songsfortheotherkind.com

I spent years reading about astral projection, about chakras, and about discarnate beings. I built images of these things in my mind and in my expectation, and upon experiencing each of those three things, my long held images shattered immediately. It's like when you finally go somewhere you've thought about a lot and imagined going, and then find that of course it just couldn't ever exactly fit what you had conjured in your mind's eye.

I realized that I could not experience another's experience. I also realized that it's extremely difficult to accurately describe an experience for which there is no common consensus or document of 'proof'. I think what happens with subjects like the ones I mention is very much a case of 'Chinese whispers'. I can't figure out whether this is simply because we all experience things in our own unique way and some things can be difficult to translate, or because most of the people writing about these subjects are talking bullshit and pretending to have had experiences that they really haven't. Well, I know that happens a lot. There's money to be made in fringe subjects after all.

One of the biggest disconnects for me had been in thinking that the physical and the spiritual were entirely separate universes. I think this was helped by being subjected to religion at school. Somehow a few ideas managed to lurk in my mind in a manner suggesting that they had already been examined and that there was no need to ask for their papers. There was an underlying idea that the spiritual, mystical and metaphysical existed in some way utterly removed from the mundane physical. The flesh is sinful, weak, powerless, etc. As far as I'm concerned that attitude is part of a rigorous and hateful mythology put in place primarily to remove people from their own power.

Chakras. Spinning wheels of energy. Well, they may be for all I know, sure, but the way I experience them in certain situations and meditations doesn't feel anything like that. The way they feel to me when I become aware of them being active, is as a sort of strong magnetic force. I feel something like a magnetic attraction radiating out from the particular area, and my whole body is kind of caught in the grip of it. It's a very distinct feeling, but all the ideas of fiery spinning wheels disappeared when I was first able to have the experience. Now I'm familiar with the sensation, and my previous, projected idea of what it was like has vanished.

In experiments with energetic perception I've realized that the body is not some irrelevance that gets in the way of higher energies or perceptions ... in fact, maybe even quite the opposite. I've now been able to engage in energetic exchange with several people, and the way we interpret what the other is doing seems to come through or at least translate into the physical. In fact it feels as though the skin, for instance, acts as some sort of antenna for energetic activity.

What's also interesting to me is how different people 'speak' to me in different ways, energetically. There is a wide variety of physical sensations, and I'm finding that the trick is very much to observe what happens rather than try to fit it into some preconceived idea of what I think it should feel like.

In experimenting with these things, I've recently remembered and rediscovered something I can do that used to baffle me, and actually still does. It's difficult to even describe. I can create what feels like an electrical charge that lights up my nervous system and floods me with endorphins, and I do it by a mechanism that feels a little like flexing a muscle - but there is no physical contraction involved whatsoever. The 'switch I flick' seems to be in my brain, but it affects my whole body dramatically and immediately, and now I can do it within a couple of seconds. It's a 'muscle' I've been recently exercising in the hope of finding out what it is and what it's for. I know that when in a connected space with someone who is capable of sending and receiving ... they feel an effect when I do it.

Here's a funny, unexpected thing I discovered in my experimentation. Recently I stayed up late talking to a friend on skype, and we both drank far too much wine. I hadn't touched alcohol for a while, and in the morning I felt utterly wretched. I had one of those awful, pounding, hangover headaches. Out of curiosity I 'flicked the switch', created this charge, and to my amazement, the headache vanished within about five seconds. It really was one of those headaches that had felt like it wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. I feel pretty sure that whatever it is I'm doing, it's not simply a good hangover cure ... but this effect was still pretty astounding.

So, this thread is about the differences between our mental pictures of various otherly things ... and our actual experiences of them. It's also about physical phenomena and how to recognise them and understand their language rather than brush them off as irrelevant. I have this feeling that so many of the physical feelings we have are actually energetic responses, but we mostly dismiss them. Perhaps it's similar to the way a shaman can read the language of nature, whereas most of us see only random happenstance and don't think it has meaning.

Please feel free to share your experiences and insights. I'm very tired of dry, dusty book descriptions that I think actually take people further away from genuine experience. I think we create projections when we read these things, and then attempting subjective experience is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. So I'd like to engage anyone who's interested in a sort of layman's, unpretentious sharing of our experiences, in a language that describes them in a simpler, hopefully truer sense.

I haven’t been able to do any of the things you’ve talked about, but I have had several ‘weird’ experiences this past year. In the old pub, I mentioned that I very rarely remember any of my dreams, but I’ve had five incidents where I had a bizarre deja vu happen in real life that I dreamt about first.

The first time it happened was the longest and most vivid one. In my dream, I was with a group of other x-ray techs from my company. Now, I’ve been with this company for almost 10 years, but had only been down to the office once and it was a small, dingy little space. (We just travel to the different centers who use our services for the day and then fax our paperwork in.) In the dream were some techs who I only see two or three times a year, some I’ve only met once or twice in the past 10 years, and some who I’ve never met. We were all standing in a large open room with dark grey tiled floors, light grey walls and bright white fluorescent lights. It was very sterile looking and kinda creepy. The owner was talking to us and we were looking at the lead aprons and someone was saying that they wanted a lead hat to wear to protect them from all of the extra radiation from Japan. (I’ve never seen a lead hat used around radiation). My boss then said that we had some, and passed them around. In my dream,I thought that was kinda strange, because brain cells are the least radiosensitive cells in the body. One tech who I had only met once, was given the first hat to put on and commented on how it was going to mess up her hair, give her ‘hat head’ and make her look ugly, so she wouldn’t wear it. (She’s a really cute girl from Russia and still has a strong accent) That was the end of the dream. When I woke up, I actually remembered it pretty vividly. I thought it was a really strange thing to dream about in the first place, then to be a dream that I actually remembered. I never go to the office, the office looked nothing like what was in my dream, I don’t have much contact with any of these people, so what the hell did any of this mean?

About six months later, we had our first ever regional meeting and all of the techs had to attend. At the meeting we found out that the company had expanded and renovated the office to include a lab area that companies and doctors could rent for practice labs and presentations. We were given a tour of the new lab... It had dark grey floors, light grey walls, and bright fluorescent lights. I started freaking out when he stopped in front of the area that held all the the lead aprons. I looked around at everyone, and realized this exact scene was from my dream, a dream until that very moment, I hadn’t even thought about. They same guy from that dream,(I don’t even know his name) picked up a hat and asked what if was (none of us had seen a radiation protection hat before), the owner took it from him and put it on the Russian girl’s head and said it was a hat. The guy who asked, joked about taking it home to protect him from the Japanese fall out and the girl yanked it off of her head quickly and smoothed down her hair, looking pissed off.

My eyes were probably bulging out of my head while that little interaction took place, because I boss touched my arm and asked me if I was alright in a whisper. I just shook my head and smiled at her and told her I was fine.

So, it didn’t happen EXACTLY like my dream, but pretty damn close as far as I’m concerned. The other four times were much quicker flashes, no talking, just snapshots from dreams. One was in a pool at a natural hot springs day spa that I had never been to before. My daughter bought me a gift certificate and the two of us went. Were were wading in a pool that was about four feet deep, and this older man passed by me while looking me square in the eye. I did a double take, because in that moment I realized that *exact* look, by *that* man (who was a complete stranger), in *that* covered pool, happened in a forgotten dream months earlier.

Anyone else have an experience like that? What the heck does it mean? I hope this post makes sense, I wrote this in a hurry. ( I've got my first belly dancing class tonight in about 30 min...woohoo! *we need a belly dancing smiley now*)

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Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference. ~ Mark Twain

No idea what it means, Cerredwin, but I hope you had fun at your belly dance class.
I found belly dancing to be quite as transcendent an experience as any I've ever had.

I second that-- belly dance smileys would be very appropriate.

I like the topic of this thread, but nothing has leaped out at me as yet as far as a contribution I might make. Working on that...

Some of the things I experience:

For me the chakras are not 'spinning discs' either and I made my Self quite ill in the past trying to treat them as such. Efforts aimed at getting them to 'spin' in the directions that all the relevant traditions speak about resulted in all sorts of mayhem and blah. I like the way you describe them as magnetic force, and for me personally this isn't it either, so your post inspired me to go look at them more closely. I've got much more awareness of them since getting the shutting the lower gates practice, and I just did a microsecond exploration to see *why* the gate shutting is effecting, to see where the energy of the chakras is coming from.

I am astonished at the answer I just got. My 'chakras' are internal gateways connected to an energy source coming from entirely another universe or reality- they appear to be some kind of centres for particular information, like the various feed lines on Neo when he wakes up in the Matrix, except these are-

fuck. compromised. I can see what they are *meant* to be and currently I'm being flooded with biological and other information as a result of recognising where the external compromise has come from and doing something about it. So it's another trojan- that makes sense, the *internal* expression of those revolting tentacles because of course, where else would the last of the best feeds be? Compromise the links points with external taps because a direct line would be impossible. Just had a brief thought regarding 'hang on, they can't feed from internal source energy' and then realised that it's the lower three again I'm looking at and they've always found blowing those out and feeding from there possible, it's the source *heart chakra* they can't feed from- hmm... can it come from the uppers? No, but those can be affected in order to feed the distortions downwards and keep blowing the gates open.

HAH! HAH! *THAT'S* how it's happening! Are there feed lines on the - not feed lines, coz not possible, so... energetic distortion via EMF does it, and so does fucking with the I Am, but there's something else... the way that the three uppers and the heart interact with each other is interesting, so it's being done via the distortions and disconnection to the lower three. I don't experience- at this point anyway- a similar multiversal connection in heart and throat, they seem to specifically be connected to me as a Being rather than anything else, and the pineal and crown are different connections again. Hmm. Lowers are physical gates, uppers are quantum? The inside of my head is tingling now, but it's hard to really get into because the Empress is sitting beside me incessantly chattering and handing things to me. This is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to moving back to the forest- I'm streamlining my focus areas so that I can get into my own energy work as well the other creative projects that are emerging.

This post has been awesome in terms of sparking my own exploration. Thank you for being willing to express your process in this way, publicly- it's fascinating because I am coming to perceive that just as the individual is sui generis, so is the way they express and experience the energy. Another co-creative realm, hurrah!

I'm going to look at what the upper two chakras are doing when I have an Empress free block of time. This is really interesting.

_________________
"For every lie I unlearn, I learn something new"- Ani DiFranco

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go. ~ TS Elliot

Excellent post and thread Borden.

Wish I could participate on an experiential basis but alas ... as with nanoo nyuckey ... all I can do is watch from afar.

Reduced I am to Romper Room and Music ...

done.

*grins*

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Evolution cannot be faked: agility of mind and Being demonstrates itself in every moment. Discarding dead Art in favour of what works indicates an individual's fluid mind. Rhetoric has no place within evolution. Let the dead bury the dead.

I am so not saving that one, dude.

*laughing*

_________________
Evolution cannot be faked: agility of mind and Being demonstrates itself in every moment. Discarding dead Art in favour of what works indicates an individual's fluid mind. Rhetoric has no place within evolution. Let the dead bury the dead.

As I understand it, the lower three chakras are fed from Earth energy that is pulled up through the soles of the feet, the upper three chakras are fed from Cosmic energy pulled down through the crown chakra, and the two energies meet in the heart chakra, where they mix and are circulated back out.

When I do chakra tunings with tuning forks, I can feel the energies of the chakras thought I can't see them. The lower 3 make up the moving center (physical power), the heart and throat make up the feeling or emotional center, and the upper two are the more intuitive and spiritual centers.

These are just words, but when I am working with the forks, the sensations that I feel while working with each individual chakra are distinct.

OK, Borden, here's an experience that was nothing like what I expected from reading descriptions of such things.
I was giving a chakra tuning to a woman and her lesbian partner was also present and witnessing what I was doing.
The woman I was tuning was very psychic and her 6th chakra was really active.
When I touched the end of the vibrating A fork to her third eye, her partner and I both saw a beam of light go shooting out from her third eye, and we both reacted strongly jumping back and saying "Whoa!" because it was very powerful.
When we compared notes, we both agreed that we saw it, but we didn't actually see it with our physical eyes, as such, we saw it with our third eyes.
(It was kind of like seeing a movie projected onto a screen, with two movie cameras being directed at the same screen, and one image being superimposed over the other. Hard to explain.)
Ironically, the woman being tuned had no idea what she had done! Her eyes were closed the whole time and she said she didn't see or feel anything except the tuning fork.
I later found out that she had been used as a child in Satanic rituals and had multiple personalities as a result of early abuse.
She was pretty screwed up, but amazingly powerful too, and a very gentle person.
I wished I had had more opportunities to work with her. Her energy was really interesting.

Calz, that wasn't quite what I had in mind when I said some belly dancing smileys would be good.

We thought that too, until we started looking at it more closely. The energy does flow up our feet through the body but it's not feeding the chakras directly, there's something else going on that I've never actually looked at closely. We accepted the way that it worked and didn't really bother to watch it carefully- now that we are, we're seeing a different mechanism at play. I'm wondering if that's the way we access the multiplicity and multiversal states- I'm beginning to sense that, at least in our case, it is. The lower three chakras are nourished by the connection to Gaia, and are not powered by it.

This is truly awesome for us to rediscover here. The effect it's currently having on the physical is powerful and sensual, lots of opiate type feelings in the lower limbs and body, slightly off center to reality feeling. I like it, it feels very familiar.



*nodding* That resonates with what I'm familiar with, that there are actually three groups that act within the whole. I experience them this way- I realised when I reread my earlier post that I didn't actually experience an 'upper three' but an upper two, the throat being connected to the heart with me.



I am wondering about the connection between abuse, lower chakra energy and power. I'm not sure what I'm sensing yet, I just know there's something there to explore.



We've written in the old pub regarding the other sets of eyes that we access in this avatar- I'm aware of at least four mechanisms for 'seeing' other than the physical eyes, including other 'eyes' within the body. I'm so used to accessing these naturally that I forget it bothers others when I don't look at them when they're speaking because I look past them and turn slightly one way or the other depending on which 'sight' I'm accessing. Our close friends and associates aren't bothered by it now because they got what is happening.

I'm intentionally increasing the slide so that I can explore this more. It feels more like home to me than I've experienced for a long time.

_________________
"For every lie I unlearn, I learn something new"- Ani DiFranco

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go. ~ TS Elliot

Wow, great responses so far, thanks guys.

Songsy, you seemed to be having a brainstorm there, and switching to fourth person! I might have known you'd experience these things differently to me, but it's all good. You obviously know what I mean about the misleading nature of the perceived wisdom about chakras and other stuff. I think a lot of us have probably fallen into the trap of trying to experience phenomena that were someone else's phenomena. I've been finding and constantly reminding myself that only my way works for me. I feel that the books and videos, etc., can be pointers, sure - but if we let them dictate what a thing will feel like for us, then we project our energies into something that's only a phantasm. I think the same principle applies to people who spend a lifetime 'discovering' what any given religion's rock star front man actually meant ... rather than trust their own experience and exploration.

Calz, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these things you claim no experience of are right under your nose. That's how it's always been for me anyway. I've said this before, in the old pub - but every time I've had a first experience of something metaphysical (for want of a better word) I always have the feeling ... "Oh, it's that! Now I get it!" I think we each have our own array, language, set of perceptions ... and my experience is that using what's familiar to me is the only way I can access any of these things. For instance, music seems to be a gateway to a different perception for some people ... sexual energy is another. My experience is that it's all about going back to the essential root of my own 'language'. You know, the inner language, the imagery, the way you perceive ... well, everything. I hesitate to write this to you, and it's tricky, because I don't want to come off sounding like I'm trying to teach you anything. That's not my intention at all, and you're older than me, and I'm only saying this because I know you've tried to astral project and been frustrated. Besides, on the subject of energetic impressions I get, my personal take is that the Force is strong with you. If anything I say smacks of 'special knowledge' it's not my intention, and I'm only trying to share stuff I've been discovering and learn stuff from other's discoveries. I do NOT want to sound grand or an arbiter of this or that ... after all, you've seen how I respond to that kind of talk elsewhere! If I ever sound like that, I fully expect your response to be ...



Cerridwen, that's pretty bloody amazing - the accuracy of detail. No wonder your colleague asked if you were all right, because in your shoes I would have looked pretty wide-eyed, I'm sure. I've had predictive dreams too, and I have theories about why they happen and how ... but they're only theories. What interests me is that they don't always seem to be about anything necessarily important. I've had a couple that foretold important things (important to me anyway), but others that just seemed fairly random. Whatever the case, they make me think about the nature of time, and I can't help but remember Terrence McKenna talking about how events can cast shadows of themselves backwards in time, that the sensitive can see.

Aquene, also bloody amazing. By the way, you and Songsy seem to have a far clearer picture of what the chakras do than I have. All I know is that I can sometimes feel them. Activated? I don't know, but it seems to happen when in connection with certain people, and more and more, with this electrical charge thing I can do (whatever the hell that is.) In fact I'm going to experiment with trying to focus that charge on specific chakras and see what happens.

Should I be worried that I don't really know what I'm doing? I guess we'll see.



What you say about third eye vision makes me want to talk about my experience of that ... so, in complete layman's, Bordenish terms:

Sometimes, when lying down and waiting for sleep, I experience what I assume to be 'third eye vision'. There's a huge difference between imagery I conjure in the usual way and third eye imagery. The first way in which it's different is that the third eye stuff comes spontaneously and without me focusing or consciously inventing. The other major difference is the picture quality. When the third eye vision kicks in it's like going from some well-worn, ancient VHS tape with the contrast turned to its lowest and seen through fog ... into the kind of crisp, high definition images that would make HD TV manufacturers salivate.

In the old pub, when we talked about meeting on the astral, I inadvertently connected with a few of the patrons. I didn't manage to astral project and meet you in an astral pub ... but I had third eye encounters with various people. One or two people were surprised when I privately told them what had happened and how I'd perceived them, because the perception - though it had seemed stylized and fantastical to me - was apparently accurate in terms of what they feel their essential Selves to be.

I think what might be happening when we encounter someone energetically, is that their projection of themselves (unconscious or otherwise) meets our expectation of them ... and so the signal, while an authentic event, can be experienced as stylized. It comes through filters. For instance, more than one person had an astral/third eye encounter with me and said I was carrying a light-sabre. Which backs up my theory about filters. Because, y'know, I of course always leave my light-sabre hanging from one of the black outfits in my wardrobe when I go to bed, just in case of rolling around in my sleep and accidentally activating it. The Sith annals do tell of unfortunate incidents involving the improper care and maintenance of one's sabre, as will Darth Stumpy, bitterly, if you give him enough Scotch and hold the glass for him.

Since those experiences several months ago, I've explored this way of connecting with and experiencing people. I started to find that I was getting an energetic impression of people through even their written words, and I came to feel that our 'signal' is in everything that carries any intent. This was one of the reasons I kept reading and posting in the old pub. It became a fascinating thing for me - to 'feel' people in there. Stop it, Calz. I don't mean it like that.

Here's where I find out if there's a character limit on posts.