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Possession, Invited and Otherwise, by Others

  
 
unconditional
16:08 / 12.10.07
In the other thread, there was much discussion of possession and horsing as it relates to the Divine - gods and goddesses, loa/lwa (I'm not sure which one is the proper spelling), heavenly patrons and the like. The things I've been through had no flavor of what I would consider 'divine', but I have every reason to believe that I was being ridden by something Other, for lack of a better term.

In the other thread, GypsyLantern noted "Sabin's reflection: Are you entertaining the possibility that 90% of this is total nonsense fabricated by an ego desperate for the presence of 'the magical' and investing far too much objective validity in an elaborate and somewhat out of control fantasy life?" Never before have I seen my major fear about what I went through articulated so clearly. With the situation I was in, I have no way to verify today that anyone else saw what I saw, and felt what I felt. The other people involved are all either long moved away, or won't talk about that time in their lives anymore.

I'd let it slide for years, not thinking about it at all, and then I became close friends with someone who not only seemed to be acquainted with similar practices, but could give names to some of the things I perceived during those times, given nothing but my descriptions of them. Now it's apparently a part of my life again, for better or worse. Having this friend's confirmation is incredibly comforting to me because it keeps me from writing it all off as just having a crazy period in my life. Now, however, I'm left to deal with what actually happened, and what it might mean in terms of future events.

(personal background)

To give a summary of what I experienced, when I was 15 years old, my sister and her boyfriend Jason realized that I was 'seeing' some of the things they were interacting with on what they called the 'astral'. I've since come to learn that there are connotations to that word that can lead to people not taking it very seriously, which is one of the reasons I've never really brought it up to anyone before now. In any case, it was a short jump from them realizing I could see it, to them bringing me further into their practices than I probably should have been at that stage in my life.

Jason was the first to suggest that I be used as a Channel. I went with it, trusting my sister to be a kind of failsafe - she wouldn't let me do anything that was patently wrong or harmful. Apparently it not only worked, but I was good at it. I remember at least three distinct Others that at various points in time I 'let in' and gave the use of my body.

I say this wasn't any sort of divine possession because there was no ceremony or ritual, no names of any god or goddess that I've ever been able to find record of were mentioned, and it had no overtones of spirituality at all. I was simply being used to give form and substance to something that had none of its own. I have varying levels of memory retention from those times, ranging from full recall, to the feeling of being just under the surface (able to see and hear what was going on, but unable to act of my own will), to complete loss of the time when I was under.

At one point, they apparently got more than they bargained for, and I didn't believe them when they told me I'd attacked Jason until he showed me the places where I'd clawed and bit him. That was the first time I realized I had no real idea what they were doing with me while I was out. It wasn't long after that, probably shortly after my 16th birthday, that I put enough of the pieces together to see that some of what they were doing might not be something I would agree with.

This was the closest I had ever been to my sister. I didn't have many other friends at the time, so I kept quiet out of both a desire to not upset her or Jason, and a fear that I had made it all up in my head. I helped them do whatever it was they were doing, and in return, I got both a sister, and someone I perceived as a Guardian. When they broke up a couple of years later, he moved away, and she stopped talking about it entirely. She never came right out and denied what had happened, but she wouldn't admit it, either.

(/personal background)

I'm curious to know if anybody else has been a host or a channel for something or someone Other, as opposed to someone or something Divine. How did you do it? Did you have help, or was it just the natural course of events? Once you realized what was going on, how did you learn to have control over it - to not just let them take over whenever they damn well pleased? Do you have any idea who or what the Others are? (As a caveat, it's entirely possible that they are aspects of the Divine that just didn't get recognized as such. I can't disprove their Divinity, but I can't prove it, either.)

I've been told that there are people who do this regularly, that this is just their calling. I've only met one other, and he freely admitted that he was an unstable individual, and being medicated for MPD/DID, so I'm a little afraid to trust the advice he gave me. Aside from him, I haven't found anyone else I felt even remotely comfortable bringing this up to, much less anyone who had any experience with it. I'm hoping that someone here will have some insight as to what I should be doing with this.

Thanks in advance for any and all input, from stories to advice and on down the line. This is my first non-intro post on Barbelith, so I'm hoping I did it right.
 
 
*
18:33 / 12.10.07
A friend of mine and I were scouting an area to use for ritual. There was a spot he'd identified in the daytime that he thought would be a great one and I had misgivings about. At night, he conceded that it didn't feel safe, but he felt challenged and wanted to give it a try. So we pushed through some brush into this little clearing.

This was in Florida, I think around October of 2003. We were on the water, surrounded by palmettos and mangroves, close to civilization--if we'd screamed we might have disturbed occupants of several nearby homes. There was a nearly-full or full moon out high in the west, which puts it close to one a.m., I think.

My friend said that he was feeling something challenging him or testing him, and he wanted to find out more. I was feeling pretty uncomfortable. I had never done work with this friend before, so I had no idea of his experience or skill level, or even if he was the "hahajustshittingyou" type. But I was not feeling up to the task of making him leave well enough alone and I wasn't going to leave him there, so I kind of shut my senses down and decided to be his anchor.

While we were exploring, he collapsed or fell down, and I knelt down by his side, and he described that he was feeling something inside him that wanted to "purify by fire." Whether that meant to be purified or purify something else was not clear. He wasn't very coherent, and he seemed to be in pain. I talked to him for a long time, reassuring him that there was nothing that needed purification, and I raised a lot of what I thought of as water energy to stave off feelings he was complaining of as heat and burning. For Florida this was a cold night--I had a long coat on and was shivering. He had a light sweater on and was sweating. This is one of three things that make me think it's possible he wasn't just either shitting me or hallucinating. Another is that this went on until close to dawn, at which point it just kind of stopped. We were both exhausted and ravenous and we went to breakfast at a diner and didn't talk much. I would think somebody having a laugh would have gotten bored with writhing around on the ground in the cold and damp in less than three hours. The third thing is that several years before he'd moved to the state there was a traumatic incident nearby involving someone who had burned themselves to death, and which he said he'd heard about but dismissed as an urban legend (it wasn't).

I had the sense that this might be something like possession, although limited because his persona was clearly still there and interpreting the experience out loud to me (although I had to keep reminding him to keep talking). The experience felt out of my control, although I didn't feel endangered enough to take more drastic measures than waiting it out and keeping him anchored and preventing him hurting himself. I don't know how out of control he felt, because neither one of us was inclined to talk too much about it. We avoided that spot in the future, although I ended up having to do some other work around there because of other people experiencing more generalized nastiness (not all of which was real in the sense of not an attention-getting put-on, just as a disclaimer).
 
 
unconditional
06:16 / 13.10.07
There are three stages, degrees, levels, or whatever you like to call them that I'm fairly familiar with.

The most straightforward is the full blackout that some people seem to think is the hallmark of a 'true' possession. I usually know what's about to happen, I feel the first twinges of the Other moving in, and then I'm just...gone. It's not like going to sleep for a few hours, then waking up to find you've been talking to people the whole time. It's like I just cease to be for the duration of the episode. I have no memory of what happened, and rarely do I even remember enough of the Other that I would recognize that specific one again. Coming out of that state is like waking up from a night terror. My eyes open, and I panic because I'm not where I was the last time I looked around, and I know something happened that I missed. I guess I'm lucky that I've never come out of that kind of episode alone - there was always someone there to help me settle down.

Sometimes I have and maintain complete physical control of myself, but my thought processes are pushed under or to the side for those of the Other. It could almost be described as them taking a hold of my mind so I could see enough of theirs to get whatever information needed to get through to my side. I try to keep myself as still as possible because my entire focus is on this Other's mind, but sometimes I have to fidget just to let the excess energy out somehow. In those times, I tend to talk almost constantly. Not necessarily because the Other has all that much to say, but because it's like I'm trying to vocalize a thought pattern, which is every bit as tricky as it sounds. At the end of those times, it was like the Other just relaxed it's grip, letting me slide back into my own headspace. I'd be tired, but usually not completely exhausted.

Most often, though, it's a sensation I've come to call being Lost. The closest physical match for it is being at the bottom of the deep end of a pool, deep enough that you've stopped fighting to get to the bottom, and you're just sitting down there watching the surface above you. I'm in there, I'm more or less aware of what's going on around me, and I can tell the difference between someone talking to me, and someone talking to something that's using my body, I just can't get to the surface to do anything about it. I can remember most of those times, but not all, and not perfectly.

The trickiest part of being Lost is that it's happened to me in situations that had (as far as I'm aware) nothing whatsoever to do with an Other. Actively being a channel doesn't seem to be required for me to get well and truly Lost. This has led to some interesting times for partners of mine, as being overstimulated with touch and/or energy is one of the easiest ways for me to lose track of myself, but it's also something I generally enjoy immensely. If I'm lucky, I'm with someone who recognizes the behavior pattern, if not the state itself, and can help lead me back to the surface.

(threadrot-funny story)

The first rock concert I ever went to was a Tool show with my husband for his birthday. I loved the show itself, although it was a little loud, but somewhere after the beginning of the last song, I just...drifted off. I felt fine when I woke up the next morning, but I had no memory at all of the eight block walk back to the car after the show, the car ride home, my husband leading me inside, sitting me down, getting me out of my clothes (which included a pair of Doc Martens that had to be almost completely unlaced to get them off), and getting me settled in bed. I don't think I was channeling, I think I just got washed away in the energy of the show. It did make for an interesting conversation with him that next morning, though.

(/threadrot-funny story)
 
 
Unconditional Love
06:34 / 13.10.07
Can i ask, along with the experience's of the other's do you ever blank into no mind experiences, total lack of self. So its as if an other has been present and it feels alien upon return, also this goes for anybody that experiences 'others' how do you then self define, at which point are you, you again? and do the others vacate or are they remaining as a chorus of self experience as you live.
 
 
unconditional
13:50 / 13.10.07
Wolfangel - I don't know that I know enough about the state of no-mind to say for sure if I've ever felt it or not. There were times when I would come back to myself, and it was like I didn't quite fit into my own skin - it took a little while for me to fully reconnect with the reality around me. I can't pinpoint a precise moment where I was 'me' again, but I've never really doubted that I was myself, if that makes any sense at all.

As for the Others, when they leave, sometimes I'm still aware of an oddly familiar presence nearby, like if you're alone at your computer, but you know without looking that your friend is in the kitchen. Other times, they're just gone. Sometimes, though, they would be clingy, like they'd been kicked out before they were done with whatever it was they wanted to do. Those times, I could definitely feel something pushing at me, at what I guess I would call my shields. To the best of my knowledge, nothing has ever forced it's way in without either my consent, or someone else helping if I didn't know how to let it in.
 
 
EmberLeo
04:52 / 14.10.07
Do you have any idea who or what the Others are?

I don't know how to address the rest of your question without reference to my experiences with god work, but I can sort of address this:

Several categories come to my mind immediately for Others that might not be gods, or not obviously gods (depending on your perception of what gods are). Those are spirits of the Dead (mostly humans, though I've met animals as well), spirits of Nature (which may include folks like Jotuns, if you happen to play with Team Norse), power animal and plant spirits (which may or may not register as Nature spirits, depending on your sense of scale), elementals, and Fey.

I've never encountered elemental posession. I have personally encountered Fey posession, Ancestral Spirit posession, Power Animal posession, Jotun posession (Fenris registered far more as "Other" than "Divine" to me when I saw Him ride an unwilling - totally drunk - horse), and local nature spirit posession, in various contexts. Then, also, Divine posession definitely does not require ritual. I have myself carried Fey a couple of times, though not often, and that definitely doesn't feel the same as Divine posession. One Ghede I carried seemed more like an individual dead person than He usually does, but I can't be sure there, since the lines are very blurry. Nature spirits do seem fairly divine to me, but again, I find that line blurry due to the gods I work with.

"Spiritual" is subjective, and your description already leads me to believe that you understand the word very differently than I do.

Also, both Loa and Lwa are appropriate spellings depending on context. My understanding is that the Haitians spell it Lwa, and in the US, it's spelled Loa.

--Ember--
 
 
EvskiG
14:01 / 14.10.07
Of course, the Others might not be independent entities at all, but merely normally unconscious and semi-autonomous portions of your own mind -- what Jungians might call complexes, fragmentary personalities, or splinter psyches.

As Jung said:

"Everyone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes.' What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us."
 
 
EmberLeo
18:15 / 14.10.07
Oh sure - and the Others might be some other kind of sepparate beings that aren't on my list of things I've encountered personally. But I'm only going to list things I actually know about directly, in this case.

(I'm just waiting for somebody to list "aliens"...)

--Ember--
 
 
*
23:48 / 14.10.07
A hypothesis I constructed about the experience described above—tentative, relying as it does on the assumption that it was not just a case of a friend having a laugh that he never copped to and me being a gullible fool, something I keep in the back of my mind—involves "possession" by something more like a place memory or an obsession somehow triggered by presence in that space by a susceptible person in a particular frame of mind. The early history of the area might have something to do with it. I had the sense that there might be some connection with the conquest of that region of Florida by the Spanish in the 1500s. That, however, is entirely unverifiable personal gnosis.
 
 
Unconditional Love
03:20 / 15.10.07
And of course demons (talking of aliens those face huggers and the whole alien birth process seems to play on the fear of being possessed or ending up in parasitical relationships.) I am talking metaphorically here not literally nor am i referring to anybody's tradition. I would like to extend the complexes notion (again the aliens seem to represent a kind of sexual fear of penetration type complex, running around with there giant penis heads.) But anyway, Complexes i can well believe that our complexes can have us as well, because i think i have experienced it at certain times in my life, especially funnily enough (or not really) in relation to my own sexuality, which seemed very alien to me and in some sense still does.

But something else i think comes up is the idea that other peoples complexes can have us as well, in a relationship with a lot of sympathetic empathy it is easy to learn other peoples neurosis and complexes adding to your own store house of metaphorical demons, has anybody else had this experience? Some one you open yourself up to trusting and let in only to absorb all of there shit as it appears that thats all they want to dump on you.

Gives you a good insight into there character and just how the potential of there abuse manifests, and given enough time allows you to tailor there complex and hand it back to them in a beneficial way, or other wise, depending on whether thay are willing to learn or not, ie are they still dumping on people.

Anybody have a clue what i am saying. I understood it more by doing a basic certificate in counselling where i was encouraged to empathise and not sympathise which allowed me to see why i was a door mat.

Complexes at least seem to me to want to spread, they seem to rely either on close emotional bonds, or some kind of mimetic effect which plays into already preconditioned social taboos. So being sat in a very dark room sharing an experience of fear for example with others while allowing images and sounds to play in the mind often without critical reading of a performance until after the fact. (taking my tinfoil hat off now).

If i am correct complexes are primarily fear based, centred around repulsion and attraction issues? So the idea of attachments comes into it as well, what we attach identity too within ourselves binds us to the forms we give it to manifest and thus creates relationships based upon those attachments.
 
 
Elduderino
08:54 / 15.10.07
Now, however, I'm left to deal with what actually happened, and what it might mean in terms of future events.

I would suggest some introspection, try to think/feel about the root, what is it about those experiences that is causing you concern now?

I wouldn't worry so much as to the objective existance of spirits etc, you subjectively experienced "something" wether or not it was real. First look to addressing why now? not, was it then?
 
 
unconditional
12:32 / 15.10.07
Elduderino - The most obvious answer to "why now?" for me would be the friend I mentioned in the first post, the one who confirmed some of the things I saw/experienced. When we started talking about it, I started to see him in the same 'guardian' role that I originally perceived my sister's boyfriend in back then.

I don't like to talk about this with most people because I'm fairly certain the vast majority of them would just think I was buggernuts. When my friend brought it up, it was the first time in ten years I felt like I could actually talk to someone about it. He made me feel safe enough to go through it all again in my head and try to sort it all out.
 
 
Elduderino
13:50 / 15.10.07
If you feel comfortable enough to findout what happened, if it were me, I would suggest plucking up some more courage and having it out with your sister and finding out what she remembers you were all doing, I'm assuming she was older than you and her recollection should be better.

As stated earlier there is a whole plethora of things you could have been channeling and I think it would be prudent to work out what you were dealing with before thinking about anything else.

Between what you can remember (and what if anything you can get from your sister) and with your friends help identifying what you remember seeing, research all you can find about them. You can take anything else further from there as and when.
 
 
grant
15:56 / 15.10.07
The third thing is that several years before he'd moved to the state there was a traumatic incident nearby involving someone who had burned themselves to death, and which he said he'd heard about but dismissed as an urban legend (it wasn't).

I knew him; he was a friend of mine. We did an ISP together, actually.

Where *precisely* did these events take place? You can respond by PM if you feel more comfortable doing so.
 
 
*
16:54 / 15.10.07
Details pmed.
 
  
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