The Importance of Stability

I feel that all of my astral travel has really given me an appreciation for some of the difficulties that gods and spirits probably face when trying to interface with our world:

• “I’ve finally managed to get to the other side, and now I can’t get anyone there to pay attention to me. How do I talk to people?”
• “I figured out how these beings communicate, but I can’t get any of them to listen to me. What am I supposed to do?”
• “Why am I in this house, this is not where I intended on showing up.”
• “Oh where did all of the doors in this house go? Why did all of the furniture move?”
• “What the hell is that? And will it hurt me if I touch it?”

I feel like all of these statements could easily be uttered by a god trying to get some human to listen to them, and they are all statements that have fallen out of my mouth at least a few times while trying to travel. I’m sure that interfacing with foreign planes is probably not as challenging for some non-physical beings, as they have more power and practice than I do, but there will always be challenges when you’re trying to interact with beings on a foreign plane.

As I’ve worked to get better at my astral travel (and with communicating with my menz and gods over here), I’ve found that there seems to be something that helps everyone get on a little bit better, and that is stability. I mentioned in my post about working with unknown beings that stability can be useful for establishing a solid connection with non-physical beings. However, I didn’t go too terribly in-depth on what I meant by stability, or how to incorporate it into your practice. Today, I’d like to talk about two kinds of stability–stability that we can create for non-physical beings here, and how we can incorporate stability in astral travel to better our success rates while traveling.

Stability While Traveling

I feel that it’s better to start with stability as it applies to astral travel, because I think that it helps to round out the picture about how stability here can benefit beings that don’t really live here. You see, when you’re traveling in the astral, you’re effectively doing what the gods do with us: you’re taking a non-physical portion of your body or Self, and taking that portion to places that you don’t (typically) fully live in. While it’s true that I have a form that lives with my astral household 24/7, the human portion of myself doesn’t really live there 24/7. That portion comes and goes as I split my focus between here and There. And while the gods may indirectly always reside in our physical layer of earth, on the by and large, they aren’t living here fully, either (which is why Open statues are helpful, which I’ll cover in another post).

While I don’t pretend that my experiences are the same sort of experiences that all travelers have, I wouldn’t be surprised if my experiences aren’t entirely unique, either. And with that being said, my experiences have shown me that the process of getting from here to There can be convoluted. Sometimes it’s really simple, and I look inside, and I am instantly there and ready to move around. But most days, there is a sort of acclimation process that occurs as I move from here to There. For those who have never traveled, imagine waking up in the dead of night after having taken some medication. Someone flicks the light on, and your eyes haven’t fully adjusted to everything. You can’t really see well, you’re not very steady on your feet. You’re not sure where anything else because your brain is still fuzzy.

There are days when “waking up” Over There feels similarly.

And when you wake up in the middle of the night and need to move quickly, part of the reason you’re able to move quickly at all is probably because you know where you’re at. You know that you’re in your bedroom, and you subconsciously have an idea where the furniture is, and where to move or not move, etc. Your pre-existing knowledge of your house gives you the stability to know where to go, even when your brain isn’t running on all cylinders.

Now imagine that in an astral setting. You finally are able to connect in, but you’re not sure where you are or who is around. Your hearing is doing pretty poorly, so even when your bestie reaches out to talk to you, you don’t necessarily hear it or register it. The house shifted while you were gone, and you’re not sure where any of the furniture is, or where you’re supposed to go. You may not even be certain which room you fell into when you woke up.

You have no stability to know where to go or what to do.

Stability is key in these examples for being able to hit the ground running. In my household, we know that I have certain things that need to be done in order to visit regularly, and all of these things lead to more stability for me as a traveler. For those who might be interested in incorporating some of these ideas into their astral households, here are some of the things we keep in mind:

• Keep some of your housing the same. The rooms that I get put into always have beds and doorways in similar or the same locations. That way, I always know which way to head to reach a door. Similarly, keeping the furniture to a minimum can be helpful.
• Keep walls and/or space to a minimum. Whenever I’m having issues with connecting, we will remove walls, or shrink the size of the room that I’m in. That way, I don’t have to try and process as much information when I come into the room. Just like with video games, I can usually only process so much of a given space at once, and if the space is smaller, it’s much easier to move around because I can process the entire space in one go.
• Keep a schedule, and utilize a partner. One of the best ways that I’ve found to make porting into the astral easier is to keep to a schedule. If I tell my menz that I’m going to be arriving at XYZ time in XYZ location, they know to keep an eye out for me and can assist in helping me to acclimate to the location that I’m shifting into. This also helps because you’ll know exactly where you’re going, and you won’t have to utilize as much energy or time trying to figure out your surroundings.
• Get physical. I’ve found that when I’m having a particularly hard time hearing, seeing, or just being in an astral space, that touching someone’s face, or holding something and focusing on the physical sensations that I get can help to ground me into my body well enough that I can start to move better.

Stability for the Unseen

As you might have noticed, most of these things involve giving the person who is traveling some predictability in where they are going or what they will be doing. And when we are trying to facilitate stability for our non-physical compatriots, you’re essentially trying to do the same for them. Obviously, some of the situations listed above don’t necessarily happen all that often. We don’t have to worry about walls appearing or disappearing here. We don’t have to worry about rooms being reorganized, and most of us aren’t moving every few weeks like some nomadic astral people might. However, there are still things that we can do to help make our experiences more stable and predictable for the entities we’re reaching out to.

• Create a space that is just for them. This is usually going to be your shrine area, but it doesn’t have to be a shrine per se. Having an item or a space within your home that is specifically for the entities you’re hoping to interact with will help to give them a solid place to settle in whenever they come over. This allows entities to saturate items with their energy, or place markers and other identifiers into their space that will allow them to transition into our plane much smoother. Using items that they readily identify with will help make it easier for them to ground into the space, and settle into their “body” or a vessel/item that can contain a portion of their energy.
• Keep a schedule. Just like with my family preparing things for when I arrive, it can make it easier for the entity you’re trying to communicate with to manifest if you’ve got a regular schedule. When some sort of schedule is kept, it makes it easier for them to time their efforts for trying to communicate with us, and it makes it easier for us to hear them because we’re both working towards the same goal at the same time. I often feel that devotees end up playing this never-ending game of phone tag with the gods, and figuring out a schedule for everyone to work around can help combat that.
• Start off sessions or rituals with similar dynamics. These dynamics can be any number of things. It can be playing the same song before your ritual. It can be saying the same words at the beginning of each ritual. It can be wearing the same thing for each ritual. Or sitting in a certain way. Anything that can be repeated regularly can help create a trigger that can help both you and any spirits you’re working with transition into a different mindset before communing begins. In the same way that a bell primed Pavlov’s dogs to be fed, starting off your sessions or rites with the same thing can prime your brain (and your gods or spirits) for astral work.
• Provide energy. Traveling across planes takes up energy, so if you can give some sustenance to your spirits or gods to utilize during travel, it can help them to become more prominent within the space. Energy can be in the form of food, but it can also be the energy you raise in ritual or energy you give of yourself, etc.

When all of these things are met on the regular, you essentially create a predictable schedule that the entity can plan for, which will occur in a predictable space that the entity can settle into when they arrive. By having familiar items and sounds around, the entity should be able to grasp onto these things and settle into the space with less issues. And the easier that it becomes for the entity to settle into our physical world, the more likely they are to do it more often. And further, I believe that it helps the gods to better understand us the more often that they come here.

While this is certainly not a definitive list, I feel that these are the staples for creating more stability for non-physical entities to alight within a space, and if you end up trying any of them, I’d be interested to hear how they work for you.

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Silent Gods

It’s pretty safe to say that most of us spend our lives unaware of the layer of Unseen that penetrates the world around us. We don’t have access to a lot of the goings on in the Unseen, and so we don’t really notice the spirits or other entities that may be around us at any given time. For all intents and purposes, we’re blind and unaware of our surroundings when it comes to non-physical beings.

But just because we are blind to them doesn’t mean that they are blind to us. So many people have stated that “looking back on things, I can tell that my god/s have been around for years now, and I just didn’t realize it” or something in that same vein. Just because we don’t notice when our gods are hanging around us doesn’t mean that they aren’t hanging around us all the same.

So if the gods are hanging around, why on earth would they be silent to us? This is especially hard to figure out if you’re in a place of pain, frustration or confusion, and could really use some reassurance or assistance in your life. And of course, I’m sure that there have been plenty of times when someone has sat around and tried to reach out to a god who is actively listening to them, and yet they remain silent for years. Why?

One of the most overlooked factors is timing. It’s a pretty common saying that “timing is everything”, and it’s a statement that is pretty accurate. To understand my point, consider your own life and your own growth. Think back ten years ago. What were you like? Were you an awful lot like who you are now, or were you very different? Have you become more mature since then? Have you learned anything new? Have you grown at all?

Odds are, the person you are now is pretty different than who you were ten years ago. It’s par for the course that we all grow and change as we age, and the gods realize this as well. If a deity is wanting you to do work for them, it’s possible that they’re waiting for you to reach a certain level before they step forward and begin to work on you.

For those who realized that their gods had been hanging around them since they were kids, it’s possible that your deity watched you silently through your teenage years because they knew that you wouldn’t be ready until after college. Maybe they felt that pushing you while you lived in your parent’s house would cause unneeded and unhelpful stress and strife between you and your family members. Maybe your teenage years were before the Internet took off, and even if the god did reach out, you wouldn’t know what exactly was going on or even what to do about it. Perhaps it was better to wait until there were more resources available to you. Maybe it took seeing those resources to make the connection to the god in the first place.

Maybe they waited because they knew you’d need to complete a boat load of shadow work before they can enlist you for whatever job or task they had in mind. So they decided to wait until you were in a place to actually work on the shadow work before they stepped forward. It was pretty obvious when Osiris showed up that I was not ready for his lessons or his methods, and he had to step back again until I was able to cope with what he was wanting. To push too soon might have resulted in our relationship not working out, in trauma on my end, or in my not performing the tasks that he wanted me to perform.

I know that looking over the past ten years of being 100% non-Christian, that I couldn’t have done what I am doing right now ten years ago. If Set would have shown up right when I first decided to look into religions that were not Christian, I wouldn’t have been able to perform the tasks that he needed. I might have been able to make some progress on the Pit, but he would have had to have cultivated me for years before I would have been ready to start working on community work. I also think that my failures through Wicca and my experiences with dysfunctional online Pagan groups have helped me to get a better understanding of what a community shouldn’t do. Every failure can have seeds for success, after all.

Even if my astral partner decided to show up when I was in college (which is where I was ten years ago–and he was around, I just couldn’t sense him), I wouldn’t have been prepared to handle what was coming at me. It’s technically better for everyone that I was forced to wait another seven years until my head broke open entirely, and I could begin to do what I am doing now. Looking over my experiences, I could definitely make an argument supporting the idea that these Unseen entities waited because the timing was not ideal. I could also make an argument that their judgement was pretty solid, and that waiting ended up saving us more time and strife in the long run, crappy as waiting can be.

Of course, some of you may be reading this and thinking “well that’s not how it is with me. I could have handled whatever they threw at me! Why can’t they start talking to me now? I don’t want to wait!” And that could very well be the truth, but that doesn’t mean that the deity in question sees it that way. Just like how we often act based off of what we think is best, so too do the gods. The gods often have a larger scope of things, and use that to discern and decide what courses of action to take. Who is right or wrong is a moot point when push comes to shove, because again, we’re all relatively cut off from the Unseen and it’s machinations, and so we’re often bound to whatever the god feels is the best course of action (for better or worse). If they put up a wall so that you can’t talk to them, it’s going to be very difficult to break it down before they are ready, and breaking it down before they’re ready can have it’s own repercussions.

I think the biggest take away when considering the various reasons why communication with a deity may or may not be happening is to remember that it’s not always because of you that things aren’t moving forward. There can always be a wide variety of reasons behind why a deity may or may not choose to step forward and make themselves known. As frustrating as it can be to be stuck waiting on a god to say hello to you, it’s worth keeping in mind that relationships are a two way street, and sometimes it’s really not about us (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), what we want, or what we think is best. The gods can have their own agendas and motivations behind why they do what they do, and we may never be completely aware of whatever is going on inside of their heads. I have always found that being patient and persistent can be the key to breaking through and being able to communicate with the gods, and that while waiting for said deity to decide that “now its okay to move forward” and “now I am okay with talking to you” can suck, it usually works out in the grand scheme of things. At the very least, I’ve always been comforted to know that it’s not always me being a screw-up that causes a god to be silent. Sometimes it’s other things that are beyond everyone’s control- the gods included.

Have you ever experienced a quiet point with your gods? Did you ever figure out why the deity was silent with you? How did you work around the silence that you experienced?