Well, the new IG and I started our first meditation today.

It was on “my biggest problem.” This was destined to be a problem meditation because, of course, it’s on a problem. The bigger the problem, the more likely the archetype will be unclear, the process confusing, etc.

(Unless it’s one of those where the arch is instead, utterly terrifying. I recall doing a couple of ‘fear of psi’ archmeds, which I thought would be no issue at all, that were so frightening I had to do them during the day with my eyes open, standing against one wall and placing my sense of the archetype at the other side of the room. But usually problems start fuzzy and confusing, not scary.)

My idea of ‘my biggest problem’ is that IG should choose. It could be something physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, some issue in my manifested reality, some combination of things — totally up to IG. After working one round, the next request for ‘my biggest problem’ should, logically, be something different, as we assume that the one already dealt with is then improved.

Meditations on any problem are a pain in the ass. They often take me several tries, even days if not a week, to get all the way through the process. The diplomatic explanation is that it is a difficult process requiring much internal adjustment, and this has “its own time”. The plain explanation is that I’m a wimp and tend to use distraction/denial as a shield, so it just takes me forever. I have what my buddy Eric calls the OLAP syndrome: “Adjusting this, doing that, then re– OH LOOK, A PONY!” Some kind of psycho-spiritual ADD.

I wasn’t looking forward to doing this with my new IG, since I don’t know her yet and am slightly nervous as to how it’s going to go. But this is the way it worked out, so I will have to assume there is some reason for that and go with it.

29APR08 5:30pm cdt

When I opened up my interior world, I just really didn’t feel like going down to the sub-world where my archmeds are done. I figured this was the first sign of denial. So I started to go, but then I really didn’t feel like getting there in the normal way. I don’t mean I was feeling creative. I mean I felt resistant to the point of, I would have gotten stubborn and angry if anything had tried to ‘make’ me.

My interior space is at the top of a super high plateau (much like the pic on my Red Cairo blog in a way which is why I chose it) and I have a process for getting to my archetype subworld: I walk down this dirt path to a metal cage elevator at the top-side of the back of the plateau. I ride it down to ground level. I open it and walk across a small field of corn which is just a bit taller than I am (I can’t see over it). At the edge of the field there is a brief clearing surrounding the opening of a cave.

I step into the cave (which is mostly-dark) and just a few steps in a small creek/river comes up and parallels the pathway. About 15 steps in there is a tiny stone footbridge that goes over the creek to the left, and just a few steps straight off that is another cave opening, this into an outer world. But not the same world that I came from somehow. I go to the outer world, take a right and walk along the wall of hill (that is the cave I walked through), and then take a left and walk straight across a small field to a space under a huge spread-out tree. There are some benches there, and that’s where I meet IG.

So the overall process is that I go ‘deep down’ and then I go inward, left, right, left. Many IG meds are done fully within a cave, but I only go through it briefly, and I always begin in my interior space (up on the plateau). There are other areas both in the outer world (the plateau world) and in the inner world (the cave world).

But I just so did NOT feel like going down there in the ordinary way. So this was a little different for sure, but I imagined having wings like Daedelus, and I flew down there, swooping around a bit, and then finally coming up beside the cave entrance and slowing down till I was walking. That was kind of cool.

The creek in the cave was bigger than normal. God only knows why. It’s been the same for like 15+ years now but today it’s different.

I went to see IG and we just stood there. I still don’t see her well. I felt frustrated again, that she is not my last IG and I don’t know her and I didn’t feel like doing this with her. I stalked and paced around the small area under the tree for awhile. I got distracted by life several times and had to come back to it. Finally I got my act together and told her what I wanted.

She began creating something. No IG has done that before. I ask for an archetype, they manifest someone/thing, and I turn around and work with it. I’ve never had an IG create anything other than an archetype behind me.

She created this giant sphere that went from the ground to far above us, in a circle as big as the cave wall across the small field would allow. Until we were enclosed. And then she said, “This is your biggest problem.”

But when I turned around, instead of an archetype behind me, there was stuff all over the place, around us. People? Creatures? Machines? I couldn’t tell — just STUFF that was rolling and flying and bouncing off the walls and ceiling. I had the impression of something like a carnival, of lots of garish colors and offbeat people or things and machines in motion and cluttered jumbled “chaos”.

I stood there trying to see it better, as the motion was clear in little pieces of time, but the details of everything was far too fuzzy, and I finally decided I was going to have to take a break and do some stuff in life, think about it a bit, and come back to deal with it later.

I’ve never had an archetype that wasn’t just a single something. I’ve a single thing in obvious pieces but that’s not the same. I felt like it was a whole small world of stuff. No idea what to do with it. So… more later.

30APR08 7:00pm cdt

When I returned to the interior today, a ton more outer guides were on the plateau than usual. I eyed them suspiciously. “Does this relate to the new IG, or to the med I’m doing right now?” I asked.

“Everything relates to you,” one said helpfully.

(Outer guides, like Star Trek’s infamous Deanna Troi, reveal ‘secrets’ that’d be blindingly obvious to an idiot. Why ask?)

I stood at the back edge of my super high plateau and looked down at the tiny valley with corn field and cave below. I imagined my wings and dived off, and flew around until I was at the mouth of the cave, and I went in, and then out the other side into the arch world, and over to see IG. When I nodded to her she shifted me inside the huge dome-structure of the archetype she’d created and I was back where I was when I left.

And just as confused. I closed my eyes (even inside my head) and tried to just ‘feel’ everything around me. The garish colors and flashing lights and constant chaotic jumbled motion seemed just as apparent somehow. I saw flashes of faces that I’ve been seeing in my head since I left the archmed yesterday: sorta like human faces, but exaggerated in some cartoonish or stylized way that is just “proportionally off”. I’d already realized (finally) that some of the sudden visual *ping* of a face was related to the “in progress” medition, but… so what. They just looked like bizarre characters.

I stood there awhile and finally decided that in order to really get a handle on even a single thing, I needed to get a better lock on it. Since I couldn’t see anything clearly when I looked at it directly, I locked onto one thing/entity in motion and imagined pouring energy into it, trying to get it to become more clear to me. It seemed to get larger, fuller, denser and heavier, and a man with super red hair and beard but a disproportionately long face in the middle, who seemed to be riding some kind of motorized thing around the side of the dome walls, seemed a bit more apparent. Unfortunately, this didn’t give me an idea what to do with him, because I had to deal with ALL of it, and he and his whatever thing he was riding were just one tiny part of a much bigger confusing mess of motion.

I finally turned to IG and said, “Ok, you got me. I give up. What the heck am I supposed to *do* with all this??”

She didn’t speak but into my head came the “understanding” that I needed to allow “lower levels of brain operation to help me” get a handle on all these disparate elements. Rather like Abramelin on Invisibility, when that identity talked to me about the multiple “levels” of thought. She was ‘implying’ that I was supposed to realize I couldn’t possibly multi-track all this at once, and allow parts of my mind better at handling complex stuff to take care of it.

I anchored myself in the very center of the dome-arch, and I imagined energy coming into my chakras, and going out of them, and connecting with everything in there, and I breathed in and out calmly in an attempt to connect. I imagined that I was clear and energy could flow through me to and from them.

I relaxed, and told my mind, “Find the pattern in the motion.” Like those magic-eye pictures, I had the idea suddenly that the motion was as much a hidden pattern my mind could find, as those visual pictures are. But you can’t do it consciously, you have to let lower levels of your mind take care of that. (Probably the idea was sparked by the Abramelin association a few moments earlier, since I thought of those pics during that experience too.)

So I asked what felt like deeper parts of myself (the savant to my idiot :-)) to calculate all of that, to find the pattern in all of it, and to arrange the proper connection between me and all the energy-forms in the dome. I sat quietly and held that intent, feeling it gradually happen, feeling more and more of the bulk forms and motions “link in”. Eventually, I could feel it — not super clear still, but enough to take it seriously — I had everything connected “through” me. The motion had slowed to slow-motion in most cases, not like stopped, more like suspended in time.

I wasn’t sure what to do with everything now that I had it, but I figured I should attempt the normal archetype process with it, even if so far, nothing about this process had been normal at all. I wanted to run the water of life, light of life, etc. over and through everything/everyone, but I couldn’t seem to make it work. They were all over the place and indistinct.

So I stood there for a bit more trying to figure out what the solution was to this. Then it came to me. I pulled every thing to me in turn, rapidly, absorbing everything. It gave me the impression of shining two films on the same screen, then three, then four–then dozens and dozens. When it was done, I felt like I had many dozens of disparate things inside and the end-result picture was just a big blot inside me, with nothing clear.

So I pulled the water of life and light of life through me one by one, imagining that anything IN me, I have authority for, and I imagined cleaning and purifying every “layer” in me (energy forms from the dome I’d absorbed), until everything was equally respected as its own “thing”, pure and clean, and yet also “harmoniously together in me”. This took a little while but was eventually done.

I was surprised, though, that the deliberate merge with all those things hadn’t supplied any physical “rush” like a good arch-merge does. Now granted this is a problem, often you can’t merge or you feel nothing if you haven’t had a good integrative experience in the med, but I’d done all that cleansing and everything and still not felt anything.

I felt that I was supposed to release all the energy-forms, to be themselves. I was expecting they would go back to their normal ways.

But my garish, cluttered chaotic carnival aesthetic, had shifted. Now it was more like some kind of flying faery ballet. There were still colors, but they were iridescent rather than garish. There was still motion all over, but it all seemed graceful, like a planned dance. There were still people, but they seemed like beautiful be-ribboned sorts rather than bizarre carnies.

So apparently the work inside me had worked.

Then I felt was the time I should be merging–now, as equals, with respect, not to control them but to share with them myself, as much as anything. So I imagined inviting all of them back in, and genuinely opening myself to them. And everything joined me inside, and it was interesting, yet I still felt no sense of the real merge. As the last objects and things in motion at the farthest points finally shifted into me, everything was gone–the dome was empty–and so I imagined that I just collapsed the whole dome into energy and absorbed that too.

And THEN I felt the merge, and my whole body got the deep-buzz-shivers-rush that a decent merge will give you. Not a great one mind you–but enough to recognize that whatever I did, had at least some effect.

I turned to IG. “I feel like I didn’t do it good enough, or do enough, or there is something else I’m supposed to do,” I complained, “But I don’t know what.”

“You did fine,” she said kindly, and kissed my forehead. Whoa. No IG has ever done that kind of thing unless I knew them reaaallllly well. I wonder if that’s a difference in the gender (maybe some mother association?) or if, as an identity, she is simply different than the IGs I’ve had before and I should just accept that.

I will be back for more. I left, before my ridiculous emotional sense of hoping to please her started to embarrass me, and I flew back up to my plateau — I actually *felt* the sense of soaring and “increased elevation” which was kind of cool.

Later

When I got to the top, all the OGs (outer guides) were still there. I imagined pulling them in like I had the others, and giving them energy, and then I put them back. Nobody moved. “Did that change anything or help at all?” I asked.

“Not really,” one admitted. “A few of us of different nature, slightly.” I sighed. Outer guides and inner guides somehow have different dynamics I still don’t understand well. (One of the funniest experiences was when I dragged an outer guide into one of my inner guide meditations. He acted like it blew his mind.)

So I just imagined sending energy to all of them, and then formally requested they all help me however they thought was best… as long as it wasn’t anything that harmed my health, body, car, finances, family, house, or… well ok then darn it, just help me in a way that I consider positive or at least not seriously negative!

I was going to wrap it up but I felt like I should do something else. I wasn’t sure what, but I remembered that up ahead on the plateau was a spot I’d once gone down through and eventually gotten to the bottom of my brain stem, which is where my psychology thinks a “control center” is located. Actually there are a few of these, but this one, when I visited it in 1996, was like a small room filled with TV-style monitors, and a man working the room, and a machine that at the time, took a VCR tape, and then sent the message out to the whole body-life-reality. Back then, it shot gold light through every screen and I literally FELT gold-light-energy rushing through my entire nervous system (and a seeming miracle of synchronicity happened 15 seconds later). Anyway, I thought maybe I would go back there.

But I decided to skip the long intuitive process of stairs, elevators, slides, hiking, etc. that had formed the bizarre downward path last time, and I just imagined closing my eyes and sliding. It was like being on a large water slide, but not as much fun… I turned various ways and the slide turned all over and back again and sometimes up again for a bit, and eventually dumped me out in a hallway in front of the door. I went in, and the same guy was there. Normal looking guy.

I asked him if he could help me best construct my “new programming” that I wanted him to implement. He nodded yes. I started explaining that I wanted to do more viewing, but wait no, I want to be better at it, but no wait, what I really want is to be more aware, but wait no, what I really want is to be more aware BUT in deliberate and interesting and helpful ways (I’ve learned the hard way not to just ask for evolution or awareness–there’s all kinds of crap I really do NOT want to be ‘aware’ of again), but wait no, what I really want is just to be more MOTIVATED to be CONSTRUCTIVE toward awareness because I know I’m good at all this if I just bother doing it, and –

– he stopped me, and I didn’t have to look at him to know if he were in this world his eyes would have been rolling about me. “One clear instruction,” he said. “And it needs to be something you will allow.” That gave me pause. How do I know?

So I finally said, “I want to be more positively motivated toward increasing my awareness.” He nodded. “Do you need me to merge or something?” I asked. “Do you want sex?” He actually laughed. (Jesus — I am so hormonal lately!) “No.” he said, seeming bemused. “But you can join me for the process if you want.” And he stepped into me from behind me, as if our bodies were simply sharing the same space, and he put our hands out, and energy from them created a small disk, like a CD but about half that size and thicker. Then he/we dropped it in this machine that sent the instructions out everywhere, and pressed the button.

Nothing happened.

“It’s dark and silent,” I said, confused. “What happened to the gold light and stuff, like all those years ago?”

“You are restricting this,” he said. And he/we looked inside me, and saw that particularly in the energetic area around my waist, a little below/above that, I had tons of natural energy pathways, but they were all locked miserably together. Imagine something like… a thin garden hose, winding all over, and then imagine you’ve taken thin clear fishing line, and you have basically sewed it all together–not pierced anywhere, just wrapped so tightly all over that it is all held together and nothing can move at all.

I imagined light, then I asked for the Violet Flame (an old exercise from eons past) and imagined a whole lightning bolt of it flashing through my body and specifically dissolving that entrapping thread-stuff. It dissolved off part of it. I did this several times, and he was helping by shaking and separating the energy coils as soon as I got the entrapping stuff off, until finally I was pretty much clear inside at least as far as this was concerned.

“Let’s do this again,” he suggested. I closed my eyes, and imagined ‘sharing’ myself with him and ‘allowing’ the new instructions.

I saw them go out… but it was kind of dim. And I didn’t really get any rush from it at all, and that’s a hard-core rush when it happens (even compared to archs), so I don’t know that I accomplished much. I thanked him anyway, figuring I’ll need to go back there again at some point and try again, and I returned to the top of the plateau.

And then…

Just as I was about to wrap it up, I thought of the Four. I didn’t have time to visit them. Nero appeared about two feet in front of me, slightly to the right. If I’d put my right arm nearly straight out I’d have hit him. I was surprised. “This is my outer guide area,” I said. “You can show up here?” “I am a guide,” he said, as if stating the obvious. “Of course I can.”

I thought about that for a moment–true, he is part of the … 16 or 32 or whatever it is that is the next outer-circle to The Four–but the first time I met him, it was as a guide, that is true. I still haven’t done the exercises he set for me (visualizations, kind of similar to occult-magick exercises) and have avoided him because although I know he is supposed to teach me, and he acts like I’m waaaay overdue for stuff (as if I’m irresponsible kinda), I feel sort of embarrassed about my laziness.

I closed up the world (I imagine rolling it up into a microdot and storing it in my heart chakra), and sat back against my pillows, and opened my eyes and looked at my cat.

And Nero reappeared a couple feet in front of me again. Not really visually, although I had a sense of his visual. Not… aesthetically. Not sensory-ally. I don’t know how to describe it. It isn’t even what I would normally call an ‘awareness’ because that usually has a nearly-physical inner-sense attached. It was like just a pure mental awareness, perhaps. I said, “Good lord! You mean you can just like… just appear even HERE? Outside my inner/outer guide area?!”

“Yes,” he said. I didn’t know what to say. Part of me was thinking, “That is so cool! Maybe I could use this like, during viewing or something, as a new sort of interactive thing. He can monitor me, haha!” Another part of me was thinking, “Oh, GREAT. Now if I wanna scratch my butt I’m going to feel like some spiritual entity is watching me!” He grinned. “Not my focus,” he assured me. “Well,” I said, feeling sort of weird now, “Then I want to be able to say, like ‘Curtain!’ and have you vanish, so I don’t feel like you’re watching in… you know… private times.” He sort of almost bowed japanese style, and I had this sense of a curtain pulling around him as he turned and he was gone.

I don’t know how I can talk about him vanishing when he was never visual to begin with. I feel like such an idiot describing some of this stuff.

I didn’t have to really hold any energy for him in terms of “enabling autonomy” like with archs. He seems to have his OWN autonomy. He is not an archetype; he’s a guide and somehow connected, on a less close level, to the Four. I honestly don’t understand what any of this stuff means or how it works. There were many others the Four introduced me to, but he’s the only one I’ve felt close to and that has made a point to seek me out several times.

Anyway. I’m not sure what to think about that. I have known people who talked about guides like they were present around them all the time. I’ve not really understood all that… sort of intellectually… not really in practice. I mean, I could not hear a word any guide said for eons when I started this work–I could see their mouths move and ‘feel’ them trying to communicate, drove us all crazy–some kind of block I guess. At least sometimes I can interact now. But I’ve never had one feel so… present in the ‘normal’ world, not the internal/archetypal area before.

I’m not sure what all I accomplished this evening, but I feel like I accomplished *something*. Hopefully the next couple weeks, if I can stay with this fairly consistently, will amp up this process quite a bit and make them more effective.

PJ