Imaginal Journeys in the Underworld

  “The Bodhisattva of Sleep” Once again, I didn’t seek out an experience this morning but one found me during meditation nonetheless. As usual, it came near the end of the meditation so at least I had a good 40 minutes of nothing-in-particular. I saw a twisted hellscape of a ruined forest. It was utterly destroyed but some sort of disaster. It wasn’t fire, though. No, the trees were snapped and twisted like they had been sheared down by a great wind but, even worse, everything was coated in black, tarry blood. It smelled awful. As I stood there, watching, I saw a bluish white glow that resolved into a great white stag. I knew this stag, of course. He is like the Woman in White but not quite as friendly. The stag was taking point, followed by a pack of white wolves who were trailing along behind him, not hunting him but forming a V behind him in the shape of an arrow. As they progressed across the ruined forest, they left only pure snow behind them; they were cleansing the place. Th...

  I’ve realized a couple of things lately: 1) I’m in a place where I need to learn how to trust my own soul’s guidance even though there is no one in my physical life who can verify its trustworthiness. 2) The Kosmos is much vaster than I even imagined and, at least the portion of it that I’m party to during these journeys, is both beautiful and disturbing. I’ve always relied on external guides. I can’t think of time, other than the past several years, when that hasn’t been the case. I’m uneasy trusting my own soul. Part of this is the curse of doing spiritual work because spiritual work schools specialize in making you second guess yourself, never allowing you to fully trust your experience. They do this for their own survival and other reasons. Even the Diamond Approach is guilty of this. You’re never quite there. Never quite whole. You always need more teaching to set you on the right path. Without it, you’ll fall into darkness and things will run amok. Well, I’m tired of this t...

  Today was similar in some ways to a meditation I had a week or so ago. I wasn’t seeking a vision but one kept presenting itself and finally I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I don’t have a good idea what it was about so here goes. I saw an immense drainage pipe in an underground sewer. Everything was greenish black and didn’t look healthy, as one would imagine in a sewer. I stayed with the scene and gradually found myself inside the giant drain pipe, standing in sewage. There was a coffin lying on the floor of the pipe. At first it was greenish black but then it shifted and started to glow cold blue like ice. There was something on the top of the coffin that looked like a glowing funnel. The funnel was glass but it was glowing a yellowish orange. (Yellowish orange was a common color theme for this vision as you’ll see.) Something like a brandy snifter lay next to the funnel and I understood that I was to pour the fiery blue contents inside the funnel. As I did so, the blue liquid ...

  Take this one with a grain of salt. I can’t make myself believe it but I can’t deny the potency of the experience. A hallucination is just a vision, these experiences are full-force, impacting me on so many levels. Make of it what you will. I was standing before an immense, ornate door made of obsidian and gold. This place was a necropolis, the halls of the dead. Behind me was only blackness and before me the door rose further than I could see. I realized the light that allowed me to see this was emanating from my body. I stepped forward and opened the doors, entering a vast cavern filled from floor to ceiling with coffins. They went up seemingly forever but I knew the dead inside were merely sleeping, waiting to be awakened. When I entered the room, the blackness disappeared and everything glowed a radiant white. The black stone turned silvery and all of the coffins shattered into silvery snow. The souls of the dead surrounded me, a vast army of them. They were likewise silvery ...

  A bit of Norse mythology today. I meditated for 45 minutes and, near the end, I felt a doorway open in my chest and then was standing in the lower level of an ancient temple. The temple had not been built by human hands but rather had grown up organically. The lowest level was dark and damp with rivulets of water pouring down around me, illuminated by golden-green sunlight filtering down from above. Everything was mossy and green. The ‘walls’ of the temple were trees like cypress. I looked down at my feet and saw the moss and ferns were growing over a floor of gold coins and jewels. Rather than seeming valuable, though, these trappings of material wealth felt just wrong. The temple was reclaiming a place that had been overtaken by materialism, covering it with living plants, fertile soil and warm sunlight. The aura of sacredness pervaded everything. Holiness poured down from above, soaking everything with its radiance. I was brought to tears. I climbed to the upper level of the t...

  This time it was a family, a father, mother and a young daughter. The theme was Mayan with the father being watched over by the god, Chaac, whose avatar was a frog. The mother was being watched over by the L, the god of the underworld whose avatar was a jaguar. Finally, the daughter was being guarded by Ixchel, the Moon Goddess. Her avatar was the Woman in White. I didn’t look for the vision, it came to me like they always do: Unbidden. First, I thought I was on a pedestal on the top of a giant temple with the night sky overhead but I soon realized that I was deep in the underworld and the temple’s stone was glowing an eerie black and green. There was an open coffin on the platform before me with a man’s body inside. Over him stood a deity with an ornate headdress decorated with Mayan frogs. I took the man’s hand and helped him out of the stone coffin, leading him through the darkness. We entered another vast chamber with another temple. This one was made of black stone and there...

  Continuing with the ‘a feature, not a bug’ theme is today’s meditation. No matter how many times I am reminded of it, I always go back to feeling like something is wrong with me because I’m so sensitive. Life in the everyday world is a challenge for me because I feel barraged by the knife edges of everyone’s ego. I experience on multiple levels just how effed up people are. The present world is crazy, filled with crazy people doing crazy things. The particularly twisted part of this is that most people are oblivious to the depth of our psychoses.  Believing that I am the flawed one rather than it is society that is flawed strikes me as a juvenile way of thinking. After all, children tend to blame themselves for their family’s toxicity, believing they are the cause of it somehow. Perhaps I am not so different? This morning, the silver fox spirit that I encountered a couple days ago reappeared. He seemed to feel gratitude to me for helping him out and offered me a reward. He l...