Stranger in a Strange Land?

Posted onAuthorTommie

As it’s nearly a year since I had what some would call a “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel” experience (and some would definitely not) I thought, given the original intent of this blog, that I would share some of the finer details with you all. This will probably be a series of posts rather than one post, which is fine for me as I am aiming to get back into doing some more regular blogging – I do really miss doing them.

Firstly, I want to mention that I am hesitant around talking about this stuff for a number of reasons:

  1. I am unsure of what is appropriate to talk about versus what I should Keep Silent about.
  2. I am really not actually sure what this ongoing experience actually is. K+CHGA? The vision of the Angel? A buddha on the road that needs to be killed? An indication of my true place and destiny on this planet? Pure nonsense?
  3. The whole thing is super Woo that even I, King of Woo, have a hard time entertaining it without feeling embarrassed.

But I made up my mind over the last week or so just to be open about it all and I haven’t had any bad feelings or warnings from the Universe to not talk about it. The whole intention of this blog/ podcast/ vlogs originally was to talk openly and honestly about my magick journey – the good, the bad, and the woo! But I have really been keeping back and withholding a lot of the more woo elements of my journey, mostly because I just don’t want to add to the already copious amount of bullshit in occult and magic circles. This stuff below is likely to add to the bullshit if I am not careful, so please, know that this is coming from a place of “Isn’t this interesting and fun?” rather than “This is True!” or anything similar.

After all, nothing is true…

THOUGH EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED

Without going over the same ground as other posts, podcasts, and vlogs I’ll try to quickly get anyone new up to speed as quickly and succinctly as possible.

Ever since I read the Baptist Head Trilogy six years ago I have mostly geared my spiritual practice towards Awakening rather than practical Magic. My practice became mostly me sitting down and inwardly asking “Who am I?” and similar type meditations. A bit dull, and definitely not sexy. But necessary, I suspect.

Part of this process of working towards Awakening includes (at least in some methods and systems – though certainly not all or even most) achieving something called The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

Essentially when successful you get in contact and become in union with your higher self/ an emanation of God or the Goddess/ a Guardian Spirit/ Future You. Two becomes one, and the boundary of what is you and what is the angel slip away entirely with no division or separation between you. Of course, these details vary and many people have many, many opinions and ideas about what actually really defines K+CHGA.

One of the first stages towards this end (in Thelemic terms at least) is “THE VISION OF THE ANGEL” (shout out to Marco for informing me about this) where you get a glimpse of the Angel but then you have to get down to the hard work of actually attaining the full Knowledge and Conversation. So I guess this would be Knowledge of, but no actual Conversation with. This is more than likely what occurred to me last October, although other people who report very similar experiences to mine are convinced that their experience is full K+CHGA. All I can say is that “The Vision of the Angel” seems the right description to me.

Actually, I guess I had (at least) two VISION OF THE ANGEL experiences. One at least seven years ago and one last year.

 

PEREGRINE

My HGA is called Peregrine and I have known and felt it my entire life even when I wasn’t consciously aware of knowing that.

I am not exactly sure when I first received the name “Peregrine” as my HGAs name but it is sometime before 2013 as I make a reference to it in my comic THEM where I have one of the Spirit helpers called Dr. Falcon, as in Peregrine Falcon. Then later when our hero Roman meets his Higher self there is a bird-like appearance to him. While THEM was ultimately a hugely successful hypersigil resulting in the release of The Forty Servants, the HGA element, and the name Peregrine, just seemed to fall away into the cracks.

I also have no recollection of how I first received or came across the name, though I do have a recollection of feeling it was an interesting name given that I have a severe phobia of birds since childhood.

On and off over the last while I have tried many times to contact my higher self, including trying to use my childhood teddy bear as an anchor as there seems to be some connection between the two that is hard to explain but as true as anything I know. Nothing really happened other than I had a sense that my HGA was female or at least presented itself as female at times. Also, she (?) seems to change from a youth to an old woman, and from a mother to a lover, and everything in between. However, at times it also felt like a very male divine presence.

Now coming to October 9th 2020 I am “contacted” by my HGA in a very deliberate and unmistakable sense during a Meditation session. I am given the name Peregrine again however this time it is spelt differently. It’s now “Piragwen”, but pronounced roughly the same. I was also shown a sigil and how to draw it out using two hands in the air. I also saw a rose and then then the colour red. The whole thing felt utterly familiar combined with an innate sense of “but of course, I’ve always known this”. While I was aware what had been shown was new information I also knew it wasn’t new at all. It was a discovery of something I have already, and always known.

The rose tied up a few loose ends for me in that ever since I trained as an aromatherapist back in my mid-20s I’ve had a weird experience around rose – particularly rose essential oil. This sounds totally woo and nonsensical but to me rose essential oil is the same thing as the Blood Of Christ. How’s that for woo? Like obviously I know a bottle of Rose Absolute is not the actual Blood of Christ but I also know it is – in a similar way that the mass wine is the Blood of Christ is to devout Catholics. Roses feel very “holy” – which given my Catholic upbringing I guess isn’t surprising what with the whole Rosary and all that. Though in my defence I never really put together the connection between roses and the rosary until very recently.

In my mind, the Rose and Jesus are connected, not the Rose and the BVM. Rose oil is His Blood, and the rose itself is His Sacred Heart. And a very particular flavour of Jesus too. Not the shitty judgy Jesus who I was taught to be afraid of as a child in Christain Ireland but a more open, deeply loving Jesus. Wrapped in a red cloak, pointing to his heart, just being an absolute embodiment of pure love and love alone.

So a rose as a correspondence for my HGA seems perfectly fitting – the Holiest of all flowers, and the Holy Blood and Sacred Heart of Divinity. Cool!

SO WHY THE SPELLING CHANGE?

A possible meaning of Piragwen can be assembled if we first separate the word in half. PIRA means PYRE in some languages. A pyre is a funeral fire used to burn dead people – a holy fire, or a cleansing fire. A fire that transports the dead to the otherside. Gwen is a Welsh feminine given name meaning “white, holy”. So we could have something like THE HOLY FIRE, THE WHITE FIRE, THE HOLY PYRE or THE WHITE PYRE.

As yet, I am not really sure of the significance to that other than something around having to cleanse or burn away old patterns, or having to die to be reborn, which is all standard advice for this sort of work anyway. The meaning of the original spelling makes more sense to me – however, it’s problematic, to say the least.

To explain I have to switch to a wider angle lens on my life.

THE INTERLOPER

One of the major themes/ problems/ shadows of my life – and one of the things I discussed often in my 30+ hours of therapy – has been this feeling that I am an interloper.

I have always felt like a trespasser on this planet. This world is not for me – it’s for people like YOU reading this (Ya know – The Others). The world belongs to other people, not me and being here I am in some way trespassing – or like I am an illegal immigrant in a country feeling at any minute the authorities will come for me.

It’s very hard to explain. It is likely an amalgamation of lots of childhood trauma and the general “not fitting in” thing that so many of us all feel. But it’s a very real, very present sensation and even when we ostensible got to the root of it in therapy the feeling hasn’t as yet in any way dissipated. It’s an ever-present background hum.

Think of it as being on private land and feeling at any minute the landowner is going to emerge from behind a tree and shoot you for trespassing – only the private land is the entire planet and life itself.

So this feeling of not being entitled to be here, in being illegitimate, or being some sort of alien, runs very deep with me. I always feel like I am about to get into trouble, that “they” are coming to get me, and when they do something bad will happen. Again that’s classic General Anxiety stuff but couple this with also having a sense that the physics of this earth plane is wrong, or that gravity is too heavy or things just don’t seem to behave the way they used to. Can’t explain that one, just how it feels. This place slightly feels off to me, like I am just not used to it.

So I have always felt like a stranger in a strange land, an outcast, an interloper, something different, something wrong. Something foreign. An Alien. So, you can imagine my surprise when I look up what Peregrine means (having previously just thought it was a name for a bird) and it means: wandering, foreign; alien; coming from abroad, or pilgrim. from the Latin Peregrinus.

Hmmm… curious.

MAYBE I’M NOT ACTUALLY FROM HERE?

Come with me now as we enter even deeper into Woo territory. This is where this story really starts to get strange and strain credulity.

Let me tell you a story about something strange that happened to me during a Reiki session two years ago. I had an amazing session of feeling very cosmic and huge and god-like. Was really lovely. I was “told” to allow myself to feel like The Chosen One, to really embrace it and allow it to pervade my entire being. Which I did, and I felt bigger and more expansive than I have ever felt. I felt godlike, eternal, immortal, universal and infinite. I felt like I was the Chosen One. At one point I think I might actually have really been the Chosen One – it was that intense.

But of course, once the sensation faded away and I returned to the knowledge that I was just a body lying on a plinth I immediately dismissed all notions of being The Chosen One, as I hope all of you would too! Having read countless reports of people on the spiritual path it becomes very clear that at some stage on the path everyone seems to gets told in one form or another that they are the chosen one – that they have some special mission to fulfil, some great teaching to bring to humanity, or some important role in humanity’s destiny. Seems to be just a bit of trolling from the Spirits, but some people do seem to get stuck here as you can see from the plethora of terrible New Age books written by the many Chosen Ones.

So, I acknowledged the experiences as super cool but also sorta had a little chuckle to myself about it. I subsequently made a vlog about a meditation practice in which you too can become The Chosen One which you can watch here:

But that experience on the plinth wasn’t even the most interesting thing about this Reiki session. When the session was over the Reiki Healer started telling me what she had experienced.

Now, I have to stress to you that I hadn’t told her about feeling like an interloper, or feeling like this world wasn’t mine, or even my experience on her plinth of being the Chosen one, or anything close to that. So, given that, what she said was very interesting, and I’m paraphrasing here but the gist was:

“The room filled with spirits – Buddhas, Angels, Other beings. The whole room was full of spirits. There was a sense that your problem is that you are not actually from this place and because you are not from this place your energies aren’t in alignment with the energy of this world – and can’t ever be in alignment with here as they just aren’t compatible. That’s why you always feel off-kilter.” She also mentioned that “I came from the stars” and had some sort of mission here, which I found hard to not laugh at, to be honest. But I didn’t, I just nodded.

Now, of course, I know exactly how that sounds – ludicrous and ridiculous, right? Good, not just me then.

But let me just throw one more thing at you just while we are here. If you look up Peregrine on a Gematria calculator guess what one of the related corresponding words are? “CHOSEN ONE”.

I’ll also point out that another corresponding word is FRAUD.

SO WHAT DO YOU DO WITH ALL THAT?

So, am I to seriously consider that the name of my HGA is suggesting some of my deep-seated psychological issues around feeling excluded from life actually may all be true? Am I really an actual bonafide Stranger in a Strange Land? Is my HGA trolling? Or am I just making patterns and connections where there are none? Am I losing it?

I guess in New Age circles the idea that you are a soul from a different dimension coming to help humanity is not actually a new or unique idea. There are countless books, lectures, and YouTube videos about people who think they have come from a distant planet or higher dimension to help humanity in its current dark days. The New Age is chockablock full of higher dimensional beings having a human experience – and to be fair, they don’t seem to be helping much!

But even though I do find the whole thing… well cliched for a start, but also ridiculous – I don’t think that’s a good enough reason not to at least entertain the notion in a Chaos Magic sense. That said it will be hard to embrace an idea that I have spent the past few years trying to eradicate in therapy sessions, but I feel I should at least try because not looking at it seems to have created a block or a halt in my greater HGA workings.

But how would I start unravelling all this? By doing what every good Magician should do – asking for a sign from beyond to help me work out how I should approach it.

I did a sigil with the target desire of “Knowing the Way Forward with my HGA work” and a day or so later I watched an interview with Charles Eisenstein which finishes with him reading a passage from the end of his book “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible” (a book I have since read, and would highly recommend, incidentally). The video is linked below and it should be lined up to the correct spot (2:05:47) but the TL;DR is that the story is about Beings on another planet who decide to come to earth to help humanity out during this critical time in human development.

Well, I mean… could you ask for more of a sign than that? But is it the sign I wanted? Nope.

EH?

So, I present all this Woo to you for your consideration.

And mine for that matter as I have no idea what to do with it all.

I mean, on one hand, it’s embarrassing to say out loud or even consider it seriously, but on the other hand it’s super fun too. All these weird connections pointing to me being a Super Evolved Space Being come here to fix Humanity is fun to play with. Though on the third hand I now have, it also really degrades my entire spiritual journey as the whole of my spiritual life just feels silly and foolish now. Like, is this really where I have ended up? In a truly cliché New Age sci-fi plot? Is that it? Really?

But I’m going to see where it goes and try to keep my most jovial and good-spirited Robert Anton Wilson hat on – he’d be the very man to travel down this sort of absurd rabbit hole and come out the other end more knowledgable, all the while laughing at himself and all creation. So let’s try that approach and see what happens.

Perhaps this is nothing more than the Universe is just having a joke at my expense in order to remind me that life is more playful than I think, or perhaps I really am an enlightened higher being from a distant star here to save humanity. I know which one I’m betting on though.

Until next time – Be well!

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