Autism and the Subtle Planes
Jan. 23rd, 2024 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele
Residence of the Collyer brothers, world famous New York hoarders.
The collective astral plane is a cluttered mess right now. Imaginations have become ghettoes: ramshackle, crowded urban hells that are prone to colonization and constantly fought over by corrupt powers. Those who do any form of genuine spiritual work do the equivalent of bodybuilding in extreme gravity. I say "genuine" because much of what poses as spiritual work or spiritual literacy is actually toxic pyramid-building in disguise. They want your money, they want your time, and they want the lifeblood of your children if you are willing to give it. We are living in a scary and dangerous world.
Autism is not a superpower. As someone who has autism, I think it is a disability that is part and parcel of the astral conditions of our time that make it harder to do spiritual work. Just as I won't pretend it is somehow more desirable to live in the worst collective astral conditions in human history, I won't pretend having autism makes me better than I would have been without it. Autism cripples us on the physical plane and easily render the autistic person as a lifelong dependent with a menagerie of wasted potentials. Plus, autism is exceedingly common. One in every thirty six humans are born autistic in 2024 with the 1970s numbers being more like one in ten thousand. I don't believe this is over-diagnosis, either. I work with children and if my 30 year career is to be considered as a cross-section of what is going on with the general populace, I can confidently say autism is more common now. Vaccines are probably to blame along with feminizing petroleum byproduct chemicals of the type discussed in the book Our Stolen Future.
Body Bleed
From this occultist's perspective, autism is a disorder of physical and non-physical body sensitivity. To better understand what I am talking about, I will invoke one of my Ogham tree cards called Saille, symbolized by the willow tree or Betula alba. In my system of Ogham, balance is represented by an upright card and imbalance is represented by an inverted or ill-dignified card. For every median point of balance, there are two extremes flanking either side that represent imbalance. Saille is Sensitivity or Flexibility. Imbalance comes in the form of excess sensitivity and flexibility or a lack of those things. Autistic people, when imbalanced, are both too sensitive and inflexible.
On the physical plane, autistic oversensitivity is easy to witness if you've ever seen it in action or suffered it yourself. Autistic people, especially children, are picky about food and can easily turn it into a battleground with parents and caregivers. The food has to smell a certain way, be served at a certain time, and it must be confined to a narrow range of "acceptable", often highly processed forms. The reason behind this kind of pickiness is that autistic people are extremely sensitive to the etheric plane, which is the energy plane where things like aesthetics, vibes, smells, and textures truly matter. Autistic perfectionism is at its most severe when it comes to food, and autistics want perfectly customized meals recreated from past "perfect" meals that alleviated their etheric starvation. As children, famous autists Beata and Greta Thunberg tortured their mother with food sensitivities and requirements. The poor woman had to cancel her career as a internationally renowned opera singer in order to constantly cater to her daughters' etheric demands.
Autistic people, including myself, often have trouble looking people in the eye. The reason for this is twofold: one is that to look someone in the eye is to forge an astral connection with them. For the normie, it's no big deal to connect some rando over the cash register, but for the autistic person with an oversensitive astral and etheric body, it is a potential disaster waiting to happen. There is a common thread among many ancient cultures that photographs steal a little bit of someone's vital essence or soul, and I think this is relative to what happens when an autistic person makes eye-to-eye contact; it is an intimate act. The second reason autistic people avoid eye contact is because they don't need to use their eyes. Autistic people do not "see" so much with their eyes as with their etheric bodies. In my own case, I know that I can remember people I know far more easily by their vibe and non-visual perception of their moods than I can their faces. The astral source underneath the etheric vibe is a much more reliable source of identification for me than physically seeing a face and a body shape. I think autistic people who can't look at you in the eye subconsciously know that Meatworld is an illusion and a fakeout. If they are anything like me, they close their eyes in order to get a true read of you and your feelings towards them without the distraction of visuals.
Sensitivity, like any force, can be good or bad. If the autistic person can sense the truest, most meaningful nature of the person without use of the eyes, I guess that can be categorized as Good. In the Bad corner, it is all too easy for the sensitive person to become overstimulated and suffer a partial or total shutdown due to sensory fatigue.
Autistic People and Their Mothers
The following is mere speculation because I have never been pregnant to my own knowledge in this incarnation.
Pregnancy is a profound bond where mother and child share a single astral body and etheric body along with sharing the physical body. The physical bodies of mother and child separate when the child is delivered. The separation of the etheric body takes much longer to diverge: I believe mother and child are etherically linked until the child reaches the age of six or seven. The astral body takes the longest time to separate and does not become fully separate until the child reaches puberty. Because the etheric body of a biological woman is male (etheric yang to her physical body's yin), the etheric bodies of children -- being the same as their biological mothers for a time -- are male until true gender development happens at puberty.
When you are adopted as I am and did not have a biological mother anywhere near the scene, the etheric bond is created with the primary caretaker. Though this isn't quite the same as the etheric homogeneity of a biological mother, it is more than adequate if there is love for the child. Fathers also create etheric bonds with their children if they choose to stick around and be part of their kids' lives. Additionally, there are plenty of times when the etheric bond is not created between biological mother and child -- there are plenty of stories of mothers who don't form the bond or children that reject it from babyhood. Interestingly, when a father (biological or otherwise) cheats on the mother of his child, he truly cheats on the child or children as well. If the child is under seven years old, he is cheating on both the astral and etheric planes, opening the subtle bodies of the mother and the child to parasites and mayhem on every level of their being.
Speaking of Infection and Disease...
The astral and etheric permeability of children is already what makes normal childhood risky. Adding autism and its accompanying hypersensitivity to the mix only makes it worse, opening avenues for the non-physical equivalent of infection and disease. With the clutter of the collective astral right now rushing in to claim autistic people as astral pyramid recruits, it's seriously not easy to be autistic.
Autistic children are often not raised with any form of diligence. For a long time now, parents have been asking children what they want to do... as if the kids honestly knew. Bribery is a common tactic. "You can have ice cream/a new toy if you'll concentrate for the next thirty seconds, buddy." Uh huh, whatever, mom. Children crave boundaries because boundaries prove to them that their parents are powerful and can keep them safe. When a child acts out, it is usually out of a subconscious fear that the parent is weak, cannot protect them, and is easily pushed around by outside forces. The child is sharing an astral body with at least one parent. In the case of younger children, the child shares an etheric body with mom, which is almost like sharing a physical body. The child wants to be reminded that their body is strong and impervious to assault. This is a natural instinct. If the parent is wishy-washy, the child will push to see how far the weakness goes. He or she has to assess how bad the vulnerability is by throwing a tantrum, crying, yelling, biting, and hitting. The castle walls must be tested to see if they will crumble.
Adding boundaries and hard limits gives the child what they need to feel protected and secure. A mother who says NO to ten minutes more of an iPad game or a request for tater tots and chocolate cake for dinner is the same protective, walled fortress who will say NO to the child molester who wants to date her in order to cover his agenda of raping her offspring.
Greta Thunberg failed to reach physical adulthood because she nearly starved herself to death during her pubescent years. (If anything, tween anorexics need to take this as a warning: if you starve yourself now, you could very well spend the rest of this incarnation looking like an overgrown little girl akin to the 2009 film The Orphan, or if you get the motherlode of plastic surgery, like 2022's M3GAN.) Greta nearly managed to emaciate herself to death despite putting her mother through a three ring autistic meal preparation circus at every meal. I cannot speak to Greta's astral development as I don't know her and I do not care to know her, but it seems abundantly clear that her etheric and physical development were curtailed somewhere near the age of twelve, and she has remained frozen in time. Cruel as it sounds, if I were Greta's mother, I would have given her two choices at the dinner table -- take it or leave it. Perhaps I would be in prison because of it and perhaps my autistic child would be dead of starvation; we begin to see why I chose not to have kids. I like to think my pretend autistic child would have grown tired of testing the limits upon finding they stood firm despite her autistic brat histrionics.
Of course I cannot speak for all people with autism, but from what I have perceived in myself and other autists, it takes autistic people longer to to master the etheric and astral skills normies take for granted. Sociability is prime example: autistic people are too busy being overwhelmed by the etheric and astral bombardment of other people's auras to figure out how to say what someone else wants to hear. Going back to maternal attachment, many autistic people turn into eternal children as adults, retreating into an antisocial bubble. Within this bubble, they depend on a parent, a set of parents, or someone who acts in loco parentis such as a spouse or relative. Autistic adults who depend financially on more "normal" heads of household suffer from stunted astral development. Their creative ability collapses into a set of fond dreams that is no more real than the games and TV/movie imagery they shovel into their minds.
As for adult autism and the salvaging of our unseen bodies, I tend to think autistic people require spiritual protection above and beyond so-called normies because of our oversensitivity issues. Whether this comes in the form of prayer, traditional religious forms, banishing rituals such as the Sphere of Protection or the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, or other unturned stones, I have no idea. For me, it's the aforementioned SoP, Ogham, and discursive meditation, day in, day out, with the kind of German-train-schedule-regularity to which only an autistic could happily commit.
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Date: 2024-01-24 11:46 am (UTC)And yes, it does make it very hard to interact with the empire of lies that passes for a society these days. The autists aren't the ones who are broken.
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Date: 2024-01-24 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-25 04:33 am (UTC)For what it's worth, I suspect it has as well - my gut feeling is that it peaked back in November. Obviously the models are still reporting a growing population, because they're programmed to do so - am curious to know what's giving you that impression/knowledge. And China's down several hundred million?
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Date: 2024-01-25 06:39 pm (UTC)Excellent!
Date: 2024-01-24 05:49 pm (UTC)I used to joke with friends in college, that I couldn't look at them and hear them at the same time, so they could pick one: I could *look* like I was paying attention while they talked, or I could actually listen, but not both at once! It was not really a joke. They learned to play along. It is so true what you say about eye contact. It's right up there with, I dunno, smooching someone or a bear hug. Not a thing you want to do with every passing stranger. What if they're not a nice person? Risky! I mean, I'm not a kid anymore and I've learned to brace myself and make brief eye contact for the sake of politeness, while hanging onto my "stuff" as much as possible. But it's a cope, not a natural thing at all. And yeah. Vibes. Sometimes I feel guilty about that, because I'll just brush up against someone, get a squicky vibe, and basically avoid them forever after on zero other info. On the one hand, I have never had reason to regret that tendency to snap judgement and very often been glad of it. On the other hand, every bit of my childhood conditioning yells at me that I'm being judgy judgy judgy and that I'm rudely ignoring/avoiding people for *no reason*. I'm not being fair and giving people a chance, blah blah blah. It's not no reason, of course. Just not any reason I can explain or justify in words.
My mother's 40-year teaching career concurs with your evidence. Autism really did get more common. She started teaching in the 70s.
We have dealt a little bit with the food thing, with our one tends-toward-autistic child, and he has not starved. I do have to repeat, often, that I am not a short-order cook and our house is not a restaurant, so I will cook one dinner for everybody, and whether he eats it or not is his business. In the end, there are certain foods he will not touch (eg fresh fruit), but they are none of them crucial things that will cause malnutrition if he goes without. I'm not holding that out as a solution, though-- from what I've heard the determination of autistic kids can be much much worse than what we deal with, and I'm not about to judge based on our (mild) experience.
I have often wondered about the autism--religion thing. I mean, overall among adult autists, there seem to be a lot of hardcore atheist types. That's a religion in itself of course, but it doesn't protect you from anything. On the other hand, I've found religious practice completely essential for myself, and if anything my uh... religious perception (?) is on the more-intense-than-normal side. Atheism/materialism wasn't ever an option. I was plagued by the haggies as a kid/young adult. And I think you may be onto something with the physical/etheric/astral oversensitivity. I've been trying for some time to formulate a clear model for that. I think of it as a multilevel boundary problem. Boundaries are just not what they should be for us: we get leakage between senses (I see sounds), inefficient filtering (taking in too much sensory data), we can't hold onto our own energy, we can't keep out others' energy, and we don't filter out a whole host of things that normal people flat don't perceive at all. That's not a superpower as you say-- there's a reason normal healthy people block out information coming from the etheric, the astral, etc. It's TMI, basically. There's only so much data our little processor brains can handle, and autistic people have got all the sluices wide open all the time.
Mothers... I've never quite figured out how to fit that piece into the puzzle. Had kind of a tormented relationship with my own, and as an adult, have maneuvered it into something... tenable, though not comfortable. Meaning, my mother's a difficult person, but not evil, and I've learned to police my own boundaries enough to make it possible to maintain contact. With my own kids... it's complicated! My autistic kid is very prickly and maintains a bit of distance... and I'm sympathetic. Like, I wish we could be closer, but he's also kind of a carbon-copy of me at the same age, and I get it and I try to respect his boundaries. The two normal kids are at the other end-- before age 5-6 they are completely exhausting. And I know it's because they *need* the love and snuggles and just... contact, and I try really hard to just roll with it, but sometimes I get to the end of the day and it's like *GAH! STOP TOUCHING ME!* (not out loud, but like, "husband, please take the conn for a couple hours, I need to go hide in the garage"). We'll see what kind of adults they turn out to be, but they seem to be doing all right in spite of me ;)
Re: Excellent!
Date: 2024-01-24 06:51 pm (UTC)Re: Excellent!
Date: 2024-01-24 08:52 pm (UTC)Re: Excellent!
Date: 2024-01-24 08:58 pm (UTC)Re: Excellent!
Date: 2024-01-24 09:01 pm (UTC)Re: Excellent!
Date: 2024-01-24 08:57 pm (UTC)The number one thing that helped me deal with my life in a constructive way was discursive meditation. I would ask any parent (of an autistic kid or otherwise) to both learn and teach daily discursive meditation. I am even thinking about doing discursive meditation classes somewhere because I believe in being the change you want to see in the world.
I too "see" sounds... I believe the phenomenon is called synesthesia.
I know this sounds cliché but kids grow up SO FAST. I feel like I blink and the 7 year old is in college. Then I blink again and they are 30 with a kid or two of their own who are rapidly encroaching on age 7. From the sounds of things, I think your kids have a great mom!
Re: Excellent!
Date: 2024-01-24 09:51 pm (UTC)And yes, this has helped immensely with interpersonal situations that would have completely poleaxed me when I was younger and dumber. People with intrusive neuroses that cause them to do and say the *weirdest* things. It's very freeing to realize *these things are their personal problems, and not mine*... and I find that instead of taking it personally and getting all flustered, I can keep a more even keel and even manage a bit of compassion (who'd've thunk it?). Took a long time to get there, but it feels good.
I am not a great mom, but I recognize (with a sick feeling) my potential to be a really terrible mom and that kicks my arse often enough that I think we do at least OK. As long as they grow up to be independent functioning adults with a reasonable amount of self-control and a solid understanding of virtue, and are still willing to talk to their parents and each other, I will call it a win. It is rather like when you talk about your potential for violence-- it's always there, and being a halfway-decent parent means choosing, all the time every day, not to allow that inclination to get the upper hand... and when I fail at it, to apologize, ask forgiveness, explain to my kids that this is not a thing I should have done, and go to confession. I don't beat them, starve them, or lock them in closets, but I do have a short temper, a sharp tongue, and a tendency to slump into martyr-complex territory when houshold tasks overwhelm me. We all have to work around the weaknesses we're dealt.
Childlike: addendum
Date: 2024-01-24 08:49 pm (UTC)Here's a brief example of the genre: https://academic.oup.com/book/25261/chapter-abstract/189818450
But you can find bunches of them, and they are truly fascinating, by just keyword searching autism + plasticity. On the neuro level, it fits nicely with the not-growing-up thing.
Caveat: quite a lot of the research on this is done by people pushing TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) as a treatment for it. So, they're selling something. I do not know if TMS is good, bad, or neutral, but what I've read about it... I won't be signing up for it any time soon. If cell phones next to your head are bad for your health, I can't imagine that TMS is completely benign.
Re: Childlike: addendum
Date: 2024-01-24 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-25 01:25 am (UTC)The effect of this is that there is a great deal more crosstalk in the autistic brain, with contact between channels that wouldn't exist in a normal brain. This density seems to enhance the function of some systems in the brain, like memory - perhaps the hippocampus works better the more links it has to the rest of the network. On the other hand, the mirror neuron system, which is responsible for intuitive social behavior, seems to be nearly completely disabled by overconnection. My guess is that the mirror neurons depend on precise timing of their signals to work properly, and the overconnection disrupts this timing.
I likewise have always had a strong affinity for the etheric plane. I learned to feel and manifest aura entirely by myself as a kid and I also learned to produce the ASMR effect before anyone gave it a name. As an interesting note, multiple autistics I've known have become addicted to the drug ketamine. My experience with it is that it effectively blocks all etheric perception. Trying to reach out with your etheric senses while under its influence is kind of like a bat trying to echolocate inside a tin can. To me this is extremely unpleasant but I can understand its appeal to someone who can't regulate etheric input. It also made me nauseous when I tried it, which makes me suspect my natural balance is assisted by my etheric senses - other people don't seem to experience this as much. I was able to resist this using breathing exercises, focusing my etheric senses entirely within my body to fight off the nausea.
And I don't know about superpowers but I can definitely do things normal people can't. Notably, I think we have an ability to manifest an "other space" where we can project and process ideas. For you, that other space is probably where you hear music you're working on.
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Date: 2024-01-25 04:48 pm (UTC)Yikes about the ketamine. "Cancelling" one's perception of the etheric is a very bad idea, because the etheric does not cease to exist just because one's senses are dulled to it. I make the spiritual leprosy analogy quite frequently but it certainly applies here. Being able to sense danger is what immunity is all about.
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Date: 2024-01-25 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-25 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-26 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-26 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-27 10:55 pm (UTC)Something I've heard from military vets is that PTSD isn't just about negative memories but a haunting sense of "It could have gone differently if I did X." The worst of it is tied to people obsessively reenacting incidents where friends died in their heads and thinking about how they could have prevented it. As such, it's tied in with a person's sense of vigilance and perception of their surroundings. Perhaps the mental reenactment loop can be stopped by nullifying the natural awareness of one's environment, but it doesn't seem at all a healthy way to approach the problem.
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Date: 2024-01-27 11:55 pm (UTC)As far as the dulling of the senses, anti-depressant drugs did it to me. Yet I was even more tormented by vicious entities because (at least in my case) tricyclic drugs cause a drift from waking to sleeping. For five years, I found myself suspended in the lower astral for several hours a night. It leaves you wide open to entities. The irony of anti-depressants is being walled off from some emotions and completely vulnerable to others.
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Date: 2024-01-28 03:12 am (UTC)So, yeah, the flashbacks and stuff were gnarly, for years. But I was not plagued by guilt about it. There wasn't anything I could have done to save them. The grief was terrible, but necessary. I came to see it as a thing that *must* be experienced fully, and I embraced it, and I think I became a better, stronger person for it. That was the year I became truly an adult, grappling with that. It was like this: the grief, the pain, the sheer horror of the thing, all that-- it was a white-hot fire. A smelting furnace. And it was like that stupid kids' game, "can't go over it, can't go under it, can't go around it, gotta go through it". I was granted an understanding from outside myself: I had to step into the fire, and just keep going no matter how much it hurt. Then it would be a cleansing fire, and I'd be refashioned into the tool I was meant to be. The right shape. BUT, if I shied away, tried to avoid it, block it, escape it, deflect in any way... I'd still be burnt but I'd just be maimed and crippled and misshapen, instead of forged properly. It was the worst, strangest, most transformative year of my life. I can wish it hadn't happened, that they hadn't died. But that was the business of fate. And it made me the person I am now-- that part I don't regret.
It seems like... a chemical escape would have been one of those paths to becoming a maimed soul. The only way through grief is through. There's no out, or around. As for the mental reenactment loop-- there are a lot of things that helped with that. But a really big part of it, at the beginning, was just acquiring the mental discipline to not let my thoughts wander. That was really hard, but very necessary-- the accident was this giant black hole with its own huge gravity pulling everything toward it. Memorizing stuff helps-- a long prayer, psalms, learning new music, these are all things that establish paths and patterns through the thoughts, wheel-tracks to follow more or less automatically. It's probably a lot easier to take drugs, but... the process was itself important. I don't think it would've come out right if I'd skipped that part. The ketamine thing sounds dangerous, completely apart from whatever physical risks there are to it. It's just not the sort of thing there are real shortcuts for.
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Date: 2024-01-25 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-25 10:47 am (UTC)I do not believe I am autistic but I have had a number of people who I take seriously say that I may be a bit towards that side of the rainbow.
I have had a lot of success in reigning in parts of my personality that cause myself and others harm through ancestral/W A Price style eating. Natasha Campbell-McBride, in her book The GAPS Protocol, Talks of how both adults and their children go through a similar process as they change how they eat. As with all personality matters, the traits remain but they are not so extreme and sometimes the diagnosis is altered or no longer applies.
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Date: 2024-01-25 05:08 pm (UTC)Many of the people who exquisitely control every morsel of food that goes into their mouths can end up ailing anyways. This happens because of pre-existing etheric and physical damage, because they are not truly grateful, because they shunt too much of the food's production onto others, or have lackluster etheric skills in the kitchen and consequently "starve" their food of energy. As sexist as this sounds, women are better cooks because they are etherically male and unlike children, they have had enough time to hone the alchemical skill of cooking. I believe women live longer because they have a woman to cook for them, if you get my drift. Meaning I will live longer because I am a woman and I cook for myself. When an etherically male woman cooks, she imbues the food with her etheric male energy. When men do it, it still happens, but it is nowhere near as potent. He has to try harder to be a good cook and his efforts easily fall short. He is an etheric female and in order to cook, he has to temporarily reverse his polarity. Energetically, it works but it is nowhere near as strong. This is why many men will think highly of their own cooking despite it being terrible and many women don't think much of their cooking despite it being amazing. Men have to expend far more effort to cook with worse results.
Single or widowed men suffer the worst kinds of etheric starvation unless they somehow live with a woman who cooks them homemade food.
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Date: 2024-01-25 07:13 pm (UTC)I'm glad you make allowances for the rest of us :) I tried the vegetarian thing for four years and it nearly killed me. I may be on the cusp of a definitive answer about why that happened-- I've got a spit sample in the mail as part of a study on monogenic diabetes. Fingers crossed! The prospect of finally *knowing*, or alternately being chucked back into the question-mark void, is weirdly nerve-wracking. I don't like limbo, I'm really ambivalent about the whole genetic-testing thing, and my results could have non-trivial implications for my very large extended family.
Contemplating what that particular inheritance might mean on a more philosophical, energetic, spiritual, etc. level is... interesting. It strongly implies a familial curse-- someone five or six generations back did something to invoke a seven-generation curse. And perhaps a non-lineage-terminating autosomal dominant genetic disorder is one of the ways that could manifest.
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Date: 2024-01-25 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-26 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-26 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-28 09:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-26 07:44 pm (UTC)I’ve followed your blog and enjoy your posts but I’ve never commented before.
This post really resonates with me. My teenage daughter has been diagnosed with depression and anxiety and so much of what you wrote describes her journey except that she isn’t autistic as far as we know. She’s social and makes eye contact easily. She also is comfortable addressing groups of people. But the battles with food, being both sensitive and inflexible, perfectionism, acting childlike and depending on others are all things that we (the rest of my household and me) have been dealing with for a while.
This post and the comments (especially by you and Methylethyl) have given me more comfort than any of the explanations by providers or therapists I’ve spoken with.
We recently adopted a cat and as none of us have ever had one before, it’s all new. My daughter seems to be responding well. Just wondering if the cat has any impact on the etheric or astral?
-Lookingforpeace
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Date: 2024-01-27 05:43 am (UTC)Please forgive me if you have read this one already, but I did write an essay about the etheric aspects of food a while ago: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/95681.html
I have a TikTok channel where I discuss the etheric and astral planes quite a bit. The handle is
As for companion animals, this is an excerpt from the book I am writing, Sacred Homemaking:
I have three cats inside my house and three ferals on the outside. I have gotten a lot of good advice on cats by watching videos from cat expert Jackson Galaxy on Youtube.
Here is another oldie but goodie on talking to your spiritual ecosystem: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/46174.html
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Date: 2024-01-27 05:57 pm (UTC)I read both of the essays when you posted them and thought the ideas you brought up made a lot of sense. That was before my daughter’s situation escalated and I’ve been in crisis mode for a while. Thanks for the reminder as all of your points seem even more relevant now.
And the excerpt from your book is fantastic. Looking forward to reading the rest when it’s available.
I know you’ve addressed being suicidal when you were younger and how divination has helped you. I’m not sure if that would help my daughter but do you have any advice for a caregiver in helping her through difficult episodes? Not asking for medical advice. No need to answer if you don’t want to.
-Lookingforpeace
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Date: 2024-01-27 11:38 pm (UTC)I suggest you teach yourself discursive meditation as I have described here: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/4166.html Once you have become halfway decent on meditating through symbols, objects, phrases, and your own emotions, you might offer to teach your daughter how to do a discursive meditation session. I believe discursive meditation, learned early on from someone who knew how to do it, would have saved me from going on antidepressants that I later had to wean myself off of against my psychiatrist's wishes. Troubled young people need to see examples of sane adulthood: there's a whole lot of talk among "experts" about what to do and not a whole lot of being the change you want to see in the world.
If she's open to praying and propitiating to gods, that may be another way to help her through rough times. For instance, depression might be addressed by memorizing the Orphic Hymn to Apollo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naJgrKv1oT0 and saying (or singing) it as an invocation against dark forces. Any old prayer, including the Christian ones, has a great deal of potency. I am a Druid these days, so I tend to like to say this prayer every morning, every night, and when I plant anything in the garden:
As far as deities go, we humans are incapable of understanding who and what they are in any meaningful sense. We're just too dumb: it's like a hamster trying to understand a Chopin prelude. Nevertheless, the gods seem willing to work with us if we choose a path of humility and openness. This means never treating them as vending machines -- side eye to Christians following the Prosperity Gospel and its variants -- and going forward with the kind of perseverance exhibited by a drip-drop of water that eventually carves out the Grand Canyon.
My opinion follows: this is only one of many lives. It's not an easy time to be incarnated. The Mayans and Incas feared incarnation during our time. We are truly bogged down; all of the material conveniences we enjoy have come at a terrible price. More people have sold their souls in this era than at any time in human history. The majority of religious leaders have sold their souls to minor demons or in some cases major ones. There are many regular people who are getting sucked down into the demonic clog and who knows how long they will be down there. If only they were spirited away while they did this! But no, hell is right here on Earth and they're all making it worse as we speak.
For those of us who are incarnated, we have to do Herculean work to achieve any kind of basic spirituality. There simply weren't as many distractions from being spiritual in previous ages and there were far better role models. The one positive is that the Great Work becomes even greater when you manage to do it in these crappy conditions.
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Date: 2024-01-27 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-28 10:39 pm (UTC)-Lookingforpeace