Ritual
Saturday I went to OryCon using Brooke's badge. (She had been to it on Friday, but wasn't feeling up to going Saturday, and I hadn't bought one last year.) It was quite fun. The kid's costume parade was ADORABLE! *Squeee!* The panels were cool, too, what few I saw. (I didn't get there til a little before 4), and the art show was AWESOME! I wish I had the money for some of those things. Oh yeah, and saw the dealer's room.
But the best part of all was the pagan ritual that they do every year. Of course, this year they'd scheduled the wrong room by accident and so instead of having a room with lots of open space, we had to do the ritual (a guided meditation) sitting around these giant meeting-room tables. But whatever, it was still cool.
I don't know if I've mentioned this, and if I have, it's been ages, but I was struck again today by the sheer awesomeness of my ability to visualize stuff. All my life I've been able to visualize very realistically, making translucent images almost good enough to qualify as full visual hallucinations. And the best part is, it comes super easy to me. Where a lot of people seem to have to concentrate on every detail, and therefore get a kind of blurry image in some way, I just map out the general idea I want, breathe life into it, set it in place, and watch as my subconscious fills in all the blanks. So I can imagine, for instance, a babbling brook or water fountain and it will move realistically. The water moves just as real water does; I doubt you could tell my mental image of a fountain apart from a video of a real fountain if I could somehow record and play back the images for others. I can even see not only ripples, but interference patterns when two or more ripples collide.
Well, I basically astounded even myself today during the guided meditation. To start with, the protective blue energy we cast before casting the circle, which I imagined as blue flame, stuck to the walls and stayed there; I could see it still moving out of the corner of my eye. And as we cast the circle, I could see a giant eye open up at each quarter when its element was called; brown eye for earth, white for air, red for fire, and blue for water. The eyes stayed there, open, for the whole ritual until closing when we dismissed each element.
Then there was the meditation itself. When she told us to imagine somewhere beautiful and safe, what came up for me was amazing! Green field of grass, and it was technically daytime, but there was a thunderstorm going that made the day as dark as night. I saw myself looking exactly like Shao'Kehn, and I was nude. I could hear the thunder and the wind, feel the wind and rain on my naked skin and in my hair, taste the rain that got into my mouth. And it wasn't just disparate things layered on each other and not interacting, no; all the elements of the vision behaved just like in the real world, interacted with one another. When the wind blew especially hard, it drove the rain sideways into me. When the wind died down, the rain came down harder because it wasn't being blown. Not only did the wind blow the grass around (which was wet), but also, when I got close enough to the grass, I could see things like droplets of water being squished into flat, flapping drops and rivulets. I saw the lightning and heard the thunder. I was naked and cold and it wasn't so much raining as coming down in bucketfuls. Rain soaked my hair and ran in rivulets down my naked body. But I felt great, and I did indeed feel safe, as well as energized.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING GETS A BIT SEXUALLY EXPLICIT.
When we were guided to an object/person/being with a message for us, what I saw was Willow, the weeping willow tree that is a spirit guide of mine, and whom helped me find my spiritual path. I leaned against him, and could feel his bark against my nude flesh. And then I did something I occasionally did with Willow when he was alive, on dark rainy nights out there in the middle of the country, and started humping one of his roots. Yes, I was getting horny in the midst of a guided meditation! And given that it was once something he and I did, I went with it.
We were then guided to find a reflective surface, to see if we could see anything in it (like a scrying surface), so nearby I spotted a puddle. Again, the physics rendering was superb. The wind disturbed the surface to varying degrees semi-randomly, and while Willow was keeping the bulk of the rain out of the puddle, occasional droplets fell from his leaves into the puddle, making ripples and ripple interference patterns. The surface was never completely still, always at the very least wobbling as though just disturbed, and always something would disturb it again before it could go completely still. Nonetheless, I was able to see an image in it as directed; my/Our reflection in the water, except that in the reflection, my eyes were holes that flames licked out of, and my hair was made of fire. I interpret this as another reminder and reaffirmation of the link between Shao'Kehn and I, as well as reinforcing the connection.
At that point the horniness revved up again and I looked away from the puddle, going back to the humping. Then I got my grahbihn out (and, like Shao-Kehn's would be, it was long, prehensile, and had been retracted into my vagina), and then used it to fuck a crack in Willow's bark. I had to hold back, being in a public place, but had I been alone, I am sure I would have “finished.”
When she guided us to find an exit back to meatspace (not the word she used), I got up and walked out from under Willow's shade, and found a pond. I dived into that storm-tossed pond and swam down to the bottom, using it as a portal back to meatspace.
Oh, and that's not the end. I already said the eyes closed when the elements were dismissed. But when the priestess said to take down the protective cage of blue light (blue fire, in my case), I did not consciously decide what to have it do beyond going down. What it did was shudder in a great spasm, and turn suddenly into this thick, gelatinous blue goo that stuck to the ceiling for a second before falling to the ground in various sizes and shapes, just as though real goo had materialized. I think I actually flinched when this happened, as a particularly large glob of the stuff came down in front of me with a wet squelching thud. Then I actually looked around the room as smaller pieces drizzled or dripped down. At the same time, the goo on the walls slumped under its own weight and pooled on the floor, before vanishing down an unseen drain. It... was surreal. I remember thinking, as I watched the smaller bits dribble down, “Well THAT was unexpected.” It was like some unknown imp in my head decided to have some fun with me.
Actually, come to think of it, it's even odder that I had a thunderstorm as my safe place, with Willow being there, because Willow fell over in a storm once. Though he continued to live on in that state, the man we were renting from removed Willow from the property. Tara and I were both devastated; she loved that tree, too. Well, I guess that makes sense insofar as Willow had a message for me.
This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1187869.html
You can comment either here or there.
But the best part of all was the pagan ritual that they do every year. Of course, this year they'd scheduled the wrong room by accident and so instead of having a room with lots of open space, we had to do the ritual (a guided meditation) sitting around these giant meeting-room tables. But whatever, it was still cool.
I don't know if I've mentioned this, and if I have, it's been ages, but I was struck again today by the sheer awesomeness of my ability to visualize stuff. All my life I've been able to visualize very realistically, making translucent images almost good enough to qualify as full visual hallucinations. And the best part is, it comes super easy to me. Where a lot of people seem to have to concentrate on every detail, and therefore get a kind of blurry image in some way, I just map out the general idea I want, breathe life into it, set it in place, and watch as my subconscious fills in all the blanks. So I can imagine, for instance, a babbling brook or water fountain and it will move realistically. The water moves just as real water does; I doubt you could tell my mental image of a fountain apart from a video of a real fountain if I could somehow record and play back the images for others. I can even see not only ripples, but interference patterns when two or more ripples collide.
Well, I basically astounded even myself today during the guided meditation. To start with, the protective blue energy we cast before casting the circle, which I imagined as blue flame, stuck to the walls and stayed there; I could see it still moving out of the corner of my eye. And as we cast the circle, I could see a giant eye open up at each quarter when its element was called; brown eye for earth, white for air, red for fire, and blue for water. The eyes stayed there, open, for the whole ritual until closing when we dismissed each element.
Then there was the meditation itself. When she told us to imagine somewhere beautiful and safe, what came up for me was amazing! Green field of grass, and it was technically daytime, but there was a thunderstorm going that made the day as dark as night. I saw myself looking exactly like Shao'Kehn, and I was nude. I could hear the thunder and the wind, feel the wind and rain on my naked skin and in my hair, taste the rain that got into my mouth. And it wasn't just disparate things layered on each other and not interacting, no; all the elements of the vision behaved just like in the real world, interacted with one another. When the wind blew especially hard, it drove the rain sideways into me. When the wind died down, the rain came down harder because it wasn't being blown. Not only did the wind blow the grass around (which was wet), but also, when I got close enough to the grass, I could see things like droplets of water being squished into flat, flapping drops and rivulets. I saw the lightning and heard the thunder. I was naked and cold and it wasn't so much raining as coming down in bucketfuls. Rain soaked my hair and ran in rivulets down my naked body. But I felt great, and I did indeed feel safe, as well as energized.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING GETS A BIT SEXUALLY EXPLICIT.
When we were guided to an object/person/being with a message for us, what I saw was Willow, the weeping willow tree that is a spirit guide of mine, and whom helped me find my spiritual path. I leaned against him, and could feel his bark against my nude flesh. And then I did something I occasionally did with Willow when he was alive, on dark rainy nights out there in the middle of the country, and started humping one of his roots. Yes, I was getting horny in the midst of a guided meditation! And given that it was once something he and I did, I went with it.
We were then guided to find a reflective surface, to see if we could see anything in it (like a scrying surface), so nearby I spotted a puddle. Again, the physics rendering was superb. The wind disturbed the surface to varying degrees semi-randomly, and while Willow was keeping the bulk of the rain out of the puddle, occasional droplets fell from his leaves into the puddle, making ripples and ripple interference patterns. The surface was never completely still, always at the very least wobbling as though just disturbed, and always something would disturb it again before it could go completely still. Nonetheless, I was able to see an image in it as directed; my/Our reflection in the water, except that in the reflection, my eyes were holes that flames licked out of, and my hair was made of fire. I interpret this as another reminder and reaffirmation of the link between Shao'Kehn and I, as well as reinforcing the connection.
At that point the horniness revved up again and I looked away from the puddle, going back to the humping. Then I got my grahbihn out (and, like Shao-Kehn's would be, it was long, prehensile, and had been retracted into my vagina), and then used it to fuck a crack in Willow's bark. I had to hold back, being in a public place, but had I been alone, I am sure I would have “finished.”
When she guided us to find an exit back to meatspace (not the word she used), I got up and walked out from under Willow's shade, and found a pond. I dived into that storm-tossed pond and swam down to the bottom, using it as a portal back to meatspace.
Oh, and that's not the end. I already said the eyes closed when the elements were dismissed. But when the priestess said to take down the protective cage of blue light (blue fire, in my case), I did not consciously decide what to have it do beyond going down. What it did was shudder in a great spasm, and turn suddenly into this thick, gelatinous blue goo that stuck to the ceiling for a second before falling to the ground in various sizes and shapes, just as though real goo had materialized. I think I actually flinched when this happened, as a particularly large glob of the stuff came down in front of me with a wet squelching thud. Then I actually looked around the room as smaller pieces drizzled or dripped down. At the same time, the goo on the walls slumped under its own weight and pooled on the floor, before vanishing down an unseen drain. It... was surreal. I remember thinking, as I watched the smaller bits dribble down, “Well THAT was unexpected.” It was like some unknown imp in my head decided to have some fun with me.
Actually, come to think of it, it's even odder that I had a thunderstorm as my safe place, with Willow being there, because Willow fell over in a storm once. Though he continued to live on in that state, the man we were renting from removed Willow from the property. Tara and I were both devastated; she loved that tree, too. Well, I guess that makes sense insofar as Willow had a message for me.
This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1187869.html
You can comment either here or there.