Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: February 9, 2019 (Saturday)
Seminar: Topic: The Energy Body and Psychometry – Saturday, 9 February, 2019 at 6:30pm/1830hr New York Time — text format in the PSC #lecture room (Discord) — Instructor: Wayfarer — Search LECTURE61
Wayfarer: Right, so, some bits on the energy body, psychometry, how these relate, and how that relationship is the basis for all the other bits.
Wayfarer: We’ll be informal because Discord narcs on all the people playing games and boy are there a lot of them.
Chirotractor: Come on people :\ this is an interesting topic that hasn’t been rehashed a thousand times!
Wayfarer: lmao
Wayfarer: I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.
Rose Cinderfall: … well i’m too sleepy to follow along. i’m not there for this one. you, chiro?..
Wayfarer: lmao Chiro bout to get the real good personal lesson that I would charge someone in the wild 50 American dollars for.
Rainsong: Waves
Wayfarer: Rainsong I guess the same except she’d get the friends discount.
Chirotractor: I’m offended that you don’t consider us friends after the 78 words we’ve exchanged!
Wayfarer: But for real were you being sarcastic? For what it’s worth I’m alpha testing stuff for an approach that is, I hope, fresh and new and better reasoned out than a lot of the rote repetition about psychic stuffs on the Internet.
Chirotractor: it is actually neat. Like the link is obvious once you think about it but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it stated before
Rose Cinderfall: … i’m really interested but today is a day where no information sticks due to emotional overload and intense events over the past few days. I guess i’ll read it afterwards… i should be going to bed soon.
Wayfarer: Because good lord are there a lot of tutorials out there that are not only tired rehashes of everything but also just … really not well done. So okay, great.
Wayfarer: That is more or less what I wanted to hear, because it is a connection that I think is sort of… well, overlooked? Understated? Both? etc.
Rose Cinderfall: enjoy, everyone
Rainsong: Be well, Rose
Rose Cinderfall: thank you, Rainsong \:)
Scelana: I hope you sleep well Rose
Wayfarer: So, let’s start at the beginning. Energy body. It’s something we’ve got, and there are a lot of different models for it. These models range from “wow it’s a blob of energy around your body” to “these are the 1700 different energy centers that comprise the anatomy of….”
Wayfarer: And, well, depending on what you’re doing, I guess that latter approach could be important, maybe, in some circumstances. You’ll see these diagrams from yogis in India or Tibet or China that have a billion meridians and a thousand energy centers and they’ll say “look at this map of the body” and people look at that and go “oh wow this is what the body is really like” and miss that, well, a lot of that shit is symbolism.
Wayfarer: For example, the 108 channels in Tibetan Buddhism correspond to 108 peaceful and wrathful deities that rule over the field of experience that comprises a person’s sum of experiences, all of the possible emotions and sensations, and on and on. In essence, it’s not that these are something like physical structures that exist in the body.
Wayfarer: Perhaps the most prominent thing today that people think of is the theosophical society’s 7 chakra model. I generally come out pretty hard against that. They’re based on C.W. Leadbeater’s book The Chakras, published in I want to say 1921 based on a kind of dubious translation of a relatively late tantric text. It’s presented as if those 7 chakras are the chakras and there are no other models, but that’s just not how tantra works at all.
Wayfarer: Tantric visualization models are magical spells of self transformation, for lack of a better word. They’re visualization tools, just like visualizing a stone tower when constructing a shield doesn’t mean there is literally a tower of stone around us.
Wayfarer: But on the other extreme, there’s this “there are no chakras and the energy body is just an aura” thing that is also not quite there. So, we’ve covered a bit of the history. What the hell am I talking about?
Chirotractor: Yeah what the hell are you talking about old man 😐
Chirotractor: 😛
Wayfarer: I like a model that came from late theosophical texts. Not Blavatsky and Leadbeater, more Besant and Steiner from the anthroposophical side. If you take that and strip out a lot of the orientalism, you get a model that basically lands on a body of four parts:
Wayfarer: From least subtle (most coarse) to most subtle (least coarse), you have: 1) the physical body. It’s the body that is physical. The flesh and stuff. Not subtle at all. 2) the etheric body. It’s the energetic body that directly corresponds to the physical body. You have etheric lungs. You have etheric toes. Etc. This is also the field that directly corresponds to physical objects. This extends about three inches around the physical body, as well as having correspondent organs. 3) the “near astral” or “emotional astral” body. This is comprised of thought-stuff. When you think of a person, if you project at them, you usually project here. I have a friend who, earlier today, was asking about how to get prayer-gunk off of him. When people pray for you, it’s usually sending energy around this layer of the field. Usually expands about 2-3 feet beyond the etheric. 4) the “subtle astral” or “thought astral” body. This is all about concepts and consciousness and thoughts. It’s super amorphous and it expands or contracts based on your state of consciousness. For most people it hangs out around 12 feet around the body. It can expand to 25 or so around some people. For like, incredible meditators, Buddhas, really accomplished yogis, etc. it can expand infinitely along with consciousness itself.
Wayfarer: Let’s break that shit down because wall of text lmao
Wayfarer: Forgot to hit enter deal with it.
Wayfarer: Well let’s do this, take a second to read over that, we’re gonna go into more detail on the back three.
Wayfarer: Not a lot of elaboration on the physical body. It’s just, you know, the basis of the whole thing. It’s pretty important to our identities. When we think of “us” we almost always include this, even if we don’t identify with it.
Wayfarer: The etheric though, that’s pretty important! That’s what you are affecting when you’re doing energy work to benefit or affect a body. It corresponds directly to the body as an object. People who do psychic diagnosis are looking at this thing; a person with lung problems will have underexpressed etheric lungs, and so on.
Wayfarer: And the astral of both flavors (usually just “the astral body” but we break it into two parts based on psychological proximity, more or less) is super important, because that’s the energetic reflection of the mind/consciousness itself.
Wayfarer: The astral body reflects what we’re thinking and feeling, but reflecting is a pretty bad word for this because it actually works both ways. We think something and it appears in the astral field. If something appears in the astral field, we end up having our thoughts directed that way. And that’s important. They’re coemergent systems, not independent systems arranged hierarchically. It’s a holarchy, not a hierarchy.
Wayfarer: A lot of people with a lot of religious ideas would say the astral reflects the soul or the etheric reflects the soul and the body is just a vessel we wear like armor and when we die the soul just kinda goes somewhere else. And that’s uh, I mean, you believe what you want to believe, okay? We’re in deep religious territory and talking about like, consciousness survival hypothesis and so on. But my experience is most people, when the physical body dies, the etheric body kinda fades and then goes nova after a bit.
Wayfarer: So if your etheric body is your soul, or your astral body is your soul, that’s pretty dicey.
Wayfarer: And, again with the astral – that astral is correspondent to your consciousness shape which is centered in an experience that usually takes place around your physical body. So those are also related. And when your physical body is knocked unconsciousness your astral body will constrict heavily, like I mentioned.
Wayfarer: Expansive meditative states lead to the astral body expanding to correspond, maybe infinitely? Hard to say, you know? But it gets real damn big. And being unconscious causes it to retract, because it has to do with inclusiveness and expansion of awareness and if you’re knocked out you’re not really in an expanded state, right?
Wayfarer: So that’s the energy body part of “energy body and psychometry.” Before we continue on to psychometry, questions? Comments? Concerns? Complaints?
Rainsong: Cool and froody, so far
Chirotractor: A+
Wayfarer: Chiro since you are a good and loyal person who shows up for lectures in particular feel free to ask any questions, concerns, ideas, etc. I’m not serving this out of a can so we can go where we need to.
Wayfarer: Else, we can move to Part 2: Psychometry: A thing we barely ever talk about in the OEC but why what the hell it’s the main thing of psychic energy in anything written prior to 1990 what happened good lord: The Topic.
Chirotractor: got a few wonderings but they’re pretty far beyond scope
Wayfarer: Throw ’em out there I mean the scope changed when this became yr personal lesson 😛
Wayfarer: And I can pick up Part 2: Psychometry: A thing we barely ever talk about in the OEC but why what the hell it’s the main thing of psychic energy in anything written prior to 1990 what happened good lord: the topic, next week too.
Wayfarer: If we just go crazy out there.
Chirotractor: Right so a necromancer group I … am aware of has this whole ‘balancing elements’ thing and suggests that they sorta go wild and cancel each other out when a folks dies and was curious if about the while energy bodies going nova thing you mentioned
Chirotractor: I’m… probably understanding it poorly
Wayfarer: So, I’ve seen some people die and been around some dead people, it’s a thing. Usually during those periods I have been working and not in the capacity of a psychic, so I haven’t paid super close attention in those cases. However, I generally think the Tibetan Buddhist teachings on the Bardo are pretty accurate.
Wayfarer: Not the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” because I think that’s taken out of context by a lot of people.
Wayfarer: But there are teachings about basically “what happens when the body dies?” and it’s related to our psychological states and our consciousness. So as we’re dying different consciousnesses basically fall off one after the other. From memory, so don’t take this as like “what happens” but it’s something like this: We lose our sense of smell, then taste, and then we lose interest in eating and hunger, and then hearing and seeing, and we enter into a state of hallucination where we project from our own mind those things instead of our sense organs, and then finally we lose touch I think, and then finally the brain stops doing thought-consciousness. And when the brain stops, about 20 minutes later the etheric body collapses.
Wayfarer: This happens at the same time as the physical body itself is dying, and takes a few days. That’s like, “ideal.” Sickness can change things up obviously. Traumatic deaths are very different (in traumatic deaths the body dies and critically destabilizes the etheric body which causes consciousness to kind of warble about and then it all just kinda blips out)
Wayfarer: The traumatic death thing is where your ghostly impressions and hauntings by psychometry come from, because the energy body just kinda lashes out and makes a huge impression on the area that lingers for a long time.
Wayfarer: Without getting into like “and then consciousness migrates through rebirth into” blah blah speculation, basically the thing about the balancing elements bit is that they don’t go crazy, they kinda just, fade away. Because the different elements are correspondent to bodily functions.
Wayfarer: So when you look at the same process, you have the fire of the body fading first, and then water, the life-sustaining winds, etc. And finally there’s just kinda earth element left over because we turn into garbage and people pay a lot of money to have us thrown away.
Wayfarer: So when you look at the same process, you have the fire of the body fading first, and then water, the life-sustaining winds, etc. And finally there’s just kinda earth element left over because we turn into garbage and people pay a lot of money to have us thrown away.
Wayfarer: Actually let me see if I can’t get you the actual Tibetan text because you’ll find it interesting I think and then the order will be right because I know I’m goofing it up.
Wayfarer: But it’s basically like that, as we die our bodies fuck up which fucks up our elements and then eventually the life-sustaining winds fail and the structures go nova.
Chirotractor: poof
Chirotractor: hmmk I was a little curious about the intersection
Wayfarer: http://www.buddhanet.net/deathtib.htm
Wayfarer: There’s a really handle table here.
Wayfarer: It goes earth->water->fire->wind which makes sense, I was thinking more after fire because earth and water fading people are still alive, that starts happening like a week before time of death.
Wayfarer: Aaaanyhow, quickly on some psychometry: basically, these energy bodies are pretty big, and they share space with things. When we think about a person, we create a spatially overlapping ball of consciousness around them that doesn’t leave our body but does go to them, no matter where they are. Because consciousness (and the astral body) aren’t limited to space. Which is why when you “astral project” you can actually not go anywhere and still go very far.
Adfeng: Can I ask a quick question?
Chirotractor: XP sorry for the heavy question
Wayfarer: You can also do it where you do create an overlapping separate energy body form but that’s a thing.
Wayfarer: Sure, Adfeng, what’ve you got? Thanks for speaking up. 🙂
Adfeng: When we’re speaking about “astral projection”, from a terminological standpoint are we on the same grounds as “mindscapes”, or is this something different in this paradigm?
Wayfarer: I’m not familiar enough with mindscapes to know what is meant there. Astral projection can refer to a bunch of different things though, that’s true. Based on just the word ‘mindscape’ I’m assuming that this means projecting one’s consciousness to a mental plane that’s correspondent to one’s mind/consciousness but not the physical world per se?
Wayfarer: Like the Hermetic concept of the mental plane, yeah?
Adfeng: That’s a pretty accurate description!
Wayfarer: Okay. Then the answer is “yes and no” there! The astral body is a big part of what relates to that mental plane, it both shapes and is shaped by it. If we look at it from the Hermetic model, the physical body is the body that exists in the physical plane, the etheric body exists as a dense construct in the mental plane, and the astral body is “us” in the mental plane and the spiritual plane.
Wayfarer: So when you think about something and it arises in the mental plane, that comes into existence in the astral body, exactly. And when we do that deep state of meditation or samadhi or whatnot where the astral body expands, it’s because the consciousness is expanding the mental plane to include more (perspectives, vibrations, however you want to say that)
Wayfarer: So in that case, astral projection is something we can do where we send the consciousness to the minscape and in that case the astral body resonates or vibrates with the concepts there, right? In this case I’m using it more in the Robert Bruce / Monroe Institute / standard New Age sense of “sending the consciousness elsewhere” which can include OBE in the physical, spatial realm as well as mental planes or conceptual places, or wherever we would say isn’t the Really Real World.
Adfeng: If we were to truly interact with something on the “planes”, so to speak, then we would need to be in an etheric form. Would that be accurate?
Wayfarer: Strictly strictly speaking, when I think about, say, Chiro, he exists in my mental plane and that’s reflected in the astral body, and at the same time there’s a metaphysical reference that arises around him because he’s the object of my consciousness and I can’t hold an object in my consciousness without changing the properties of the object (now “that which is thought about by…”) so I show up in his mental and his astral body as well.
Chirotractor: in your mental plane kicking over piles of folders 😛
Adfeng: (I’m trying to short-circuit the discussion because I believe I may understand the paradigm so I don’t detract from the lesson at hand)
Wayfarer: That would depend on what we consider interaction, I think.
Wayfarer: (It’s okay, like I said we’re being pretty fast and loose because there aren’t like 40 people here all wanting to hear about psychometry)
Wayfarer: When I teach people astral projection, a lot of people can project consciousness but they can’t organize that information in a way that makes sense, because information in the “astral” or “mental planes” doesn’t actually make sense to our brain-embodied consciousness unless we can organize it into meaningful concepts. Accomplished meditators and yogis and so on don’t need that because they can operate without the concepts, but most people are trying to get there, they aren’t there already, right?
Adfeng: :ok_hand: We’re on the same page
Wayfarer: So I teach people to create an energy body for themselves at the “place” where they’ve projected, because that energy body can have sense organs (an energy eye, energy ear, etc.) and that allows them to kind of organize that information.
Wayfarer: But that energy body is a kind of reflection of the etheric form being shaped in the astral. It’s not actually sending the etheric body there per se because that’s intrinsically linked to the physical, etc. And the astral body just goes “wherever we think about” but without those sense organs it just has raw information to work with, can’t organize the information, and then people go “wow that was crazy but I have no idea what happened” lmao
Wayfarer: Basically it’s “think about having a body so you can sort the information out” and then we use language like “create an energy body” because it helps disambiguate it. As a general rule I think astral projection is something people rush to accomplish and don’t really have a reason for, and it ends up with people really confused about the point of all this stuff lmao
Wayfarer: So, bringing this back around to psychometry, because this is all actually related!
Wayfarer: Psychometry is somewhat narrowly defined as reading information from objects via psychic means. More technically it’s picking up the energetic impressions left on objects through interactions with consciousness. Even more technically, physical objects probably aren’t affected by consciousness, but we have zero way of interacting with actual physical objects. What we interact with, what consciousness interacts with, are thoughts about physical objects, and that includes the etheric forms of those objects.
Wayfarer: So to make that a little more palatable, when we psychometrize, we’re reading information from the energy around objects.
Wayfarer: But how do we do that? Well, the entire energy body I just described is essentially a sense organ all of its own.
Wayfarer: When our physical body interacts with things in the physical world, organs make contact with objects and this sends a signal (a sensation) which our brain then interprets and organizes into a concept with a name and a body of ideas we associate with that name (a perception). I talked a few months ago about sensation and perception, I won’t labor the point.
Wayfarer: The reason I mention this is that psychic information is transmitted through psychic contact with things. Objects have this energy field around them and that energy field intersects with our own energy field. If we pay attention to that, we start to see these subtle changes that both make on one another. My thoughts about something resonate in the astral body, and where the astral body intersects with the object, it shapes that object to accord with my thoughts.
Wayfarer: That’s “imprinting.” That’s how the objects got the information on them in the first place.
Wayfarer: At the same time, the object’s energy field is imprinting onto the astral body. I can get that information. Except it’s usually pretty subtle and often we’re thinking about other things. We drown out the signal with a lot of noise, and we do this all the time by having music on and thinking about wanting dinner and what we’re going to do tomorrow and so on. We’re not paying attention to the astral body all that much.
Wayfarer: So, 2 weeks ago I talked about meditation and about specifically calm-abiding; calming the mind and just noticing, just paying attention, to all the different thoughts and feelings and so on that arise.
Wayfarer: This is why I talked about that as foundation. Because the next thing we can do when we start recognizing all the things that are happening in our actual physical bodies, is noticing how information in the etheric and astral bodies are reflected in the actual physical body. How does it make us feel to be in a church? And if we peel back our preconceptions and ideas (“I don’t like churches,” “churches are holy,” etc.) and we account for those biases and get really down to physical sensations, we can start to see how a place (or object) is affecting our energy field. And from that, we can start picking up information about things.
Wayfarer: So, moving out of the abstract and into the concrete, I’m a big fan of a guy named W.E. Butler, who was an English occultist. He wrote a book in 1970 called “How to Read the Aura” which has a big ol’ chapter on psychometry. And he gives really good practical advice about delineating the practice as a practice in and of itself.
Wayfarer: It’s the classic stuff: hold the object in the hand, quiet the mind, note whatever thoughts arise. He talks a good bit about organizing information because, as he points out, there’s a big difference between well organized information and poorly organized information, even if the information is the same.
Wayfarer: He mentions some good stuff: doesn’t have to be in the hand. Some people need to touch it to the head. That’s all good stuff because it accounts for individual variation.
Wayfarer: But I want to kind of tangent a bit here as to why this is super important to understand for OEC people in particular, I think: unlike the physical body, the energy body itself changes as it contacts things. Our eyes don’t really change all that much depending on the color we’re looking at. Yes, I know different cones and rods are activating blah blah that’s true and great, but like, your eye doesn’t change into a nose when you look at a flower.
Wayfarer: The energy body does change and, in fact, those changes are the mechanism of psychic sense. Because the subtle body corresponds to parts of our conscious experience, and vice versa. We think about flowers, our astral body resonates or vibrates (whatever word you want to use) with the flower-concept-information as if we were actually seeing flowers with our eyes. And this is important! Because it’s noticing those subtle changes that lets us know when someone else is thinking about flowers.
Chirotractor: So is it accurate to say youre not actually sensing things. You’re sensing yourself interacting with things
Adfeng: If the above statement is true, would that not mean that we would have to take pre-cautions before even just sensing things due to negative side effects they may have on our energy systems/bodies?
Wayfarer: In a way, yeah. What you’re perceiving is the impression things make on your field (and in turn your field makes impressions on objects, and they exchange until contact stops). And this is really important because it’s why two different people might sometimes psychometrize the same thing and get different information. Sometimes, surely, one person is wrong. But sometimes, their energy bodies are just attuned to different details.
Wayfarer: Absolutely, yes, largely dependent on the kinds of things we’re interacting with.
Adfeng: And, in addition, would that not in turn affect how we sense? Like wearing a glove to examine a patient.
Wayfarer: Yep. So, for the most part, things we deal with are pretty benign and/or we can mitigate potential harm by just thinking about other things, counter-signaling, etc. And we usually know well in advance because we feel badly well before we strap in and go to psychometrize something hateful to us. These feelings manifest in the form of feelings of dread, foreboding, doom, anxiety, whatever. (That, too, depends from person to person and it’s important we learn those signs)
Wayfarer: But this is essentially what’s in play in haunted houses, right? Here I’m talking about haunted houses in the sort of now-in-vogue traditional sense where some terrible thing has happened and it’s imprinted on the home and gee it just doesn’t feel right and the new owners bought it and they just feel dread all the time like something is watching them or like something is about to go wrong, etc.
Rainsong: Not the ones inhabited by the little orb dudes?
Wayfarer: And in this case these are people with no knowledge of what’s going on, who aren’t aware that their energy body is a big ol’ sensor picking up negative bad stuff. So they just feel bad and welp must be ghosts.
Wayfarer: Right yeah, the little orb dudes usually just mean people need to dust and use like a HEPA filter in their AC and maybe don’t take pictures using flash with digital cameras. Different kinds of hauntings.
Wayfarer: 😛
ceahhettan: Good evening folks.
Wayfarer: Ahoy.
Rainsong: Hi, Ceah
Scelana: hello ceahhettan
ceahhettan: Only vaguely here, but I figured I’d pop in while I’m doing work-related research sitting in the truck stop.
Wayfarer: So the energy body is pretty much a thing that changes things and changes with things at the same time. And this is good, this is a cool thing because there’s a series of correspondences that happen. Butler talks about picking up objects and like, touching them to psychometrize.
Wayfarer: And that’s really effective because the objects are coarse physical objects and the etheric body is coarse-er than the subtle body and so it’s a really good in-between spot.
Wayfarer: When you hold an object in your hand, it’s inside that “roughly 3 inches” I talked about earlier.
Wayfarer: Oh, another quick digression: I mentioned chakras earlier and I mentioned I used to be really against them but I do want to point out that generally “structures in the body” isn’t quite the right thing to say, but there are points of intersection between physical, etheric, and astral bodies that serve as conceptual references. So a three energy center model isn’t terrible wrong. If we look at the three different bodies as existing essentially in three different “planes” with each one having some form of reflection in the other, then the chakras are the intersections on the Venn diagrams of those planes/bodies. And you can use this for visualization exercises and so on.
Wayfarer: That is, the whole etheric body is inside the astral body but you can also point to a place that is the sort of … I dunno I don’t want to lean too hard on the word “conceptual” or “symbolic” and make it seem like quantum woo, but the median or average of those fields, so to speak. The central point of the intersection.
Wayfarer: The “anchor” of the astral to the etheric. It’s not a structure per se but it is a thing.
Wayfarer: And the “anchor” of the etheric to the physical, and so on.
Wayfarer: So like, these are useful ideas, even if they’re not really like anatomical structures of the energy body, since that’s kind of… I mean we’re talking about consciousness here and the fact that it can and does change shape and resonance based on what is being thought about is exactly why the idea of strict anatomical concrete structures doesn’t really work even if it does work on a symbolic level.
Wayfarer: I’ll probably make that a whole separate lecture though, I just wanted to close that loop from earlier.
ceahhettan: Right.
Wayfarer: So, then, this is a skill that 1) builds on other skills, and in turn, 2) is built onto. If we want to picture my program for psychic ability development of the house, we’re on the first floor now. The foundation was the meditation practices, and the combination of meditation, imaginative play, and attention exercises I discussed in my last lecture. This is the first floor.
Wayfarer: I’ll start talking about the next floor next week or the week after, but as a spoiler or a teaser (your pick), the stairs to the second floor are found on the first: telepathy, empathy, and clairvoyance are all things we can “hack” via psychometry. Because when our field intersects with someone else’s field, they start to communicate. My astral body shapes his or her astral body, his or her astral body shapes my astral body in turn. I can start noticing other people’s thoughts by the thoughts that arise from my own astral body (or in my mindscape or mental plane, if we want to use another paradigm). That is a form of telepathy. And that’s where the next stairs lead to.
Wayfarer: Regarding precautions, since Adfeng brought it up: like I said, generally we don’t need them for most objects. What if we do? And don’t they dampen our senses, and if so, how do we work on that?
Wayfarer: So, yes. Let’s use, I dunno, I’m trying to think of a good example that isn’t outlandish and also isn’t just dumb.
ceahhettan: Mmm um. Idk I ever so much as used precautions in that sense, so afraid I’m not too much help on that. :p
Wayfarer: So let’s say our friend brings home some weird knife from a pawn shop and is like “hey I saw this spooky knife and I know you’re a big dumb wizard so I bought it for you to do big dumb wizard shit with”
Chirotractor: chopping haunted vegetables
Adfeng: Are we taking this from the paradigm that we can only affect things that we can physically touch?
Wayfarer: And we’re like, “god dammit, I don’t do dumb ritual stuff with knives” and we go into a 2 hour long lecture about Wicca and the symbol set that Gardner developed and the male and female aspects and how our ritual work doesn’t involve that kind of thing at all blah blah and then he leaves but I notice that he left the knife anyways and now I need to know what the fuck is up with this.
Wayfarer: Not at all, and you’ll note that while I think that having that etheric body sense can be pretty handy (especially for picking up emotions and such)… actually let’s touch on that for a bit:
Wayfarer: Butler likes people picking things up, because Butler wrote a book called “how to read the aura” and I mean come on, he’s not writing for like, super advanced practitioners, right?
Wayfarer: Like he’s writing more or less for people who are just getting past the point of “I bet psychic stuff is real, huh”
Wayfarer: And I like it at this stage because it can give us pretty visceral stuff. Most people do psychometry to pick up emotions and ideas off objects. Emotions are something we feel viscerally, in the physical body. Because the etheric body relates closely to the physical body, that kind of information is very easy to pick up just by touch alone. Most people do this just automatically all the time. In houses, rooms, touching objects, whatever.
Wayfarer: “This room feels tense” in a place where an argument just happened, or so on.
Wayfarer: But it’s not the only sensor at all. The astral body interacts with the astral fields of objects just the same.
Wayfarer: Astral fields of objects are a bit weird because they are shaped by thoughts of people about the object. Objects don’t think, unless they are possessed, and then it’s the spirit that is doing the thinking.
Wayfarer: But the astral field can pick up stuff people think about objects, and information from the etheric fields of objects, and that information can be translated back to us. And the astral field isn’t limited to an area around our body. We can think about an object a thousand miles away and it will overlap our astral field (or exist in our mindscape/mental plane, or so on) and we can psychometrize it like that.
Wayfarer: I prefer to do things physically when possible because the more senses we engage with the object the more we can attune to it, filter out nonsense, focus our thoughts on it, and cut down the “noise.” There are other ways around that, though. We can also “bridge” more easily from physical contact -> etheric contact -> astral contact than from astral contact -> etheric contact.
Wayfarer: Anyhow, I’m not saying at all that you need to have physical contact with the object or that the paradigm requires it, just that I prefer it.
Chirotractor: I’m sure the contrast must be helpful too
Wayfarer: We also don’t affect things dependent on physical touch. We do that passively just by being in a room with things. We can actively do it, again, with no real limit on distance.
Wayfarer: So we’ve got this knife and we’re psychometrizing it. But it just feels badly. We need to protect ourselves because hey, maybe there’s some weird shit going on with this knife.
Wayfarer: Probably there’s nothing terrible but we don’t want to take weird risks. So the normal stuff applies, grounding, centering, shielding. We can go real eclectic and put it inside a Triangle of Art if we want and throw up some circles around it and then psychometrize it from inside the circle while it’s in the triangle of art so we can leave and break the connection, etc. right?
Wayfarer: Basically, we have to know what it is we’re doing to nullify it so we can mentally account for that. You used the example of an exam glove and that’s a pretty good example. It’s useful because I have a lot of experience with exam gloves from working as an EMT.
Wayfarer: As an EMT, checking people’s skin is pretty important. I can get a lot of information if someone is clammy or wet, that’s useful information. But man, I do not want to be touching someone who is moist and damp as hell with my bare hands.
Wayfarer: Fortunately, I can feel moisture with the glove, it just feels different. It doesn’t feel wet, it feels slippery.
Wayfarer: If I’m psychometrizing something and I’m using consciousness filters, shields, fields, Triangles of Art, whatever, the important thing is that I need to be familiar enough with the protective method to know how it’s going to affect what I feel. Because I don’t want to psychometrize something and be like “it’s slippery” when it’s wet. I don’t want to be like “it’s angry but not harmful” when I’ve filtered out harmful stuff and instead the harmful stuff feels angry.
Wayfarer: So this is one of those things where practice and consistency is key, which brings me back to: we need to be consistent. We need to keep a journal of what things feel like. We have to go places and feel them out to develop our vocabulary.
Wayfarer: The more situations we “check in” with ourselves in, the more situations we “feel out,” the more often we practice, well, psychometry, the better we get at it. We recognize things based on consistency. That does mean we have to take care of ourselves and be self-aware. Because the same place might feel different when we’re different. We have to be mindful of ourselves, and start to recognize what things feel like.
Wayfarer: People talk about discerning spirits, that’s a big thing for the Christian folk. But a lot of discernment of spirits is just recognizing what different spirits make us feel like. And that’s, more or less, psychometry: our energy body interacting with their energy body and resonating those effects to our physical body, and so on.
Wayfarer: And don’t ignore the physical body. That’s like the cardinal sin of my past. It’s the tool by which our embodied consciousness translates a lot of information and you can go pretty far with a mind-only approach to psychic stuff but it’s like digging a tunnel by hand when you have a big ol’ mining drill parked outside.
Wayfarer: Like, it’s definitely possible and kind of impressive but if the goal is to dig the tunnel and not to impress people then I mean use the mining drill.
Wayfarer: The mind-body connection is way more important than I used to give it credit for and recognizing that I was trying to be way too conceptual and discount physical sensations definitely was a huge benefit for my ability to function psychically. Not saying to ignore the mind or go the other way with it, just that they’re both there.
Wayfarer: So before I wrap this then, questions, comments, criticisms, hatemail?
Rainsong: Remember the mining drill bit for your book 🙂
Wayfarer: Really should include that, yeah? 😀
Rainsong: yep
Scelana: what is a triangle of art exactly? not heard someone mention that before.
Wayfarer: @Chirotractor cheers for being willing to speak up and make this happen, it wasn’t entirely on script but I’m glad because otherwise I was just gonna vomit stuff from the last week of writing. @Adfeng welcome, not sure we’ve talked before? But you clearly already have a good background in this kind of thing and that is fantastic because it helps me a ton as well. Thanks for some great questions, it helps me elaborate points I don’t always know.
Chirotractor: :thumbsup:
Adfeng: We may or may not have in the past. I just tried asking questions that may have helped stimulate the lecture and that cleared things up for me.
Wayfarer: Scelana: a triangle of art or a Solomonic triangle or an evocation triangle is a triangle used in ritual magic for evocations. You summon spirits into them to contain them there, then usually the sorcerer is inside a summoning circle and personally I like to put a whole circle around the thing.
Wayfarer:
Wayfarer: Triangle of art is at the top, summoning circle with the sorcerer in the center underneath.
Wayfarer: It’s not a psychic thing but I wanted to illustrate that you can mix approaches up a lot, there’s a lot of room for that kind of thing if you know what you’re doing.
Scelana: ahh i see, thxies for explaining it to me
Wayfarer: Main place where people screw up in mixing paradigms is not understanding the backgrounds of the traditions they’re drawing from. You’ll see a lot of people who will just kinda do this sort of buffet approach to magical traditions, right?
Chirotractor: all the icing but none of the salad
Wayfarer: But like, using the triangle of art for example, all the names and words of power involved there are coming out of a Solomonic ritual that is pretty much dependent on the monotheistic God and if you’re not ready to play that game (what the chaos magicians would call paradigm shifting) then throwing it up is going to mean absolutely fuckall to the spirit you’re summoning and, if the spirit is a spirit that actually rates that grade of security, you’re probably gonna have a bad day.
Scelana: makes sense
Wayfarer: And if you have no idea why a triangle of art works and just don’t care at all and trace “tetragrammaton” on one wall and don’t know why or what that does like, you might get really lucky and it will “work” or, well, you might not and you should probably not just grab stuff randomly from traditions willy nilly.
Wayfarer: But if you do know how that stuff works, you can probably contain an energy field with it and then that’ll be fine for securing the object you’re psychometrizing. It’s a bit of a weird choice, admittedly. I used it as an example with recognition value, not as an example of something I’d actually do.
Rainsong: Like the wannabe witches who decided to call the Lady Kali as the guardian of the North in a warding ceremony… What could possibly go wrong?
Adfeng: It’s about understanding your own paradigm and relating it to anothers’ to see what may or may not fit, conforming, shaping, adding, etc.
ceahhettan: (Bed, will catch up the rest tomorrow.)
Wayfarer: Right. And you have to be able to actually relate it to the substance, not the superfice.
Chirotractor: that’s like summoning ganesh to keep something out :\
Chirotractor: does not actually understand hindu gods
Scelana: that reminds me of when it was talked bout those who do something else entirely instead of the lbrp when setting up for something that would use the lbrp as parts of the whole setup and closing stuffs etc
Scelana: sleep well ceahhettan
Wayfarer: A lot of people sadly will grab the superficial bits and not actually “get” the part that makes it work. You see this mostly in like absolutely bog standard beginners, admittedly. It’s a phase of learning but part of learning is making the mistakes that someone once told you not to, also, haha
Chirotractor: I hate the LBRP so so much :\
Chirotractor: completely useless but everybody reccomends it
Wayfarer: LBRP is a great example because it’s a lot of people’s first introduction to ritual but banishing is such a small part of that ritual, it’s really more of an empowerment ritual than anything, and it only serves as an empowerment ritual if you’re using that specific Hermetic/Rosicrucian approach, right?
Wayfarer: And then a thousand billion adaptations of the LBRP to different models. “Here’s the LBRP modified for Buddhists” and it’s like, why? Why are you doing that? Buddhism has preparatory self-empowerment rituals! Use those!
Wayfarer: I was going to crack wise about putting other names around the triangle of art but actually that technically does work.
Wayfarer: Just, not with the rest of the ritual.
Wayfarer: Like Rainsong was saying, just grab bagging deities and plugging them into other rituals is a silly thing. But at the same time it’s not really any sillier than doing the rituals for those deities without having the proper background to do them. But you can substitute materia magica for example if you understand the sympathetic properties. You can’t substitute it if you don’t know why it’s being used.
Wayfarer: Like, a lot of Dharma protectors in Buddhism like wine as an offering. But grape juice is not an okay substitute. But black tea is.
ceahhettan: Whereas in judaic ritual grape juice is often the preferred substitute.
Wayfarer: Because the reason for wine is it’s wrathful and potent and affects the body strongly, so offering it acknowledges the properties of the spirit and also that the spirit is enlightened and can transform those drinks. Coca cola also acceptable, incidentally.
Adfeng: It’s the symbolism in this instance that matters
Wayfarer: Yeah, exactly. The symbolic or meaning-properties rather than the external properties. You could probably do dark liquors as well, not sure about clear liquors, I would have to check with someone as to why though. With the deity I have in mind, anyhow, which is kind of part of it: I’m thinking about a particular deity and those rules aren’t universal.
Wayfarer: Nagas have expectations for incenses and wrong incenses will actually piss them off and it’s better to skip the incense entirely than to offer them the wrong stuff, but if you’re just blindly going through the motions because you picked up the ritual from MagicSnakes4UDot Com or something, you wouldn’t know that.
Adfeng: Back in the days when they performed Judaic rituals (BC), they would almost always have wine available or wine would be available to retrieve within the day because that’s all they could drink. (almost all) Water wasn’t potable so they fermented grapes and all the water had just a little bit of alcohol. Now-a-days we just don’t give kids alcohol because we’re afraid it’ll “corrupt” them, so most Christian churches accept grape juice (or sometimes grapefruit or other) as a substitute.
Chirotractor: by that logic could you offer a bottle of sirracha?
Chirotractor: I mean that’s not entirely even a joke
Scelana: doing research before setting up to do something of that nature, or already having done your research and knowing the what and how etc of it all definitely sounds like a good idea instead of the willy nilly approach
Wayfarer: Sriracha for Achi Choekyi Drolma would be dicey in this case for a number of reasons, but mostly because it’s not a beverage so it doesn’t tick that box. You could offer it as a food offering but probably not to tick that box in the ritual.
Chirotractor: who hasn’t drunk hot sauce before tho?
Wayfarer: Like back against the wall, I found myself in a cave but have to do a daily practice, all I have with me is sriracha, I’d probably use water if available or just visualize those offerings.
Wayfarer: Okay, so this looks like a good time to call this. I will be back either next week or in two weeks for the next installment, depending on if I divert from the editing work to writing work or not. Thanks everyone for coming out.
Scelana: thxies for the lecture Wayfarer, it was quite informative!
Rainsong: Thanks for the seminar, Wayfarer. Interesting stuff
Adfeng: Glad I could join in, hope to be here for the next one
Chirotractor: Thanks way!
Chirotractor: Good one this week 😀
B.O.X.: Pretty amazing stuff.
Flux: @Wayfarer Just read the lecture. You know I’m gonna ask a question related to spiritualism, right? Assuming sensing works with an interaction between the bodies you described and the bodies degrade after death, are ago purposing that mediums largely interact with parts of the clients bodies? Or something else?
Wayfarer: @Flux when you say “client” do you mean the sitter? Or the control? Mediums usually are interacting with the control’s energy body. I can’t rule out telepathy in cases where mediums are channeling the deceased for a sitter who is present.
Wayfarer: And the energy body that is connected to the physical form intrinsically dies as well, but the consciousness can reform. While I don’t think it’s common, some people are reborn as spirits hat haunt places or people. I don’t buy into Kardec’s philosophy though, I don’t think that we all hang around immortally waiting to interfere in the physical world.
Flux: Kardec’s ideas are pretty limited to Spiritism or derivatives of. Spiritualism as a whole is pretty eclectic, so reincarnation, heavans, and other ideas get crammed together.
Flux: What do you mean exactly about the reformation of the consciousness. Is that a temporary thing? Is it due to the medium’s interaction with the control’s energy body?
Flux: Also, I’m not very familiar with the term control. At one point I made the incorrect assumption that you were talking about the spirit. Now I believe you are talking about the person that is being read, correct?
Wayfarer: No, the control is the spirit, you were right.
I’m asking if you were calling the spirit the client for some reason.
Let’s paint a picture and define everyone so we know what’s going on.
Wayfarer: We have a psychic medium who has a sign outside the door with a hand of Hamsa and such, okay. We’re gonna call that person the medium. A person comes to them and says “I would like a reading.” That person is the client. They say “the reading is actually for my brother.” The brother is the sitter. The brother comes and sits down and says “I need to contact my dead business partner to find where he hid the gold.” The medium says “okay” and does medium stuff. A spirit shows up and talks to or through the medium. That spirit is the control.
Flux: Okay. I gotcha. So the sitter/client can be the same, but not necessarily.
Wayfarer: Right, that’s why I split them up and needed to clarify. Basically a client is anyone we are doing the work for, but that’s the person who is paying me, not necessarily the person I am working with, yeah?
Flux: That makes sense.
Wayfarer: Like if someone hires me to teach their son intuition, I work for the parents, not the son. He’s my student, but they’re my clients.
Wayfarer: It gets a bit hazy with like, child counseling, where we would say both the parents and the patient are the clients, but we’re accountable to the parents so they are definitely also clients, it’s just our responsibility is to the patient and saying “patient” is a dirty word now, so we’d say “client” there also. 😛
Wayfarer: The control thing is important because the control isn’t necessarily the spirit being communicated with.
Flux: Wasn’t aware of the shift away from patient.
Wayfarer: Eileen Garrett’s control was a single spirit and later she just went to “channeling from my unconscious” or whatever. Edgar Cayce had a control that was the one spirit, and that spirit would go communicate with … what did he call it, the spirit of the person? I don’t recall off the top of my head.
Adfeng: It might be important to mention that in some of these instances we may need to question whether or not consent is required from the client/patient (due to their unawareness of the work being performed).
Wayfarer: So the control is the actual spirit that is handling the medium, but not always the source of the information. So like, for example, as I understand it Chico Xavier had a control named Emmanuel that would go get these other spirits and then the other spirits would dictate books or whatever and Emmanuel would control Chico’s hand and he would do psychographic writing. Emmanuel was the control, but they were channeling yet another spirit.
Wayfarer: Some mediums just open up to any ol’ spirit in the room and let them do their thing and handle the medium and then the control is that spirit. Like if you’re a tween using a talking board and you ask any spirit in the room to communicate then the control is whatever spirit (or spirits) answer.
Wayfarer: I’m not gonna lie btw I think the word “control” is dumb as hell but blame parapsychologists for that.
Rainsong: They’d be the type most likely to be taking the piss, yea?
Rainsong: (Like Sylvia Browne’s friend Francine?)
Wayfarer: (Yeah, that. I almost used Browne as an example but I figured Chico Xavier is less controversial)
Flux: I’m not familiar with either, but I’ve seen Sylvia Browne’s books.
Flux: But what you’re describing makes sense to me and is within the realm of my experience.
Flux: Moving this back towards my original question, what, in your estimation, is a medium typically doing when they are interacting with spirits of the departed? I’m ignoring edge cases.
Wayfarer: Browne was extremely for profit and possibly probably at least somewhat fraudulent some of the time, but she may also have just been getting played by her spirits, who had a lot of fun fuckin’ with her. Chico Xavier was a Brazilian Spiritist who wrote a bajillion books purportedly psychographed from deceased authors.
Flux: Oh neat. They had ghost writers.
Wayfarer: lmao exactly
Wayfarer: I can’t speak generally. If we’re being very strict within the Spiritualist community and talking strictly about “I have your dead business partner here and he says…” then I can’t say with certainty what’s going on and I can’t make a general rule, there are a lot of ways that could be possible without assuming that people’s consciousnesses/souls/whatever endure and can be contacted. And I am admittedly biased against the idea of soul survival, like I ain’t gonna pretend my religious belief in anatta doesn’t factor in there.
Flux: That’s fair. I’m also not 100 on any particular explanation.
Rainsong: Anyone want to speculate on exactly who/what shows up at funerals several days or a week after the death of the individual?
Wayfarer: But some possibilities include: accessing information about the person from the same “matrix of information” that is hypothesized for remote viewing, telepathizing the sitter to get information from his or her unconscious mind, contacting the reconstituted consciousness of the person in its new form and reading off its karmic memory, intuiting the desired information via some other mechanism (clairvoyance, claircognizance, etc.) and symbolically forming this as a conversation, contacting some unrelated spirit that is capable of divining the information, etc. etc.
Flux: Also, contacting the spirit before dissolution of its energy bodies.
Wayfarer: Depends on how many days, the consciousness kind of roams around in an astral body for up to 40 days before it gets recycled into a new being even within the Buddhist paradigm, so I suspect a lot of people drop in on their own funerals out of attachment.
Wayfarer: Yeah, exactly.
Rainsong: These were all United Church of Canada, so within a couple weeks on the outside
One of ’em stood right behind the minister and made silly faces at the congregation.
I’d never met the woman when she was alive, but this was entirely in character for her, and two other people saw her do it
Wayfarer: The Buddhist take on death that I didn’t get into the other night is basically that when the body dies the etheric body blows up and the consciousness goes through a series of hallucinations while the consciousness reorganizes itself around not having sense organs. Once that reorganization is complete and the consciousness is just kind of roaming around, it depends on the person’s inclinations. People who were attached to their forms (this is almost everyone) will tend to reconstitute a dense astral body and travel around places they knew for up to 40 days before that consciousness dissolves and the new consciousness arises as it’s formed into a new body etc. etc.
Wayfarer: Sounds likely to be that thing.
Flux: Thanks for the explanations. Got to run and practice some telepathy.
Wayfarer: lmao right on
Rare peypey: i’m stealing him away haha
Wayfarer: I’m glad of it, I can’t think of any better reason to duck out 🙂