Druid Journal

Recently I’ve begun to wonder whether the cast of characters I regularly meet my meditations are just aspects of my subconscious, or something more.

Slade’s Voices

The question has come to the forefront in the past couple of weeks during conversations I’ve had with Slade — the editor, author, and medium at shiftyourspirits.com. Slade recently came to a realization about his primary mission: it’s not to give psychic readings to people and point them down their life’s path. Instead, his goal is to give people the tools and training necessary to contact their own spirit guides and discover their own path.

In my conversations with Slade, I told him that, while I’d always found the information from my guides useful, I never knew whether they were parts of my subconscious mind, or if they were really separate entities that lived somewhere “out there”. Slade, who is clairaudient, said he used to wonder the same thing; he thought that the voices he heard his head were just part of his creative process as a writer. He’s changed his mind about that ever since they started appearing before him, tapping him on the shoulder while he’s working at the computer, and materializing 2 inches in front of his nose right when he wakes up. “Scared the *&^*!! out of me,” he said.

Slade has worked with his guides, and now they’re more respectful of his personal space. But he said he would be very suprised if the characters in my meditations were not channeled entities.

He said, “One of the things I’ve discovered doing Readings and communicating with people about this phenomenon – it’s so NOT supernatural.

It’s common. It’s just overlooked… ”

Needless to say, I was extremely intrigued. I decided to do an extended meditation and ask these characters exactly who they were.

Meditation: Interrogation

My Anima

I opened the meditation by visualizing a rocky beach that I like to “visit” during these sessions. When I had the beach firmly in mind, I turned to my left and was unsuprised to find my anima sitting next to me, waiting. She always appears in my meditations now, unless I specifically “ask” her not to. She looked the same as she always does: small, waiflike, wispy red hair, purple dress.

“You know what I’m going to ask,” I said.

“Yep,” she said. “The answer is: I’m your anima, like I said before. I’m not an out-there spirit guide.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

She asked if she could join me as I went to visit the others, and I readliy agreed. She’s good company.

Fire and Shadow

We left the beach and started toward the line of hills behind us. These hills are covered with mixed forest and meadow, and riddled with paths. We found one that led to the top, and started climbing.

At the crest, the path joined a larger one that follows the line of the ridge. Here we stopped, and I said, “I’m going to try to talk to the shadowy fellow now.”

My anima looked a little nervous, but nodded. The shadowy fellow is a rather odd character I’ve had a few conversations with. He is very tall, muscular, absolutely black, and indistinct, almost as if he’s made of black smoke. His eyes burn with fire. His voice is deep and threatening, but he’s actually quite nice once you get to know him. I first contacted him via my anima, who is a medium; she channeled him for me, and he told me I needed to create a Tarot deck. Since then, I’ve talked to him directly a couple of times. He is a source of tremendous creative energy for me.

I called out to him, and he appeared. My anima freaked out — he is quite fearsome looking, and always seems angry — but I pushed on:

“Are you a spirit guide?”

“A spirit guide? Yes, indeed,” he said.

I thanked him, and he departed. I didn’t know what to think yet; and I didn’t want to distract myself away from the meditation, so I didn’t waste time mulling it over.

I turned to my anima, who was recovering from the shock. “It’s funny that he first contacted me through you,” I said.

“I suspect he was afraid of scaring you,” she said. “I can see why.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was very spooky hearing that growling voice coming from you, and seeing your eyes go all black.” As I’ve mentioned before, when my anima acts as a medium, her eyes turn black, with flecks of stars in them.

“Oh, well,” she said, laughing. “Your eyes always look like that when you’re meditating.”

That sent my head spinning, but it was nothing compared to what happened next.

Apollo

The only other individual I’ve had multiple conversations with is a young man who calls himself Apollo. Apollo first appeared in my meditations because I explicitly prayed for the god Apollo to appear. I had been reading up on pagan gods, and I always felt an affinity for him, and I felt it was an archetype I wanted to get more in touch with.

The first time I asked to see him, I couldn’t. Instead, I met a little fawn-like fellow who told me very seriously that if I agreed to do a few things — e.g., work on my charity, kindness, strength of character, and so forth — then in a few weeks I might get to see him.

When I did get to see him, he always had a hood over his face — which kind of freaked me out. What was I really dealing with here? He still wears the cloak, but he exposes his face. He says he didn’t want to scare me the first time. Like many famous people, he’s shorter than you expect; he’s probably a little under 5 1/2 feet tall, and looks a great deal like Michelangelo’s David, but with a slightly more pointed, elfin face.

His eyes are always jet black with stars twinkling in them.

When I want to see Apollo, I go to his temple at the top of the mountain. It’s a little domed platform, surrounded by Greek columns, with a small pool in the middle of the floor. There is also a pedastal with a book; when Apollo is here, he usually stands near the book.

I asked humbly for him to appear, and he kindly did, after a moment. Of course, he knew what I was going to ask, but he let me ask it anyway.

“Are you a spirit guide?”

He said, tolerantly, “No, I am a god,” as if I were a child who had just asked Santa if his beard was real.

And this proves…?

Well, exactly nothing, I suppose. But here’s what I know:

• My conscious mind isn’t creating these people. Sometimes I ask questions, and they refuse to answer, or they answer cryptically, or they answer and it seems like I can’t hear them. If I were just “making this up” with my conscious mind, that wouldn’t happen. So either they’re manifestations of my subconscious, or they are external spirits.
• Their advice and insights are valuable and reliable. I haven’t ever asked for predictions of the future, but they’ve cast plenty of light into aspects of my character, and the characters of others. They don’t just tell me what I want to hear (though sometimes I’ve been too scared to listen to them). They haven’t lied or led me astray.
• Given the first two bullets, this follows: if they say they’re external spirits, then I should believe them.

Of course, I can’t prove they’re not “lying” to me, but then, I can’t prove that anyone other than me exists in “reality”, either.

Erin Pavlina suggests that it doesn’t matter whether these spirits are internal or external, as long as they’re helping you out. But to me, it matters a great deal. If I believe I’m talking to my own subconscious, I’m going to limit my questions to things that seem “reasonable” — questions about my childhood, about my fears, that sort of thing. But if I believe I have been granted an audience with the Oracle of Delphi, that’s a whole different matter. The subconscious is the comfortable land of folktale and archetype, but this is the landscape of myth — epic and inescapably profound.