her kids' education... I spent all day at home bored, and then depressed. I felt like a Handmaid with her legs sawn off. I had plans and dreams at school, but not the strength of character to follow through with them when privileges (like a private school education) were yanked from under my feet. I also realize now that my passivity as a character trait had become demonstrably fundamental: I didn't want to save the Handmaid in my sleep paralysis vision, from further harm. I didn't even want to save myself.

Shadowscapes Seven of Swords. I like think that I've told that quite prettily, but I still have no idea what the fuck happened there. Dis-identified self, maybe? Chaotic servitor/egregore? Because the form came from physically outside myself, and I was consciously working with that image without having much of an idea about what working on it would do. So, Shadows are the products that flow through me from someone else, while chaotic servitors/egregores are the destinations to which my energy is directed by me. They're the same thing, but I think it matters how much my conscious intention was involved. The less conscious the creation, the more Shadow-y they are. The more conscious the creation, the more servitor/egregore they are.

...No, not really. I don't know!

Shadowscapes Queen of Swords. Ditto the Seven above.


Now, each and every single one of the above mentioned, did not come to me by any of my deliberation. They were already there-- that vividly, in that form; so, I add-- in that plane of reality.

These have been my experiences, as received, not interpreted (until now) (well, the human cosplayer a little bit: I thought he was my guardian archangel for a while for some reason) or actively manipulated with a basis of conscious deliberation.

And I think that's going to change. Fiction has obviously added as much to my metaphysical vocabulary as mythology, spiritual and religious tradition, and science. I am going to embrace it!

Or, no, what do they call an embrace from a different angle...? I am going to spoon it!