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I'm finding this thread a bit difficult to interact with, and I think it has something to do with the sense of revelatory expectancy, and the way in which these encounters are being framed as a form of privileged experience. I think a lot of people who get into magic really lust after this type of contact experience - be it deity contact or anything that appears to be genuine communication from something beyond your "self". Encounters with spirits and suchlike don't really have any place in our culture and society, so are viewed as something very special and weird when and if they happen. Something like Philip K Dick's VALIS experiences are a good example of this - a very unusual inexplicable subjective occurrence that's viewed almost as a talisman of "the other" and the unknown, and the potential for the unknown to suddenly intrude upon the known. I'd say that Crowley's reception of Liber AL is another obvious example of this phenomena in our culture, as well as a perfect example of how this material tends to be regarded in revelatory terms after the fact. There's possibly parallels to be drawn with UFO encounters or any of the range of bizarre and inexplicable "contact experiences" that some people report, and more people yearn for. It's as if there's this deep hunger for the magical in our culture - a desire for that one experience that is going to prove to you once and for all that there is mystery and magic in the universe beyond the unsatisfying drudge of 9-5 jobs, suffering and taxes.
I think I have a slightly different perspective on this stuff, as the bread and butter of my practice is exactly this sort of spirit work. I think the lust for result concerning these encounters is entirely natural in our culture, but in other cultures that permit more of a space for this sort of contact scenario to play out, it really isn't such a tremendous fuss when these things happen. In my Voodoo practice, direct contact and communication with the Lwa is a daily occurrence. It's so entirely normalised into my life, that this thread might as well be asking me to list all the telephone conversations that I've had or all the text messages that I've received. Me and the Spirits shoot the breeze all the time, about all sorts of stuff, and whilst it's always a profound and meaningful dialogue, and a driver of extremely valuable personal insight and understanding, these interactions are rarely coated with that gloss of "revelatory expectancy" that contact experiences in the west are often painted with. There is very rarely a sense that "Deity X has chosen me as his prophet to deliver this important message unto humanity"; and the sort of communication I get is often a lot more about deep insights into a deity's mysteries: how their mysteries manifest in the world, and how the worldly manifestation of their mysteries relates to the various things that I might have going on in my life.
This is possibly related to the particular nature of the deities I spend most of my spirit time talking with, but I think it also has a lot to do with cultural factors and how we frame these things. I practice western magic as well as Voodoo, and I do occasionally get contact experiences that are more in the former mode. The most recent of which involved my partner receiving late night dream transmissions from Sirius in an alien language, that were apparently intended for me. I think that if I had that happen at an earlier stage in my magical career I might have viewed it quite differently. It was all a bit Rose Crowley - and I think that in less experienced hands, it would have inevitably led to the proclamation of a new Aeon, a limited edition hardback of channeled writings, and a drearily predictable spiral of pomposity from which I might never emerge. But viewing it from the perspective where deity contact is fairly normalised into my experience, I had no compulsion to go down that route with it.
It's just something I've filed away - along with similar prior encounters in that mode - as interesting, and probably relevant to my practice on some level, but not really a big deal. Every so often I'll have that sort of thing come up, and who knows what it's all about - for all I know it might be vitally important and I'll only really understand its relevance ten years from now - but right now it's just an odd thing that doesn't really fit in with anything else I'm doing. It doesn't really help me very much, and it doesn't give me any insight into anything going on in my life. It's essentially just someone calling me up and talking a load of gibberish down the phone at me that I don't understand. I'm actually used to getting useful and pertinent information through that phone from deities who I know very well and have very close relationships with, so when "alien transmissions" such as this come up, they happen in an established context of spirit communication and I respond to them quite differently from how I might if I didn't have that established context.
I think that a list thread, where contributors are asked to recount their experiences of "communication from the metaverse" (whatever that is) is a bit pointless and unsatisfying if it doesn't delve into these questions around cultural and personal context, and how we choose to interpret and respond to the basic subjective experience that has occurred. |
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