Imaginal Journeys in the Underworld

  Was I punked by a rich, white woman on a shamanic tourist visa? I guess I will never know but, in hindsight, that sure seems like what happened. If you’ve read these entries (you poor thing!), you’ll know that I sometimes encounter the souls of people who aren’t dead. I think that happened this morning. During meditation, I became aware of a curious creature. It appeared to be like one of those dumb ‘drinking bird’ novelty toys from the 1970s. (I thought they were so cool back then!) This ‘novelty toy,’ however, was life-sized and completely black. It looked just like the toy; in other words, it wasn’t a living thing. I’m pretty sure it represented the ego structure of the woman to whom it belonged. This was how her ego appeared (to me, at least) in the in-between realms. The bird toy was a good structure for her ego, it turned out, because after sitting with the silly, life-sized toy for a while, I realized that its function was to give form to her inner self. Looking at it, I b...

  I haven’t ‘traveled’ much lately but did journey this morning and I also remember an experience from about a month ago. In that one, I was in a grand, moonlit ballroom. In the center of the dance floor, there was an enormous porcelain doll that looked like a woman in a ball gown, dancing soundlessly across the floor. It was ghostly and more than a little creepy. Gazing upon it, I realized that there was a soul of a woman inside this doll. As soon as I saw that, I was inside the doll with her.  I realized this soul was different from most of the souls that I encounter because her appearance was pretty distinct and she seemed quite emotionally stable. (She appeared to me as a woman in her thirties with short, brown hair. She also had an air of determination but the determination was a determination to avoid something, not to accomplish something. I was curious why I had been called to her because she didn’t seem like she needed any help. The longer I was in her presence, thoug...

  This morning, as so often happens, I could feel the souls of the deceased passing through me on their journey. The metaphor is this: I was aware of being a tree in an immense forest of ghostly blue trees. These trees were mostly ‘asleep’ but I was aware of being luminous white-blue, a tree made of light. Inwardly, my ‘tree’ was like a crystal palace. I perceived the Woman in White’s presence and moved out to meet her, walking through moonlit field to a little hill that looked back on the forest. My ‘tree’ was shining and luminous among the other slumbering trees.  Looking forward, I saw a sea of flowing dragons. They were luminous blue and white, undulating around each other. I was reminded of the wyrm that is supposedly devouring the tree of life in Norse mythology but these dragons were not sinister or dangerous or destructive. “Correct,” the Woman in White said, reading my thoughts. “But they are ferocious when confronted by trespassers. They don’t attack you because you ...

  Earlier this week, I experienced my soul as a doorway through which the souls of the dead passed. On one side was pure blackness and on the other was a golden world. The souls drifted through, revitalized and ready to continue on. It’s not exactly unlike other experiences I’ve had but there was a key difference. At a certain point, the Woman in White appeared and we had an intimate exchange that is only possible when you are in the Numinous without boundaries or solidity as we’re used to it in the physical world. After a while, we merged and I experienced a heightening of awareness and power as our two souls became more than the sum of us. It was a mindblowing experience that left me scintillating all over. Combined with her, her teaching was even more powerful as she showed me the experience of the White (as a counterpart of the Black.) It was both dissolving and emptying but not exactly annihilating. I took it be a taste, that she was showing me something through the direct exp...

  The Woman in White found me today, not willing to wait for me to take the initiative and see where she takes the souls I bring her. It turned out to be yet another teaching from my Shizun , whether I felt I was ready or not. Of course, she knows me better than I know myself so I was definitely ready; she’d never force me to do anything I wasn’t prepared for. I started out in a familiar place, not the Crossroads but close by: The realm of the Soul River. It feels familiar because I’ve visited it countless times before, both in this lifetime and numerous other times before. Each culture has its own equivalent to this realm which makes me wonder if it’s the same realm perceived differently by people from different cultures or if there really are multiple realms? Given my experiences so far, it’s likely the former. The reason I say this is because the Woman in White and her compatriots–as well as me–appear differently to different people, depending on what they expect or what will ma...

  This morning’s meditation took me both in a familiar and an unexpected direction. As I sat, I felt more strongly than ever how the simple factness of my Being is important, essential even. This is a lesson I need to learn over and over as a Point Three fixation on the Enneagram. Even in my lofty state (haha), I still get swept up in the belief that my value comes from what I do, not who I am. It’s deeply ingrained in me. These experiences during meditation serve to correct that misconception and also point to a key difference between life in the physical world and life in the nonmanifest realms.  In the physical world, each person is said to have value as a person but we mainly just give lip service to that notion. When it comes down to it, we really don’t value a human life that much. It’s sad but true. We’re so materialistic that the lives of wealthy people are generally worth more than those of almost anyone else. There are exceptions but not many. Further, in the physica...

  I was kind of dumb. For the past many months when I meditate, I’ve been pretending that I have no outside help, no teacher, no one to tell me what I’m experiencing or how to interpret it. It’s not a bad idea in principle but in practice it subtly reinforced my ego structure and I inadvertently was doing a quintessential American thing: Attempting to be a rugged individualist. You know the American myth of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps and soldiering on? That’s basically what my meditations became.  I couldn’t figure out why my heart was feeling increasingly pinched. Finally, when I realized that I was blocking out the expansive field of my soul’s experience and allowed that awareness to permeate my meditation, things got a lot better. My heart no longer feels quite as pinched and my meditations are different. It is important not to do anything while meditating and forcing myself to narrow my focus was a kind of doing. One thing that got blocked out as a result of my...