kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with clairaudience

One of the traits of the Age of Pisces (the Equinox I believe we are in right now that is giving way to the Age of Aquarius) is the pathological need to declare the imminent arrival of the Rapture, which is supposed to take the form of an epic cleansing and/or a universal improvement in consciousness. For Christians, this fallacious line of thinking is expressed in belief in an actual Rapture. For New Age types, it is a Great Awakening during which a golden age will dawn and the "ignorant" -- a.k.a. anyone who is disagreement -- will be swept away in a tsunami of rainbows and unicorn farts. For atheists, hope rides with luxury communism and Universal Basic Income. The forced institution of commie UBI promises that soon-to-be sterile, formerly middle class plebes will be permanently kept under thumb in voluntary, walkable pod prisons. They will eternally eat ze bugs and dream of flying cars that never materialize in between marathons of drug-fueled masturbation and video games... Yippee!

Noah and Klaus are advised to retreat to their underground bunkers NOW. I encourage them to keep detailed journals so future scientists can study their excruciating deaths by etheric starvation. When their ancient, emaciated yet bloated bodies are found, samples of tissues will reveal a treasure trove of information about how awful death can be despite a near perfect diet of the best preserved food and lots of high-tech simulators and massage chairs in every basement room. Live like a mole, die like a mole. As for the rest of us, we will take our chances with the real sun and its cancer-causing rays, operating under the grim acknowledgement that none of us gets out of here alive.

I have said it before and I will say it again: Meatworld sucks. Nevertheless, you and I were not entirely reluctant in our choice to be here, as is self-evident despite Meatworld being an illusion.

A hundred years ago, people were still able to see ghosts and spirits regularly. I have a small book collection on people who recall interacting with fairies from the years 500 to 1900AD. I believe if we could go back a couple thousand years and live as a human being of that era, seeing monsters, ghosts, and fairies would be an everyday occurrence. My guess is that Beowulf, including all accounts of the monster Grendel, was closer to news reporting than fiction in its day. Even further back in time to ancient Egypt, I think it is highly likely that witnessing pyramids being put together via a combination of slave labor and levitation would not have been a big deal.

What Happened? The Dark Age of the Soul

We are living through the worst part of what some call the Kali Yuga, an age of spiritual retardation that was dreaded when it was foreseen by the Incas and loathed and feared by the prophet Nostradamus. Via sheer fate and our collective choices, the human race has descended to the rock bottom of an abyss of spiritual ignorance. We are living through a Dark Age of the Soul. In the West, monotheism narrowed the already ailing connection with the Divine, reducing it to a dogmatic set of rote repetitions based on what used to work. Like Hollywood sequels nobody asked for or wanted, monotheism continues to double and triple down on dysfunctional routines. In the East, the combination of Marxism and Confucian conformity reliably produces hideous manifestations of slavery and capitalist excess. Though most of the East's depravities have been blamed on Western devils, absolutely none of it happens without the consensual copycatting of Western greed. Ghost cities, clear cut Indonesian (former) rainforests, and florescent blue rivers do not happen without permission and participation.

The usual strategy for battling the world's evils, if you can call it a strategy, is to wallow in outrage about what was done by that guy over there. Karen can wave her finger until it falls off and it's never going to do jack until Karen looks at her own life and decides to be the change she pretends to want to see in the world. There is a more subtle approach that works better than outrage. As you can imagine, the subtle road is often avoided because it requires nuance. This road entails discovering the hidden goodness of the Kali Yuga and amplifying that goodness until it is powerful enough to transform the midnight of the soul into morning.

Insensitivity

The commonest disease of the modern age is etheric starvation and the commonest birth defect is spiritual retardation. We cannot see, hear, or properly feel the non-embodied entities known generally as spirits and we are almost hopelessly ignorant about the astral plane. When we are still children, some of us are occacionally clairaudient or clairvoyant. Some of us (not me) remembered their past lives as young children. Many of us play with imaginary friends, which by the way are real beings without flesh bodies. By the time we are out of diapers, most of us are taught to be good little atheists in one way or another. We are instructed to dismiss our childhood conversations with non-embodied beings as fantasy or worse, we are condemned if we don't say the being was Allah or Jesus himself. Adding punishment to pre-existing spiritual retardation is like beating the prisoner for peeing in the corner because he had no toilet. Many people raised in this thoroughly modern manner take on spiritual damage for life, abandoning the pursuit of the higher self from cradle to grave: this is what often happens to drug addicts and alcoholics. A more obnoxious variation on the theme are the ones who are convinced there is a single way to connect with the only God and all the rest is Satan. That said, monotheism isn't all garbage and sometimes serves its original intention -- to connect the seeker with his Creator. Communism has been known to produce spiritual people in spite of itself. Beautiful flowers bloom in abandoned asphalt wastelands... they're called "weeds" and they are very hardy.

The average spiritual condition of someone born in our time, especially when compared to the spiritual condition of someone from long ago, is akin to a non-physical form of leprosy. Leprosy is a deteriorating condition of not being able to feel what happens to your Meatworld body even if your limbs rot and your nose falls off your face. The pain one feels as a leper is random an unrelated to the states of emergency happening to various organs and body parts. Unlike the Meatworld leper, the spiritual leper cannot end her own suffering by opening her wrists and going for a stumpy jog. The spiritual body is eternal and prevents temporary Meatworld solutions.

I tried to explain to someone on my neglected White Witch of the Prairie channel on TikTok why cursing others is dumb despite it feeling good. I said it was like thinking you are playing Catch when you are actually playing Dodgeball: all that bad energy you throw will be met by a sea of vicious, famished beings who immediately perk up and say "The girl who threw THAT smells TASTY."

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

I say this all the time but if you don't have a daily, working prayer relationship with at least one deity, a daily banishing ritual, regular discursive meditation, and daily divination on your side, you are most likely a sitting duck for veritable legions of malevolent entities. You are their ticket to ride, you are their free lunch, and they will happily go after your family if you'll only give them a way in.

Speaking of prayer, I recently saw a person on Facebook asking for prayer warriors to help her through her latest bit of self-caused drama. First of all, prayer is not war. Those who use the term "prayer warrior" in a serious context are the same as kung fu amateurs who hang around in bars looking for someone to fight. Prayer is not defense; if it was, those who prayed would not need to lock their doors or own guns. Prayer is encouragement and advice from beings who are older, smarter, wiser, and better than us. If you largely create your own messes and messes for others who are drawn into your drama, prayer is counterproductive. When "prayer" is really just begging for more enablement from mysterious forces, it is worse than a waste of time. The lady who asked for prayer warriors is constantly begging not to learn the lessons that have been in front of her face this whole time. I steer clear of asking gods to help her avoid slipping under the covers of the bed she made.

Another bon mot you'll hear me dish like a broken record is the practice of thanking items and spaces compulsively and then patiently listening with one's mind's ear for a quiet, barely discernible "You're welcome". The Clean Toilet Challenge is forever, if you hadn't guessed. Though I maintain a spotless commode in careful hopes of one day having an empire of earned wealth, it is primarily a practice of daily humility and deep appreciation of the convenience of indoor plumbing.

The Ecosystem: You Were Never Alone and You'll Never Be Alone

It is my belief that despite spiritual leprosy, we all have our own spiritual ecosystem before birth and well after death. While incarcerated in the Meatworld illusion, we can talk to all of our selves, including our higher selves, along with a panoply of non-embodied beings. Here is a partial list of beings who are around any given person on any given day:

-Ancestors
-Ghosts of the recently dead
-Spirits of place
-Spirits of objects
-Animals who astrally project
-Ghosts of dead animals
-Angels
-Demons
-Egregores
-Fantasy versions of the self
-Fairies
-Random things wandering around the astral

There is nothing unusual about conversion with these beings; or at least there didn't used to be anything unusual about it. To be schizophrenic is to have a generally toxic ecosystem where you have the conversations aloud. Demonic obsession is when the ecosystem is trashed and opportunistic, malevolent entities have moved in to feed off the energy produced like parasites. Demonic possession occurs when the soul inhabiting the body is so weak, the body itself can be automated by demons.

If you've ever talked to yourself, you have probably talked to a non-embodied being. It isn't a big deal. Everyone does it. The trick isn't in talking to entities but in knowing:

1. If it is your own voice or someone else's
2. Knowing who you are talking to

Beings can and will impersonate others: that's why the idiots who run seances or use Ouija boards who think they've channeled Elvis or Napoleon can almost guarantee they've laid out an energy buffet table for random, opportunistic demons wandering the lower astral. I call this kind of entity an Impersonator and they are freaking awful. Inviting them into a seance or a Ouija session is like going to a party dressed in a string bikini, taking a couple of roofies, and expecting to remain a virgin by the next morning.

Discursive meditation, divination, and meaningful, non-combative prayer are the only ways I know of getting anywhere the truth of who's who where non-embodied entities are concerned. If you know of any others, by all means, please share them.

Gardens are Holy

The cultivated spiritual ecosystem is much like a garden coaxed out of wasteland. Careful and deliberate, its variety invites benevolent pollinators and repels pests. It works to improve what was good about the land that was already there.

When death happens, there are choices to be made. If you see Meatworld as the end all and be all as many atheists and self-labeled faithful do, then you remain unaware of the larger spectrum of reality. Meatworld is the calcified extension of the spiritual plane, and being in it for periods of fleshy incarnation is something Dion Fortune likens to being asleep to the higher planes. To die is to awaken an to return to the true home beyond the Gates of Death. It is only when we die that we can awaken to reality out of the Meatworld illusion and get a more unfettered access to the Divine. Occultists spend their Meatworld lives cultivating the connection. The classic occult path is to spend time in prayer an contemplation hoping for Divine help broken with a ton of "chop wood, carry water" diligence in Meatworld. The ecosystem of the occultist ideally starts as trashy parking lot and ends as well-tended Paradise on Earth. Of course materialists and atheists fail to understand why we would rip down the abandoned shopping center only to transmogrify it into a woodland path terminating in a statue of Athena. They only understand once they have left the mall and its fever dreams of looking cute and gorging on salty snacks. (I too love salty snacks but at some point, you've got to eat something naturally green, pink, purple, or orange or you will have a bad time.) For anything new to be born, the old must die an fade away. We have reached peak parking lot, I think, and that's why we are witnessing a slow and undramatic re-sensitization to the spirit world. If a half-blind, former atheist can see the light, I believe anyone can.

If you think sensing the spirit of place is beyond your ability, ask yourself one question: At any time during your early childhood, did you have a friend whose house was considered the best? If you knew that friend with a “cool mom” whose house was laid back and friendly, that was you sensing the spirit of place. The spirit of a place is rooted in the pragmatic: what happened there, who lives there, and what their general attitude tends to be. Even for someone who does not consider themselves a psychic at all, an abandoned mental hospital with crumbling walls, decrepit cot beds with rubber straps languishing in the corners, and piles of syringes lying in a puddle in the middle of the mildewed hallway is not going to be a comfortable place to spend an afternoon. There are both seen and unseen factors that make the abandoned mental hospital a scary place to be, and one of them is the invisible energy that torture and incarceration attracts. Scientists of our era frantically deny any such energy exists, even though over sixty percent of people believe they have seen a ghost and one out of three report they have either lived or stayed in a haunted house (research by OnePoll on behalf of Groupon of 2000 people). I’ll guess that near 100% have sensed the spirit of place, regardless of clairvoyant ability of belief. Of course some people are more sensitive than others, just as some people are better at math or knitting than others, but everyone has got some ability where spirit of place is concerned. It follows that sensitivity to the spirit of place can be developed and refined.

I was born insensitive in some ways and oversensitive in others. For instance, my hearing is so acute, I have to sleep with earplugs and become extremely stressed when in noisy spaces, including American movie theaters with surround sound. I am an extremely high functioning autistic, and that has caused me to often misread people’s verbal or physical signals and subtexts, a form of often devastating insensitivity. I am extremely sensitive to the spirit of place. I’m not a neatnik, but clutter bothers me enough that I keep my small house at a constant wabi-sabi level of clean, because any more clutter than that would disrupt the good feeling of the rooms of my home. Conversely, I will never live in a Mies Van Der Rohe minimalist space if I can help it, because I am confident the bareness and sharp angles would impede my ability to concentrate and/or sleep at night.

I can sense the aura of a neighborhood much like one can sense the nature of a person by knowing them over many years. The area where I grew up has changed radically in the half-century I have been alive; it has changed to the point where I can no longer comfortably spend a significant amount of time there. I grew up in a distant suburb of Chicago. If I fictionalized the place I grew up, she would be a Baby Boomer era woman with an idyllic childhood. Her teenage years were staid and placid, nevertheless, she grew into a compassionate, earthy, pragmatic young woman with her heart in the right place. This all went down the toilet when she married a scientist and stumbled into wealth beyond her wildest dreams. She about-faced from her former hippie ideals and replaced her old compassion with a new and miserable standard of racing the Joneses. She’s enjoyed prosperity and wealth, but she’s also been immersed by the byproducts that come from being engaged in constant competition with rich idiots. Though she speaks much rhetoric to indicate otherwise, she is a snob and a racist. She is all quaintness and charm as long as you don’t scratch her surface. She’s a woman who has had every single appetite in life satisfied except the ones that matter. She’s not just hungry; she’s ravenous. That’s why I don’t like spending time in my hometown. She feels hungry for whatever I’ve got.

I also don’t care for Chicago, which is where I went to University. Chicago is a fast-talking, slick, sophisticated middle-aged man to me. He’s Plutonian, charismatic, and powerful. He’s no wimp or shrinking violet either. He has zero problem getting his hands dirty. Though I like those things in a man, I consider Chicago to be my ex-boyfriend. We have had a passionate relationship at times, but in the end, he wasn’t for me. I don’t see him much anymore, and when I do, I try not to get deeply involved.

Where I live now is an old woman. She’s what I hope to become — a crazy cat lady and a wise old witch. Her beauty is hidden under a rough at the edges exterior. People are afraid of her because she is fierce. She doesn’t tolerate bull. She is nurturing and she welcomes me home every night. We are just getting to know each other and I hope to know her much better in the future.

Portraying a city or a town as a person is common enough in writing to be a trope. I’ve read enough novelists of varying talent who have called London or Paris an “old whore” to roll my eyes when I see the cliché in print.

Beyond towns, streets have spirits of place. So do individual living spaces such as houses or apartments. There are a couple of streets where I work that genuinely feel good. There isn’t anything special about them — one is a hill with some schools and malls on either side and the other is a somewhat busy thoroughfare that splits a couple of townhouse subdivisions. Why they feel warm and pleasant is a mystery, much like why my current town feels like an old woman.

A childhood friend of mine has a bad family. Lots of shouting, verbal and sexual abuse, and the kids often ran away. I went to her house once and it felt like living a nightmare. The worst part of it was the thin veneer of stability they slapped on for the brief period of hosting a guest. Sadly, I can see someone preferring to grow up homeless than to grow up in that house. If her house was a person, it would be John Wayne Gacy. The experience of meeting my friend’s family was so traumatic, I wasn’t able to process the information I took in for many years. I can’t imagine trying to grow up there. She deserves a medal for even making an attempt to stay in that house as a young person, though what choice did she have? She had no control over what happened then, however, she can control what happens now and so can I; so can you.

The smallest of efforts can make a place much better and improve its spirit. A classic case in point is Christmas lights. Even the most pathetic, single string of giant bulbs from the year 1983 thrown on a lopsided arbor vitae lift the mood of the general area. Electric lights produce such a tangible effect, manipulative corporations rely upon lighting up stores like constant fourth of July fireworks displays in order to make it seem like happy things happen at Walmart. Another small action that helps lift the mood of the general area is gardening. Personally, I appreciate the smallest and most bungled attempts at gardening when I see it on other people’s patios or in their front yards. When you go through the trouble of planting violets or canna lilies in a pot and watering them for a month or three, that is care manifested on the physical plane. You may see it as insignificant but I don’t. Every little bit helps, and conversely, every little bit hurts. That’s why it’s so frustrating and annoying for some of us to see a new mini-mall or being installed in an area that already teems with half-abandoned mini-malls. When the tiniest scrap of fragile, wild space is subject to being asphalted over for the almighty force of Profit, it reflects the attitude of a generation and an age. Ripping out one’s front lawn in order to replace it with native plants (if the city zoning and homeowner’s association overlords allow it!) becomes an device of rebellion against the prevailing spirit of our age that wants to stamp out wildness and individuality at every turn. We are in a psychological war where every consumer lifestyle choice is a test of what side we are on; if you think about it too hard, it is easy to become overwhelmed. The average person isn’t conscious of this war, but that doesn’t stop it from going on all around them. Nevertheless, perhaps that is a topic for a future post.

East Asians of various flavors have traditional notions of household gods. Japanese call these spirits “kami”. Western atheist and Christian know-it-alls have done their level best to stamp out the idea of kami residing in homes this side of the oceans, however, the West has its own rich traditions of fairies, elves, brownies, and ghosts as counterpart to Eastern tales of ancestors hanging out after death and prankster fox spirits. I have gone through my own phases of belief and disbelief about such disembodied creatures and am currently in a belief phase. What changed for me is that I realized that I don’t have to believe in non-embodied entities for them to exist: pragmatic evidence from every world culture except for our current Western industrial one shows they do, and though they can’t be proven (because they’re not physical) it makes sense to try to figure out what they are and what they are possibly saying. There is no proof, there is only This Stuff Works. Most people talk to their cats and dogs, and they talk to themselves. I talk to my cat (I don’t have a dog at this time), I talk to myself, and I also talk to the spirits in my house. I have a relationship with the spirits of my house just as I have a relationship with my cat. I also talk to the spirit of my car and thank her after I’ve finished driving her for the day. I talk to trees when I visit them in the forest preserve and yes, sometimes they answer back. Do I hear voices? No, I do not, though every now and then I’ll have an episode of clairaudience, like when I hear birds in trees in the middle of night in winter or music that isn’t there before going to sleep. Hearing what spirits have to say is like tuning into a radio station. I have to carefully filter out my own thoughts and wishful thinking, including my negative wishful thinking and fetish for portents of doom. There is also the important consideration that not all of these spirits wish me well and the whopping majority are as omnipotent as I am, which is to say they aren’t at all omnipotent. Spirit voices can be a scary place, and I went through that place when I was sixteen and began to study the occult via Gardnerian Wicca. Opening those channels resulted in mostly bad experiences for me, and because of my skepticism, I was ill prepared to deal with both spirit attacks and the consequences of my own stupid intentions. Thankfully, I did not end up dead or permanently messed up, but looking back, I shudder at how easily that could have happened. After my nearly 20 years of atheism, I began studying Druid magic and with it, the Sphere of Protection, a well-known invocation/banishing ritual that has changed my life for the better.... but that is a long story. Once again, I’d like to save that for another post!

If you’ve ever seen a ghost or felt a space you lived in was haunted, I invite you to share your experience in the comments.