December 14, 2021
This proved to be an interesting development in my experience in the Imaginal. For a few days after encountering the young girl who had been assaulted and ostensibly murdered, I felt her present within my soul; it was she was ‘borrowing’ my body and I could feel her body as it was mine own. It’s similar to my private sessions with my Diamond Approach teacher where he encourages me to feel into my body; usually, the issues or blockages I am experiencing psychologically show up in my body as patterns of tension, contractions, numb areas, etc. As the session goes on, I inquire into those places and usually the issue comes into sharper focus, eventually resolving itself.
It was like this with the girl. I could feel the frozen, numb areas of her body inside my own. In doing so, it seems like this allowed her to experience them more clearly and she could allow True Nature to work on her. After all, this is what happens in my private sessions in the physical world; True Nature manifests, working through me and my teacher.
The young girl very gradually thawed and came alive, seeming to blossom in a matter of days from a naive young girl into a mature woman. It was beautiful to experience and I was glad to allow my body to be the location for her unfoldment. It seems like a human soul, especially a partially awakened one (meaning a soul that can at least partially recognize its ultimate nature as the Divine) is a necessary ingredient, a catalyst for this rescue and unfoldment to take place.
It makes sense, right? As a human in the physical world, we need a physical teacher to help us to awaken. If we didn’t have a teacher who was partially awakened, we would have a hard time recognizing our innermost nature as Divine. We are essentially blind--blind to our essential nature--and a human, physical person is needed to help ignite our unfoldment. It can happen without a teacher but this is vanishingly rare. Most of the time, we need a teacher. I’m not sure but I’m willing to bet that the teacher feels my blockages, tension, contractions in his own body and this helps him to guide me through the inquiry.
(This is a pretty left-brained explanation for a mysterious process that is quite beautiful.)
After a few days, the girl had woken up and healed sufficiently to continue her journey with the original entity that had called me to her. (That entity appeared to me as a Mayan goddess.) I was left wondering inevitably about the girl’s assailant, the man who raped and possibly killed her.
It didn’t take long for him to appear.
Another Mayan god, this one definitely of the underworld–perhaps the bat god, Camazotz–led me to him. If I were Christian, I might be tempted to read all sorts of judgment and moralizing into the experience but actually the perpetrator didn’t strike me as being punished for his misdeeds, rather he seemed frozen in time. Like the girl, he was stuck. Also like the girl, his body felt numb, rigid, frozen.
At first, I wasn’t very enthused about being led to him. I may not indulge in the revenge fetish that afflicts most Westerners but I wasn’t thrilled to open my body and experience to such a man. I did so only begrudgingly and it therefore took a number of days for the opening/thawing process to take place. When he began to thaw out and I had access to more of his inner experience, impressions and memories, I realized he was just a guy like pretty much every other guy. There wasn’t anything especially evil about him, although I’m not saying that his actions weren’t evil. He was just lost like so many other souls I have met. In life, he was also lost, not especially awake or introspective. There was a lot of unmetabolized ‘stuff’ - issues, etc. - going on inside him.
Unlike the young girl, he seemed to grow younger as his time inside my body progressed. He grew more open, more innocent, fresher, more alive. After a while, it was hard to maintain a grudge against him because he was so cute. How can you be mad at an innocent child? I couldn’t. It was almost impossible for me to muster any sort of outrage at his crimes and I ended up thoroughly on his side. I don’t know what this says about me, probably nothing good.
And so it went on for about a week and then he, too, continued on his journey. I should point out one difference between his experience and the girl’s: She was met by a loving, feminine spirit and disappeared into a sublime cloud of love; he, on the other hand, was met by a masculine spirit who appeared in a cloud of fire and burning coals. This may be where we get the Christian impression of Hell - the burning fires of Hell, right? - but there was no punishment involved and the fire, while burning hot, was filled with compassion. It felt good to be burned by that fire, like sitting in front of a welcoming fire on a cold, winter night.
The fire entity was fierce but not threatening. He was a very solid, definite presence full of power and strength. His fire was the fire of the Truth, wielded to burn away all pretense. Only Truth could survive such a fire which may be why I liked the experience.
My ‘guy’ didn’t seem afraid of the entity and didn’t flinch away from the fire. He actually seemed to welcome it, giving him fully to this guide from the underworld whose mission was to take him back into the Light. He stepped forward and the entity met him, transforming as he did so into a white-hot being, burning so brightly that he might almost have been blinding. Interestingly, though, there was a softness and receptivity to him that was quite disarming. I realized again that there is no contradiction between the fire of strength and the softness of compassion. They can and often do arrive together, complementing each other and working together to free those of us who need them.
So, this fiery and soft ‘demon’ emerged from the flames and took my guy’s hand and led him onward to the next phase of his journey. I have no idea where they went or what that next phase entails but I was left feeling hopeful.
I am still waiting to have an encounter with anything that could be defined as evil in the Imaginal. I’ve read things and have heard that often people meet scary and threatening things in the Imaginal. I don’t know whether I’m just naive, tricked or blind but nothing like that has happened to me. I can’t say that there is nothing evil in the Imaginal, just that I have yet to meet anything like that.
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