Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 24

Meditated last night. Tried to dream, and did, but couldn't remember much. No image tags. I know I was with someone else and together we were going around from house to house, or from one place to another, doing or getting something.

Before sleep I lay on my back and did the whole rainbow, red to white instead of violet on top. I ended up not being able to leave my body at the end, although I got close. Couldn't or wouldn't "let go" of my eyes and face, that is, dissociate my consciousness from them and still stay poised. Think I messed up indigo, and lost concentration and my mind started to wander once between yellow and green. Not too surprising, either one, considering the attributions I've learned and was using. Red, for the root chakra at the base of the spine. Physical groundedness, sense of place, the "bear shaman" power of making home ground out of where you happen to be. Orange, for the sacral chakra and the abdominal area where the womb's at, desire and (I was surprised to find) joy. I usually associate orange with aggression or destructiveness, but that means I usually forget that passion means love, and love means the desire to create happiness. The desire, fundamentally, to create, which is why that energy source in the personality is symbolically represented by the reproductive area of the body. Losing touch with orange along the way was probably the biggest reason I didn't manage to travel. Spirit without body is made of and powered by organized emotional energy, and the stuff orange represents is what gets you moving and gives you "oomph." Not enough orange and too much purple. That's yer egghead for ya.

Anyway. No, I ended up not being able to picture a door at the end, so it wasn't a true scout's rainbow. Besides, if I'd been tranced successfully enough to find the door and go into the room, I'd've probably been tranced enough to travel. Bleh. The only place I could think of that I felt like going, parenthetically, was Wolf's Point. Beautiful spot, and sacred too, as far as locations in downtown Chicago are concerned. It's the only one of the five or six I know that isn't in or part of a building--although the Mart's parking lot has it squeezed right down to the edge of the river. When I realized I'd gone as far as I was gonna get meditating just then and Dave was going to stay up through the night, he not being sleepy, I decided to give my mental visualizer a workout.
[Interrupted. Baltazar asking what happened to his missing hours. I hate those conversations. Wish I had better answers.]
The results of said workout did help me get to sleep, although the cat interrupted my sleep attempts for awhile regrardless.

Here's the thing, with that. I have this (to me) really sexy story in my mind. It would make a really kickass erotic novel or series of short fiction maybe. I could account for all the ridiculous improbable things that (to me) put the whipped cream on the sundae of a really good sexual fantasy within the canon of the story. And really, how is it not unfair playing as a writing-person, to use the extreme intensity of sexual situations to reveal character quickly and in interesting detail? But if I ain't got brain or timespace to write a damn sonnet, no way am I gonna be able to make brain and timespace to write that. Le sigh. The whole thing is just the character backstory for the outsider Vaya the Worldbender in my old, awesome interdimensional travelers storyverse. Worldbender isn't a unique title, by the way; it's a guild. They assemble pocket universes to spec out of pieces of other universes. Which requires a lot of orange. Which Vaya is very good at using because of her many adventures.

Come to think of it, a lot of that storyverse had a lot to do with sex. Makes sense given the premise. The Greek gods never had trouble getting laid, after all. (Maybe Vulcan. What was his Greek name? I forget. But he got the last laugh anyway.) And they spent a lot of time fighting about the results when they did. I suppose the biggest difference is that all my outsiders used to be locals, and the multiverse is a lot bigger that the Mediterranean. Well, okay, I'll be fair. Homer's Mediterranean had a multiverse connected to it and was quite big enough. But the main difference is one of scale. In my story you have thousands of "gods" who think of themselves as ordinary people (and most of whom think of non-"gods" as less than people, of course) instead of a few dozen, and you have a large and indeterminate number of universes which all have different rules and populations and stories instead of many strange islands in a sea with different rules and populations and stories. The idea is the same as the idea behind any adventure story: if anything you wanted was easy to get, what would you do? And if there were a whole bunch of people who could all do anything, how would they manage to make each others' lives miserable in spite of their great powers? When people have power over other people, their true character is revealed. I believe that very firmly. So I like thinking about situations and stories where people have exactly the right amount of power to reveal their characters as much as the story has space for. Which is why the backstories for my outsiders tend to be more involved and in many ways more interesting than what happens to them after they get out and figure out which side, if any, they're on.

I wonder if I have time for a little more of this. Heh. Just had to consult the character map to get the keystroke for ñ. (It's alt+0241.)
The two Mañanas. The main character(s). Probably predate the war. Got imprisoned in the menagerie (that's mental menagerie, like the one I supposedly have) of one of the first leaders of the e before the faction had really defined itself as a group in the way it exists during most of the story arc. Back when it was just a bunch of thugs who liked to get together and have bullshitting sessions. Escaped through the deeps, went to ground (a saga I have not explored!), went their separate ways after re-emerging into the outside. In the vagaries of time, one ended up the leader of the library and the other ended up the leader of the e. So. Sorta twins fighting over ideological differences while riding herd on a bunch of ignorant godlets. Why? Because I like dual polarity and how else is a teenager going to represent her psyche?

At the end of the story arc they do both die, kind of. Mostly. I still haven't decided whether the shiny, shiny Reality node at the center of the multiverse should be the major plot element it was or just something that exists but isn't discussed. Not because it's secret, just because no one thinks to discuss it. People don't sit around their living rooms or the water cooler going "Gee, I'm really feeling gravity well today, I have a very astute sense of how much the earth is pulling on me and how much my material cells long to go towards it." So in the multiverse gravity pulls you towards the center, which is half of why deeps-diving is so difficult. Pulls you towards the center, that is, except when you get right up close, when it starts pushing. Not like a hand reaches out and shoves (although that would be fair, since the deeps do reach out and pull), but like Earth's atmosphere resists as you're going towards the ground from space. Burns you up and such.

But astrally, not materially. I'm'a keep right on using astral travel words for that stuff since that's the only symbol set I really think can be used to discuss the outside. Which sucks, because it's too accurate. If you use a symbol to symbolize the thing it actually represents, the mind quickly drops the gap and thinks only of the symbol. There's no tension within meaning to hold the thought suspended. So when I'm talking about astral travel using astral travel terminology, it makes the whole idea of traveling flat and known. Talking about it too matter-of-factly destroys the kind of poised mental openness required to actually do it. Smooths the royal purple down to indigo, you might say.

I think I would do more in the way of instructing people on how to use their natural psychic powers by writing erotic short fictions than could be done in a dozen textbooks. Even really nice ones, with pictures and exercises. Giving people psychic learning exercises in a book is usually an exercise in futility. Maybe one or two people in a thousand will do the exercises and get the intended benefit. Curious, kind minds who feel comforted by walking paths that have been tread before. Otherwise on the one side, you have people like me who won't do anything unless they made it up themselves, whether from lack of trust or will to creativity. And on the other side, you have people who will just read it, snort, and not try anything because it seems like such a dumb idea.

The latter type are the ones who would, if they lowered their preconceptions, get the best results of any of the three. But that is actually because of their preconceptions. Think of the mental tension that creates! A person has deeply held beliefs that certain things are false, bunkum, hogwash. And of course, those beliefs are comprised in large part of powerful emotions. On the other hand, the person has curiosity, wanderlust and the urge to test his limits. Powerful emotions as well. Those things clash and come together in a personality while that person is meditating, that person is going to get some interesting results. Maybe they travel, maybe they have weird psyche reconfigurations, maybe a transfiguring insight. But it's the tension within meaning that raises the intensity of their effort to the point where things get interesting. Without that, you're just having really pleasant and well-ordered daydreams.