After weeks of pushing posts for deadline’s sake, I think I’ll shelve this for awhile unless I can think of something I want to write. Not much new has been happening spirit-side for awhile, and the things that do happen don’t really make good posts. Regular Tuesday posting is on hold, and I’m going back to a when-I-feel-like-it basis.

Layers of Sight

Recently it feels like my vision has shifted while in the astral. There’s one kind of vision where you focus on what appears to be physical-like structures, walls, decorations, plants and humanoid people. Then there’s another way of seeing in which those things stop seeming important, where you see right through them, if you see them at all, and instead focus on the energies underneath. There’s probably a word for that, but today the term that feels right to call it is pattern sight.

I’ve always done a bit of both, but lately it’s been more of the second one. Between the two, it’s harder to write about because it’s harder to describe. It conveys a lot of information in a compact form, but unpacking that into something you can talk about is difficult. It’s like describing a scent, if the scent were condensed into a solid object.

Ra has always preferred that I see him this way. Sometimes my brain rebels and slaps some image over him, often some TV character of questionable motive, sometimes a former boss, and sometimes I make up an image. That might tell you something about how I’ve always been a little uneasy about our relationship. Many times I’ve stood right in front of him, having a conversation in my projection of how his office on the barque appears, and could not tell you a single thing about what he looks like, except “dark.” It may seem ironic that a sun god’s energy would appear that way. I’ve always attributed it to the idea that he’s covering up his brilliance for my protection, like that time when I watched a solar eclipse through a welder’s helmet. Other words I might use would be powerful, authoritarian, masculine but also loving, giving, protective. He has a deep gravity well that pulls you into his orbit.

Heru on the other hand, gives me big brother vibes. He is warm, like a more gentle version of the sun, with a taste of wind on a summer’s day.  That’s when he’s in a good mood. The sky has many moods. There’s always a sense of motion there even when he is still, like an underground stream.

Last week during the ritual I didn’t see the garden exactly, maybe a thin ghostly version of it. I went to the knot of energy that was the natron spring to purify myself. I saw the glowing pillars of the three ladies. I dropped through to a landscape of lines and energies. I only saw flashes of images as my mind translated and labeled the structures. I took molten glowing lines and wove them together like a rope.

I often feel this that this is the true way of seeing, and assigning shapes to things that don’t require them is something of a crutch that humans use to interact here. Ra seemed to imply as much, in that he refused to settle on a form because I shouldn’t need him to do so. On the other hand, maybe the visual layer also has a measure of reality to it, and maybe that’s why I got burned this lat time. I wasn’t paying attention to my own shape while working on that deeper layer. Maybe it’s false to think that one is more important or more real than the other and it’s just a matter of focus.

Integrity and Internal Magic

The ritual over, I brought my awareness back home, to my room. I felt Djehuty hanging around close by. My energy body felt tired but not too bad, then I noticed the blisters along my arms as if I’d been burned. Djehuty covered the phantom wounds with aloe vera bandages.

“I don’t remember doing that.” It didn’t hurt exactly, but it didn’t look good either.  The bandages helped a lot.

You were very focused. Djehuty told me.

“Nebt-het didn’t stop me.”

You weren’t done yet.

I thought about how I’d grabbed various energies and wove them together, strengthening the connections between them. It’s possible that interrupting me partway would have ruined the whole thing.

I wore the bandages for a couple days. Overall it wasn’t too bad. If the results were half as good as I hoped, then it was worth it. Unfortunately, I usually don’t see the results of my efforts. I keep doing it because it feels like the kind of thing that I was made to do.

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Internal magic involves the concept of changing yourself in order to change the world, or at least your corner of it, whichever part of it you can reach. If external magic is about ritual, spell components, and sigils, then internal magic is about energy work, journey work and shapeshifting.

Changing yourself, being willing to change, doesn’t always work out the way you planned. There’s a certain integrity, the structural kind, that is disrupted with any change. The energy body heals faster than the physical body, but those little imbalances can add up over time. I can’t do this kind of stuff as often as I used to.

If your sense of identity is rooted in your appearance, then changing your appearance can be disorienting. If your sense of stability depends on reality being just so, then any change of the rules can leave you off balance. If you have a clear sense of what is inside and what is outside, then any blurring of those lines will make you have doubts about where self ends and other begins. It can make you wonder who the self even is and if anything is safe from these changes.

But I’m the kind of person who is drawn to this. Being too solid, too hard, feels like being trapped. I used to feel like I needed to break something, even if that something was myself. I don’t feel that way as much anymore. It’s important to put it back together when you’re done. It doesn’t have to be the same as before, but it’s important to rest and recharge, to settle into the new shape.