We Are Spirits in the Material World

Over the past seven or eight years as I’ve progressed substantially in my personal practices, I’ve encountered many people who wished for me, Meridjet, or both of us to mentor them. While initially this struck me as patently ridiculous for my part, I have always been willing to act as channel for whatever Meridjet wished to do to help, and over time I’ve grown more open to the idea that perhaps I have something worthwhile to offer. By some high cosmic irony, there are people who feel that I am wise and approachable. The humor of this is not lost on me. As it happens, Meridjet has a way of using whatever situation is available to teach me, and these relationships have provided very fertile ground for those teachings. I’ve screwed up these situations in pretty much every way you can imagine, and not the least of them was to assume depth or friendship where there wasn’t any. I’ve failed utterly at establishing personal boundaries until far too late, and then set them too abruptly so that I pushed people away. I’ve leaned where I should not, and allowed myself to be leaned upon when I was improperly equipped to fulfill that role. These lessons continue to roll in on an almost daily basis for me. Tragedy has struck on several occasions, and usually when a situation implodes, everyone involved feels like a victim. Perhaps everyone involved is a victim, but usually that is only the result of our own misplaced efforts, trust, and loyalties. I’ve had people who once admired me grow to despise me for my mistakes, while denying their own, and I’ve allowed myself to repeat stupid behavior in the hope that it would lead to a different result (the stereotypical definition of “insanity”). Whether or not I ever intended harm is immaterial; the fact is that harm was done or perceived to be done. And despite efforts to cooperate in healing, I am never able to repair any damage because the person no longer trusts me. I’ve become someone with an Ulterior Motive™. It’s funny and sad how black and white a situation like that can become. What once was beautiful is now ugly, and what once held promise now only inspires fear. A couple of people stand out in my memory as folks who really didn’t take well to having boundaries drawn up in our friendship. When you start out giving everything and over time learn not to do that, the recipient of your good will begins to see your self-preservation as a personal affront and even as an attack. As one old friend once put it, “You lost me when you started to ask for something for yourself.” For a long time, I was really confused as to why this kept happening. I mean, regardless of how many “crazy people” one meets, eventually one must ask what one is contributing to the situation. Even if the circumstances are different each time, there is going to be something the same, something that you (or I, in this story) are contributing. Recently, I lost another one who initially sought me as a mentor and later deserted me as a friend. Her perspective is undoubtedly quite different from mine, or else there would be no loss on either side. We reached critical mass and fwoomp! it all fell apart like a used up Howler in a Harry Potter story. As usual, I didn’t see much of what was happening until it was too late. And this is only one of my errors. I didn’t want to write about this for my column, but it won’t be ignored. I’ve had several epiphanies since things imploded for my friend and me, and not all of them were bad. What would be the point? I mean, if all you get out of an experience is negativity and hate and anger, you’re not really learning anything you can use. It’s only going to eat at you, and scar you, and affect how you deal with future friends. That’s taking the victim role a bit too far, in my opinion. You need to find what you gained in a situation, because I promise you there is something that you gained that would not be a part of you or your life without that experience. For my part, I’ve gained enormous understanding into why boundaries are necessary from the beginning, particularly when someone seeks you out as a mentor or a teacher. It’s a bad idea to enter into an intense friendship with a person who admires you, because admiration is based on very limited information – it’s a pedestal thing, at first, and then when you start to show flaws, you are not forgiven them because they are a sort of betrayal to that person’s faith in you. They committed to something that didn’t exist, and when faced with the reality, they are appalled at your humanity. Sins that might be forgiven in a sister, a high school chum, or a spouse are not forgiven in a mentor, because the mentor’s job is to shine the way for the admirer. This seems obvious, and it’s even a bit trite, but it’s harder to see from within – particularly when one is accustomed to rejection. A person’s trust tends to open you up, and that’s even more likely to reveal your flaws. It’s not a pretty sight. I’ve also gained the understanding that my solitude is not something to be overcome; it has value beyond the transitory ‘personal space’ that everyone craves. I don’t live well with others. I am a strange person in too many ways. Beyond the woo woo stuff that people seek out in these cases, I am a perfectionist and something of a control freak. Put me in a house with another control freak and good things are not in the cards. I am OCD in the sense that I have a particular way of doing things, and it bugs me when that is ignored or misunderstood. One example: I hate confrontation, and so over the years I learned how to compensate for that in my communication. I might start out irritated and work my way into talking things out, but if the other person isn’t actively engaging the discussion, I’ll just keep going, trying to draw them out. My usually reserved nature suddenly reaches verbal overdrive, and people overdose quickly. In type, it’s fine. In person, it’s intolerable. I’m learning what I don’t need that I thought I did. I’m learning that distance from my emotional reactions is a lifesaving skill for me, and bless Meridjet for teaching me how to attain it. I’m learning that not everyone I have deep discussions with has to be my best friend forever. I’m learning to refuse to be guilt-tripped when I feel that my actions are for self-preservation and are absolutely essential to my sanity and well-being. I’m learning to say no, and damn the torpedoes. And once again, as I do on a perennial basis, I’m learning to feel gratitude for the blessings in my life. From the outside, my life doesn’t look like much. But I like it just fine. I’m grateful for so many things, but the one thing I’m most grateful for is the very ability to feel that gratitude. It changes everything, and makes it all meaningful. Pain is only pain, and you have to let it go. There is joy waiting to take its place if you only let it in. ©2008 Sheta Kaey Edited by Sheta Kaey due to lack of availability ;-)

Recent efforts with friends and Work partners to quantify our experiences have led me to a not-very-startling conclusion: we need a new set of terms, a new jargon, for the experiences and paradigms being created. Every day, now, I see further evidence that new trails are being blazed in the fields of magick and metaphysics, mysticism and … stuff there’s no name for yet. Herein lies the problem. If there’s no word that describes that thing, or that idea, or that experience, or that entire path that’s suddenly developed, then we are all left fumbling for expression and a need to articulate what is happening with words that do not do justice to the subject at hand. This in turn causes any new terms that are created to be adopted by people not quite fitting the assigned criteria, but who find that the label is the closest thing they’ve found, so they run with it. Then, in an inevitable chaotic fallout, newcomers, or worse, researchers, have an even worse time sorting one thing from another because a word that meant one thing two years ago now means a dozen different, sort of but not quite related, things. When a serious practitioner or researcher then attempts to describe a genuine phenomenon, they find that the only words anyone associates with that phenomenon have been diluted to the point of uselessness, and a jumbled mess has taken the place of any effort to create a terminology that makes sense. Worse still, the most visible or vocal component of any group, particularly in fringe society, is the fruitcake component, and once they’ve adopted the jargon it becomes laden with automatic snark and ridicule, leaving anyone trying to convey an actual message frustrated and ready to pack it in before they even really begin. Unfortunately, the second most visible component is the armchair “practitioner,” who goes around to various online forums playing the expert, throwing around terms and defining them based on no actual experience whatsoever, but only on what he or she thinks sounds the most logical. It would be nice if this helped consolidate things, but it really doesn’t. One of the areas I wish to address – that of astral projection and OBE – has a multitude of terms that mean umpteen different things, depending on what author you follow and what system you subscribe to. Terms that mean the same to 80% of the population (mostly laymen), “astral projection” and the “out of body experience” are, to experienced practitioners, rarely the same thing, and the homogenizing of the glossary is not helping matters. So I propose a new list of terms, an unfettered list, untainted by idiocy and empty of negative association. And that’s what I’m going to try to do, in this column and in future columns (from time to time). I am not doing this alone, as I’m not quite arrogant enough to think I know everything. Anyone who wishes to get in on this development can email me to get involved. I’ve got several people helping me already, but the more the merrier. I doubt we’ll be able to come up with completely original terms in all cases, but with any luck the ones that are already in use can be streamlined and simplified. I invite anyone who has ideas or who considers hirself an authority on any particular experience or perspective to write to me, and help flesh this thing out. Make yourself heard – or even more heard! What makes me any more of an authority than the armchair experts I describe above? For one thing, I don’t intend to personally involve myself in the creation of any term for an experience I’ve never had, nor will I be encouraging that behavior from anyone else. Other than that, there’s no difference between me and those folks above, except that I’m attempting to do a public service rather than throw my weight around. Feedback is crucial – please get involved with this if you have any need whatsoever for a new term for something that’s been obfuscated by misapplication. This is an evolving glossary, and things should grow over time to a more cohesive set than anything posted early on. If I get enough of a response, I’ll start a column just for this. Before I get into the words I want to address myself, I’d like to provide you with one I picked up from our very own Sunfell, as it is particularly nifty, in my opinion — Netrovert Contributed by Sunfell A Netrovert is a sensitive introvert who has a presence on the web, such as a blog, community, book, series of articles, etc. along with an audience. A netrovert has the best of both worlds – social time online, with good feedback from their work, but also the solitary life and people-free time required to generate work. In the real – majority extraverted – world, introverted people tend to be easily overwhelmed or exhausted by others – especially strangers in crowds, or lots of interaction even with close colleagues. Socialization can be a chore, parties and stuff can be exhausting and draining. For people like us, the Internet, and the advent of blogging has been something of a godsend, permitting us to present things online, but also permitting us our peaceful cocoon that we need in order to function. We used to have to suffer in silence, but now, we can log on, or if we get tired of the noise online, log off, and return refreshed. Netroverts have rich lives offline – if they live entirely online, that’s a danger signal. Netroverts should have pets, friends, movies, gardens, craft projects, etc. to keep them grounded. Are you a netrovert? Can you add to this definition? Words and Concepts by Sheta and Friends, Part one As I mentioned above, our current focus is astral projection, out of body experience, and associated words. If you’ve ever been involved in any sort of astral work – from astral temple during the LBRP to full-blown Focus Infinity (to paraphrase Robert Monroe) – you know there are a plethora of terms that could be tossed around. Think about it. Astral projection. OBE. Bilocation. Astral travel. Etheric travel. Lucid dreaming. Dreamwalking. Remote viewing. Scrying. Mental projection. Then you get into associated terms and it gets very messy. For example, how many astral travelers have ever really seen a silver cord? It’s assumed by people who haven’t done it yet that the cord will be there… but I’ve never seen it, and I don’t know anyone else who’s ever seen it, and I’ve experienced both (my definition of) astral projection and OBE. How many people have experiences of the astral plane (et al) that perfectly follow classic “textbook” examples? What we need is a growing language. Without a growing language, we cannot hope to evolve. A quote I read today from Terrence Mckenna: “We can only transform ourselves as fast as we can transform our language.” Someone made the point that the Internet, among other technological advances, is changing not only the way we access information, but the way we think and our self-perception. The earlier one is exposed to the Internet on a regular basis, the more one is affected. A child who grows up with Internet access is going to have a radically different way of thinking and perceiving than the average middle-aged adult walking around today. And we all can see how much effect the Internet is having, already – the emergence of subcultures from Otherkin to multiplicity has occurred since the turn of the millennium, and the numbers – and new subcultures – grow every day. Without additional terminology, it’s going to be that much harder to assimilate the new information and the ever-changing varieties of self-perception. For now, I present this: The method of astral projection that I employ (and which many people I know also employ) is a fully conscious experience. It does not require extraordinary levels of meditation, though that helps when developing the skill initially. An “out of body experience,” on the other hand, involves losing complete contact with the physical body and being fully immersed in the astral body. The only time I’ve ever had a full OBE was during sleep, after becoming lucid. Then I experience re-entry to my physical body as a very palpable experience. Astral projection is more like a shift in focus, a changing of mental radio station to see and interact on the astral levels, with not only spirits but also other corporeal human beings. Though the people I’ve worked with (and taught) over the years are familiar with this experience, I’ve only spoken to a few others who understand what I mean. So I’m thinking that a new term is in order… and from there, a whole subset of associated terms. Kyrene Ariadne, well-known Greek Reconstructionist (one of her many irons in the general metaphysical fire), is one who agrees with my description of this occurrence. I’ve known her for several years now and just discovered that we had this particular experience in common. I hope that she, along with anyone else who recognizes this experience, will assist me, my Work group, and Sunfell in defining and/or creating new terms, and maybe over time we can involve the subcultures that I mentioned, etc. I for one would like to see this trend grow, either here at RTV or in general. ©2007 Sheta Kaey Edited by Sheta Kaey

This column exists primarily as a way to share the odder, other plane elements of my magical and mystical practice. What I do is easily outside the realm of what most magicians do, and there’s always a risk that I will explain badly and end up looking like a kook. Nothing underlines this possibility as much as the practice of the form of astral projection I’ve come to call phasewalking. Phasewalking is a form of astral projection that is not an out of body experience (OBE), and does not induce unconsciousness. It’s done while fully conscious of both levels of reality. Magicians have done this for a very long time when they do astral ritual, but my experience goes farther. I know of many other people that practice phasewalking as well, and meet more on a near-daily basis. It’s time that I shared more about this practice here. In the early days of my relationship with Meridjet, we used to participate in what I thought of then as shared fantasies. These were mental images, daydreams if you will, in which we were able to interact for a more visual component to our interactions. Over time, the sensory input increased and came to encompass all five physical senses to some degree. But it wasn’t until five years after these early forays into shared space that I came to understand what I was doing and took a more active role in creating it. Via my associations with various people who practiced the same type of work, I gradually realized that I was severely limiting the potential of this medium (no pun intended) by trying to pigeonhole it into something I knew, which was daydreaming or fantasy. It’s arrogant to assume that everything we encounter can be filed away into familiar folders, regardless of our level of scientific or philosophical knowledge. Some things are going to be new, and when you spend your life in pursuit of metaphysical understanding, trying to carve away at a new piece of information until it fits into our preconceived little boxes is the opposite of what we need to do. This is not to say that skepticism and scientific methods should be tossed out, but these are tools for our use and are not meant to be our masters. And new experiences sometimes defy our efforts to explain them away. I’m no Mulder, but Scully wasn’t all that balanced in her view, either. Once I decided to try deliberately testing the new medium of interaction in ways that exceeded dreaming up new places to have sex, I had to come up with a way to bring more objective viewpoints into play. The first thing I needed was a static location… over there. I already had my “astral temple,” the room that every ceremonial magician is supposed to mentally build for the purposes of astral ritual. It was fairly constant for me, but it was also a) personal and b) small. So I added on to it. I built a house. As an exercise, I started to think of the astral house as a construct, like in The Matrix. Suspending judgment of the situation and looking at it as an exercise allowed me to stay emotionally detached. This kept me from stressing about the validity of the exercise and about what other people might think. (While magicians all like to claim that they don’t give two shits about what other people think, you might agree that the transparency of their argument is evident in the way they strive to impress and out-cite each other. God forbid any of them ever accept defeat on any level whatsoever. It’s a form of losing face that might as well result in the winner mounting the victim’s testicles on a wall plaque, for all the effort they make to avoid it. Luckily, I never had any balls to worry about.) To aid my house-building, I drew a layout in Adobe Photoshop®. I put the walls, doors, windows, and a general layout of the furniture as I saw it or wanted it to be. Some of it came easily and was easy to “see,” and some of it seemed to resist my efforts to include it in the design. Once the layout was finished, I started to invite my friends to visit. As you can imagine, this was a bit of an odd request, but I have open-minded friends, so they were game to give it a try, despite the fact that the majority of them had never tried astral projection on any significant level. My “map,” as I called it, didn’t include any details with regard to appearance. It was just a flat, black-lines-on-white-background layout. I’d invite a friend over and wait for them to describe to me what they saw. When things they described matched what I’d intended, I took it as validation. Things that didn’t match, I noted for future reference. If a majority of visitors (who came one at a time, in the early days) saw similarly to their version as opposed to mine, I took it as indication that I was wrong and had forced something on the environment that clearly somehow wanted to be otherwise. Sometimes, it became clear that Meridjet had made changes, which other people often spotted before me or validated things I’d noticed but dismissed as my “imagination.” This is an important point: Astral projection while conscious is said to be all about imagining, but not all your imagination. The difference is subtle but relevant. Think about this for a minute – in the case of remote viewers who somehow see (in their mind’s eye) a remote location and describe it to a third party for verification, what do you think they are doing? They are imagining what they think that remote location looks like. I believe that everyone can develop this skill (I did), and that everyone can develop the skill of phasewalking in a very similar way. I give my map (which developed and expanded over time, and later I made a new house) to many people who swear they’ll never be able to do this weird astral projection thing. Then I instruct them to imagine what the room would look like – the texture of the furniture, the colors, the floors, and so on. I have them describe it to me, and I give what encouragement I can about things they get right, and correct some of the things they get wrong (but not all of them – there needs to be room for improvement). This gives them the feedback to learn to differentiate between the feeling of seeing and the feeling of projecting. Then I tell them to just put themselves mentally in the room, so that they’re not just seeing it anymore. They can now touch things, and walk around. And it works every damn time. Some people are immediately able to move around freely and interact with Meridjet. Some people can see and touch to some degree, but don’t feel really comfortable moving around and hanging out right away. Some people still visit regularly, three and a half years later. More interesting are the people who’ve gone on to build their own astral spaces. (I think of them less like constructs now, and more like other levels of reality that can be linked at will, sort of like overlapping circles or keyrings hooked together.) Some people have gone on to raise astral families… but that’s a bit of “craziness” for another day. ©2008 Sheta Kaey Edited by Vira and Trinity

I was running late getting a column together this month, and in reading the material presented for this issue I was reminded of something I wanted to discuss with the readers of RTV. I hope you’ll bear with me as I try to articulate the strangeness of the situation, and perhaps shed some light on things or share experiences of your own, in comments. In the course of my relationship with my spirit companion, Meridjet, and the communities that subsequently sprang up in my efforts to find out more about that particular bizarre situation, a lot of odd things happened that had more significance than I thought at the time. He led me through a variety of exercises that seemed ingenuous, and that later turned out to be much more, well, applicable on a larger scale. One of these was related to astral projection. Astral projection, as it is commonly understood by the layman, is a method of leaving the body (the term “out of body experience” is typically considered synonymous) and traveling around the universe. But in reality, it’s both more and less than this common assumption would suggest. Donald Tyson points out in his new book, Soul Flight, that astral projection does not involve leaving the body at all, in the way most people think. It’s simply a shift in consciousness, using the mind to travel to distant locales – either on this plane of reality or on other planes. He also points out that when people who astral project believe themselves to be traveling on the physical plane of reality suddenly find anomalies that make no sense to them (such as finding that the door they thought led to their bathroom now leads to an underwater tunnel), they either invalidate the experience by dismissing it as fantasy or dream, or they are simply confused and have no explanation. In fact, or at least in my reality’s fact, all levels of consciousness are equally valid and equally real. Dreaming is just as real as waking – if you don’t believe me, think back – have you never had a dream in which you tried to determine which was real life and which was dream life, and in the dream, decided that you were now in reality… only to wake up and think, “Wow, what a trip! I can’t believe I thought that was real!”? I have had many of them. Similarly, in the exercises with Meridjet, he taught me that fantasy is not always what it seems to be, either. In our efforts to gain a more easily sustained contact, we did a lot of what I thought of as “shared fantasy.” This consisted of an agreed-upon scene in which we would meet and act out events. We could do this, I thought, because we have what can only be termed a psychic link, anyway, so it made it easy to ‘see’ what each other wanted to do in the scene. Later, after I learned more about the astral level(s) and how they work, I thought of these scenes or fantasies as astral constructs, similar to the Construct in the movie The Matrix. The only fundamental difference is that instead of a computer allowing us to access each others’ minds and thoughts, we had something magical and rare. Or so I thought. Long before I started doing this exercise with Meridjet, I was already familiar with the Astral Temple that most magicians (particularly ceremonial) end up using at one point or another. I’d also seen the alt.magick tagline a couple of hundred times in my day: “It’s all in your head… but you have no idea how big your head is!” But it never occurred to me, in my efforts to understand the difference between what “everyone” thought astral projection was and what magicians said astral projection was, to wonder just how deep the rabbit hole went. (The character’s name was Morpheus, remember? God of dreams. I somehow doubt that’s an accident, or even as simple as it seems. Nothing else is.) Much later, I met someone who interacted with all manner of astral oddities on a daily basis. While she turned out to be disreputable, knowing her prompted me to question more deeply and examine what was happening to me. Meridjet and I, in our seeking to find ways to interact on the astral more regularly, built a house in my mind, allowing easy access to familiar territory. (Even though going there is now a normal activity to me, it still feels entirely nutty to reveal it here. Magick is like that a good deal of the time, I’ve noticed.) Whether or not it was real in any way whatsoever was, er, immaterial, because that wasn’t really the point at the time. Then, however, an unexpected epiphany occurred. I found out that a friend of mine could spontaneously see my house, which I had never described. This in turn led to her visiting, which in turn led to me asking others to try to see it, which led to more visits, etc. Then I started to use the house as a practice set to teach other people how to access the astral plane. I drew a layout map of the place, and began to use it as a sort of gateway. I let them describe furnishings, colors, etc… and even amongst those with no astral (or even magical!) experience whatsoever, the success rate was scarily high. It was the easiest magic trick I’d ever taught anyone, and there really wasn’t anyone who couldn’t do it on pretty much the first try. In fact, we began hosting parties. While the success rate was confirmed by comparing unspoken details simultaneously, we found that interacting there was easier if everyone was in a chat room (a private-to-the-group Yahoo conference, typically), where we could talk to each other and have some sense of consensual reality. Doing this is not paramount, but it eases things considerably, and once you’ve validated your experience a couple dozen times, you want to get on with other things. However, bringing up a chat room when inviting a new person to play along often has the (expected) effect of making them question just how accurate it could be. If ten people witness the same car accident and then are interviewed afterward by the police, they will give ten different, subjective descriptions of the event. The best description comes from the consensus. There have even been studies in which a group of people are shown a film of an accident, then asked various questions. Two conclusions are apparent straightaway: one, the more sources of information, the more complete the picture; and two, leading questions lead to the power of suggestion taking hold. In our chats, there are certainly going to be some ‘power of suggestion’ issues, but we know this and we try to minimize the potentiality. We meet there for the consensus. In any case, it was just the start of it. I started to have things happen that made no sense, but they were not happening there, in My Own Personal Fantasy World™. They were happening here, where reality is allegedly a firm and solid thing that doesn’t randomly shift without a good reason. At first, I didn’t really notice this happening, because like everyone else, I tend to take the relative permanence of my everyday reality for granted. But then it got glaring. Initially, I had the rare occurrence of “wait, didn’t that already happen?” One time, for example, I heard about the death of a favorite actor who died of a heart attack. I was confused, because I’d thought that this actor had died a considerable time before (of the same cause). Naturally, I dismissed it as a misconception on my part or on possibly having received some misinformation. Later, it became more frequent and still pretty much took the form of innocuous issues such as celebrity deaths. Then one day I was reading a LiveJournal post by a friend of mine. I began the post, and then grew confused because I already knew this post, word for word. It was not a minor thing, but referred to a near-accident she had had and how she and her passenger responded to it. I left her a comment inquiring whether LJ had hiccupped and reposted a previous entry, but no, it was new. There was no previous entry and this event had never happened before. But I knew it. I knew it very clearly. Let me be clear here: I am not talking about déja vu or any sort of experience wherein one has a dreamy feeling of having been here before, or a vague memory of something similar happen. This was a crystal clear, certain-as-the-two-hours-ago memory, indistinguishable from any other memory I’ve ever had. But it had never happened. And now, I had two memories of identical events – two unique and different memories, to be exact. This same oddity has occurred randomly since then, and my ‘normal’ déja vu’s have grown stronger as well. And then there’s one other thing. Near my house, there is a highway exchange that I have to use on a semi-regular basis, as it’s on a road I have to use when I visit my mother. It involves changing from one interstate to another in the city of Houston, so it’s an integral piece of concrete spaghetti. I never see it under construction. But in the last few years, I’ve become very conscious of this exchange because I never know what ‘version’ of it I’m going to encounter. It’s a two-lane entrance ramp that merges somewhat awkwardly with the freeway, and due to the angle of approach, it’s difficult to look to see if the way is clear. In one version, the left hand entrance lane merges directly into the right hand freeway lane, making it quite dangerous due to the difficulty in determining if a semi is barreling down upon you. In the second version, the left hand entrance ramp enters the freeway alongside the right hand freeway lane, making it perfectly safe. It seems to change randomly, with no other visible sign of any difference in the road whatsoever. No one else appears to notice this. I never know until I’m coming up on it if I will need to finagle my vehicle between oncoming cars or not. I never use the right hand entrance lane because the people in that lane are invariably slower than I want to go, plus that lane becomes exit-only immediately after we enter the freeway proper. So I’m especially conscious of this particular anomaly in my reality. And I have absolutely no idea what causes it. The one thing that I’m increasingly conscious of, however, is that I really can’t take anything for granted anymore. So, has anything like this ever happened to you? I’d love to hear any theories or similar experiences. ©2007 Sheta Kaey Edited by Trinity