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Okay, so while I just revised Enneads I iv, it seems I might as well revise the joke that went with it. Perhaps you recall how I was tired after work, but since I'm a burning-the-candle-at-both-ends kind of person, forged ahead to study this particular essay, but a bird flew overhead and pooped on the page I was reading, an obvious omen to just give it a rest already.

My daughter was asking me about my angel today, as I mentioned how they have a very playful personality. She asked for examples, and so I told her a number of my angel stories. I got to this one, and while she was laughing about it, I was telling her how that page of the Enneads is still kinda messed up since of course I had to wash the poop off. She fetched the book from the shelf and asked me to show her which page it was, so I turned to the beginning of Enneads I iv and pointed to the worn-out section near the top of the page.

As I did so, I realized that I had missed the joke's punch line!

See, in the edition of the Enneads I was reading, the essay on True Happiness starts halfway down the page; the top half of the page is the last part of the prior essay on Dialectic. Here is the relevant section, with where the poop landed (which is now half-erased from being scrubbed clean) highlighted:

And while the other virtues bring the reason to bear upon particular experiences and acts, the virtue of Wisdom [...] is a certain super-reasoning much closer to the Universal; for it deals with correspondence and sequence, the choice of time for action and inaction, the adoption of this course, the rejection of that other [...].

The bird didn't just poop on my book, it literally pointed out that it would have been wise for me to rest. Lorna Byrne says somewhere that "angels find it easier to move minds than physical objects," but it seems to me that they're plenty capable of fine movements when need be...

The sunflowers are wilted and geomancy gave the go-ahead, so it's finally time to go outside again. And, indeed, while my skin flared up I can breathe okay.

I was walking randomly around the neighborhood when my angel said, "Follow me, I want to show you something!" I laughed: I'm not clairvoyant, and can only hear Them, so following would be impossible—though I had a vague sense of presence bounding along merrily before me, it was nothing strong enough that I could follow. It worked out fine, though, since They gave me directions. "Turn left here!" "Go straight through this intersection." "Turn into the alleyway." That kind of thing continued for a few blocks.

Eventually, my angel said, "Ta da! Here we are!" I looked around but didn't see anything interesting—it was simply an unremarkable part of the neighborhood. "What did you want to show me?" The only response I got was a sense of playful mischief.

I took a step back and—oh! Turns out I was standing on top of a tiny, white feather. My angel beamed.

I am feeling very dispirited today, and have had a lot of difficulty pushing myself to get up and do anything. I finally got myself together enough to go out for a little walk and do my prayers, and when I had gotten outside, I took a deep breath and felt the sunshine on my face. A house sparrow flew over and landed right in front of me, carrying a down feather in its beak. It laid the feather gently at my feet, hopped a few steps back, and regarded me for a moment. I said, "thank you," and it nodded and flew away.

My brain has been much too shot to dig very far into Plotinus lately, so I've been reading some lighter material. Yesterday, I finished P. M. H. Atwater's Beyond the Light: The Mysteries and Revelations of Near-Death Experiences. I'm never sure how seriously to take this stuff, as it's so heavily colored by Evangelical Christianity and New Ageism (neither of which I have much respect for, I'm afraid), but one thing stuck out to me of unusual interest.

Atwater's thesis is that near-death experiences are simply one of many kinds of spiritual awakening, just like more "standard" mystical experiences or those brought on by rigorous training or austerities, and that they exhibit the same range of symbolic communication. And as an example of a symbol, she offers the color yellow:

For those near-death survivors who could recall, the first color encountered during their experience was usually either yellow or yellow-gold. Some described it as just plain gold. Others saw it as more of a yellow-white, gold-white, or radiant white. Invariably, survivors commented on how different that color or light seemed; bright, and yet somehow easy on the eyes and not at all like the yellow-gold tones of the earth. [...]

People who are learning how to have an out-of-body-experience go through basically the same range of color hues in the initial manner as do near-death experiencers. Their first awareness of sight is usually as if through a yellow screen or filter. Yellowish colorations often continue until full separation between consciousness and body connections are made, then colored vision is restored. The more advanced the individual, the less yellow tinge to what they see. (For ten years I taught people how to "astral travel." The yellow filtering occurred so often, that I came to depend on it as a signal that some type of genuine separation was taking place.) [...]

In the language of symbology, yellow is considered a cross-over color—the harbinger of change. Tradition has it, for instance, that the sudden preference for yellow signifies that a person's life is about to change, that new, exciting times are ahead, with increased energy, enthusiasm, and upliftment. Yellow has always been thought of as a revitalizing tonic, a sign of spring, vigor, cheerfulness, new birth.

The reason this is interesting to me is that both of the two "transcendental" experiences I've had came with the sense of seeing the world through a gold-colored filter. In fact, the second of these is memorialized very simply in my diary:

29 Sep 2011

everything is glowing gold

The memory of that experience is very, very dim these days, but if I remember aright, I was going through a period of unbearable stress and was walking to work across town on a damp, overcast morning. While walking, I was watching one of those little streams that form after a rainstorm on the sides of roads, running down the street and pooling here and there in little, foamy ponds. I was watching one of these when, suddenly, a "switch" flipped in me and everything—the puddle, the clouds, the trees, people, buildings, everything—seemed to glow from within with golden light. I had the sense of joy and peace and of simply knowing that all these glowing things were connected, beautiful, and perfect and right just the way they were. (In fact, this was a source of some hilarity to me: I lived and worked in the rust belt, and the town was a literally crumbling old industrial city, as ugly as can be—and yet here it was, ugly and indescribably beautiful at the same time!) The color and glow and sense continued for about thirty-six hours as I went through my normal workaday routine, slowly fading over that time.

Strangely, after the experience faded, nothing seemed changed; and while I kept on meditating and studying, other than an odd experience or two, everything stayed the same as ever until 2019, when I bumped into geomancy during another period of unbearable stress, which opened the door to a proper spiritual life.

Let me excerpt an entry from my diary, dated Mar 2011:

While walking by my house today, there was a little leaf devil swirling in the road. I stepped past it, and it began to follow me, darting forward and back, playfully nipping at my heels. It spent ten minutes or so with me in this manner, all the way down the street: I leading, and it chasing. When I finally reached the end of the way and turned onto a side road to continue my walk, the leaf devil balked for a moment, spun in place, and finally whirled itself apart now that the game was over.

When I see such things with my own eyes, it is very difficult not to believe in magic.

I had completely forgotten about this lovely little incident, but was reminded of it by today's chapter of Sallustius, which speaks of circular motion being the imitation of Mind and linear motion being the imitation of Soul. We think very little of plain, old wind—but, for some reason, when the wind moves in circles, it seems intelligent, as my diary indicates!

So reminded, I thought I might ask if there was intelligence behind it, after all.

I'm Laetitia in the I, a figure of inspiration. The prospective spirit is Conjunctio in the VIII, the figure of forces coming together—and, I might note, a figure of Mercury, lord of intellect. Perfection exists through the translation (resolution by a third party, here Sallustius) of Fortuna Major (of success after long and patient effort) rejoicing in the IX (of philosophy) and in the XII (of blind spots). As a figure of the Sun, it's almost as if He's shedding light on the situation, and I would certainly say that taking ten years to make sense of an experience qualifies as long and patient effort!

The court takes a step back and looks at the bigger picture. At the time, I (Rubeus RW) was full of confusion and turmoil—I was just beginning, then, to take my first steps back into spirituality after harsh treatment at the hands of Christianity and materialism, both. This was soon to end (Cauda Draconis LW), but for the time being I was at a loss about the nature of the world (Amissio IV and J).

Puer in the III and XI seems to be my deity, winking and saying, "see how far I have led you?"

A bit over a month ago, I had a strange dream.

I was walking through a forested campsite, the kind you see in state parks all over New York. It was getting on towards evening. As I walked past a picnic table, I noticed it had what appeared to be a typeset page torn from an encyclopedia on it. I picked it up, and read, Benevolent and malevolent beings come into existence in pairs, and so every benevolent spirit has it's matching malevolent spirit, and vice versa. If one finds oneself so afflicted by a malevolent spirit, if one reaches out to its matching benevolent spirit, the two will recombine and cease to be. Suddenly, night fell, and I heard a howl. I started running, and sure enough I was soon being chased by a wolflike creature: I couldn't see it, but I could hear its heavy paws on the dirt, feel its hot breath on my back. Thinking of the page, I mentally called out to the wolf's mirror-being and poof!—the wolf disappeared and I awoke.

Now, to be clear, the encyclopedia entry is just science fiction: spirits don't appear and disappear like sentient particles and anti-particles. (At least, I'm pretty sure they don't: it fits with no metaphysics of which I'm aware, and anyway my divinations on the topic have all said it's just dream-logic.) But the basic idea of reaching out to a benevolent being to counter a malevolent one stuck with me. Different kinds of beings exist at different levels of consciousness: the states of love, hope, joy, and so on mix with the states of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and so on about as well as oil and water. If you can raise your consciousness, beings of lower states can't touch you.

"Raising one's state of consciousness" isn't exactly an easy thing to do, but as a mystic, it's something I've been practicing for nearly a decade now. I can't say how, exactly, it works, but I know what it feels like and it's something I regularly practice during prayer. (If I'm honest, I'm certain my deity's doing most of the work, pulling me up much like I hoist my daughter onto my shoulders. Even so, it's an exhausting state to maintain for long!)

Anyway, I wrote this all down in my diary, figured it was interesting if abstract, and filed it away. I didn't think I'd ever have occasion to give it a try—but so I did!

Last night, I got up in the middle of the night last night to go to the bathroom, and when I came back into the bedroom, I had a feeling of something terrible watching me from the closet. The door was open, which was a little odd since I keep it closed, so I went over to close the door and I felt something of a horrible malice leering out at me from the darkness. I could almost see hungry eyes peering at me, long limbs hunched as if ready to pounce. I closed the door—this took some effort as my every reaction was to "get away"—and got back into bed. It wasn't long before I felt the malevolent energy stalking over to the bed from the closet.

I remembered the dream I had, and the theorizing I had done around it, so I immediately began to pray and trying to raise my mental state to where it is when I meet my deity. This got quite a response: my deity said, Hang on, and waves of rage poured from the whatever-it-was, and I felt—literally felt, with my physical senses and not my spiritual ones—a violent and bitter tempest rage around me, but I felt safe and serene in the eye of the storm. It took effort to keep my mind focused on love and not fear—I'm naturally a very fearful person—but I held on to the mental state as best I could. After a minute or two, the wind subsided and the rage stalked away. As it did, I heard my deity say, Good. Remember that trick, and I drifted back to sleep.

What's further interesting is that this whole thing was presaged in my daily geomantic reading:

Notice the Rubeus (malice) in the eighth (spirits) and eleventh (benefactors), crossed with Acquisitio (plenty) in the ninth (dreams, specialized knowledge) and right witness (me). I've seen "crossings" like that a few times, and they usually seem to indicate a contest of sorts. I have a number of examples among my notes; someday when I have more time, I'll need to go back over them and see if I can pull a theory together about them.

Anyway, this was a very strange experience to me. Prior to this, every spirit I've encountered has either been at best quite friendly, or at worst playfully neutral. It just goes to show, there really are monsters out there, and yes, sometimes they creep out of closets.

The first spiritual event I can remember happened just after I started college. I was working for one of the departments and was asked to deliver a package to a destination around half a mile away. It was October and the weather had just begun to turn cold, and on this particular day it was extremely windy, and since I had just "left the nest" and was on my own for the first time, I was awfully underprepared for the weather (and many other things). So I had set out and was buffeted by the severe winds, so strong I could barely walk, and so cold that I was chilled to the bone. Normally I could make this walk in ten minutes, but with the wind it was taking me three times that. When I was halfway to my destination, I was stressed enough that I called out (to nobody in particular), "Would you please just give it a rest!?" and immediately the wind stopped dead and was so calm that the leaves on the trees didn't even move. I was shocked! I sheepishly murmured, "Thanks," and continued my errand. The wind remained still until I had finished the delivery and returned: I opened the door and a massive blast of wind, as if to tease me, kicked me over the threshold. Ever since I turned my back on a materialist worldview some years ago, I have wondered if this was literally a spirit: now that I have the tools to find out, I figured I'd ask.

I'm quickly-fading Fortuna Minor in the I, while spirits generally are peaceful Albus in the VIII. The VIII perfects to the I through a conjunction in the II, indicating that yes, a spirit did come over and make themselves known. Albus also occupies the IV, hinting perhaps that the spirit was a local nature spirit. The reception of the I and VIII is Cauda Draconis: this figure indicates commitment to a predetermined course of action, suggesting I was bound to bump into the spiritual sooner or later. This story is mirrored in the court: my world (the RW) is materialistic Tristitia; the outside world (the LW) is Caput Draconis, the figure of wide horizons and many opportunities; thus, the overall situation (the J) is Conjunctio, the figure of contact.