February Behind-the-Scenes: Occult

Miss Diana, As an addict should I be allowed to see this clip?

I love this -- I think that casting a wide net, spiritually, is a good practice for many. So much old and new wisdom to draw from.

To answer your first question, I know of many traditions that make "homes" for spirits, ancestors, ghosts, et cetera, and just sort of cobbled together my own with an antique jewelry box and a few objects that I thought might appeal to a prankster -- bells and noisemakers and a little cat figurine. It was fun to set up, and I felt like a goofball, but it seemed to work!

That is so sweet!

Very interesting to hear you discuss the connection between meditation and trance. I'm certainly not a very spiritual person, but I am a seeker of enlightenment in the old sense of that word. This means that I've sought out spiritual enlightenment through a number of means. Basically somewhat similar to your own road. Furthermore, I have a very strong sense that we all need to create our own world view and simply based on the best ideas from various sources, I've found a path that seems to work for me - some old Norse myths, Buddhism, Daoism, and a blend of common sense ethics that tells me that treating people the way you'd like to be treated is probably a pretty good way to live your life. I discovered that yoga and meditation gave me the absolute best way to deal with the stress of life. In a roundabout way that brought me here and that feeling of relaxation and bliss is what is so amazing. I'm happy to call it a spell - it just works. My grandmother used to be very spiritual. She had a very strong connection to the spiritual world. She would tell me about the spirits looking out for me and had a way to see into the future. She not only saw ghosts but was quite comfortable with there being a spirit world and would tell me about my aura.

Not a ghost story, more of a reincarnation story: About 7 years ago I lost my gray long haired cat to cancer. About 2 1/2 months later I decided it was time for a kitten. Found a tuxedo cat at the shelter in my town, but when I came down the cat was already adopted. They did have a tortie who I instantly loved and adopted. My tortie shared some personality traits as my grey cat. Looked at my tortie’s info from the shelter, and she was born the day after my grey cat passed away. I still have a feeling my grey cat was reincarnated into my tortie, especially since the cat I originally came to adopt that day was already taken

Inflatable_Dream

This was delightful to watch (and rewatch). Thank you Miss Diana. Long reply follows: No personal ghost stories to report but some friend of a friend type of stuff. Your potential ghost experience is interesting, especially the timing of it stopping. Did you intuit how you wanted to respond to what was happening? What was going on internally for you as you set up that space? Buddhism was an early entry point for me as well, especially growing up Catholic and growing increasingly more critical of religion as I hit my teenage years. Growing up in the country was probably a factor too. Lots of time to be out alone in the woods with an unfettered imagination led to a weirdly regular meditative practice (that lapsed as a teenager/younger adult) and some organically ritualistic stuff involving whatever beliefs I'd constructed at the time around elemental energy. On reflection, studying sport psychology as a coach was another thing that pushed my exploration into consciousness. Learning how belief plays a large part in which stimuli we assign importance to and how that can change what we perceive and how we interpret it. Philosophy followed as a natural extension of that study to get into reliability of senses, how we define identity and consciousness, the nature of knowledge and what not. At a certain point, inviting choice bits of nature past my blood-brain barrier helped too. Trying to figure out the full breadth of your intentions with the occult integrations is beyond me. After working through the Occult Training series (which was great) I spent hours trying to decode some of the chants you have in your files and still have no idea. Probably not a surprise that it's kind of exciting not knowing but trusting you enough to engage with it anyway. The stuff from that Occult Training series has stuck for me. I have a space in my room set aside for a little altar/shrine and the words I constructed with your guidance are something I repeat to myself daily (among other fun mantras that you graciously gave to me). I'm not sure if you were alluding to it, but one of the things you mentioned reminded me of a quote (I looked it up to confirm, it's from Arthur Clarke). "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I think that any of those sorts of explorations of consciousness have a mysterious quality to them that connects well with trance. Lacking the science to explain things fully, there's room left for them to feel magical. Even when there's a scientific understanding of what's going on, trance can still be pretty mind bending to experience. There's a magic and a joy in not knowing what your sigil means but knowing that by focusing attention on it at your suggestion, it gains importance in my experience of the world. Whether it's explained as you guiding someone to change the state of their nervous system with breathing and visualization or as you invoking spirits and uttering powerful words that impact deep parts of the mind, the effect is still there and still glorious to feel. There's a bit in the blog you linked for this post that says it well (referring to mundane explanations). At the core of it, I think that the more I experience the malleable nature of consciousness (whether through occult or scientific means), the more accessible trance space becomes. My limiting beliefs and/or expectations around trance shift with more experimenting. Playing with how consciousness can be altered and directed, how the environmental inputs can affect it, how reframing the beliefs about those inputs can affect it, how consciousness can be diffuse, and how it can be concentrated. Bringing that into trance, hitting new depths, and having more space to dig around in later as a result. I love the distinctions you made in your blogs about the different subject types. It seems like certain types of occult practices may lend themselves more towards different subject types.