December 8, 2010

On Where Not To Find Spirits

The past few weeks have been a flurry of caffeine- and fear-fueled activity for me. Normally I'd like to use that as an excuse for my recent spiritual inertia, but to be honest it's a recurring problem in my life and I'd be lying to myself if I did.

Seeing that the worst of my situation is over, though, I thought tonight would be a good time to celebrate with my invisible friends. Now, I wouldn't say I'm a particularly gifted psychic or scryer, but as I was watching threads of incense curl around the water glass and over the candle flame, a few thoughts on the subject occurred to me.

The first was an exercise I read years ago on a now-defunct website, whose content eventually became Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation. Basically, the exercise entailed spending a full week trying to perceive "hollow" objects (cups, doorways, etc) in terms of space rather than form. For example, you'd see the space in a room, the space in a doorway, and the space in the next room as one continuous medium, rather than see "the door" as a discrete object. How mind-bending (and/or fun) this was depended on how deeply you threw yourself into the exercise.

But as I recalled this seemingly random memory, I suddenly understood why so many people have trouble with scrying, especially in incense smoke or another 3-D medium. They're looking at the smoke, instead of at the space itself. Although I hadn't been trying to summon any spirits into physical appearance (I'm not in the habit of coercing my guests into performing party tricks), or even trying to scry anything, I started looking at the space between the threads of incense. And wouldn't you know, there were forms there, dragging small threads along their frames like wisps of... well, smoke.

Maybe you really do need the blood of a dove and a half-pound of incense to properly see a spirit. Or maybe we're just looking in the wrong place. I don't pretend to know, but I sure as hell plan to experiment with this more.

5 comments:

  1. This is brilliant. This is what I do when I scry and I have tried to explain it to others who are learning to scry, but I have never been able to describe it quite as well as you have.

    It is in the space. And when your mind can perceive empty space as a sort of field thats when it starts to work. You look into that "field" and at first you only get little inklings or impressions. Now for me I have to talk it out. I will say things out loud like "I'm getting impressions of ...." And these little impressions are sometimes simple geometric images or thoughts that appear only in my mind. I use these as a precursor to actual real scrying. I think of it as my mind is tuning-in. I'll keep stating what I think I am perceiving in my mind, and then out of the blue I'l start to see images in the "field" not my head, which are directly related to my spirit work. And the the new images are not just thoughts, but exist in the "field-space" not my head. It works all the time for me.

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  2. Yep. I sometimes think that the reason there's such an 'eye of newt and toe of toad, and ___ and ___' laundry list of necessary conditions could be because the practitioners were in the habit of throwing everything possible at the question of perceiving things, in the hopes that something would stick and their eyes would be opened to whatever is present.

    I haven't scryed in a long time, but have had some interesting observations when burning incense at the kitchen sink when I'm preparing the space to bake and invite my blood mothers to come visit a bit, etc. There's no such thing as 'empty' space :)

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  3. I was just thinking about this yesterday! I was doing a Reiki treatment on a friend when I looked up and noticed that the space in the room seemed 'thin' - like a piece of tracing paper had been placed over the room, and I could almost see something else behind it - some sort of movement.

    Was this spirit? Another layer of reality? Or just a momentary eyesight issue. Who knows - but I really like the way you explain it here.

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  4. Truely enlightening! Thank you, I've shared this the my facebook page, hope you don't mind :)

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  5. That is interesting, i have always had a slight issue with using visual aids to see spirits, it really makes me want to experiment with a new evocation.

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