PHANTOM POWER

A radio/blog/comic book experience

[alanwilsonwatts]

And don’t forget, of course, that getting rid of your ego is the biggest ego trip there is.

Alan Watts (via alanwilsonwatts)

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

How to be Mentally Strong

1. Don’t look to the world to give you an identity.

2. Don’t look to your family and friends for approval.

3. Set your own goals and believe in yourself.

4. Expect things to take time.

5. Expect to meet with setbacks.

6. Expect people to put you down, and for some to walk away.

7. Don’t be swayed by pressure from others.

8. Don’t resent others’ gifts and successes.

9. Accept that some things cannot be controlled.

10. Believe that you will make it one day.

[thelovejournals]

Maybe my passion is nothing special, but at least it’s mine.

Tove Jansson, Travelling Light (via wordsnquotes)

[love-personal]

[phantompowerpages]

Behold the forgotten spells from the tombs of ancient Serbia!

More than 1,500 years ago, at the height of the Roman Empire, a young woman died. Someone close to her thought she might need some help in the next life. Help from a demon.

Learning from the past...

[phantompowerpages]

Living in the liberal bubble of Seattle, I am bemused and puzzled by a certain cross section of my Facebook friends who think Trump is Americas savior. I made this diagram to explain it.

[phantompowerpages]

Question Liminal Reality ...continued...

The reader may have to check out my previous post to understand the following words, provided, of course, that any sense can be made out of that one.

With these notions of filtered and customized information intake, let me illustrate with material from my own life the importance of increasing our awareness of the process. 

Back in high school I began playing with lucid dreaming because of my love of the Carlos Casteneda books. I read and reread his first three titles ravenously, attaching great weight to them. I became obsessed with the books and though at times what they described frightened me with the weirdness that they insisted was all around us yet invisible to all but “sorcerers”, I experimented with some of the exercises the old teacher Don Juan described. 

One important lesson I practiced was “dreaming” which was essentially lucid dreaming. It wasn’t long before I was having lucid dreams on a regular basis and lucid moments in liminal states that frightened the hell out of me. I would get scared just thinking during the day about some of these incidences. The weirdness and otherness of these experiences fit right into my own increasingly disassociated and depressed adolescence. These books took my already anxious demeanor to the next level and soon I was having panic attacks as I lay down to sleep. These were dark times. I grew very superstitious and jumpy. 

These frightening experiences in liminal consciousness are called night terrors in the West but I had never heard the term. Sleep would all too often bring these lucid half wake periods where I would inevitably slide into a feeling of anxiety then absolute terror as I believed some discarnate being wanted to get too close and attach themselves to my energetic body. If this was in any way ever true or ever a danger, I don’t of course know. I do, however, now see that I had my own dramatic subjective lens that I was seeing these experiences through. My understanding of them was completely up for questioning Just as I believe people ought to be careful to classify their experiences of “alien” or “Bigfoot” as flesh and blood E.T. or undiscovered great ape, I too need to question my own demons. Do they have an existence outside of my own psyche?

Currently, I am finding that a lot, if not all, of their existence is due to my own fears and the forms my fears take. I create in these liminal moments a kind of bogeyman. What the bogeyman is personifying is unclear. It could easily be a combination of fear of intimacy and fear or being injured, which, I suppose, are one and the same. These fears can get quite intense and are, no doubt, born of early childhood trauma. The superstitious, fearful mindset effectively deflects and distracts away from the pain of the old psycho-emotional injuries. 

There is a strong association with loss of freedom and safety with my bogeyman. He was going to take over my personality, make me depressed, or place me in a state of disassociation. Not sure why these storylines occurred but I was sure some version of the worst-case-scenario would be true. “Perhaps it already was true!”, I might worry. In truth, the effects/symptoms were something I had been living with for years and had a much more mundane cause.

There was a real sense of discovery when I recently realized that it might be possible to face the fear that so often interrupts lucid awareness and that it might come as an experience of freedom and clarity wholly new to me. Everything esoteric is looking like a metaphor for something much closer to home. The tribulations of lucid dreaming are in fact the same in waking life. Pitfalls and traps come at us in our waking hours without the symbolic clarity of an intense dream so we shift focus and increase our awareness so we can have that freedom we’ve dreamt of.  

[phantompowerpages]

Question Liminal Reality

I wish to write out at length, and in the process hopefully, clarify my recent thoughts and experiences around liminal reality or the conscious space between sleep and waking life. My own skill at expressing these concepts and notions is quite limited and language itself lacks as a communication tool in these realms.

The difficulty begins for this endeavor the moment I begin planning my words. I instruct myself to stay on topic and not to veer off until a clear point is made. But in this funny head, thoughts are more like a web than a continuous straight thread connecting one idea to the second, then the third in an if-this—then-that orderliness. Because I don’t wish to confuse the reader or the writer, I am permitting the conceit of linear thought and sticking to it insofar as it serves this purpose. I am not so sure, though, that this has any more validity or truth than the naturally tangled, though potent, mental connections I make.

Another disclaimer I feel is necessary is that although a prose style is being used that is much more formal than my conversational voice, I don’t have the schooling to back it up. I guarantee that mistakes in grammar, punctuation and spelling will abound. For now though, I enjoy writing in this style and whether or not it is a pretension, I couldn’t care less. No promises either that the style will not change within this single entry!

Okay...onto the matter we are exploring! But where to begin?! My recent influences, apart from a steady stream of podcasts which explore paranormal topics*, are two books. Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Megonia and The Chaos Conundrum by Aaron John Gulyas have been excellent fodder for deep thinking on the topic. Vallee and Gulyas drive home the point that stories are changing over time and have different characteristics in different regions yet core factors remain a constant. What I think these two authors suggest is that a significant part of the phenomenon’s representation, the way it manifests, largely comes out of the cultural conditioning or “cultural scripting” of the observer. When the unknown is encountered, our sense-making mind must categorize and label, quantify and interpret sensory data. Presumably, our nervous system does this as part of our adaptations to survive and thrive. — What is it? Is it a danger? — The sooner this is determined, the sooner a response can be made. 

With this in mind, I think it is essential to our understanding of the phenomenon experienced in liminal states that we are cognizant of our reflexive interpretation of the data, in other words, what we are  placing onto it. This interpretive faculty isn’t giving us an accurate or unfiltered picture of the ordinary and everyday, surely we can’t expect it to give us fresh raw data on something stigmatized, misunderstood and avoided in our culture — “paranormal” phenomena and liminal states. People who see unexplainable things are quite possibly experiencing breaks with "sanity". Insanity: a definite no-no in Western culture. The cards are stacked against our experiencing the unknown. In states of sleep we are (according to the West) always experiencing something entirely inside our own mind, though it may be influenced by the car alarm going off down the street. Dreams are from the overactive, restless mind and in no way have bearing on the real world.

So, what should we do with this understanding of our senses and how the raw data is handled, edited, and censored?

Bring our awareness to it — understand that the data once it gets to our rational mind has been customized. 

Question our interpretations — are we being served up new dishes carefully prepared to be palatable or are we ordering our old favorites?

Maintain an open mind — refrain from jumping to conclusions and putting our data in tidy boxes. We may never understand what happened but even unsolved mysteries can be useful to us and our development.

In the next section I will illustrate the importance of developing this awareness, drawing on my own experience as an example.

[phantompowerpages]

OWL RITUALS and LIMINALITY

Had a weird experience two months ago... 

In proper high strangeness style, the account I'm sharing could be dismissed by the fact that it occurred during an ayajuasca retreat.  Also, it happened while I was in bed trying to sleep. But whether or not an excess of DMT was in my system or I was having sleep paralysis, I don't think is the point. The experience was profoundly affecting and quite out of the ordinary.

After a night of drinking ayajuasca and having a challenging though mostly gentle experience (This was in the Northwest with a Peruvian trained shaman at a beautiful healing center with lots of nature and alder trees around), I was worn out and went to bed. I did not feel in an altered state anymore, only more relaxed than usual.

It was early in the morning that I awoke to some peculiar sounds coming from outside the bedroom window. I can best sum up the sound as an "owl ritual". It consisted of three sounds in a slow rhythmic, repetitive cycle. HOOOO...... Clack...... Ding................. HOOOO..... Clack..... Ding................HOOOO...... Clack...... Ding And on and on intermittently for what seemed like at least 20 minutes. The hooting was deep and loud and sounded like a giant owl. None of the sounds were quiet. They were preventing me from getting much needed sleep. I never sat up but tossed and turned wishing I had the energy to get up and investigate or that it would simply stop. I felt quite lucid but in retrospect think I must have been in a hypnogogic state.

The next morning I shared my story with four different people sleeping in the same structure and no one else had heard a thing or could figure out what I had heard. We were the only group staying at the retreat center this weekend. Being a visual artist, I drew a representation that day of what I had heard.  I'm still unsure of what it all meant but I feel it was a gift to receive a message, this performance from an owl, especially, after researching the mythological meanings behind the owl. 

Incidentally, I have had more lucid dreams and liminal explorations since then, more so than usual. It’s sort of a rebirth of my work in this realm and I’m dealing with the fear and anxiety that eventually turned me away from it so many years ago. The owl has ushered in a period of growth and increased wisdom and I am grateful to all the sources of wisdom and healing I have been fortunate enough to have aid me.

[phantompowerpages]

A little chalkboard paint on the bedroom wall is perfect for Qabalah meditations.

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[phantom-power-pages]

#liminal #owl #spirit #Artemis #hoot

[phantompowerpages]

This drawing I made on my ayajuasca retreat. Inspired by an auditory message I received from the spirit world the morning after the first maloca.

[phantom-power-pages]

#chaulkboardpaint #mysticism #qabalah #hermeticism #viewfrombed #study

[phantompowerpages]

I've been enjoying this patch of blackboard paint at the foot of the bed.

[phantompowerpages]

When we imagine, we create a form of life.

Colin Bennett

[phantompowerpages]

[phantompowerpages]

This song and video seem inspired by Ayahuasca. I have plans to experience Mama Aya this year. I will report about my thoughts and feelings leading up to it and my experience itself on Phantom Power Radio and here on this Tumblr page.

[phantompowerpages]

This was an attempt to present in comic form a thought I had about consciousness and physical reality and the connection therein with regards to the so called paranormal. I hope it communicates something of my original thought which is that there is a spectrum of connected phenomena rather than separate, individual phenomena with different causes. By varying degrees one can interact with reality. I see one the more mundane end of the spectrum such things as synchronicity and on the more advanced end, tulpas.

#paranormal #supernatural #fortean #ufo #magick #shadowpeople #synchronicity