Imaginal Journeys in the Underworld

  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...

  It’s been a while since I’ve had a journey. I don’t know why that is but I never seek out these journeys so I guess I’m not in control of when I have them. I don’t know who decides, probably no one. It’s probably more a case of the being available and being needed aligning. This morning I first found myself in a very green place. It was like a glade in the midst of newly-leafed sugar maples. The leaves were fresh and vibrant green, almost chartreuse in color. It felt like a near realm, sacred but not out of reach of humans, although I suspect they are mostly dead when they find themselves there. I stayed with my meditation and gradually sunk deeper into the ground. The earth below was completely black. This wasn’t the pure blackness of the Absolute, although it wasn’t separate from the Absolute, either. (Nothing can be truly separate from the Absolute, after all.) I was among many. They writhed around me, human and wormlike at the same time. They were blind but responded to my pr...

  Today, I found myself in a familiar place. I don’t know exactly why it felt so familiar but it has appeared in other journeys over the past few years. A forested realm that was verdant and beautiful, bursting with life. Simply being there was nourishing because even the air was succulent. There was a creature of golden yellow and green waiting for me. I suppose you could describe it as a dragon but it was more than that. Also, I felt like I knew it somehow, although I’m not sure why. I sat with the place, the forest, the creature, eventually opening myself so the creature could show me where I was needed. As soon as I did so, I was transported to another realm entirely. A shadowy place that felt underground, the beings there were humanlike but had horns on their shaggy heads and glowing yellow eyes. Their faces were satyr-like and so were their bodies. Their skin was blue and their hair black. Despite the link between satyrs and sex, there wasn’t any sort of erotic charge so I ha...

  A brief encounter that didn’t seem to have to do with the soul of a dead person but I suppose it may have been a person. I can’t be sure. I’ve seen creatures like this one before and have written about them here. They appear as black wolf-like creatures but their bodies are skeletal so they are like the skeleton of an anthropomorphic wolf covered in black fur. I felt empathy for this creature as I regarded him. I could tell he was suffering. He told me (without words) that he was tired of being a creature of fear and darkness and wanted only to give up, to die, to surrender. I cradled him in my arms and he hugged me tightly, crying. (I was crying, too.) Contact with me brought the annihilation of the Absolute but also release and rebirth. When we emerged from the blackness of the Absolute, I realized I was wearing a woman’s body and I was holding an infant in my arms. We were in a milky white pool of water. The Woman in White appeared and started laughing as soon as she saw me. “...

  I’ve had a few other experiences lately but haven’t recorded them. They have followed a familiar trajectory, though. I’ve realized that, while I have by no means worked through all of my personal baggage, I’ve worked through the basic ego issues and now barriers are relatively few and far between. Because of this, I’m aware that most of the time when I feel a tension or numbness or pinching or pain somewhere in my chest area, it’s not my stuff that I need to look into; rather, it’s another soul’s conflict trying to get my attention. This feels like the definition of empathy if you consider the empathy is the attunement to the state of another. You don’t need to be physically in the presence of another; you just need to be open and available. Today, there was numbness around the top of my chest. I sat with it and found myself in a beautiful but eerie underground chamber that may also have been under the sea. It was black but there were pale beams of light here and there illuminati...