Imaginal Journeys in the Underworld

  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...

  The Four Angels: The Pi, the Xiao, the Pixiu and the Human I hope you realize that I hold all of these visions with a grain of salt. Most of the time, like yesterday, they appear to be a calling to help a fellow soul in need. Sometimes, though, they appear to be teachings personal to me. Whatever they are, I don’t hold them to deeply prophetic and realize they could just be my extra vivid imagination. The feelings they bring out in me, though, are real. What the feelings mean…well, that’s up for debate. Today as yesterday, I held out until the last five minutes of my meditation. At that time, I realized I was standing in a rather ugly place. It was fiery red but the red was the pulsing color of blood, not of fire. It wasn’t hell per se but it was definitely an underworld location. Even though the place pulsed with the red of blood, it didn’t feel fleshy but was sharp and rocky. The overwhelming feeling was one of suffering. A tunnel appeared in the pulsing rock and, staying put, ...

  As you know, I’ve been focusing on meditation, simply allowing things to arise without pushing them away or encouraging them to come closer. This feels really important for right now and I’m not inclined to change my meditation practice. Even so, occasionally an image or entity comes through. I don’t do anything, just stay present and don’t follow it. The image will then sometimes shift and evolve. Today was just such a meditation. Towards the end of the meditation, I saw fire. An entity emerged from the fire and approached me. I was engulfed in fire that incinerated everything but left me unharmed. When the fire receded, I was standing in an eerie, green forest. A figure emerged from the trees, a familiar stag whose outline glowed whitish blue. It turned and led me through the forest, although I did not walk or move. It was more like the forest dissolved around us. The stag disappeared and I was in a crypt that was lit with the sickly green light of decay. There was an open coff...