Persona

Just as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series provided a springboard for modern therianthropic spiritual practices, so do I believe that this fictional system best illustrates a spiritual practice of astral entity creation. This was the inspiration for my imaginary friend Shadow Elly, who has not "behaved" in any way that I would attribute to becoming a paranormal phenomenon herself, ergo "imaginary friend" status instead of "tulpa" "servitor" "artifical elemental" or even "psi construct".

So. I'm an avid fan of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, a Playstation game that's now an animated series. One main feature of the story, is that each of the main characters are forced to wander some dark spirit-world of the collective subconscious. Here, they're forced to fight themselves, that is, fight another person who looks exactly like themselves but is really their "shadow selves".

The source material keeps it somewhat ambiguous, but Shadows are made up of other people's judgments about a person, that is emotionally hurtful because these judgments are (or have become) true. Have you ever been upset about something, and have someone tell you that "It wouldn't bother you so much if it weren't true"? The mechanics of this fictional world, really rubs it in each of the characters' faces. They're all forced to face what they don't want to, at a level that frankly most people don't ever need to.

(This, I think, demonstrates the bridge that modern spirituality and metaphysics provide: the idea that the thoughts and emotions of every person, can impact reality in some way, without the middleman of physical action. It's the idea that someone's personality forms a metaphysical body when, in all likelihood, this cosmos as we would understand it doesn't exist-- and gods either don't exist or don't care. This also demonstrates a problem in most fiction: this much focus on a character can stall the story arc for the sake of the character's self-obsessed introspection, which is not generally accepted as entertaining! But I love the way it's done in Persona 4.)

The only way they get out of that otherworld alive, is by having a personal epiphany about themselves and their place in the world. That transforms their Shadow into a Persona, which is a projection of their power, and takes the form (with artistic license) and name of some mythological character.

(...Okay, maybe there's some cultural misappropriation. My own Persona is named Goorialla, after the rainbow serpent from an Australian Aboriginese legend. I realized that I had a personal tendency to overcomplicate things to confuse and manipulate people: the energy from that epiphany, I channeled into that form, a form which the energy flowed into so easily that I can't imagine how the form could have been anything else. And I feel that I wouldn't have been able to do that at all, if I had never processed this about myself. And I haven't attempted to do anything with my Persona, other than think that it's there and feel smug that I can own up to my faults, so whether it's pure imagination construct or some metaphysical psionic construct remains to be seen.)

The core concepts of creating a Persona, as described, came through Personal 4 as a JRPG/manga/anime, but it was itself a modified version of Carl Jung's Shadow/Ego/Persona psychology with Japanese schoolkid superpowers added, and a lot of the psychology modified to suit the story. The real-life Carl Jung, interestingly, I heard had an imaginary friend of sorts named Philemon, who appeared to Jung as a winged elderly human man. And whose name sounds like a pocket monster, but of course it wasn't because Carl Jung was a brilliant and respectable scientist who couldn't have done something that silly.

The Shin Megami Tensei Personas don't talk. Mine doesn't, either. This makes sense to me. Being a projection of a psychologically integrated person, they don't have to talk anything out-- without an ego, they might not have the ability to. Whereas Shadows have been so repressed by the Ego or conscious mind that they have a lot to say.

All of these are just influences to my conjecture that, were astral entities created, they can slip out of the control of the magician if the mind were not disciplined. This was a given, but my thoughts lead to the idea that mental discipline means compartmentalization. It appears that integration is equally important, because of the psychological stability that it provides. To keep the bad parts at bay, seem to naturally bait a lot of pushback from those very same bad parts.

I probably won't go as far as solipsism, but metaphysical explorations have just felt like they've been taking place on a very different level than I'm used to, with a very different quality.