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And back again...
I've been working with this for the past few months, and I've done a lot of re-evaluating. I'm getting less involutary stuff these days, largely because I've learned to stop kicking against the work and permit myself to do it without stressing too much.
I still find myself Out There from time to time, but it seems now that I'll get a "flight plan" more often. Something else that's been happening is not faring-forth exactly (because I'm still quite conscious of being in my body, and can come out to respond to people if they speak to me), more a kind of bilocation. The input I get there is less... literal, I guess, less "I went here and talked to this guy" and more "I saw such.and-such a place, and seemed to communicate with so and so as if we were seperated by a transparent barrier."
One thing I've learned to do is to handle the experiences more gently, without feeling the need to embrace them utterly as really-reall-real or completely false. I find it more profitable to record what happened, honour the experience, without sticking it in one box or another unless I have recieved time-sensitive or urgent data requiring action.
As an aside, I'd say that one big problem I've encountered in learning about evaluating this kind of work and experience has been finding people I could discuss it with. There's a huge, huge resistance in many quarters to any kind of evaluation, to applying any kind of filter, or to recognising different varieties of experience. You're supposed to treat an account of a serious shamanic journey resulting in verifiable meatspace effects in precisely the same way as someone's astral dinner-date with Sephiroth off of Final Fantasy. I'm not saying that a person might not find such an encounter beneficial and worthwhile in some way, but having experienced both varieties myself I'm reluctant to put "...and then I woke up with a bruise where the dog bit me, to find the patients' fever had broken..." in the same category as "...and then he said I was really Aeris in a past life and he's a good guy now and we're gonna get married!..." |
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