What Lies Beyond

sleepparalysis
I don’t have a corresponding blog post for today’s mammoth Halloween podcast with Forrest Borie, on sleep paralysis, night visitations, and the energy of the other world.
Reason being that I am immersed in putting together a long piece about my family history and Fabiana using the material from the Occult Yorkshire thread at RI, and the piece keeps getting longer and it has a pull that is all but irresistible, to uncover the mystery and “see something that’s always been hidden.”
So the theme would seem to be the ghosts of the past, that haunt us in one form or another, externally or internally, which is of course why Halloween gives over to All Saints Day in the West and then to Day of the Dead in Latin-America. Ghosts & demons, saints and angels, and finally our own ancestors, which is probably all it ever is, shades of a shared psyche that trap the attention and pull us into vortices of estrangement from our own souls, yet are also, conversely and perversely, the way back to wholeness.
As Forrest describes in our conversation, resisting the pull of those vortices only makes the pull stronger.
But getting fixated on what’s inside the vortex is also a way to prevent ourselves going all the way through them and out the other side, like getting fixated on an image in the mirror and so failing to see that what’s being reflected, primarily, is us. So what’s the middle way?
Maybe the hardest thing of all is to admit that, once we have laid to rest all the ghosts that haunt us, it will just be us, all alone in our houses.

3 thoughts on “What Lies Beyond”

  1. I’ll be listening to the podcast, but just had to respond to your beautifully crafted (as always) intro above. The theme of ancestors is running hot & heavy in my life right now. I’m elbow deep in crafting some kind of awkwardly grim shrine to my own forebears as we speak. It’s fraught with complexities…all I can really say is that, for all the monstrousness of family, I wouldn’t be breathing without them. And breathing is good.

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  2. I have been enjoying these recent podcasts, and this one is no exception. Very thoughtful dialog and pertinent topics, most of which I could relate to quite well. I appreciated the lighthearted tone, despite the at times very heavy subject matter.

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