Groundwork

It turns out that a lot of the groundwork for this has already been laid—which takes away all of my excuses, really…

My third grade teacher was fond of calling me her “little daydreamer”. She was the only one of my early teachers to be enamored with the ability. Time passed inconsistently for me as a child because I was rarely present in the ordinary world. I could never recall what happened when I faded out, but my parents and other caretakers always claimed I must have been somewhere, because they could plainly see I was not behind my eyes and even calling my name didn’t always work to bring me back. But when I did come back, I came back with bursts of creative thought and thinking far more maturely about myself than most young children should be thinking. By that third grade year, my mother liked to say of me, when someone asked my age, that I was “eight going on thirty”.

The daydreams came under some semblance of control around the time I started reading in earnest. Then my mind was occupied wandering off into the books instead. I lost the world around me when I read. All that existed was story. I called it “journeying”. My mother called it dangerous.

“I think she’d die if the house was on fire,” I heard her tell my father once, “she wouldn’t even notice.”

 She had said that after yet another incident when she had called for me repeatedly to no answer and found me reading quietly in my room, roused only by her touch. I can imagine how disconcerting that was for them. Though I tried to hold onto it, the ability disappeared slowly as I got older and real life gradually consumed more of my attention and time. Eventually, journeying was only a thing I did while I slept. My dream worlds were large and my memories of those nighttime visions numerous if not always entirely clear. I was semi-lucid on the other side and could recognize locales I had been to before and know where to find things based on prior experiences. I started to map those worlds even while awake, paying attention to how they flowed together.

I first learned relaxation and visualization exercises when I was ten, through my mother’s acting classes for a local children’s theater group. Many years later, I got interested in Wicca and spellwork, using my idle moments as a teen to experiment with grounding, centering, shielding, and raising/sensing energy. In college, I dabbled in automatic writing, shapeshifting, channeling, and divination. After finding my path in Kemeticism, I trained myself to hear the voices of Netjer and to communicate freely with them even when I had no tools at hand. I turned away from overt energy work, and worked instead in talismanry and formalized heka and rituals.

I tend to think of my childhood in terms of my “atheist upbringing”, but in reality, I have led a very magical life in spite of that (or perhaps, because of it). It’s true that I was taught to think about things rationally and skeptically, though I realize now that I rarely did when it came to my own magical workings. In college, I was further taught how science ruled all and how there were documented, researched, physical structures underneath of many of the things I thought of as mystical. Over time, I’ve learned to accept that those truths can coexist with the ones I have always sensed intuitively.

But I was also taught something else through the years, something more insidious that was as common among the wise folk as it was in the ivory tower: control. Even in liberal pagan circles, control is considered prime. Control of what things happen, when things happen, and how things happen. Go ahead and journey… but make sure you’re the one driving. Now, Set and I have had this conversation before: He thinks control (or at least mine, anyway) is overrated.  Which isn’t to say he forces anything on me…but, well...

There is something in education law called passive consent forms.  These are the sneaky kind of permission form. They usually say “check this box if you DON’T want your kid involved in X”. We merrily put them in the kids’ backpacks and if we don’t get any back the next day, the parents are said to have given consent. This is usually used for harmless events like classroom movie showings (always G-rated anyway) and field-day, but it is sternly frowned upon in the education community (and court system) for more serious things like Sex-Ed and Free At-School Medical Care (a common practice in low-income schools).

Heads up for prospective Set followers: He uses passive consent forms all the damn time. His favorite phrase to calm me down after the fact is “Well you didn’t SAY no…” which He relies on even in situations where He is well aware that my polite, rights-driven modern society would demand an explicit pre-approval. It’s hard to be mad at Him for it, though, because by the time I think to be mad, I’ve usually already seen the benefits of whatever it was that he pushed me into doing. This effect is made worse by the giddiness I feel after having intense contact with Him (or any of the Names, for that matter), and I usually follow it up on that giddy high by giving active consent in the aftermath. Then I’m committed to whatever it is and I lose my right to argue.

 I’ve basically agreed to open my head more, because it used to be open before I spent half a lifetime slowly learning how to close it.  I’ve been told that in order to get where I need to be, I specifically need to learn to do productive trance work. So I’ve dug out my copy of Diana Paxson’s Trance-Portation: Learning to Navigate the Inner World and I’m resolved to work through it as a kind of self-study course. For anyone who wants to follow along (and if you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it), this entry is more or less my commentary on the first chapter’s background questionnaire. I didn’t include an item by item answer, mainly because I don’t want to bore you (I mean, I could go on for hours about how being a writer helps me with visualization stuff and about how good I am at recreating familiar music in my head), but I hope I’ve given enough to more or less summarize where I’m coming from and what I’m bringing to this experiment.

My excuse to avoid doing this before was that I wasn’t “faithful” enough to do this sort of work, that I didn’t believe in it enough, that I had become too rational as an adult and therefore wouldn’t be able to let go fully. But between the dream I had yesterday afternoon and thinking about my past history with altered states of consciousness and general energy work, I think it’s been made fairly clear that I am capable of it, and that my excuses are just that: excuses. I may not have had much luck with the “clear your mind” style of meditation that one time I tried it, and I may have been a poor subject of hypnosis ever since I got old enough to vote, but that isn’t necessarily indicative of anything, and it isn’t a good enough reason to write it all off. It’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater and I know it is.