Meditation, visions, auras, and whiskey…

On the mundane front, it was quite a weekend.  Any time you work on an old house, never expect things to go as planned.  There are terrible things that can lurk behind 91 year old walls, and they all need to be fixed if they are to see the light of day again.

On the more esoteric side of things the weekend was also quite busy.  The most notable of these happenings was last night while I was wrapping up from my weekend.  I decided that I should do a little bit of meditation to help me unwind from so much work over the weekend, and to help me mentally shift gears back into my normal work mindset.  As I was a bit sore from the physicality of what I had been doing for three days, I decided that a bit of whiskey would hit the spot to help relax the muscles.

With all that in mind, I decided that I would use the whiskey as part of a small conjuration to promote healing and relaxation.  I filled my shot glass, lit my incense, fired up a candle, set my binaural beat, and off I went into meditation land.  Lately I have been starting my meditations with my eyes open, and I just let them naturally close as the relaxation hits them.  I have also been incorporating some visualization techniques to help me to focus my mind when it is darting in uncontrollable directions.

As I started to settle into my zone, as usual, my vision started to change.  It used to take a mind-aching act of will for me to see auras, but with the addition of Horus (my eagle fetish) I can see them much easier, and sometimes unintentionally.  In my limited experience, most inanimate objects have auras that range from white to black.  Plants, people, animals and other living things are the only ones that I have experienced that have any kind of colored aura.  Well, the exception to that comes from rocks and crystals.  I have no idea what is up with those things.  I have seen rocks and crystals that have nothing more than a simple white/grey/black aura, very thin, and I have see samples of the same kind of rock/crystal that have a distinct, stable color.  But, we’ll save that discussion for another day.

The first interesting part of last night came when I noticed that my candle had color in its aura.  It was still the usual, thin aura it normally has, but this time it had a distinctive green color in it.  As the eyes-open part of my meditation went forward, I thought I saw a swirl of red move across the face of the candle, but it was only fleeting and never returned.  The green was still there and very apparent.

The big deal isn’t so much that it was there, but why it was there.  There are a couple of explanations that I can think of right off the top of my head.  The first being that it has always been there, and the additional gift of vision provided to me by my fetish is letting me see things easier and more clearly.  The second explanation that I can come up with quickly is that the candle has been a part of so many conjurations and meditations that it has absorbed some of the energy.  If this second option is the case, what does that mean?  Does that mean that the candle is unintentionally enchanted?  Does it hold some sort of power that I don’t understand like certain crystals/rocks do?  At this point, I don’t know enough to answer any of those questions, let alone why it now has a colored aura.  Perhaps I need to have my fetishes and other items join me in my next round of meditation and see what they look like when my vision changes.  I think that will help me move towards an answer.

Somehow, that didn’t interrupt my meditation.  I quickly slipped further into my meditation.  My eyes slowly closed, and I started my visualization techniques to help corral my thoughts as I got into the deep, dark recesses of my own mind.  Part of my visualization technique is I go into my sacred place to relax and meditate within my meditation.  It may sound bizarre, but the technique works very well for me.  It is a much different technique than I used to use, but the old technique led me to astral projection more than true meditation, so it was been reserved for that specific purpose.  My current technique gets me into a very still state of mind, even if my thoughts are not entirely stopped.  It seems to take so much mental energy to create this multi-layered state that all I’m left with is a single voice with no background noise.  If that voice stops talking, there is nothing but silence.  These glimpses into the absence of thought are powerful.  They make the visualizations that you receive seem more powerful and realistic.  When you still the mind, all you can do is watch what’s happening, without judgement or consideration of any kind.  It just is.

During my meditation last night I did a tarot reading.  It may sound odd, but it’s a great way to receive communication from your subconscious.  You need to plan for it ahead of time, and it needs to happen when you are devoid of thought.  Yes, this is a part of the Conjuration Seven  – Shamanic Divination from the Liber KKK, and last night was kind of a trial run.  I had no specific question, I just wanted to see if it worked, and what kind of information came out of it.  I have not spent the time to really figure out what the four cards I pulled were trying to tell me, but that will give me something to do this evening.

The whole process may sound a bit convoluted, but it’s all techniques that I have figured out thanks to the help of my fetishes and my meditation enchantment.  I haven’t done a ton of research on the topic, but I haven’t found information on anything like it.  But, it works for me so I’m not going to complain.  The best part is you can also multitask.  The primary intention of the meditation and conjuration was actually to help my whiskey work as a muscle relaxant.  I can’t take any aspirin derivatives, Tylenol doesn’t do anything for me, and my work tests constantly for drugs so I couldn’t take any of the old Vicodin I have laying around.  On top of that, I have a medication that doesn’t allow me to drink any large quantities, or even very often.  So, one shot had to do it, and after all of that it really hit the spot.

It was a lot to have happen in a single evening session, but I think it’s a sign that all is going well.  After about six weeks in my training, I would expect things to be happening more than they did in the beginning.  It’s all just a part of the experience of learning and doing.

Back to the Tarot…

I have been lamenting over the past couple weeks about divination.  The Liber KKK states that I should use a simple method of divination, such as the runes, because a method like the Tarot may be too complex for later usage.  I have been using the runes for the past couple of days, and I just can’t seem to get into a good groove with them.  Yes, they are far easier to interpret than the Tarot, but on the more in-depth issues, the answers seem very vague.  I feel that this would lead me towards interpretations that have been tainted with my own desires or perceptions, versus the far less cryptic answers I receive from my cards.

I guess that’s the one thing that has always kept me drawn to the Tarot over all of these years.  The answers it gives me aren’t always what I want, but they are correct.  Just as things are with life, it doesn’t really matter whether you like something or not, it is what it is.  That, of course, is one of the things that draws us to magic, we desire some control over our reality, so something being  “the way it is “ isn’t necessarily the only possible outcome.

It will take a while before I get to Conjuration Seven  – Shamanic Divination, so I plan on trying a few experiments before that step arrives.  First, I plan on doing a series of readings using my traditional method of interpretation, then a few weeks later (when I have forgotten the reading), I will try to interpret the same cards quickly, one at a time.  I think this will be a decent test of how well my basic instinct guides me in my readings versus the broad view interpretations that I currently use.  I also want to try to see if I can get to a point in my meditation where I can speak while I do it.  If I can achieve this, it will allow me to describe what I see for interpretation later.  Although, if you read yesterday’s post, there seems to be no problem remembering a profound experience while meditating.  I’m still having a hard time not accepting that as a memory of my physical body.  All of my senses were engaged so heavily that I can still remember every moment as vividly as if I were still there.

I’m currently working on the portion of Conjuration Two which has me divine short-term phenomena to help me determine a reliable idea about the accuracy of my readings.  Things aren’t quick when you’re learning, but they do keep on moving.

The search for divination…

I’m currently preparing myself to follow the second step in the Liber KKK. Conjuration Two  – Sorcery Divination will be an interesting test. As I have stated in a previous post, I’ve been a student of the tarot for a couple of years, and I am fairly comfortable with using it for divination. The Liber KKK recommends a simple method of divination so it isn’t too complex for Conjuration Seven  – Shamanic Divination. At first I wondered if my knowledge of the tarot would allow me to continue using it through these two steps, but I can see now that it would be a recipe for disaster. While I am confident in my ability to interpret the tarot with surprising accuracy, it’s the speed of my method that concerns me. I like to lay out all the cards in whatever spread suits my needs, and then I look at them as a whole, not just their individual positions. This helps me spot trends and themes that run through a reading, which has been where some of the best information has come from. I’m afraid that if I have a successful  “vision quest “, which is the goal of conjuration seven, that the imagery might come too fast for me to properly interpret, or it may be so subtile that I miss, or forget, it entirely.

So, my new search is to get comfortable with something much more simple, that can give me answers that can be readily interpreted in a matter of moments. I think this should give me a better tool to work with as I advance towards Conjuration Seven. I might just go with the suggestion of the book and use my set of runes. I’m not terribly familiar with them at this point, but with a bit of practice I’m sure I will get in a good rhythm with them. I now understand why the Liber says that people shouldn’t spend less than one year complete the training. As I am being honest with myself in this process, I’m finding out how much more there is to learn. Learning takes time, but it is always a solid investment of time. That’s why I went to college, that’s why I constantly refine my skills at work, and that’s why I try to learn as much about different beliefs as possible.