Escape from the Spirit Guides
Seduction of the Spirits
I’ve just heard this particular story way too many times not to comment on it. It usually goes something like this:
- Person talks to spirits and is happy for years.
- Person then gets freaked out over something.
- Person has beliefs involving the absolute division of spirits into inherently good and inherently evil; decides that since the spirits in question aren’t absolutely good, they must be evil.
- Person turns on the spirits and tells them to leave.
- The spirits, quite understandably, get angry at all this. A spiritual battle ensues.
- After some amount of trouble, the spirits eventually leave. Person retrospectively thinks of the happy years as the intentional deceptions of evil’s honeyed tongue, just like those people who talk about ‘that bitch’ after a nasty breakup even though the relationship was very happy for most of its length.
The fact is, as harmonious as the relationship is between the two of us, we would react the same way to attempts to get rid of us. And then you’d have the classic possession situation. Another casualty of absolutes.
December 21st, 2005
The LiveJournal multiplicity community now has an exhaustive categorized list of old posts. This probably makes it the largest reasonably organized collection of plural experience one is likely to come across.
December 19th, 2005
I found a really amazing quote by James Hillman in his book Healing Fiction (1983):
The fuller, more philosophical implications of the dialogue between Mark and Sheba are better presented by our final excerpt, this time from an eclectic psychotherapist with wide experience who came to Zürich for some deeper Jungian training. Again our refrain:
He: What do you want?
“I want out,” says a voice he called variously “soul-voice,” “anima,” “chest-voice,” “my person.”
He: Out! That sounds like you are a prisoner.
Soul-Voice: I did not say that. I am not blaming you. You keep me, for better or for worse, inside. Protective. But I want out.
He: I do not understand [that same sentence!]. It has taken me so many years first to find you and get you inside, as a psychological factor as Jung says, so we can have dialogues like this, that to let you out means to start all those projections once more.
Soul-Voice: You are afraid to let me out, then you are keeping me for worse: not protecting me, but yourself. I am a prisoner.
He: Just wanting to keep you inside and psychological makes you a prisoner?
Soul-Voice: A prisoner in your psychology. You have imprisoned me in your psychological system, preventing me from appearing wherever I please.
He: It’s the way you say that, that makes me afraid: “wherever you please” means anima attractions, foolish business speculations again, wild goose chases. When you are ‘out’ I become a silly goose. I can’t afford it. I must protect myself.
…More than a week passed before he took it up again, although he had been struggling with her “wanting out” without resolution. In fact, he did not take it up again, for it happened to him after swimming in the lake. On coming out of the water, he experienced his body wrapped in space that was full of presence, and air that had a density. He heard her say distinctly, so aloud that it was as if an hallucination: “Now I am out. Now you are in.”
When he told me this I remarked about the coagulatio of the soul in alchemy, its becoming thickened, sensed as a presence. This had evidently happened like a chemical process. After long cooking, stirring, and containing, suddenly, as in making a sauce, a coagulation takes place. (Healing Fiction, pp. 121–123)
I like to think of it like a seed, growing a long time in silence before pushing its way out into the light. I’m not sure what to think about being compared to a sauce… :D
December 16th, 2005
James Hillman is an interesting fellow. He is a psychologist who was trained in Carl Jung’s system, but he went on to develop Jungian ideas in his own direction. Depending on who you ask, he’s either seen as a radical Jungian or the initiator of his own school—archetypal psychology.
Archetypal psychology views the ‘ego-complex’ as just one of many different complexes in the psyche. In his magnum opus Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), Hillman writes:
From the bastion of Rome, reactions (that I have not ordered) by other persons in my psyche are alien, and they will be chronicled by the case historian as peculiar personifications of my primitive hinterlands, strange behavior honoring strange Gods… But the Roman central ego is no more “conscious” than are the outlandish styles of the other complexes. Consciousness may be reapportioned without being diminished; it may return to the bush and fields, to its polycentric roots in the complexes and their personified cores, that is, to a consciousness based on a polytheistic psychology. Polytheistic psychology refers to the inherent dissociability of the psyche and the location of consciousness in multiple figures and containers. (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 26)
He considers excessive singleness to be unhealthy, and one major concern of his is the ‘relativization of the ego’:
The egocentric psyche with its one eye fixed on wholes and unities may grudgingly admit personifying as a figure of speech, but never that the imaginal realm and its persons are actual presences and true powers… This means nothing less than dethroning the dominant fantasy ruling our view of the world as ultimately a unity—that real meaning, real beauty and truth require a unified vision. It also means that we would abandon a notion of our personality as ultimately a unity of self. Instead of trying to cure pathological fragmentation wherever it appears, we would let the content of this fantasy cure consciousness of its obsession with unity. By absorbing the plural viewpoint of “splinter psyches” into our consciousness, there would be a new connection with multiplicity and we would no longer need to call it disconnected schizoid fragmentation. Consciousness, and our notion of consciousness, would reflect a world view that is diverse and unsettled.
…we would find ourselves no longer alone in our subjectivity… All would depart together: unity and uniqueness, identity, integration and integrity as simplicity, and individuality as undividedness. And with the departing dominant unitary fantasy would go as well its dominant emotion: loneliness. (Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 41–42)
James Hillman Links List:
December 14th, 2005
Living with Magick—Meridjet
Meridjet is my mate. He is also a discarnate (and formerly human) being who has ‘graduated’ from the need to reincarnate here again. You can think of him as similar to human in essential makeup, since he has an emotional structure humans can relate to and the incorporeal version of a human body.
They also have a Yahoo group and a LiveJournal community.
I find this site personally interesting because my experience is similar in a way—I am two, who are lovers. A major difference is that I see my experience as being psychological rather than spiritual.
Knowing him has been the most profound thing that’s ever happened to me. He’s an incredible being, and I love him intensely…but the story would not be complete without my feelings being expressed. He is very, very special, and has changed my life totally.
I can definitely relate to this statement.
December 13th, 2005