March 29, 2025

 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 illuminating the floor as if I was underwater and moonlight was streaming down. The prevailing color was cobalt blue.

There was a statue of a middle aged woman, carved from cobalt stone. She looked like a Catholic saint but I don’t really know my saints so it’s hard to tell. As I gazed upon the statue, I became aware of a figure standing in the distance. She was illuminated by a shaft of white light and wearing a white robe with gold fringing. Her face was visible beneath her hood. I recognized her as the saint carved in the stone.

“I have a difficult job for you,” she said. “Come, I’ll take you there.”

She turned and I followed. We eventually exited the cave-like chamber and emerged into a narrow gorge. A small stream flowed through the gorge, pouring downward between rocky cliffs that were covered in moss and ferns. The woman waited above while I continued down the gorge to a little waterfall emptying into a clear, cold pool. There was an entity at the edge of the waterfall. I couldn’t really make its form out precisely but it reminded me of the description of seraphim in the Bible. Clearly, this seraph was watching over something in the pool.

I waded into the pool and gazed down into the crystalline waters. Beneath the surface was a woman about my age. She looked similar to the saint but I don’t believe they were one and the same. Rather, I think the woman in the water had prayed to the saint and it was for this reason the saint found me. I don’t know how I knew but I could tell this woman had a daughter and that daughter was in trouble. In other words, I’d been called here for the daughter’s sake, not the mother’s.

I knelt down and lifted the woman from the water. As I did so, she breathed, “Find my daughter and help her.” I promised I would and helped her onto the shore where she stood just below the seraph. Looking downstream, I saw the stream disappeared and there was only mist. I knew I needed to enter the mist in order to find the girl. I walked inside and became lost in it.

I found myself on a rocky hillside surrounded by roiling fog. It reminded me of Iceland, a very spare and austere landscape. There were dead sheep scattered across the hillside, their carcasses bloody as if they had been freshly killed. 

Ahead was the crouched figure of a giant wolflike creature. She had white fur and red eyes and bloody fangs. Her pelt was flecked with blood. I only needed to look at the ‘monster’ to know this was a human soul in torment. I approached her and placed my hands on her fur, inviting her to relax.

“Rest, my friend. Just rest.”

I knew as soon as I touched her that I was the right person to do this. I’m a gay male so I’m ‘safe’. I could tell that a hetero male, hetero female or even a lesbian would not be appropriate because this ‘beast’ wouldn’t trust them. She could tell that I meant her no harm and was not going to judge her, though, and she relaxed.

I felt into her inner torment. I have no idea what had happened to make her this way but could tell she blamed herself for something awful and thought of herself as a monster as a result. This is fairly common. Usually, the souls who are stuck are stuck in self-recrimination of some sort.

We stayed together. I hugged her, murmuring soothingly to her. Very slowly, the scene around us dissolved and we were in pure blackness. “The Absolute,” I explained to her. “It’s our innermost nature. Feel it.” We did. Slowly, the golden Hu symbol materialized out of the pure blackness. We gazed upon it and I explained, “The true human of the Absolute. This is our potential.” And then we were dissolving into the Absolute.

Before we disappeared, though, I reached back and hauled the young woman’s mother along with us. When we arrived in the Crossroads, the Woman in White was waiting for us. She appeared holy as in Christian holy, something that amused me. It was just the right form for her to take for these two, though.

The mother and daughter were like little children now and they went running up to the Woman, laughing. With a quick wave, she was off, leading her young charges down the way.

I found myself back with the saint and we shared an intimate conversation. She was curious about me because she hadn’t encountered a human like me before. I understood that most of the humans who make it to the Imaginal do so as sort of representatives of a particular faith. I’m not a religious person and arrived there via an unorthodox path, the path of the Diamond Approach, the Path of the Absolute. Perhaps as a child of the Absolute, we are rare. The Absolute takes no position on good and evil, right and wrong. It’s the path of harmony, the holding of opposites, the healing of division.

There was no particular resolution between the saint and me, just a mutual sharing. I invited her to experience the Absolute with me but she shook her head, saying she couldn’t go there. Maybe one needs to be alive in a physical body in order to work through the obstacles that block us from recognizing the Absolute as our true nature? I don’t know.

I thought that was the end of it but I was wrong. I felt a doorway open in the blackness before me and a very seductive female demon emerged. I immediately recognized her as the butterfly opposite of the saint and she wore robes of black and red. As she approached, I realized that the daughter in her beast form had been under this demon’s sway and she wasn’t very happy with me for liberating her.

I’ve encountered this sort of situation before. What could I do? Certainly not apologize. But I didn’t reject her, either. I occurred to me that both the saint and demon were limited in a similar way. Neither one could cross over the ‘chasm’ of the Absolute. In that sense, I was a bridge between them. 

Again, there was nothing to do but allow everything to simply be there. There was no resolution but I left my meditation feeling like both the demon and the saint had been set back on their heels a bit by my presence. Maybe that’s a good thing?

In hindsight, I’m struck by the understanding that, in order to be a saint, one must split from their dark side. Maybe the demon was the saint’s shadow, split off for a very long time. I might be reading too much into my own importance but maybe my presence allowed the two to perceive each other because I wasn’t splitting them off? This brings up the question: Can this split be healed in the Imaginal or does it require being born into a physical body. 

If this experience contains truth, then it seems like the mother and daughter were each under the protection/control of a different side of the same being, a saint who had split off her dark side. Did my presence not only facilitate the liberation of the mother and daughter but the possible healing of the split between the saint and her darker nature as well? It’s intriguing to think about.

It seems like perception doesn’t work the same way in the Imaginal as it does in the physical world. We have to learn how to perceive and there’s always the danger that we’re projecting our own fears, desires and unconscious onto it. Being clear about what you’re perceiving is hard and it’s the reason I don’t hold up my experiences as being reliable. They might be and I might be projecting things that aren’t there or that are there but I’m distorting.

***