kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with reincarnation

When you die, you are always given many choices, just as you are given choices while you still live. As someone who speaks to the dead, let me reassure you that an entire unseen ecosystem surrounds you at all times. The only difference between the after-death state and Meatworld is that the ecosystem becomes much more visible and perceivable because you don’t carry the albatross of your Meatworld body.

After physical death, your subtle bodies (also known as the eternal soul) undergo a series of baptisms as your perception is re-opened to the real world. Meatworld is a spacetime illusion. It is like the reflection a mirror. The scenery behind the layer of glass looks real enough until you try to walk into it.

Goodbye, cruel world!

So imagine if you followed the advice of a certain nihilist influencer and upon dying, you reject the light, run away from your loved ones who are calling out to you, and instead choose to run towards the Void. The influencer informed you that evil space lizard gods have been farming you for your soul energy for all your countless lifetimes on Meatworld. Said lizard devil-gods wash your memory each time so you’ll continue being their compliant livestock. Meatworld sucks, lending hefty credence to the notion that it is all a scam, along with those pesky religious recommendations to be a good person and to do unto others as you would yourself. Nah, all that do-gooder stuff is for suckers. You believe this influencer until the day you are hit by a bus and croak.

Perhaps part of you believes that as you run towards the Void, the gods will catch you and say “No, you’re not allowed to do that!” Since you are convinced that all deities are scheming space lizards out for your blood energy, you are quite surprised as the light fades, the tunnel recedes into the distance, the glowing door vaporizes, and the voices of all those you have ever loved, including your beloved pets, are squelched in an abyss of silence. The Divine won’t stop you from being engulfed by the Void if is that is what you choose. You are and have always been autonomous. As it turns out, you can have your Void and eat it too, but don’t be shocked if what you thought were open arms are actually open jaws.

The Void is a vacuum and nature abhors a vacuum. The Void wants you in it and always beckons. Humans are not the smartest creatures and our intelligence is somewhere between plankton and demigods. If you reject Meatworld’s school, it will happily let you go, but you will remain a spiritual retard with a Dunning-Kruger approach to the learning process. When you reject Earth while presuming the grass is greener in the Void, the Void will sweep you away, far from the soul swarm in which you incarnated to other planets and other universes. These could be heavenly depending on the frequency at which you vibrate. Odds are that your vibration is more of one of despair and arrogance, and there are plenty of planets, timelines, and universes ready to match you note for note with more of the same. Just because a planet is not Earth does not make it good, and there are many places that are far more harsh and hostile to your type of soul, which after all was incarnated on Earth because that is the ecosystem to which it is best suited. The lore around comets is very useful to study here, as comets have long been associated with bad omens and demonic beings.

Let’s hear it for the Void

The Void has a much stronger pull than the light, especially if you vibrate in sympathy to other beings who have chosen to wander it. The pull of the Void is so strong, you don’t have to wait until the end of your life to partake in it. In fact, most people are swayed heavily by the Void’s gravitational pull, which is especially true in our current materialistic, demonic age. It is actually far more difficult to resist the Void, because resisting the Void requires the Apollonian virtues of knowing yourself and exercising moderation in all things.

To jump into the Void right now, all you need to do is cut off and abandon every connection and friend who cannot help you in the purely material sense. Those souls at the other end of the doorway are also right here and now; give up on them and you make it much easier to leave them behind later. Refuse to see the beauty of anyone or anything unless it is an acknowledgement of superficial glamour or sex appeal. All beauty is the light and the light is supposed to be false, provided by the Archons as a fake out. Sequester yourself on a metaphorical island of parsimony, expending the bare minimum of energy it takes to stay afloat, abandoning all work if it means being inconvenienced or if it involves sacrificing your precious time for a greater cause. Grab all the wealth you can, never questioning how it got into your bank account. You won’t have to wait for the Void or travel to the Void because you will be the Void.

When the next comet comes around, you’ll feel its gravitational pull, which exists on the astral plane as well as the physical plane. The comet will seem even more promising than the Void and you will find that others who have chosen to exempt themselves from Earth and its natural laws will be magnetized by it along with you. Sociopaths, serial rapists, pedophiles, ritual Satanists, various murderers, and hoarders of unearned wealth will jump on board thinking they are going home, and in a sense, they will be going home. You, the aforementioned group, and the others who believed the influencer over their own guts will hitch a fast, free ride to lands far, far away from Earth. It is highly doubtful you’ll be back again. That said, be careful what you wish for.

What is karma?

The challenge of karma is to understand it is not a set of arbitrary laws put in place as a measure of sadism. Karma is another word for consequences. It is also known as cause and effect. I’m sad to have to say this: the point of incarnation is not to run away from incarnation because evilly evil space lizards are forcing you to live your worst lives. The point of consequences for your actions is to forge you into a being who is brave and strong enough to consistently be better than you were yesterday, if only by the slightest bit.

Forsaking the rest and grace that comes after a Meatworld incarnation for the promise of adventures and free-dumb in the Void is like being saved from starvation only to vomit the contents of your life-saving meal into the nearest toilet. Go ahead and gag yourself, but don’t expect it to end well.

I don’t claim to be an expert and I could always be wrong, but from I can tell, it is up to us to suss out the beauty in an ugly time. It is our duty to make the best out of what we are given, even when what is given looks like a trash heap. With enough spiritual work, the blinders are removed while we still toil on Meatworld, and that is how I can converse with the dead and remember a patchwork of my own past lives, including some of my past lives as geese and cats.

When I die, I am going to skip hitching a ride deep into the Void. No comets for me, thanks. Instead, I will enjoy having my Second Sight turned back into my First Sight. I especially look forward to communing with my soul swarm and the higher selves of the family and friends I have had during incarnation. I’m looking forward to seeing my Dad again. While I am here, I will love the seasons and I will embrace the spirits of the land, for I am one with them. I will never give up the Great Work in despair. I will persevere like the drop of water that became a creek that became the Grand Canyon. I will ratio my hatred with love. I will stay on the Path, no matter how lonely and difficult, and I will trust in the Divine. I hope you’ll join me.

Back in the roaring 90s and 00s, I casually observed how flus and colds got a little more severe every year for the kids I taught. By the early 2010s, it was not uncommon for several children in my Studio to be out of school for several weeks at a stretch and hospitalized for pneumonia. When I was a child in the 70s and 80s, there were all of two kids pulled out of school for any length of time for respiratory illnesses, and they were the ones with congenital problems such as type one diabetes. In other words, Gen X was healthier in childhood than Millennials and Millennials were healthier than Zoomers/Gen Z.

Many of us sensed something evil coming down the pipe after the turn of the Millennium. Though I sort of guessed that it would be related to one of the worst grifts of our time, Big Medicine, but I certainly did not predict that it would come in the form of a mild, clearly lab-created flu that average people would latch onto as a (false) Messiah. The same people who kept McDonalds, Taco Bell, KFC, and their ilk in business all these years while failing to see the connection between their children's worsening seasonal flus suddenly did a 180 and played along with draconian lockdown schemes, ineffectual masks, and routinely deadly shots in order to conform to the Latest Thing. Recently the Centers for Disease Control voted unanimously 15-0 to push a policy that is designed to absolve Pfizer and Moderna from liability, shoving the MRNA quaxxines onto the “recommended” childhood schedule. This means that all those parents with kids in public schools who somehow avoided allowing the US's corporate fascists to use their children as lab rats will face increasing pressure from all sides. They are given a "choice" of either yanking their children from public school altogether, which is a major lifestyle change, or dealing with schools that will wantonly coerce, trick, and brainwash their children into taking a shot that apparently cancels their future fertility if not their actual lives.

Strange times.

If I were still an atheist, I would be a great deal angrier right now. As a Druid occultist, I find that I am more easily able to forgive, even if I cannot forget. Christians have gone every which way after largely allowing their churches to be co-opted by plague fearmongers. They cannot forgive because the whopping majority of them were complicit. They are a small facet of the greater gem that was quaxxine compliance: Somewhere between half to three quarters of the world population supposedly took the MRNA shots. The number is somewhere in the billions.

From the beginning of my life, I have been intrigued by human overpopulation. As a little girl, I had a series of terrifying epiphanies about it. All of the world’s socioeconomic problems have a single root: too many people. Humans are greedy creatures by nature, present company included. We have a very difficult time separating need and want. We shove aside other species without mercy when it comes to getting something we want for our own. For some of us, and I would argue that it is more of a woman thing, the awareness of how the human race burdens the Earth leads to existential guilt. It certainly did for me. That is why by age seven I was already dead certain I would never bear my own children, because at that tender age I felt it was a crime against all that was good and holy in an age of rampant overpopulation. Unsurprisingly, my torment over my own guilt escalated to vegetarianism and being suicidally depressed in my teens.

Nowadays, we have all sorts of overgrown children who possess the same existential guilt I did in second grade and decide to project that guilt instead of dealing with it like honest brokers. Klaus Schwab, Noel Harari, and Bill Gates feel the guilt all right, but they go a few steps further by appointing themselves as God and forcing sterilization upon the unwashed masses via their brainwashed tools such as Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. Let’s not forget that Trump has lauded the MRNA quaxxines since their debut and though he has somewhat ameliorated the damage by insisting on quaxxine choice, he is still largely responsible for legions of people who became convinced the quaxx was as safe and effective as its propaganda laid claim.

A smarter being would have seen all this crap a mile away I suppose, knowing the ins and outs of the puppet show by heart. I was hoodwinked, upset, and thrown for a loop. I clung onto my lesson studio for thirteen years in a commercial space, always throwing everything I had at it and either breaking even or sinking below solvency at various times. Finally the Coronapocalypse swept my business (at least its incarnation as a commercial space) away and decimated my ability to afford commercial rent. I still have people who got quaxxed and offer to wear a mask when I teach in my private home. I got out just in time. I would have lost everything had I not made the decision to collapse the Studio in early 2022.

I was lucky. I have never had a salary class job, and that means I have known how to be scrappy and frugal nearly my entire working life. I did not have to walk away from a big house and a big lifestyle. I was already used to demi-poverty: driving an old car, overdrawing my bank account despite being thrifty, skipping restaurant meals and fast food for three to four weeks at a time.

Every single person that got the quaxx seems to hold the fear of demi-poverty and loss of status in their mind. I have yet to meet someone who got the quaxx who is lower middle class and content to be that way. Most quaxxers are either in the upper middle class or desperately want to be there.

As an atheist agnostic, I had no hypotheses for what happens to a soul once it is released from the body. It irritated me that Christians and Muslims conveniently imagined themselves as going to heaven no matter how lacking in good works and deeds. I once ran into a Christian who boldly stated he would be in heaven with his Father for trillions of years once he popped this mortal coil. He literally said this. I noticed something very strange as he made this speech. He had a habit of stepping back and forth while he spoke, much like how horses or pigs do when they get excited. I’ll come back to this observation later.

So Very Tired

Occultists who believe in reincarnation speculate that we human souls used to have longer stints between incarnations back when there were fewer humans on Earth and therefore fewer human bodies for souls to inhabit. From my own memories of reincarnation, I believe this is the case. I believe my first human incarnation was somewhere in Europe in the Middle Ages. I had an incarnation once every 200 or so years until the recent era, where my human incarnations were much closer. I believe my most recent past life was as a wealthy American widow who lost her sons in a World War and died in an embittered, angry state the 1960s. Since I was born in 1973, the gap between incarnations was only a few short years instead of the usual 50-120. Since I believe all humans have been incarnating more rapidly, I believe that I am not the only human to have had only a quick dirt nap in-between bodies. No wonder everyone in the world, even children, feels inappropriately tired. We were all born tired and will die that way because our very souls have not had enough rest. Another part of the phenomenon is that many formerly animal souls are thrust into human bodies at the moment, long before feeling ready. I no longer get frustrated with the scourge of “stupid people” as I did as an atheist. The “stupid” person could have been a Labrador retriever or a factory farmed chicken only twenty years ago.

Now keep in mind that I am only speculating and in any of the statements I have made or am about to make, I COULD BE WRONG. I am fully prepared to meet my maker (if there is one) and laugh about how wrong I was shortly before burning in hell for all eternity for refusing to accept Jesus Christ as my only Lord and Savior. I have no dog in any fight and no need to be correct.

If there are an excess of human souls in incarnation at the present time, and I believe there are, then it follows that the wave will crest and depopulation will follow. The human race may not suffer the fate of yeast in a sugary Petri dish as I once believed, but it does seem apparent that we are headed for a world with fewer people by several orders of magnitude. Population is like sound, light, or any other form of wave. There is a crest and then a valley, then another crest, lather, rinse, repeat. To someone who believes in reincarnation, this means a return to a time without as many human souls in incarnation. It means that the few souls who are left to incarnate as humans will have longer rest times. It also points to (and again, I could be so very wrong) a bunch of former humans being incarnated as animals or not incarnating at all for long periods of time.

Where Will They Go?

One of the various reasons I was willing to fight petty bureaucrats, white biosuited goons, and neo-Stalinist neighbors to the death rather than take the quaxx was because I believe it has a severe impact on a human’s karma. If karma is nothing more than cause and effect, my primitive understanding is that if you do a thing, the repercussions of that thing will ripple around you and back at you like waves of water in a pond. If you do good deeds that help people and spread love and light, it hardly matters if you believe in God or not because you are making a cause and effect that works in waves. You will be blessed because you make blessings. Of course if you spend your time marinating in fear, consciously or unconsciously hexing and cursing those you hate out of fear, greed, and hatred, those things will return to you in kind.

The quaxx was a weapon of hatred and fear, so to take it was to seal the deal with the demon or demons running the quaxx show. Like any astral pyramid, the quaxx was a greedy, top-glorified structure that depended on a large base with benefits that trickled up and not down. The quaxx actively sought the blood and suffering of children; in fact, its whole mission was the indoctrination of as many children as possible this whole time. Many of us have a nascent awareness of the quaxx and masks and their tie-in with Critical Race Theory, drag queens waving their junk in front of preschoolers, and sex ed for kindergarteners that includes graphic depictions of intercourse. I believe these things are all symbols of the hunger of one specific demon who has been having a field day: Paimon. I also believe Moloch and Mammon play their parts in the current debacle. The demons who brought us the quaxx and its shutdowns seek an erasure of limits, specifically the limits that prevent them from infesting children. I personally have yet to understand why demons prefer to corrupt children over adults, but their lust to do so is self-evident.

I Can Has Reparations?

What lies in store for the consenting adults who sold their own kids out to masks and experimental quaxxines? What do they owe, if anything, to the children of the grandmothers and grandfathers forced to die alone and terrified while nurses and doctors twerked for TikTok? Is there a price beyond possible tribunals and Nuremberg trials for public officials who vacationed in Florida while issuing draconian orders for their constituents to shutter and lose their businesses? Is there any kind of retribution for celebrities and influencers who used their fame to push the quaxx on the naive? Is there any comeuppance for the quax-pushing newscasters who are indirectly responsible for quaxx injuries including nerve damage, graphene/lipid nanoparticle clots, strokes, tremors, pain, Bell’s Palsy, and heart attacks?

I don’t think there will be punishments in the here and now in Meat World, though it remains to be seen how the legal system could discover the guilty parties as a potential cash cow. I won’t be holding my breath for any reparations from the quaxx-pushing wealthy for getting in the way of euthanizing my cat in 2021, being mostly responsible for my business closing in 2022, or the subsequent deaths of many neighbors of mine and one relative over the years of 2020-2022.

I think the entire quaxxed population including those who faked it bear a burden of responsibility and unknown karma that I was and am willing to die as Kimberly Steele to avoid. I think they’re going to hell.

Unlike Christians, Muslims, and other people who I think are partially insane, I do not believe hell is eternal. It is temporary and is meant as a cleanser. I believe hell is that time after death that you have to face all the garbage you did while in incarnation and figure out how you could do better next time. Once a soul has gone through hell, the spirit guides bounce it up to heaven for a time so it can rest and get ready for the next incarnation. Because human incarnations are so rapid-fire in our era, souls don’t get enough time in hell and they get far less in heaven, and that is why most people, including children and babies, are tired all the time. We are not tired because we lack health or sleep so much as our souls are tired. We need our time away from incarnation in order to process, dream, and rest.

The quaxx has weighted down the souls who took it. Perhaps by not being arrogant, by spreading blessings, and by being generous, many souls who took the quaxx will not bear the brunt of its karma. There are also many who are paying their dues in suffering by dying young of quaxx-injury or quaxx-induced disease. Those who handle that suffering gracefully will have the karma of handling it gracefully: by not spreading misery around and refusing to adopt a WOE IS ME attitude, they will be an inspiration to others to stay strong in the face of horrific physical torture. Their bravery for speaking out against the Safe & Effective McNarrative counts for something, I believe.

As for the compliant who acted with Luciferian arrogance, I believe they will be rewarded by stints in hell and karmic retrogressions that would impress Arachne the Spider and Narcissus the Daffodil. Though I could be wrong, one potential outcome for the haughty quaxxed is a near-eternity spent running the mazes of the Back Rooms for untold millions of years followed by eventual incarnation as an extremely smart and devious buffalo. Such an outcome would satisfy a future world with far fewer human souls and an eventual explosion of non-human animal life after the current extinction event reaches its long coda. Though I don’t know if the arrogant Christian dude who presumed he would spend the next few trillion years in God’s playground was quaxxed or not, his prancing did strike me as uncannily porcine, as if he could depend on a not-so-distant future where he was bred and re-bred to be a pork chop on somebody’s plate.

The question "Why won't God heal amputees?" is a rhetorical one and is meant to shut down discussion. The forgone conclusion is that God cannot heal amputees because God does not exist. I know this because as of five short years ago, I was an atheist. I understand where atheists are coming from. My husband, raised in a strict, apocalyptic Christian faith, is still atheist. I was also raised in a Christian household and confirmed at age twelve, however, the Christianity of my upbringing was nowhere near as strident or as well-observed as my husband's. For him, I believe atheism is a reaction to the way he was raised. As for me, I experimented with Wicca in high school and college and was a full blown atheist by the age of 25. I was atheist all through my thirties, quoting Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens. It was only at age 44 that I started to emerge from atheism, because of the example of one John Michael Greer, who presented a sane, rational example of devout, non-Christian, non-Eastern religion in the form of Druidry.

At any rate, after only three years of religious practices of daily discursive meditation, prayer, the Druid Sphere of Protection, and divination, I consider myself as religious as they come. What an odd state for a former atheist! Being raised in a materialist Christian household of the type that is quite common in the middle and upper-middle classes, I feel obliged to try to answer the question "Why won't God heal amputees?"

Why won't God heal amputees?

1. Because Meat World sucks. HARD. What's Meat World? Meat World, my friend, is the material plane. It is absolutely awful here. Yes, it can be a place of stunning beauty and kindness, but most of the time, it's harsh and brutal. For instance, there once was a mallard duck who was raped to death by a gang of male mallards, after which she was pulled apart by raccoons and hawks, feasted upon, and finally done away with by maggots and ants. Did she deserve it?

No. Did the amputee deserve it? I'm going to say what any rational person would say -- I have no flipping idea, and if he did, it's not my place to make that judgement!

Let's look at how a Christian would answer this question... "The Lord works in mysterious ways." To that, I say NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The problem with a Christian excusing their God's capricious cruelty is that many of them presume their dogmas contain everything one needs to know about the world. I am not making excuses for God's cruelty if that is what is really going on here. What I am saying is I don't know.

Now let's take a look at how atheists answer the Did He Deserve It? question. They are going to say absolutely not, the event was random and chaotic as goes the world we live in. With this equally thoughtstopping answer, any further curiosity as to the forces working in the amputee's life are summarily dismissed.

Instead of looking at the amputee's plight as a binary -- it's either A or B -- maybe we can try looking at a third possibility. As horrific as it is to have a limb amputated, there just might be lessons to be learned not only for the amputee who has no choice but to live without his limb/limbs but for the people around him who have the choice either to act as harmers or helpers. It's almost as if the world sucks because it is a school or testing ground.

A matrix, if you will. Speaking of matrices, remember that part of The Matrix when Neo and Agent Smith have a chat about the state of the world? Agent Smith said that a perfect Matrix where nothing bad ever happened had been tried and that the experiment utterly failed.

The reason we have amputees, guinea worms, and pedophiles is because we are all being tested at every moment of material existence. Those of us who are lucky to have no encounters with amputation, guinea worms, or pedos have a duty to help those who have been harmed by the aforementioned terrible things as well as all of the other afflictions of the material. What we are not to do is gloat about how sweet we have it in comparison or the opposite, to pretend that nobody has it worse than we do.

We humans begin to fail the tests of the material plane the moment we hoard a bunch of goodies for ourselves and refuse to share what we have, whether that is in a small way such as getting mad that a family member wants a bite of our food or a large way such as holing up in an environmentally-devastating, fully gentrified McMansion while virtue signaling to all of the rich neighbors with a shirt that claims Black Lives Matter.

Every moment of our material life represents an opportunity to make the best of what we are given, and that's true for McMansion dwellers and guinea worm victims alike. Is it fair? No, or at least's it isn't fair on any level we can possibly understand. The atheist rejects such an explanation because atheist thought always has to run one way or the other towards the ends of a binary: If God exists, and the world is a testing ground, then God is cruel and I've already failed! Might as well do whatever I want! If God doesn't exist, then it explains everything, because everything gets to be chaotic and random and I can do whatever I want because I'll never be judged by my actions by a superior being!

Yes, some gods are cruel. Some are dying out, like the Christian one (my opinion, anyway), and other gods and demons have often sprung up in their place to grasp the consciousness of would-be Christians. The unseen world is an ecosystem, just like the visible one is an ecosystem. The ecosystem self-regulates and balances in a way that we do not yet understand. Humans don't understand ecosystems. We are easily terrified by nothingburger viruses, dumb enough to use RoundUp in our lawns, and have yet to create a working biodome. Though our scientists like to think they understand how nature works, the proof is in the pudding that they don't. We know even less about the unseen world than we do about the material one. Our scientists are so arrogant and dimwitted, they can't be bothered to study occult phenomena that practically smack you in the face, such as the etheric value of food in relation to the way it is prepared. If we take the arrogant attitude of knowing it all, for instance by trying to micromanage the weather via nanotechnology, we see disastrous results. Dumb humans attempt to force an ecosystem they don't understand into a proscribed mold. The unseen ecosystem also cannot be understood by trying to force it into a proscribed mold, and one of the proscribed molds it is shoved into is the atheist's "it's all chaos and coincidence" theory. The other is the monotheist's "it all works the way God says it does in my religion's holy book."

2. Because God isn't what you think it is.

There are many atheists who are natural mages/witches of exceptional natural talent. I was that atheist. Some of them have figured out that they are naturals and have proceeded to become bad karma grenades, flinging around their bad intentions with glee and never putting two and two together when blowback hits them with a rare cancer, severe depression, or a bully-terrorized child.

I am a natural witch, and it's not just the hair or the black cat that makes me that way. When the gods took me on a few years ago, they had plenty of raw material to work with, but they also had to school me repeatedly on why it's a bad idea to do hostile magic. Every time you wish someone would suffer and/or die (including when you do it subconsciously), you are flinging around hostile magic. It is only when you wake up and say "I don't do that anymore" that you have a chance at a worthwhile deity working with you. If you enjoy flinging around hostile magic (including subconscious hostile magic) and have no plans to stop, you can still work with non-embodied entities, but you're more likely to get the attention of demons, and at that point, the joke is on you, Dr. Faust. If you fool yourself into thinking the entity granting you favors is a god, by all means, go right ahead. Some people can only learn the hard way and if you're that person, I wish for you to be blessed because you'll need it. The sad part is that if you are naturally talented as I was/am, if you go the cacomagic route, you'll miss out on forms of happiness that are deeper that anything that could be granted via material prosperity or ego gratification. If you can put your pride and your preconceived notions of what God is supposed to be aside, you are suddenly in the position to listen to what God has to say to you.

I believe in many gods. I have had the honor of talking to them. I talked to one today. It was my day off. I stole the opportunity to take a long, solitary walk down to one of my town's many forest preserves. While I was on my walk, I talked to one of the Greek gods. We had a brief conversation about the folk tunes I have written to accompany the Orphic Hymns. I also talked to three different dryads or tree spirits. It's not a big deal and I'm not special. Anyone can do this. This is my normal now. I'm far less crazy than when I was atheist, calmer, and more easygoing.

If you've ever had a close relationship with a pet, you're already aware that it is not difficult to communicate with a non-human entity. The difference is that we cannot physically see gods, goddesses, and dryads, or at least I cannot see them. I'm occasionally clairaudient, meaning I can hear birds chirping in the middle of the night that aren't technically there or a voice will make itself heard randomly -- this happened when I was fifteen when I heard a ghost exclaim "Oh my lambs!" in a retail store I was working in at the time -- but I'm no clairvoyant. I can feel the presence of non-corporeal beings though, and because of my Druid practices, I can discern the array of feelings in order to identify what is going on around me. Occultists call the unseen world the subtle planes for a reason. I don't want to freak you out, but you are surrounded by an array of ghosts, spirits, elementals, manatus, gods, and potentially demons right now. If I was in the room with you, it's likely I could communicate with one or two of the beings around you. If you're sensitive, you can sense them wherever you are, like on the train or in your apartment. Most of these creatures are harmless. Just as we tend to see more squirrels, sparrows, and raccoons out here in the suburbs and people in the city encounter rats, cockroaches, and pigeons, certain non-embodied entities go with certain territories. Some of the entities are parasitic and riding you and/or someone you know. You're more likely to have a direct experience with a fairy or an elf in the hinterlands, the more remote the better. You can absolutely attract "good" entities to your domicile. Cultivating a garden, whether outdoors or indoors, is an excellent way of doing this.

Or you can be like the atheist and the Christian, clapping your ears and screaming LA LA LA when someone mentions the inhabitants of the non-physical planes. The Christian believes in a boring universe that in my opinion does not reflect reality. This boring universe is divided into three parts: Meat World, minus the unseen ecosystem, Heaven where all the good repenters go after they die, and Hell, where the majority of the unsaved will burn, including those who lived upright and charitable lives while believing in the wrong gods. The atheist believes only in the humanity-dominated Meat World and an endless gaping void afterwards.

I reject both of these outlooks. I think the reason so many people throughout history have believed in gods and spirits is because gods and spirits are present and accounted for, we just lack the ability to see them. Atheists especially like to think humans are the smartest creatures on the planet. I used to share this belief. We're not the smartest beings on Earth and we never will be. Atheists also think that if a creature is hyper-intelligent, then it must be physical and from outer space. The atheist lacks the creativity to entertain the notion that perhaps some beings are far smarter than humans while also being body-less and from Planet Earth.

The Christian dismisses the idea of non-embodied intelligences so she can return to the comforts of her usual submission programming. God is what the Bible says. There aren't potentials beyond what the Bible describes and the condition of being saved is that you squelch any disagreement with Christian dogma. Furthermore, your job in life is to go out and recruit others to believe in your God exclusively because the Bible instructs you to do so. You are to remain unconcerned about the ethics of forcing conversion to your faith because you must convince yourself they are damned without it. I have only met a handful of Christians who didn't have these sleazy sentiments lurking within them. I would like to be proven wrong about Christians. Actions speak louder than words. By their fruits I shall know them. I hope that in the future, Christians devote more of their energy to emulating Christ than to their current routine of being confused in all things except the drive to gain more converts to their confused cause.

I don't believe in an omnipotent God, or at least if there is an omnipotent God, I highly doubt there would be a book that could inform my tiny human brain about things he said. I vastly prefer to strike up relationships with gods who never claimed omnipotence if they will have me. I believe in Jesus Christ, but I also believe in Allah, the Buddha, the entire Greek pantheon, and too many more to mention. I think people who are like my former atheist self find themselves unable to talk to gods because they are a combination of too arrogant, too preconditioned, and to blind to know what to look for.

When I was an atheist, I remember the desperation I sensed in the faithful, including that of Occidental exotic fetishists who obsessed over various gurus or fawned over the Dalai Lama. Their supposed inner peace proved only that religion truly was the opiate of the masses. To be atheist is to declare oneself an island separate from "all that nonsense" which starts looking like mumbo jumbo if you achieve the goal of lumping it all together in one steaming pile of woo. Never mind the series of odd synchronicities in the lead up to Trump's election. Never mind the kid in Dr. Ian Stevenson's patient archive who remembered every detail of being a fighter pilot in his past life to the point of knowing his old Air Force buddy's names. Nothing to see here, folks...

3. Because of Reincarnation and That Old Chestnut, "I Could Be Wrong"

The gods I believe in don't seem to be spontaneously healing amputees, though I think that many people who are amputees now will not be amputees in their future lives. I believe I was an amputee in one of my former human lives, though I'm not sure why I was an amputee in a previous life. John Michael Greer says that in his ecosystem-centric view of the Universe, one shared by many occultists like him, people who are human in this incarnation have been through billions of years of incarnations as gradually evolving animal forms on Earth. We became human at a literally glacial pace, and every human soul has spent quality time going through various animal incarnations, all the way from single-celled parameciums to fuzzy mammals. Becoming human represents a jump in intelligence along with specific challenges in order to proof us for the next phase, which is the non-embodied state Druids call Gwnfydd, "the luminous life". After that, there are more complex states we all have the possibility of achieving.

I haven't the remotest idea what they specifically entail because I am not a god. Supposedly I can also screw up and end up going through my animal lives again -- this is the karmic equivalent of having to repeat kindergarten. If I make an absolute mess of my lives, I have a shot at being stripped down to my basest non-physical elements and being swept away by a passing comet, never to return to this solar system again. For me, this seems like a decent incentive not to go down the Chairman Mao or Jeffrey Dahmer route and to attempt to continually refine my compassionate and thoughtful parts instead.

But I could be wrong. Who am I to say how the Matrix works? I know at this point you were waiting for me to take some cheap shots at Eastern religions, and here goes: Buddhism and Hinduism were both extremely wrong when they created caste systems around their beliefs in reincarnation. I've never understood how two religions that fully acknowledge karma can invent a giant civilizational bad karma generator in the form of a caste system. Just... dumb. Institutionalized snobbery does not belong to god, that's strictly the domain of the other team. I know a very smart vegan guy who once said of children who die of horrific cancers that they "probably raped a thousand women in a former life" to me while I was an atheist. This didn't sit well with me. I suppose there wasn't time for him to communicate the short novel I've gone into above, but the problem with his statement was the missing idea that he could have been wrong. I'll never know because I walked out of the conversation that day, condemning him as a fool. I don't think he is a fool anymore; I do suppose he had a point but I wasn't ready to hear any part of it.

I can only speak for myself, but I think the moral of the story is that I should strive to be the most balanced, kindest, and thoughtful person I can be every day whether I am faithful, faithless, or somewhere in between. That's not the easiest prescription when in Meat World, especially when times get tough. Nevertheless, I am going to try and I hope you will too.

Once upon a time, my husband and I were yuppies with yuppie aspirations. He had an executive job and spent his weekends golfing. I planned on owning a large house and going full throttle entrepreneur. Meanwhile, at my husband's work, there was a mentally handicapped guy who my husband's evil coworkers liked to torment. Let's call him Mikey. Mikey was a janitor. My husband was the only male person in the place who refrained from grade-school level bullying of Mikey. The cretins and literal whoremongers (while married with children) my husband worked with played pranks on Mikey, for instance, by glueing coins to the floor.

If there is a hell, my husband's coworkers will be burning in it for a not-short amount of time, and I don't think this is a simple matter of me being humorless. They also liked to torture Mikey by accusing him in a roundabout fashion of "funny" habits, such as compulsive masturbation. Mikey's odd reply to their taunts was "I don't do that anymore." This, of course, was as good as an admission of guilt in their small minds, and would set them into hysterical laughter.

My husband's executive job went away through no fault of his own -- the company went under because of bad business decisions and two or three terrible managers. My aspirations to own a large house and expand my business became deflated by reality as I struggled to support us during nearly three years of my mate's intermittent unemployment. The phrase "I don't do that anymore", however, stuck in my mind as something important.

The Trouble With Christian Repentance

The problem I have always had with the Christian notion of repentance is this idea of living a wholly awful life, perhaps one similar to the pathetic managers and salesmen at my husband's former job, and then being able to suddenly repent at the end of one's life and go to heaven. The concept of Christian repentance was repugnant enough to make me an atheist for many years, as other religions were just as baffling in different ways. Christians like my in-laws (RIP) were brimming with hatred and fear. The Apocalypse for them was always two weeks off into the future. God would come and sweep them away to a bliss they had done nothing to earn while on this plane. My in-laws were Bible bangers who believed the Earth was created in one short week around six thousand years ago. My father-in-law's Biblical literalism, his misogyny, death fetish, plus the unfortunate time when he openly tried to hex my husband's car tires so they would blow out on the road and force us to believe in his God, motivated me to completely avoid him for the last five years of his life. He convinced himself he was going to heaven because he was right with God. His life wasn't easy, but in my opinion, it wasn't an excuse for the way he treated others. It struck me that if those were the people who were convinced they would go to heaven, it made perfect sense that heaven did not exist.

I always was a bit of a freak: long before I believed in reincarnation, I stopped fearing death. I have imagined myself dead, thought about the ways it could happen, plus I love horror movies. As an atheist, I imagined being swallowed into the great black void of space from whence I had come. I never imagined an entire spiritual ecosystem where my current incarnation as Kimberly Steele was one of many. I never anticipated past life memories of being a widow on a yacht or a singing court jester. Yet the funny thing is I had these memories long before I dived into the occult four years ago. I had memories of the yacht when I was a suicidally depressed twelve year old and the court jester came to me at age fifteen. I didn't know who these people were at the time. Now I know.

There is no black void. There is an ecosystem, and because our human brains are not that big or great, we barely have the faintest clue about how it all works. No wonder it seems unfair! The one thing I have gleaned is that it is a great big school or testing ground, and at every single moment we are being proofed. Every second of our lives on the material plane is an opportunity to make the best out of what we are given, and no, I don't mean taking all of our energy and dumping it into getting a bigger house. To a huge degree, spending one's time chasing the McMansion lifestyle equals failure.

The cold fires of my depression were fueled by regret. My young life was filled with regret and guilt for the stupid and awful things I had done, yet it rarely helped me to become a better person. Instead, I wallowed in my misery.

To pull myself out, I had to do a few things. One was ceasing to care what others thought of me. Another was learning to be kind and gentle with myself -- I am the sort who gladly works herself to death and nearly died at the age of 27 because of it. The third, and arguably the most important of all, was to say "I don't do that anymore" when confronted with a regret.

Christian repentance is hollow because the resolution to be a better person is weak. Christianity has been plagued with this issue almost since it began. Martin Luther's Reformation had its roots in outrage over the Catholic doctrine of Indulgences, which was a way of buying one's way out of being punished for one's sins. Protestant hypocrisy one-upped its Catholic counterpart in the form of Calvinism, which pushed that certain people were chosen by God to be saved and the rest were damned if they did, damned if they didn't. In far too many stripes of Christianity, there was every reason to go back to one's old ways. The rich could buy their way out of hell and anyone who subscribed to Calvin's way of thinking didn't have a choice one way or the other. This, plus a convenient Satan readily available to blame for one's own mischief, began the legacy of slipping and sliding around the heavy, onerous burden of responsibility for one's sins.

To make amends, Christian repentance involves plenty of beating oneself up for being such a stupid sinner; the Flagellants spring to mind. There's lots of room for self-harm and self-destruction as one grovels in front of an angry God. What is missing is responsibility and being willing to accept the consequences of one's actions. Repentance without responsibility isn't repentance at all. It's a temporary distraction so the sinner can go back to sinning and still believe she will win whatever game she thinks she's playing in the bitter end.

No More Games

"I don't do that anymore" is far more potent because it isn't an excuse. Instead, "I don't do that anymore" is an affirmation. It does not wallow in regret. It makes a bold statement: I did that behavior, I am sorry I did it, but I will never do it again because I DON'T DO THAT ANYMORE. It creates a new track in space. Though it acknowledges the old one, it does not return to it, because it burns the path of a new and better trajectory. Instead of backsliding and expecting rewards despite continuing an unexamined life of bad behavior, it wholly rejects bad behavior and moves on towards the path of goodness. "I don't do that anymore" is true repentance. It takes Occam's razor to the faux repentances of various religions and strips away the bullcrap of ego-stroking and wish fulfillment. It forces one to keep the original promise.

I used to spend a decent chunk of my time marinating in hatred over real and imagined wrongs people did to me. Years ago, I had a boss who did a bunch of stupid, unjust things as bosses tend to do. Being fairly stupid myself, I threw a curse at this person. I have always been good enough at cursing that if the government had somehow been able to find out how successful I was, they would have sent CIA goons to my door in order to kidnap me and enslave me as their political weapon. Bad things reliably happened to the boss as they often did when I threw curses. I did not put together my own life disasters and misery at the time (blowback) with the hexes I threw at other people, all the while being atheist and a non-believer in the entities behind curses. Here is the secret I learned about curses when I was actively throwing them: for some of us, they are easy. They work. Stuff you would not believe is possible happens to your enemies. Cursing people in this way is the way to commit the perfect crime: no fingerprints, no hired guns, just ice-cold revenge. The problem with curses is their cost. I thought I could throw a curse without suffering for it, but that isn't how it works. Many would be witches and mages think they can throw a curse (usually against Trump and his followers) and come away with their hands clean. Nope. They can carry on with their curses and as long as they believe they are free from karma, they hilariously don't connect their depression, health problems, and the disasters that befall their families as related to their Nightly Hex Amateur Hour.

The reason cursing doesn't help the curser is because it places the curser on a lower realm of the astral plane. Cursing demotes you by a few astral neighborhoods every time you do it even if you live in Chelsea or Echo Park on the material plane. When I was cursing and hexing on a regular basis, my dreams were plagued by entities that chased and harassed me. What did I expect? There's an old Chinese proverb about going to bed with dogs and waking up with fleas...

Only now that I don't do that anymore am I happy and free, because I don't wish for my enemies to be cursed. I wish for them to be blessed, because not only do I want the good to ricochet back in my direction... they need it!

When I was sixteen, heartbroken from my first failed romantic relationship, I turned to witchcraft with desperate hopes that I would gain the coolness and perspective of a sage adult. My relationship with religion had always been complicated despite having an average suburban upbringing and average attendance at the local church. I was confirmed in the usual way. Truth be told, I never much felt adoration for the Christian god except for when we sang his music. The music wasn’t enough to hold my interest. At sixteen, frightened of my increasing hypnogogia and suicidally depressed, I dived into Gardnerian Wicca.

In my opinion, Gardner is the type of occultist who is like a broken clock: he’s right twice a day and wrong the rest of the time. His version of Wicca is more empty pomp and circumstance than substance — his rituals weren’t all that user-friendly to the sole practitioner, his explanations of what magic is and does were completely obtuse, and his frantic need to grant authenticity to his brand of witchcraft undermined its intention as a revival religion, which I would presume to be reviving a religion, to state the obvious. I got myself a Tarot deck and it was the Thoth deck. I love the Thoth deck to this day and I’m grateful for my early study of it, however, because of it I jumped from the frying pan into the fire. I started delving into the works of Aleister Crowley. Crowley, like Gardner, had no practical advice for other occultists and, like a bad music teacher, assumed every student was starting out with a basic working knowledge of the field's principles. Crowley also was simply an awful person. He’s a man who started out with everything in life: good looks, wealth, intelligence. He squandered all of it, most likely molested children, and died broke and friendless in a fleabag rent-a-room. His reputation as the “evilest man in the world” is somewhat of a joke, because shouldn’t a thoroughly evil man have bottomless sources of wealth and power? Nevertheless, to dismiss Crowley’s labors, especially his magnum opus (the Thoth tarot deck) is to skip over a secret key to a vast storehouse of knowledge. I bumbled through my late teenage and early college years, gaining a reputation among Christian paranoids at my city university because I dared display my esoteric books on an open shelf. Yes, a small but rabid Christian constituent in my dorm tried to stop me from displaying 777 and Tarot: Mirror of the Soul. Christians can be real asshats, and they don’t do their waning religion any favors by acting in such a fashion.

By the time I was leaving my 20s and college behind, I came to a watershed. I was on anti-depressants because at seventeen, I voluntarily started taking antidepressants so I would stop thinking so seriously about killing myself. As an adult, I decided the drugs had done their job. My psychiatrist, a vacuous, incompetent, rich, comfortably numb boob, insisted I was nuts and that I would have to be on tricyclic antidepressants for the rest of my life. This conflicted directly with me becoming an adult, and at the time depression was considered a pre-existing condition which could prevent me from getting health insurance. I fired my shrink and weaned myself off of antidepressants. My hypnogogia waned along with my antidepressant dosage, and it felt natural to stop thinking so much about Crowley, Tarot, and magical rituals that didn’t seem to do much of anything, let alone improve my life.

By 30, I was atheist. I still had hypnogogia and encountered odd things while in that state; I just chalked it up to the undiscovered scientific truth of inter dimensional bleed. I still did magic, meaning, I threw my intentions in certain directions and uncanny stuff happened as a result. Like any good atheist, I was a solipsist, trusting that I was God of my own mind and no other forces could possibly be at work there. I condemned all forms of belief in God as various manifestations of the fear of death. I ignored any and all beings who tried to talk to me; hidden deep down was the fear that my shrink was right, that I was crazy and soon enough the voices would prove I was insane. I was gleefully nihilistic in my atheism. Though I suppose it bothers some atheists that death is a one-way trip into a permanent void, that didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I wrote my first novel, Forever Fifteen, as a look into the horror of being forced to exist in the flesh for a thousand years or more. The protagonist, Lucy, longs for the black, permanent void of death, as boring as that may seem. I have always loved tedium and the atheist version of what happens after death is about as tedious and boring as can be.

Oddly, my atheist self also wrote a decidedly non-atheist music album, the Dream of Flight, which is an entire, programmatic album about what I only now belatedly understand to be the astral plane. Occultists see human existence as the simultaneous manifestation of the soul or Individuality on approximately seven planes ranging from the lightest, the spiritual plane, to the densest, the material plane. The astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of emotions and daily and nightly dreams, is somewhere in the middle. Despite having written an album about dreams that talked about “bringing a whole world to life” via the dream world, I puttered on, quoting Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell and not believing there was any such thing as a disembodied spirit, non-corporeal being, or god.

Fast forward to around age thirty-seven, when I went vegan for the animals. Veganism gets accused of being a religion for good reasons, one of which is that it takes tremendous will power and dedication to ignore opposing forces who would have you conform to their animal-eating and abusing ways. People in our anti-religious culture believe that sort of dedication can only come from belief in a higher power, but I would argue that humans are naturally religious and if the Christian god cannot fill spiritual needs, actually living ones values as a vegan rushes into that spiritual void. Most vegans I know are atheists who suffer from the binary delusion of either having to have one God (usually the Christian god) or no god at all (atheism). Most are not willing to hear (at least in my opinion) they’re both wrong. When I went vegan, suddenly all that bilge I used to spew as an ova-lacto vegetarian about not wanting to take on the energy of suffering and sad animals by eating them actually made sense. When you go vegan, the weight you lose is mainly spiritual. I was one of the lucky people whose health benefitted from going vegan — it helped that I already cooked most of my own meals and didn’t subsist on junk food — however, the feeling of clarity and purity that happened when I stopped eating animals and their secretions was one I wouldn’t trade even if being vegan gave me cancer, so there’s that.

Around the same time, my absolute hatred of the suburbs and car obsession led me to an author-blogger named James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler is devastatingly witty and because of this, I became a constant fan of his podcast and writings. Every now and then, he featured a guy on his podcast named John Michael Greer. I began to read John Michael Greer’s blog The Archdruid Report, which ostensibly was not about Druids or their religion but about the same subjects as Kunstler wrote about: peak oil, people, and politics. I quietly ignored Greer’s “other” blog, The Well of Galabes, which was about magic. As an atheist, I hardly cared about woo-woo interests I had abandoned along with antidepressant drugs and childhood. I’m not sure at what point I decided to read Greer’s other blog or the many books he had written at that time about magic, but I did. Unlike so many religious people, Greer was high on the reliability meter and low on the hypocrisy and narcissism meters. I read the Well of Galabes and just like the Archdruid Report, it contained pragmatic, well-rounded perspectives about the world, and it made its points about religion with no obvious or subversive aims to convert the reader. When Greer brought Archdruid Report and Well of Galabes to an end, he began a new blog called Ecosophia, I followed it eagerly. Comments on Greer’s blogs were always lively and fun, with many smart people throwing around provocative and intriguing ideas. The Greer essays that gave me the most to think about were The Next Ten Billion Years, which over time got me to rethink my belief in short term human extinction: yes, that’s what Extinction Rebellion is blathering on about. I no longer believe the human race is going to cause the end of a livable climate in the next 300 years, and I think the reasons why I used to believe that would happen is because the thought allowed me the luxury of thinking nothing I do matters. Once he was on Ecosophia, Greer wrote an essay people had been asking for about reincarnation. If there is a such thing as a life-changing essay, I believe Greer’s A Few Notes on Reincarnation was it for me. That particular essay explained mysteries about my own experience and also helped me to understand the chaotic world around me. I started considering the possibility that I was the reincarnation of a chain of people behind me and that I had many more human lifetimes to go. I became nascently aware of realities I had considered impossible as an atheist.

At this point, I started looking into Druidry, because as a long time writer of Celtic-sounding music and long haired tree-hugger, I figured, why not? Druidry (and other magical paths) required three things on a daily basis:

1. Discursive meditation, which is not the mind-emptying Eastern kind but rather a disciplined form of rational thinking invented in the ancient West.

2. Divination, which I already had some experience in via Tarot cards.

3. The Sphere of Protection, an approximately 20 minute bit of solo performance that involved memorizing a script of invoking and banishing elemental forces (once you’ve got the elements down, you graduate and assign a pantheon of existing gods to each part of the ritual) designed to shape and master one’s thoughts and actions via unseen forms of energy.

I have no problem committing to a daily routine — as a highly-functioning autistic, routines are my bread and butter. I began the Sphere of Protection on January 1, 2018 and did it every day without fail. The SoP has always felt helpful even when I was bumbling through it, barely memorized and doing it without a pantheon. By about six months in, I chose to assign the Druid god pantheon because for me, John Michael Greer’s system outlined in The Druid Magic Handbook was the appropriate fit. I would often be so overcome with emotion during certain elements that I would cry. After the SoP would be discursive meditation, which I prefer to do while writing in a journal as it allows me to jot down thoughts as they occur. I first started doing a daily three card Tarot divination, which gave me much insight into the old Thoth deck, however, I changed to Ogham as it is part of the Druid Magic Handbook course of study.

The last two years have been the oddest and best of my entire life. I now consider myself deeply religious. I pray every day and I highly believe I am in near constant communication with deities and spirits. Furthermore, I believe I may have always been talking to the non-corporeal entities without realizing it. I think many people who talk to themselves don’t understand they’re actually not talking to themselves but a non-corporeal entity. All I know is that the interactions I have with non-corporeal entities are of a far higher quality than they were when I was first experimenting with Wicca, and that’s due to the SoP and the discernment that accompanies discursive meditation.

I’m not sure what we are to the gods we are working with. As far as I can tell, they are super-beings who were wisely worshipped by the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese and if you’re sensitive and kind to them, and if you ask them politely and respectfully, they just might mentor you and give you their excellent advice. However, if you’re disrespectful and you do stupid human things like:

A. Arrogantly presume they can’t possibly exist because Jesus/Allah says you’ll burn in hell

B. Use and wear their name for a pair of overpriced sneakers

C. Curse them for not helping your lazy, regressive butt to win the Lotto

You can expect to have a bad time, or at the very least, you can expect the gods not to care about you. If an annoying hamster was biting my ankles, shouting at me in a high, squeaky voice to make it King of Hamsterland, I’d probably ignore it too, despite my soft spot for hamsters.

In my two years of becoming religious, I became calmer, stronger, and more sanguine about everything in my life. I have begun to understand that limits are the key to a happy life and that our culture has an insane disregard for them, most likely because of the absurd amount of petroleum wealth we have enjoyed for the last 200 odd years. I became far more detached from money, that is to say, I began to look at it as valuable in terms of keeping me clothed and fed, and as far as having loads more than that, I have seen the benefits of rejecting the infinite perversions and complications that come of having too much. I have come to understand why throwing your unexamined bad intentions around inevitably drags you into being a crappy person with rotten luck, no matter how much you insist you are one of the Blessed & Good People. I have made the affirmation that I am a better person tomorrow than I was today, if only by the slightest amount.

In this strange dialogue with gods, I have apologized for my pathological fondness for dad jokes (I simply must be reincarnated as a father, because I have WAY too many dad jokes to work out of my system) and I have heard birds singing in the middle of the night in winter, which is also known as clairaudience. I have had conversations with dead people before they moved on to the next cycle of reincarnation. I have discovered my past life as a traveling musician in an era of bards and my past life as an alcoholic Scottish laird. I have felt my tensions drain away as I walked through a forest where the beings patiently wait for me to visit. I had the privilege of talking to a few Greek gods (they seem to be the same as the Roman ones, for what it’s worth) as I arrange melodies and harmonies I’ve composed to flesh out the Orphic Hymns. What a fantastic journey it has been. I certainly look forward to the remainder.