I had a choice, opted for other(world)... and had a good time, at least, no worse a time than I was perhaps already having in the default world... and I'm still alive and untraumatized, years after my first OBE. I met entities who remain my friends to this day. And... I never shield. I haven't even learned to battle until recently. I posted here how someone else might be able to project, period, full stop.
Sooooo I've recently considered that I have simply been so very fucking fortunate, and that giving everyone else the keys without also giving driving safety tips, does quite the disservice.
If I could do it all over again, here is probably what I would buff up more with:
Banishing, Cleansing, and Warding From The Physical
When I meditate, the thing I most notice is the arising of this sharp, frantic sort of feeling. It feels more like something I'm sensing from outside of myself, rather than something that I'm generating from within myself. So, I conclude that it is an outside cause with a subtle effect, perhaps clouds of thought and emotions emanating from people I share the space with. Visions of creatures and attackers during meditation, have the same "outer imposition" category, in my paradigm. One solution for this problem, for someone who hasn't gone out of body and wants to without being bothered by all that other stuff, would be to conduct banishing, cleansing, and protective actions that affect the astral from the physical.
I was very snobbish when it came to this. White sage incense, feng shui, wind chimes, circles of salt or chalk or white sand, pentagrams... superstitions! That's all they are! Actually, I still am snobbish about this. Pentagrams failed when I needed them, thus: it's just geometry. It's just smoke, and mirrors, and bells and whistles, and junk and stuff. The only thing that's been able to keep me, as an incorporeal astral entity form, at bay? Was my default-world corporeal friend, Anjie, and she didn't know and wasn't even trying. If, in the astral, I can move right on through physical barriers? And if, in the astral, I bump into laylines and barriers that correspond to nothing in the physical? Then I might as well give up on anything making any sense to what I already know.
Identity: Deconstruction of What I Already Know
My cosmology was this: my astral body is a fluid, and my physical body is a drinking glass. Sure, I would edge towards the idea that it's only physical, it's only neurons and electro-chemical signals feeding anything we would notice about the world at all... and meditation was a way to make those operations different, that was all. But, my fears were always based on the glass-of-water paradigm. What if I went out of body, and some other thing that called itself "I" would enter and displace me? The symbolic and the material would blur: if I did witness another entity taking over my body, then it could symbolize a re-wiring of my brain, that my dominant sense of self would become passive, and some sub-personality complex of mine that I was unaware of would take over.
I had feared a loss of integrity in my consciousness, when I hadn't even integrated my consciousness in the first place.
With experience came the questions. Why did my vision remain the same out of body and in-body, if I didn't have eyeballs? How could I remember these experiences at all upon coming back, if they memory of the experience wasn't stored in the formation of my neurons? Why was my personality and priorities different when I was out of body, versus when I was in body? What of spiritualists who engage in "horsing" other beings as part of tradition-- if they don't precede the possession with an out-of-body experience, then perhaps there's not even a correlation let alone causality. I started to read about past life regressions where, rather than a person re-living an experience from their own point of view, or being able to witness but not interfere with a time past (unless they already did, so of course they will), the ego of the person's own past life spoke to them as one separate entity to another-- which made no spatial-temporal sense, but personally made sense because a past life personality is different enough to be a different person on the ego level (while still retaining a connection. That whole statement was intuitive opinion, not fact.)
Whether I give credence to these ideas, it changed my thinking to have them introduced at all. The glass-of-water paradigm has very much broken since then, and with it the fear. The fear came from a structured understanding of something... that was untrue.
Actually, I personally have yet to encounter real dangers that should spark real fear, so maybe I shouldn't even be writing this guide yet.
Cosmology: More Deconstruction of What I Already Know
My favorite tutorial, still my favorite tutorial, made haste to distinguish lucid dreaming, or even vivid nonlucid dreaming, and especially imagination, from an out-of-body experience or astral projection.
The astral experience, to me, only ever took place between doing the meditation to get out of body-- and coming back. Projecting my intentions, feeling otherworldly clouds and auroras, thoughts and feelings, and all those forces? Didn't count as astral travel, to me. If I didn't have violent "otherworld entry" signs, then I classed it as a simple dream, or a vivid fantasy. It had to have bookends. It had to have standards.
Since then, I've relaxed my categorization quite a lot. Maybe I've simply become irresponsible, lazy with truth-seeking: that a young woman in a white gown and a rictus grin who otherwise resembles my youngest cousin, should come into my vision unbidden and persistently, doesn't mean that she's not a product of my imagination. Still, I treat her as if she isn't, because I've invited this into my category of "astral". Such beings more often vanish when I forget that they're there, and then appear instantly when I remember as if I didn't need to summon them-- didn't need to reach out into the otherworld and find them, as if they don't have lives of their own (so to speak, and maybe they don't, maybe they don't have lives outside of the ones I give them). Sometimes I can rewind, like when this Queen of Swords attacked me, and I made it so that my heart wasn't there where she stabbed in the first place. (Maybe she stabbed me after all, and I blocked her out with my own fantasy and fantasy-memory.) Other times, I can't rewind: I can't make it so that I didn't give her my second best sword or never let her into Eddy's locker room in the first place, and her betrayal of my trust in those moments refuse to be undone. But rewinding at all, I've read, is a sign of fantasy and not a specialized astral ability skill thingummy that would have its circumstances and limitations-- to rewind.
My physical experiences are appreciated. My dream experiences are appreciated. My imagination-level experiences are appreciated... all to the same thing. That's what works right now. Maybe someday in the future, I'll slice them up and sort them again. Like some experiential equivalent of sashimi: "That's tuna, that's salmon, that's... not even a fish, that's sweet scrambled egg and it's awful, don't eat it."
Right now, it works because I regret when I did not integrate experiences outside of those rigid bookends that I used to have. Dreaming has giving me weapons that I can use on the astral, and mere fantasies have left me with mild astral injuries. I should have paid more attention to them.
What Is This I Don't Even
So, I did eventually figure out how to astrally ward from the physical. Sort of. I traced out some runes with my fingertip, on each of the four posts of this bed that I would be meditating from. I didn't read the runes very well, hadn't been thwapped by the Norse spirits, but, it worked. I believe that it did, and not necessarily because of the runes. During a hypnopompic REM atonia episode, recounted here, I saw three nightmarish figures and one sort of stick-like figure with melting skin. I believe that stick figure may very well have been the bedframe, having heard what I asked of it, and having agreed to protect me-- which was why the nightmarish figures weren't actually sitting in that bed with me like they used to be able to.
I used to think that the paradigm didn't matter. You can be an animist and ask a wooden pole to protect you in exchange for a good oiling... or you can be a cold and calculating magician to treat it as a thing and a tool, that it is your capital-w Will alone that imbues an inanimate object with purpose, and the outcome will be the same.
... You know what? This isn't helpful at all because I really really do not have any regrets or precautions at all when it comes to this. Much as I regret any time that I've accidentally imposed Will upon another being (and not just because it hadn't worked), everything has always happened in its time, I've always learned at the pace of the experience first before theory-- especially when the theories break. I have this much experience, and keep coming back to how I know nothing. I don't know it's dangerous. I don't know it's safe. I don't know!
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