Hindsight: Psi and Astral

I have returned momentarily from exploring disobedient imaginations in what I called my imaginarium.

I might not be staying long. Maybe I've changed values. When I had taken the Astral realm or other-world as good enough (not that it wasn't) and psi or subtle energy as ways to move within that plane, the goal used to be so clear: to practice until I had empirical evidence to show for it.

The imaginarium lent shapes to the stories that shaped me, that really might not matter to anybody but myself. They parsed the chaos that my life had become. Psionics, I feel, requires more organization than that.

Energies and otherworlds became metaphors, and there were so many other metaphors.

I found myself drawn to fairy lore (not, so I thought at first, fairy tales; but fairy lore...although, fables and fairy tales and even nursery rhymes have come to be prominent metaphors) most of all, so that seems to be where I'll stay. Psi has become a sort of a Glamour. The Astral and its variants have become the other worlds beyond the soft places. I still order and categorize them: corporeal, sidereal, incorporeal, ethereal, surreal. These aren't planes to chart, but only distinguished by features of my personal experience.

An important part of the practice is make-believe, which involves examining the belief and constructing new ones. The practice involves ways: craven's way (examining doubt and pain), maven's way (investing or committing to something that is not true, that is, not fully-formed to be true so that it may become true; recognizing and reifying potential), and haven's way. That last one is theoretical. When I sense the nature of the Glamour, what I call the poetics of it could be wild (without a structure to contextualize it), weird (within a structure to contextualize it); and the meanings represented could be: waylaid (immutable), wayside (mutable), or wayward (volatile).

Somebody asked me once what the difference would be between a cloud or current of subtle energy and an entity. Perhaps they would treat of elemental subtle energies for one example in an animistic way, by nature. It was, I considered, a good attitude. So, I couldn't explain the difference, only that I knew the difference when I saw it and one would accompany the other (entities emanate energy). I might attribute agency, but it wouldn't categorically be there.

Thus I considered what I call the Guisers, perhaps entities without mythology. Perhaps familiar spirits, perhaps fragments of my own psyche, perhaps constructs or characters.

All this recognizing that semiotics are not universal but relative. A practice has lost priority to discovery, empiricism losing priority almost entirely. I only have words for all this. I might only ever have words.