Imaginal Journeys in the Underworld

  The beings in the Imaginal are bemused by us humans. To them, we seem so hyperactive, so driven. We are accustomed to living in time and thus are always mindful that our time is limited. This tends to make us frantic, compelled to accomplish as much as possible before it’s too late. The non-humans in the Imaginal have no such compunction to get as much done as quickly as possible. There is no time there and consequently they don’t feel rushed to do anything. They find our mania peculiar because they know there is no reason to rush. There is all the time in the world. Today, I was back at the shadowy crossroads, the same place I was yesterday when I took leave of the man I’d been ‘helping.’ I felt the same despair that I felt yesterday as well. It’s a despair based on being overwhelmed. The darkness of humanity’s ‘negative karma’ is daunting. There is so much to work through. So much suffering, so much hurt, so much wrong to be redressed. It feels insurmountable. As I stood there ...

  I failed. I seem to need regular reminders of my fallibility during these excursions into the Imaginal. I guess they keep me humble. The overriding message lately has been, “There is nothing you need to do except breathe and stay in your belly.” Nevertheless, I’m human and I have an ego and I therefore can’t resist identifying with the experiences in the Imaginal and believing that there is something about *me* that’s making things happen. Well, I guess in a way that’s true but the something has nothing to do with my actions or abilities; rather, it has to do with simply being present. This is something that anyone who meditates or engages in a spiritual practice can “do.” Yesterday, I drawn back to the African American man and also his murderers. It was a difficult meditation because the holding of space involved holding the deep and painful schism that causes the violence and hatred to erupt in the first place. As humans, we split. It’s a primitive defense, maybe the most primi...

  I’m pretty worn out. These forays into the Imaginal are draining. I feel like I’ve just attended one of my Ridhwan retreats. There is this certain kind of fatigue that sets in after a spiritual retreat when ‘muscles’ I haven’t worked are spent. It is different from physical or even mental fatigue; it’s the fatigue of the three centers working in concert with each other. The Imaginal allows for a hyper-real experience because all three centers are firing simultaneously. This doesn’t happen in everyday life very often because usually I’m only nominally using the mind/heart/belly subtle sensing. Usually, I’m just using my physical and emotions senses, maybe with a dash of subtle sensing thrown in. This is the opposite. Instead of mostly using my physical and emotional senses, I’m using the subtle senses full tilt. Moreover, I am working and working hard to be open to everything that is occurring. It’s intense and tiring. It’s a good thing my meditations are only 40 minutes long beca...

  I keep getting reminded how naive I am about these journeys in the Imaginal. Whoever is in charge (that a partial jest) seems to be sending me on progressively more challenging forays. The one that started a few days ago is no exception. Remember how at first I wasn’t sure about the race of the man I was sent to help? He was caked in white clay or wax - I couldn’t tell. It took me a while to realize he’s African American. The white clay/wax was sort of a red herring at first but it finally became clear this morning what it was. Yesterday, while I meditated, I was surprised that he was still with me. I thought the reason I’d been brought to him was to reunite him with his daughter. But when I sat down to meditate, he was there. His body was mostly shrouded in darkness and I could just see his back and torso. I tried looking at his face to see his eyes but was somewhat taken aback when I realized his eye sockets were black. They sort of shone with shining blackness so they weren’t ...

  Even after a year, I still waffle between thinking I’m hallucinating and trusting that at least some truth is being revealed to me by way of the Imaginal. Today was no exception. I started out thinking that it was all in my head (which, I suppose, it is. Or at least, it’s in my soul which appears mostly within my body awareness.)  You’ll recall from yesterday’s entry that I encountered the man who was worried about his daughter (or at least I think it was his daughter) because he’d died, leaving her alone. He took up residence within my soul and I could feel the patterns of tension in his body within mine. It’s clear when this happens that the tensions aren’t mine, although they do have some impact on my experience. I tend to feel slightly numb emotionally when the soul that is occupying my own is numb. It’s not bad, just noticeable. This morning, my meditation was just a regular meditation at first. Gradually, though, I became more aware of his experience in my body. I lear...

  I had a fews days of rest after the last experience during which my meditations were simply meditations and nothing visited me. I wasn’t bored or worried, though. If my meditations went back to simply being meditations with no further visits into the Imaginal, I would be fine with that. I know that the Imaginal uses me as needed and I don’t use it. My job is to do nothing beyond continue to sit in my meditation practice; the Divine does everything. I’m just a vessel, an ornery and mean-spirited vessel. ;-) It’s funny how I dislike people in the physical world for the most part. At best, I tolerate them. Mostly, I seek to avoid them. There are very few who I go out of my way to be around. I feel like I get flooded with their inner experiences when I’m near them and it’s exhausting. I want to slap them, tell them to wake up, grow up, or whatever. It’s clear that most people are living their lives upside down; i.e., prioritizing the wrong things, wasting their precious time on this ...

  This proved to be an interesting development in my experience in the Imaginal. For a few days after encountering the young girl who had been assaulted and ostensibly murdered, I felt her present within my soul; it was she was ‘borrowing’ my body and I could feel her body as it was mine own. It’s similar to my private sessions with my Diamond Approach teacher where he encourages me to feel into my body; usually, the issues or blockages I am experiencing psychologically show up in my body as patterns of tension, contractions, numb areas, etc. As the session goes on, I inquire into those places and usually the issue comes into sharper focus, eventually resolving itself. It was like this with the girl. I could feel the frozen, numb areas of her body inside my own. In doing so, it seems like this allowed her to experience them more clearly and she could allow True Nature to work on her. After all, this is what happens in my private sessions in the physical world; True Nature manifests...

  I see now why I’ve been pushed to focus on developing my belly center. On the surface, it’s clear that occupying the belly center is important for embodiment. By embodiment, I mean fully occupying the physical body, feeling it as completely as possible. The belly center is also important for the soul body. I’m reminded of the maxim, ‘As above, so below,’ in this: Meaning that there are parallels between the physical and numinous. It’s just as important to fully occupy the soul body, the physical body’s correlate in the numinous. The reasons for this weren’t immediately apparent but after today’s meditation, I’m seeing why more clearly. The ability to fully occupy/sense the soul body allows one to fully occupy another’s soul body and experience their experience. This is important for helping other souls to heal and process their experiences, especially traumatic ones.  This morning, I started meditating and saw in my mind’s eye saturated blue and green. It took me a while of ...

  It seems like by being Being, we are able to transcend the temporal or maybe it’s more accurate to say that as an embodied being, we have the potential to be aware of simultaneously being in both the temporal and the numinous. By numinous, I mean the realm outside of time and space or inclusive of it. The temporal is manifest in time and space so I guess you could say the numinous includes the temporal. I guess, I’m trying to say that our awareness can be located in the numinous which means it also includes the temporal. Clear as mud? I write this because I was called into the numinous once again and found myself in another time and place. Or least in the representation of another time and place in the numinous. This time, I was inside a tomb. It was ornately decorated in a style that may have been Egyptian or maybe even Minoan. I couldn’t place the decor exactly but it was clearly from a long time ago. Apis (which is the name I’m using these days to refer to the entity who holds...