The Phantasm's Balm

Recently I've ben taken to the act of pondering phenomena regarding ghosts and spectral phenomena.

The Spanish film, The Orphanage, reiterated a point I had forgotten; the atemporal quality of a haunting. From the film's perspective, the emotional severity of the incident that precipitated the haunting would create something of a knot in the passage of time, where the incident, lacking sufficient resolution, would continue in the subjective realms and create synchronous events in the standard model.

Part of me wonders how many of us have created ghosts in our own being? I wonder if the presence of ghosts inside facilitates the perception of ghosts in the external model? Of course, a person who has so many elements of reality within them can see that reflection externally. Of course, just about everyone has some form of unresolved emotional turmoil that results in nervous tics, neuroses, PTSD, and so on. To move toward perceiving these elements within oneself confers the ability to see them outside, as well.

The big problem along these lines is gaining that strength to act on these matters with empathy. Thanks to having a martyr god avatar ruling the mythology of Western culture, too many people attempt that absolutely titanic harmonization without considering that it's oftentimes too powerful of a beast for an individual essence to handle. It's not dissimilar to surfing a mammoth wave on one's first try. The wave might be a good place marker, but the act of surfing itself provides a constantly fulfilling goal than the massive achievement, as the act will constantly provide activity and sustenance, while the wave terminates, leaving a source without a path afterwards. I digress.

To heal otherworldly phenomena requires the most minimal push from judgment, and a level of both humility and charity. The phenomenon will speak as to what it needs, since each has its own resolution and rules beyond what we know. If only salting and burning were all that was needed.

The Lunar Gastropod Sings its Glory

I remember as a child watching octopi on nature programs, fascinated by their ability to change both shape and color, their brilliant minds adapting to a shape that had little or no fortitude against the environment. My mother also had a collection of glass animals, one of which was a green glass snail, ever present in my childhood. Nautili would come to me in dreams, and slugs were common in our temperate gardens.

The snail, however, was the mollusk to truly stand out for me, for their analogues to many alchemical concepts; Both hard and soft, with their bodies kept within a great container formed in a logarithmic spiral, hermaphroditic, and complete with four protruberances from its head similar to the four classical elements. Dimension-snails would slowly ooze their way through my work, sometimes croaking out haunting melodies from blue throats. Reflections of their shells and heads would sometimes reverberate through both my ear canal and throat respectively, and loud choirs of shell organs bellowing steam would herald their arrival to impart great secrets.

Phantoma

It was about that time when I slipped on the green, glowing ectoplasm, when the rattling ghosts dragged their way up to meet me.

Ghosts don't always come from someone who died and wasn't buried correctly, or from cranky, insidious goons whom the brothers Winchester must dispose. Many of the ghosts I've experienced have merely been the haunting of certain lingering, unresolved human essence. Many of these are both borne from and held back by funerary custom, which sprung from our own awareness of mortality. I'm certain that dolphins and elephants have experienced ghosts as well. Domesticated pets seem to find a physical analogue with these spirits, but is that something that they derived from their persistent interspecies contact with humanity?

Something doesn't necessarily want me going into such matters, which is what makes it far more worthwhile to tell, don't you think?

To describe what it's like slipping into the realm of the darkened dead is often thought of being this hole between worlds meticulously partitioned, spackled and patched through which some hulking breach of the universe's order has burst through a wall. Hmmmmmm, a bit overdramatic, and perhaps smacking of camp? Iiiiii'd say so. If we consider that existence acts as a spectrum of low- and high-wavelength frequencies, then those moments when the fantastical meet humanity on its own sensory plane are like those little glitches on a scratched DVD. Unlike a DVD, existence seems to share the organic quality of growing and healing, not unlike the phenomenon of "life", and so those scratches either heal or sometimes scar, and the viewing experience changes around the point of intersection to fit it into the story.

I digress. Many of the beings found at the "ghostly" wavelength have been too solid for too long, and their seemingly disruptive actions are attempts to find change and growth. To use an electron as an example, a ghostly being has been a particle for a tremendously long time, and under their relative existential gravity, they seek to become a wave once again. I'm not certain whether this is a consensus of these beings, but at least the ones that we experience seem to crave this.

Nevertheless, this comes up from a certain phantom likened to a played out situation. These ghosts are more personal visitations; they interact with the human heart and send carrion crows to squawk in a person's ear, as a friendly warning. As the life leaves the situation, the visited individual must follow, or find a piece of him or herself missing. The situation will mean something different for each person, yet the world of the one thusly visited requires a diseased branch be trimmed from its World Tree, to offer forth new growth.

My head pounds, my sinuses fill and drain, and I'm still sweating out the lager consumed to steel my nerves after that harrowing journey out from the collapsing den, yet it's worth it all to know that I've saved a piece of my soul.

Staring into the Exploding Suns of Twilight

Living occasionally happens. Constantly staring at one's footfalls when urged forward can cause one to trip. Eyes forward.

The world has been met with great sorrows and joys. Oftentimes, the seeker must feel the weight of betrayal, not as the recipient, but as the merchant of such materials. This essence remains useless when rationalized. The key to endurance is to move forward, fully aware of the transgressions committed, to know what pathways become torn away with each movement while having no idea where these pathways may lead. This step becomes wholly necessary to those who pride themselves in their compassion, as compassion becomes useless when untested and blithely accepted, as with any virtue. To know virtue is painfully to accept an aspect of vice inherent in that decision.

The shaman isn't what most self-help books would have you believe. This isn't an archetype of a mere serene, kindly soul that sits in quiet judgment, dispensing cryptic wisdom while perpetually tending some fire in a tent or childishly jumping around a jungle. These books would have many forget the dangerous, unsentimental and almost callously selfish actions of a person who communes with spirits and the souls of others. A move at the wrong time could set off an animal current of retribution and horror from the shaman. An offer to meddle in his matters could drown an individual in the current of the shaman's lifestream, and trample the person underfoot. Shamans, while often considered healers, contain an equal amount of envenomating, destructive power that can forever cripple a person's soul. This isn't a power to be envied, but a necessary pathway to open when trafficking with beings greater than oneself. To destroy one's own being, one must be reverent of the ability to destroy another. True spiritual power remains unqualified, with no blazing sword to tilt the scale, no black scythe to drag the universe into darkness. These are elements left only to the universe itself, and its manifestations of either merely pebble ripples in an endless ocean of existence that bears more than our senses and instruments will ever truly perceive.

Yet as still, nowhere near any level of proficiency, I choose to walk this dangerous path, to tread amongst the beasts in my soul and hunt amongst the shelves of poisoned, manufactured foods to make sense of the universe as best as it can choose to show me, and with great difficulty carve new languages to understand its message. With no small amount of fear I step forward, knowing that where my foot falls, I shall be annihilated, over and over again, until the atoms of my being forge together to the point of perpetual death and rebirth, with the discipline to bear that explosive energy within my own form.

Clutching the Mistletoe to Melt the Ice

I feel a bit like I've missed out on a very strong human function whenever I listen to my peers discuss their influences or discuss prominent figures in either recent or distant history.

I have to admit that I hold many forms of media close, yet I can never let them lie still, as a pinnacle of existence that remains beyond reproach. It's perhaps to my social detriment that I slaughter my sacred cows regularly. I can't abide their presence within myself. Perhaps it was a lonely, uneventful childhood that brought this out in myself, but I can never trust my memory of something. Glowing memories become shackles, blinders to the world around me.

The goal seems to be to live with imperfection. The problem lies in the discomfort in watching people ensorcelled by celebrity, fallen into a corporate glamor over a series of images, all falsely planted to coerce us to feel this unattainable attraction, and to hold ourselves to those standards, conceived through Photoshop and lighting, which we vilify, give up on entirely, or hopelessly attempt to mimic in an unsullied, physical form. I watch others admire this image before them, this essence derived entirely by cultural and commercial context, rather than understand it and undo its spell.

Much of this comes from my own frustration in our societal conception of intelligence. To Love Thought, one must somehow trudge through the minds of those who came before in periods of great social repression, racism, sexism, and nationalism, and think them the saviors of modern thought, people with whom we could never hope to be peers. We are devoid of a modern philosophy outside of kitchy little books with minimalist covers to appeal to grad students and make their universes seem that much smaller and immediately comprehensible, rather than expanding and releasing immediate understanding to create the adversity the mind needs to grow in strength and flexibility. The realizations of these aristocratic layabouts are seen as unattainable by we of the modern era, and our own achievements are relegated to what we have bought, how we dress, and our financial impact on the world around us, rather than our sociological and ideological. History has just as many self-important stars as we do currently, and time has seemingly erased their humanity in favor of their glittering surface.

if we were to really examine this phenomenon, it's not dissimilar to Loki's murder of Baldur, the dull, indestructible ne'er-do-wrong. These figures, with their bewitchment of their image and seemingly unassailability, fall prey to those powers that sit in between, antagonistic and in turn undone by the forces of change. I mean, what could all of the Aesir have been doing when they spent their time throwing crap at dumb, pretty Baldur? Functions were set aside and undone by his unassailability, his crystalline image that needed to crack to facilitate the ultimate metamorphosis of the cosmos.

I wonder what we will do when we cast off our echantments and accept our capability to achieve great feats on our own, humbled by the achievements of our peers? What strange, exciting world shall we see?

Facing Giants

Hah. So, of course, in my paean to Thor, I receive immediate results of seing my ugly giant tendencies.

To be vague, yet specific, my eagerness to please, yet dissatisfaction with the results. I'm one to promise the world to keep people happy. I'd cow to the whims of any near, and erect no barriers for myself to grow. Instead of blaming myself, I'd blame the insistence on others on my woes. The collective is a constant excuse, and the urge to see myself exist in another's eyes seems insatiable.

Hmh. So much of myself is invested in a mask, to the point that I wonder if a void lies beneath. Poignantly cliche. That void has the capacity to hold anything, and I believe that I must begin to ally myself with that void, understand what it wants to fill it, in order that when I strip to my barest self, something lies underneath.

The Pulverizing Thunder

Idolatry's a funny animal. Some feel it's the acceptance of a fixed form for divinity, some feel that it's depicting divinity in any way, shape, or form. Some even feel that being remotely happy is idolatry.

Either way, certain deific matters seems to be given common forms and attitudes, given their mythology and the sentiment as composed by these individuals. What many forget is that mythology is the anthropomorphisation of concepts and universal patterns. Thusly, I feel that idolatry is the fixing of a single, common form of divinity to one's view of a divine concept and ignoring personal interpretation.

So, Here's me, thinking about how damned afraid I am of self-reflection, and I thought, "Who could help with that ridiculousness?" Wellllll, giving my predilections to Northern European Drug Hallucinations, I figured that perhaps having a go with a Thor motif might be a good idea.

But wait! Isn't Thor some big stupid shotgun-hammer-toting hick who doesn't know his sphincter from a steering wheel? Perhaps, as he's popularly depicted. Yet, allow us some leeway in understanding this brutish figure. He's inseperable from his depiction as a "slayer of giants." It's as with many things, where one takes on the traits of one's activities. Yet, as he kills these giants, and we ourselves take stock of their traits, we see similarities to his own traits. Fondness for drink, reliance on artifice, contempt for the weak, and so on. Long story short, the "giants" are sizeless, amorphous, unconscious traits of a person or of a situation, and the slaying of those giants is the acceptance and integration of those traits into the gestalt psyche, by way of Thor, who could be considered a deity of condciousness.

Although Thor might be lacking in some of the more subtle qualities such as Wodan, who does many things if only to confuse and befuddle, sources often list him as the Strongest of the Aesir. (On an aside, The Avalanches have come onto my internet radio, and for some reason, I've always associated "Frontier Psychiatrist" with the Aesir. Gunderic's a strange one.) Thor's embodiment of Awareness allows him to indeed change negative traits efficiently. He's almost a tactical nuke against hidden difficulties. However, to know him is to know those difficulties, and thus he remains Slayer of Giants.

More on Thor later. It's going to be a bit for me to process.

Synchronicity is a lovely lady with mammoth breasts and interesting nail polish.