Actual Psychic Ability

So, it's pretty well established by now that I, Tyler, am not always the one at the controls of my meat suit. Some people call it possession, others call it channelling, I just go with a "someone else is piloting the gundam" sort of vibe.

SO! Miguel-in-Felix, as the artist behind the page, is working on this page at a local coffee shop in mid-late November, and ELIGOS KING OF SCRIBES is hanging out with him. In my body. Cause why would he sit around as a disembodied spirit when he could just kinda *voop* into my body and actually take sips of Miguel's coffee when Miguel's not looking? Except nobody got coffee because Miguel did a weird kind of flail and BOOM! Coffee all over the page!!!!!!! WHILE IT'S STILL IN THE SKETCHBOOK!!!!!!!!!!

He was working in watercolor pens, so the colors immediately start to bleed. Miguel is full on panicking, two girls who have been kinda watching from a diagonal angle gasp at the destruction, but Eligos is so calm. He stands up, directs Miguel to put the sketchbook on the ground, talks him through how to pull the page out without spilling too much coffee on everything else, then tells him to put it on the tiled floor and take the sketchbook to the table to blot the rest of the pages. Eligos then stands over the page, studying the way the coffee is flowing. Suddenly, he bends down, grasps the two bottom corners and ZWIPS the page up and away from the coffee in a way that leaves all the bleeding ink in a page-shaped puddle of coffee on the floor. The two girls gasp again in shock and awe while he sets the page on the table to dry out, then he locates the cleaning spray and paper towels and CLEANS THE FUCKING COFFEE OFF THE FLOOR HIMSELF. (No employee offered to help, or even said much of anything, btw, which was WEIRD.)

Eligos then sat back down, helped Miguel calm down and realize nothing else in the sketchbook was ruined, and then helped Miguel calm down again as he realized that the coffee stains was the exact shade of brown wash he was wanting to do on the page.

Speaking a bit from the end of the body of the author:

So, this page. This effing page. I want to show you what it looked like after the coffee dumped on it and it was cleaned up and dried but before the colors on it were finished off:

You can see which colors it got and what it left behind. The tiny bit of blue in the hair is new work since the spill happened. And then the rest of the work was done and you see the results of that in the final. Anyway, it's amazing how many colors stayed, how the top third basically just didn't get hit. THE COFFEE STOPPED AT THE STOP SIGN.

THE SPILLED COFFEE STOPPED AT THE STOP SIGN.

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We could have been doing anything, my husband and I. Experiencing anything, anywhere and with anyone. We were already trying to play off of each other for November, my esoteric posts responding and being responded to by his posts about his own psychic and spiritual experiences. The idea was that we respond to each other during a month of spiritual observance of our shared religion, one I started creating in 1999 and since then have grown with the help of my husband.

Well, the month of November got hijacked during about the last third of it, so we weren't able to write our coordinated articles like we planned to. We weren't able to do anything like we wanted or planned to. But for all our trying, we did end up with something for the effort: we somehow managed to synchronize in a way that meant we've been keeping parallel journaling experiences since then through the manifestation of some incredibly unexpected esoteric phenomena. And also some curses. Some big fat evil curses. We documented all of that automatically, and it was kind of like running the cameras in a haunted house while Dracula gets into a pottery-throwing fight with three ghosts and a poltergeist. Worthy of video capture, but nothing you'd ever want to film yourself. It was like getting firsthand footage of an F-5 level tornado with a shoulder-held camcorder while running backwards.

I definitely got hit by flying objects a few times.

I've really been interested in my husband's experiences of spiritual life when around me and my fucking demonic shenanigans. I was surprised by how fast he yes-and-ed to working with demons in a system that was documented by no one but my own injured-during-preschool-years erisian occultist brain. I was surprised by how fully he experienced things so quickly. I've had people hang around me, hang ONTO me vampirically, who've pretended to understand the system I helped start and then tried to pick its bones over for all they could take before the damn thing had even become a dead religion. So to see him use the religion to pick himself up off the ground from, to raise himself up with... how fabulous! I'd sure like to track that in an easily-readable, sanity-confirming way.

TOO BAD FOR ME BECAUSE RELIGION AND SCIENCE AREN'T THE SAME THING.

Oh yeah, it's all been scientific. Oh yeah, all the things have been 'possible.' "Possible." '''Possible.''' That doesn't make them actually affirm your belief that science is the most powerful way of interacting with the universe, that logic always prevails, that causality will always be understandable... you know, it doesn't affirm any of your beliefs that are STUPID. I guess what I've been seeing the most in my husband's experience, and his creative work during the duration of all this, is all the proof that what I have been doing is REAL and that it can do ANYTHING, but in like... just the least expected ways possible.

I'm not sure WHY I don't expect some of these things to happen. I'm not sure why I expect other things to happen. I'm not sure what's normal to happen at all. To be honest, I didn't expect marriage to affect religion nearly as much as it has already, and is now. I grew up in the same house as two married people who didn't love each other and fought around me, and sometimes THROUGH me, all the time. I didn't even get raised by them so much as just had to put up with being around them until I finally left home for a boarding high school. Marriage isn't just a mystery to me, it's incomprehensible.

So really, I have no idea what's going on. I have absolutely no idea what's going on. But hey, here's a view from the ground floor of House Chaos, if you want to know what it looks like. All I can do sometimes is ask my husband for clarity.

First of all, have you heard of the ritual to gain Knowledge and Conversation of Your Holy Guardian Angel? HGA for short? Well it's kind of famous in occult circles, kind of something a lot of high-level occultists like to do and low-level occultists like to try and mid-level occultists try to claim they already did when they were sixteen. Well, I didn't do exactly that and neither did my husband. But the HGA ritual is very specific about how you should interact around your spouse (ASSUMED TO BE YOUR WIFE, IT IS VERY HETERO AND CIS) and states that you basically can't share a bed during a certain period. Or things happen. That you do not want. Because your spouse will become possessed by an entity in a way that will complicate your spiritual life, your marriage, and MAYBE the very pseudostructures of the universe.

Well anyway that's not what we did per se but we have been channeling a lot of demons, sometimes automatically, because apparently in this religion the demons you work with just show up in your life as particular people you interact with, whether intended or accidental. And also you can channel them on purpose. And also they can live your life for you for awhile. And that's pretty cool and oh boy have we been journaling this in a completely parallel yet entirely separate manner.

So, we both sign and date and timestamp most of our journal entries, writings and drawings. This means I can easily compare what entries were during the same experience, or conversely, compare what different times similar experiences were experienced at. Now, getting together the journals all in one place where I can compare and contrast them all and take notes and make conclusions... that's been difficult. Because for one, even the notes on the experience themselves are hard to keep organized. Tyler has at least three different main journals/notebooks/note stashes of an experience he had over the course of a week. In that same span of time, I generated art and notes in at least four different sketchbooks. Neither of us planned this, and thus neither of us was consciously trying to make this more complicated or even less complicated than it needed to be. When you generate notes on a large-scale magical/spiritual/psychic act, those notes become in themselves part of that large-scale work. And they get weird.

They automatically shuffle themselves around and skip pages to obscure something and get lost so you have to use another book and the pens get lost so you have to work in brush ink and then the cover of one journal rips off so now the first page is the cover and that Means Something Now and you tucked the bus passes into that back pocket and now your bus trip is itself haunted several more times over than any bus trip you've ever had before. Your receipt for the groceries you bought during the event to keep you going and keep you from falling over has a cryptic note that makes sense eight years later when you find it randomly bookmarking your largest tome on herbalism. There is a folder full of medical paperwork that is not only Legally Significant but has notes on mystical creatures and their correspondences with colors and heraldry that you will be meditating on for at least half a year going forward.

Reading this stuff is intense. The thing about taking notes during a mystical event is that it's already an incredible difficult act. To be fully immersed in a ritual, you have to put down your pen and your notebook and do the damn ritual. The opportunities for fresh observations from one's time during a ritual are very few and usually the experience must be journaled hours or even days later. Some memories of mystical experiences even present themselves before the ritual, so in some cases we had documented things for enough years back that we could match up some precog that was signalling the past versions of us to really show up for something. Now, reading this stuff is even worse when you're still experiencing the stuff.

An intense ritual experience is already a multi-dimensional affair during which you likely, due to the physical place you are being kept inside of while doing a major psychic work, are using every part of your brain possible and accessible to process as much as you can but are still getting far more input than you'll ever be able to take in. If you've ever wondered, have I missed important parts of a ritual, did I not concentrate correctly during them: the answer is that no one can truly concentrate on any of this stuff. I fell asleep three times just trying to write this paragraph. I misspelled "times" TWICE before getting it right.

So yeah imagine reading just one of the notebooks that Tyler or I wrote in and reading maybe ten pages of it and then imagine trying to read a normal thing like, the weather. And then see how you feel about whether that weather chart is accurate or not. Because once there's multi-dimensional material in your brain, it affects everything inside and outside of your head. There's emotions you can't understand and probably never will have an understanding of that will try to process themselves and make you have weird ideas about the number four and its regularity in the license plates of the cars that pass you by for the next eight days. And then some deity you've never heard of is going to send you a firm signal that they've got your back and a random person you meet will know exactly what it is you're looking for and tell you exactly where to find it, and then you do a drawing of your favorite video game character and it turns out to be an illustration of one of your partners' dreams last night. And then a bird comes by and lands on the car mirror you're staring at right as the radio advances to the next song and three emergency vehicles tear down the road with sirens wailing to the exact beat of whatever's playing on Spotify right now. And yeah, that's just what happens when you idly try to take pictures of the ritual with your camera phone while data and wifi are still turned on.

The project: I will go through at least three of my husbands' journals/folders he made during this last experience. I will compare them to my sketchbook art and social media posts, both of which are dated and timestamped. I will see how many times we wrote about two angles of the same event. I will see how many events happened to us at different times. I will track colors. I will track names. I will track behaviors. I will report back with what I find.

Until then, please feel free to make this post (probably a series of posts, to be honest) appear faster by sponsoring a post on this blog! The more scratch I have to work with, the easier it is to reserve a space with lots of table room and organization supplies. I also have commissions available of both character and spirit art, and when my husband isn't creating seven-dimensional journals he crochets and sells hats! Take a look at what we've got! Check me out on Patreon! And look forward to the future, when you will finally be able to pay for food ans services with pure dream currency. Whoops, that was too far into the future. Gotta stop reading this journal. It's got a buzz.

This is an article on bouncing around to different bodies and keeping things safe and fun while doing so! If you enjoy it, please check out my tip jar and my Patreon, which has some exclusive and early release material of this nature. Also, I post a lot of material to @badpsychicadvice and @timetravelerasfuck, as well as @imahypnotist.

Hey. So, there's a spectrum. On one end, this happens to you all the time, and you need some tips or just solidarity handling the situation, and on the other end, it never happens to you, and you want to know how you'd even end up in someone else's body in the first place. This is mostly for people on the "this happens to me" side of the spectrum. I'll have more material for people on the other side of the spectrum later. It's a spectrum, which you can move back and forth on at any time, and you can be unaware of previous out of (your own) body experiences. So even if this information isn't useful to you now, it might be useful for you in the future. And if you're the sort of person who needs to tag this with unreality then, I guess that's fine, but I'd consider it more multireality.

Anyway yeah so you showed up in someone else's body. What do you do? This may be your first or ninenieth time but in all those previous times maybe you just panicked and tried to blend in and not be seen. How do you take more initiative in the experience and control your life in this new body?

Maybe you are currently reading this article from a body you are new to. If so, hi. I hope you are doing well. Remember to hydrate a reasonable amount.

The best place to start is to understand the life of the person whose body you are inhabiting. You might have very different experiences, very different bodies, very different backgrounds and skills. You may or may not have an awareness of each other. First saying "hi" can be a little weird or can even be dangerous if the person you're body-sharing with is being watched a lot or just has a busy social life. So, you'll want to be sensitive to how they're doing in their life, which might take a bit of just sitting in the background and observing sometimes instead of coming all the way fully over.

When you start to get some control with your jumping-over to this new body, you can experiment and see if you can just thinly cast your consciousness over to them and see how they do day to day life things. You may also have dreams where you see their life and experience what they do. Use this information to understand the person you share a body with.

Share a body is used very intentionally. If you are ending up in someone else's body then they may also be ending up in yours, especially during the period when you are not in your body. It would be a good experiment to keep a journal around (that only your body can access) and see if they leave you any notes, or otherwise give them a way to exchange messages with you. Once you two can coordinate, it can get a lot easier to get interesting and fun things done when you're in their body.

It's really important to take care of any body you're living in, and this body is no exception. It is on loan and the person you borrowed it from will need it back. In the period when you might not be communicating much, caring for their body can be a way of showing your good will, which is pretty important, because they probably have your body when you don't. And you want them to take care of it! So try to set a good example. Do what hygeine and feeding routines seem appropriate and regular for that body, and if you can and it makes sense for the situation you're in, see if you can do something a little extra. Take a shower, clip nails, change into some fresh clothes, etc.

See, the self-care thing is very important because if you've landed in someone who has been dissociating a lot or has been depressed, they may need some help with self care. These are common factors in people who regularly body-swap or body-travel (astral project perhaps). Often several people will swap around when one person feels overwhelmed with something they can't handle just as another person is, perhaps, zoned out and wishing they had something to do. Suddenly each person is in a different situation and a different brain with different chemistry. It can be a little break, it can be a writing process, it can be an addiction, it can be a needed escape.

It is also, however, often a trying situation. So the self care can be vital to help keep up the person you're visiting. It can also carry over to you, since the two (or more) of you are having a parallel experience. The other person may get the notion to care for your body because they're picking up on your actions.

If they're at the library while you're visiting, check out some interesting books for them. If they're at a restaurant, order something that'll agree with their digestive system and stay within their budget. Make sure when you drive their vehicle (IT HAPPENS!) that you understand how it works and what all its functions (or lack thereof) are. And if you don't understand how to drive... don't drive! Or check in with the body and see what it thinks you should do.

So, the body you're in has a subconscious and also has opinions and, sort of, a whole life experience. Check in and see if the body has an opinion on the trouble you're having. See what would be normal to do if the original person whose body this is couldn't drive for a little bit. Maybe the body can ring the original owner back in and you can step out and let them live their life.

Which, by the way: you can leave! If you're really stuck just try taking a nap and see if you wake up back in your own body, which is pretty typical behavior. Try focusing on your original body and where it is, constructing the room around you and imagining it there. This is usually enough to start spiritually moving your consciousness back to your own body, and will probably transfer the original person back into their own body at the same time. If this doesn't work, just keep going and stay calm until eventually you end up in your body. Or seek out a shaman. There's no shame in consulting outside help.

REMINDER: BREATHE. EAT. DRINK. REST. Time travel means no need to rush! Take care of your body!

Reality warps can be disorienting but are often easily adjusted to using this simple mental exercise to focus on your own identity amongst your many alternates. This short list of questions is to be answered in your own head. Do not leave written evidence of your answers where others, including your alternates, can find them.

Basic Orientation Info

Date & Time:

Address / Location:

Planet / Station:

Reality / Timeline:

REMINDER: Before ⇨ After. Cause ⇨ Effect. Past ⇨ Present ⇨ Future.

Identity Confirmation & Affirmation

I like [favorite food or other consumable].

I do not like [least favorite consumable].

My favorite [color or other preference] is:

What relationships am I in? With which people? In which timeline?

Something that's always the same about me no matter where I go:

Something that's always the same about me no matter who I am:

Something I've experienced before often:

Something I've never done:

When this is all over and I'm back where I'm from, I am looking forward to:

What am I expecting next?

You've got this! Remember to sit down and take a breather!

Time travel is a strange game when it comes to gender identity. First there is how time travel itself affects identity by jumping through your own or other people’s lives out of order, often repeatedly. Experiencing puberty early or repeatedly, for instance. But then there is the aspect of time travel that has the most to do with identity--body switching. It can be called many things: switching, swapping, exchange, et cetera. With switching, you end up in a different body, for at least awhile, than the one you were born with. This can be a confusing experience for identity, especially for gender identity.

Time travel makes us confront a lot of assumptions we make about how we show up in life, and gender is a huge part of how people show up. For instance, the development of gender throughout a lifespan typically involves puberty happening at a certain time and in a certain order. A mental fourteen-year-old develops gendered features and develops an understanding of those features with a fourteen-year-old brain, based on experiences that came before. But a time traveler may hop back in time from later adult experiences into early life experiences, thus bringing the experience of an older person to early gender development. Another example is a preteen traveling to their own future adulthood, past the point of puberty, skipping those changes before living an adult life. When one skips rites of passage or goes through them out of order, it can entirely alter life experience. Rites of passage, after all, are usually based on the assumption that a person only experiences time linearly and in one direction.

Let us look at the bar mitzvah, a Judaic rite of passage that happens to boys around puberty to commemorate their entry into teenagerhood from childhood and their ongoing journey into adulthood. A bar mitzvah is a rite of passage that is assumed to be experienced once and in one direction only. But what if someone were to experience their own bar mitzvah, and then experience the alternate timeline where they had a bat mitzvah instead because in that alternate timeline they were born with different gender markers? A bat mitzvah is for girls, is assumed to be an experience of girlhood. Would one's own experience of masculinity be changed by having a bar mitvah and then a bat mitzvah? Of course. Would it be changed by having a bar mitzvah experience at a different time in life than the norm, or repeatedly? Of course.

Gender identity is often about certainty and confidence. One becomes certain they are a specific gender and confident in their gender expression through gendered experiences that are validating and stabilizing. Perhaps re-experiencing a bar mitzvah later in life might reinforce a man's confidence in his own gender, or maybe it might make him feel doubtful about his masculinity. Experiencing both could be validating or destabilizing depending on the individual and how they process life changes. Going out of sequence seems like it could violate the natural order of things, but what if a person's life experience is always that they go out of order or repeat experiences? Something that might weaken confidence in some people might strengthen it for other people. Time travel is often about confronting and accepting changes in life. Repeating experiences or having them in a different order than expected can help a person accept change.

A very common form of time travel is to focus on a memory and re-experience it, sometimes to completely re-enter the moment and redo it anew. This can be very validating and can help answer questions that come later in life when the memory of the experience has worn away and stretched thin. When having doubts about one's own gender in adulthood, earlier rites of passage are important to re-examine. Perhaps to make a decision earlier in life about one's own gender expression, a person might flash forward to gendered rites of passage to know ahead of time if they want to go through those rites at all.

Most of the mental difficulty when time traveling is in accepting experiences that are outside the perceived norms we learn from society. This is in fact one of the key experiences of being trans--confronting a gendered experience that is not the same as what society assumes you would (or should) have had. Often the taboos associated with time travel are about crossing barriers that society does not think should be crossed, or crossing them in different ways than society is prepared to accept.

Another boundary that time travel can cross, regardless of whether a society feels that time travel should or could do this, is the boundary between one's own body and the bodies of others. To jump through time, often the method is to jump into a different person's body who is in another time period. Sometimes the body of the person you are jumping into has a different gender or remarkably different gendered experience than you. This means you have the opportunity to experience gender differently, and thus, the opportunity to reflect on your own gender experience in turn. Experiencing a different body with different gendered features, especially for the first time, can have a profound effect on someone's consciousness, making them aware of norms they never knew they wanted or needed to have before. For some, it can shore up their own experience, confirming to them that they do not want to change anything about their gender identity. Living on "the other side" for a little while helps us understand more about the place we lived before, and might return to.

Some time travelers incorporate gender into their time travel. It is common for travelers to have preferences about the bodies they jump into, and one common preference is gender experience. If someone wants to have an ideal experience then they'll often choose a body similar to their own. Sometimes there is not a large selection of bodies to pick from and a person must go through a different gender experience than they are used to if they want to do time travel of a specific kind. Sometimes time travel is an escape or defense mechanism and there is no time or opportunity to choose gender or anything else about the body you land in.

Often the presumption about gender identity is that it needs to be "correct." Time travel is often an experience of alternate ways one could have done things or shown up for them, and in experiencing alternates, one has to confront which is the correct one, if any. It can be confusing to experience so many variants of yourself, but also affirming in that it helps you understand your own specific variation. One way we understand things is to compare them, and what better means of comparison is there than direct experience of different norms?

I focus on the throb. A bite into my skin every time my heart beats. Like an ant bite. I can deal with it, can feel the rest of my finger as I feel the tiny point of hurt. It doesn't make me run from my body the way I did before. // I can feel it. Like an ant bite. There's a cut on my left finger. //

A lot of stuff that's considered canon in star wars is actually kind of ascended fanon. Like, if you really dig into it, it's remarkable how much of the lightsaber-juggling, movie-retreading atmosphere of pop culture/the expanded universe Lucas incorporated into the prequel trilogy, likely without realising.

Example: Strictly according to the original trilogy, does Master Yoda possess a lightsaber? I would say no. It is significant that in a film, where every shot is deliberately planned, we never see a lightsaber in relation to Yoda, and the one time he acknowledges Luke's it is dismissively; "Your weapons, you will not need them." By implication, Yoda is a Buddha to Obi-Wan's warrior monk. Yoda is a teacher and a mystic, but he is not a warrior.

Force lightning is another of these things. You go back to the original trilogy, and there's a sense that the Force and what you can do with it is very personalised. Nobody but Palpatine throws lightning, not even his apprentice, and in turn nobody but Vader chokes people to death. Luke does learn the mind trick introduced by Obi-Wan, but that's part and parcel with Luke's growth into a compassionate warrior-philosopher who tries to solve conflicts nonviolently. Force Choke is not 'a dark side force power', it is Vader's power, a manifestation of his crushing authority and smothering presence.

Likewise, Force Lightning is not 'a dark side power', and it is not generic lightning. It is the Emperor's power, characteristic of his cruelty, his sadistic delight in corrupting and hurting other people. We can see this in how it is used. Force Lightning does not split steel or blast people off their feet or blow things up, like a real bolt of lightning - it transfixes Luke in agony, sends him reeling to the floor with torturous pain until he screams for his father's help.

At some point the fear of being blown sky-high left us. I'm not sure how or why. All us boys underground just came to a realization one day that if there was no way out of this place, if we were stuck there with no chance of escape, then even Death couldn't haul us away. It made for a strange but comfortable acceptance of the mortars pounding and the earthen sky falling above in the form of pebbles and clay. I once watched a movie about the first world war where they'd shake the set, or the camera, to really make it seem immersive to the actors that they were in the shit. Me, I remained unconvinced.

The real thing is so dark, so cramped, so airtight.

The timelessness was the worst of all. I lose track of the memories. What came before this conversation with my bunkmate, and what came after supplies were rationed out? Do I have any wine left or is my memory of drinking it all correct? Am I out now, and remembering the whole thing after the fact? Or am I still in, and this blog is just my way of fantasizing a dissociation?

A prison can be any number of things. To escape it you have to leave it mind, body and soul. If a piece of it remains with you, if it leaves a permanent impression of its bars and blocks, that doesn't mean you have not escaped it.

Ever want to stay in your body for a really long time, successfully, but you've just never known how? What about staying in someone else's body? What do you have to do to accomplish long-term spirit travel and hosting? What about being inhabited by spirits? Is your body ready for it? Is someone else's body ready to be yours? Today's podcast is ready to be inhabited by today's brand new guest as we explore how long-term body occupation works!