Imaginal Journeys in the Underworld

  If I said that I understand this morning’s vision, I’d be wrong. I’m left pondering what really happened. It was powerful and clear but the meaning escapes me…unless we go with the simplest, most straightforward explanation. I guess that applying Occam’s Razor to all of my experiences would yield the result that they’re just fantasies. However, the number and variety and unpredictability of them sort of undermines that. The simplest explanation to today’s experience, which occurred within what I would consider to be Judeo-Christian realms, is that good v. evil is a thing. If you’ve read many of these entries, you know I’m not a fan of black and white thinking and frown upon simple good versus evil thinking. In my opinion, people are far too obsessed with these generalities. Good and evil are concepts and we’ve piled so much on top of them that any meaning that may have been contained in the words has been lost or at least severely abstracted. Yet I can’t deny that my personal exp...

  Not quite the usual journey this morning but somewhat close. I’m up north visiting my mother in the house where I grew up. I’ve been aware for a while of the spirit of the land up here. I don’t quite know how to describe it other than I can feel it embrace when I return. I am mindful of expressing my gratitude when I return. Revering the sacred and giving thanks for the blessings received from the living land is important. So much of what I am learning is the importance of the sacred and the need to place it in the center of our lives. We have lost so much reverence that it is time to restore it. This morning during meditation I became aware of the spirit of the land. I welcomed the experience and soon was visited by another spirit. (The spirit of the land didn’t have a shape or form but was more of a presence whereas this other spirit had a human form and was definitely female.) I recognized this other spirit as a resident of the sacred land in this nonphysical realm. It’s nonph...

  A bit of a head-scratcher today that has left me unsettled. I’m pretty sure I did the right thing but am also questioning myself. I mean, it’s not like I have a choice with these ‘missions,’ right? They present themselves to me and I trust that they wouldn’t be available if it wasn’t the right time for the soul (or souls) involved. My actions are guided by intuition which is another way of saying non-doing. The non-doing practice is one of listening and acting upon what I ‘hear’. I’m not exactly certain about the circumstances surrounding the death of the souls I encountered this morning. If I were to take a guess, I’d say it was a small cult whose members all died simultaneously. I’m not ready to go so far as to say it was a suicide cult because I get the sense their deaths were less suicide and more murder. But the picture is unclear and it feels like a complex mixture involving both suicide and murder. People are strange so it shouldn’t be surprising that their deaths can be s...

  This morning’s journey was a tear-jerker. I cry at least once during these journeys into the Imaginal. I can’t help it; it’s an automatic response when I’m confronted with the full force of each soul’s story. There is beauty and suffering and all sorts of emotions. Souls that are stuck carry a lot of baggage with them and my heart has to be open or the meeting wouldn’t happen. Somehow, I’m led by my heart to find them. I shudder to use the cliched terms ‘frequency’ and ‘resonance’ because they are bandied about by all sorts of spiritual snake-oil salespeople these days. However, it’s not wrong to say there is an affinity. Perhaps this affinity or attunement is what leads me to them? I only know that I don’t get attracted to souls that I don’t empathize with. So, maybe it’s empathy? I’ve begun to realize that a blocked feeling in my heart presages the visit of a lost soul. It’s taken me a long time to understand that this feeling doesn’t have anything to do with me or my personal ...

  I had another multi-realmed experience today during meditation. These experiences are fluid and shifting. Also, the symbolism is more relevant to the person I’m sent to find but it pulls imagery out of my own experience to match it (more or less.) First, I became aware of golden light in the midst of dark green and black. I approached. It took some time to resolve itself but I finally perceived a being in the midst of the golden light. The light, I should point out, was like buttercream rather than honey. In fact, everything in the midst of the pool of light appeared to be made from buttercream. (I’ve been to a ‘buttercream realm’ before during these journeys.) The figure before me was of ambiguous gender and appeared to be wearing a Medieval jester’s costume. As I watched, it collapsed, breaking into many pieces. What to make of this? I stared down at the fragments. As I did so, they dissolved, forming a black hole. I traveled down into the hole, finding myself in a vast, dark b...

  Today, I saw an icy, dead eye staring at me. It was ice blue and covered in frost. This entity, I knew, had come looking for me. Her icy appearance was an indication of being from the Land of Souls. Indeed, as I looked around, I realized I was back in that realm and this being before me appeared to be a horse. It was ghostly pale, blue-white, and its intestines were hanging out of its belly. Around it were ghostly scavengers, coyotes and ravens. The scavengers were ringed about a scene of carnage. The snow was covered in red blood, the only color besides white and blue in this realm. Curious, I stepped forward to examine this circle of blood. Somehow, I knew that my own soul’s blood was required before anything could happen so I casually opened a small vein on my arm and let my blood drip out. It joined the blood of the others strewn across the ground. Blackness arose around me then and, when it dissipated, I was standing in another realm that mirrored the one I had just left. Th...