-:- little vision tricksters -:-
-:- animal guides and spirit helpers -:-
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Some years ago, I took a course and trained to become a Reiki practitioner. As part of this training, the group was to invite individual spirit helpers (or 'spook' if you will) to come and act as our 'Reiki Guides' or 'Guardian Angels'. This was done as part of an hour-long guided visualising meditation.
'I closed my eyes and began to follow the meditation. If I was honest, I was unsure about the whole spirit guide aspect of Reiki, but nonetheless I made the invitation. I became suddenly and firmly aware of a tigress entering the room and staring straight at me. She stopped in the doorway, as if making her entrance somewhat dramatic. Once she seemed sure that I had registered her presence, she continued walking towards me until she sat down to my left, all the time acting as if she owned the place, as if sitting in my Reiki Master's living room was a perfectly normal thing for a large female tiger to do. It surprised me. I really hadn't expected a tiger.
'Then she turned her head and glanced back at the door, whereupon two tiger cubs playfully bundled into the room and scampered across to her. She again looked at me. I began to realise what her intentions were - she herself was not to become my Reiki Guide, but one of her cubs was to fulfil that role. In fact it was the second cub to enter: the young male. In my meditation I saw this cub - who in the end was named simply Tiger (*11) - leave his mother and clamber clumsily onto my lap and look up at me with the same firm and insistent stare as his mother. The mother stayed for a while, but a few days later, in another meditation, I saw her leave for good. But the male cub stayed.'
From Author's Reiki training notes
Again, this is a fairly typical experience and one that can be found throughout the numerous personal reminiscences on the Internet. It had a fairly profound effect on me, not least because my initial scepticism caused me to expect to invite a Guide of a form that I might have seen previously, such as one derived from my art work, or one based on what I might think I would want as a Guide. Instead, in came the tiger. (*12)
But what, aside from the personal, is the significance of this type of experience? Can it really be said that a tiger spirit visited me on that day and became a guide, or is this more evidence which lends weight to the argument that spook-based belief systems are returning to our culture? A glance through the Mind-Body-Spirit section of any good bookshop suggests that it may well be.
Here, we see a wide range of literature on Guardian Angels, animal medicine helpers, the development of psychic abilities through the use of spirit guides and even shamanic manuals, an integral part of which is the acquisition of spook allies. Now none of these things need be true in the literal sense, however their presence in mainstream bookshops does make a strong case for a resurgence in their beliefs. Here is another personal, Reiki-related memory:
'My Reiki Master was holding a public workshop in Bristol city centre and I came along to help her out, and add to the energy. Providing the music that day was a woman who, in her words, "channelled the music of the angels and gave it voice". I took some time out to watch her. She stood at the edge of the room, holding a small bell which she occasionally rang at the end of what seemed to me like a musical phrase, with her eyes closed in prayer. Her voice was soft and gentle; high pitched but firm: "hay-la-la, shay-na". I never learned her name, and never saw her again.'
Here, then, is the phenomenon of channelling - the creation of spirit words or music taken from either the world of the spooks or somewhere deep within. The truth of this is again highly subjective, but it is clear that channelled information has reached the mainstream with Neale Donald Walsch's 'Conversations With God' series of books and tapes. Are such channelled works the spooks talking again?
We have seen how the Yanomami invited the hekura into their bodies so that they could shamanise, and we have seen how the Ainu had a very straightforward relationship with their kamui. It seems now as if the two of these spook aspects are being combined in modern Western culture to produce a whole range of new spook-based experiences which do not depend greatly on shamanic initiation or spiritual protection. Instead, a simple guided meditation can lead one to a personal spirit-spook, a guardian angel or channelled information.
This is a softer, more homely way of experience the world of spooks than we have possibly seen before in human history. Humans are taking back control of their world-experiences, and entering a spirit world which is warm and welcoming, combining elements of the shamanic with the positive, the healing with wisdom and ushering in what is aptly called the New Age of Spiritual Philosophy. Spooks, like our individualistic culture, have become individuals, tailor-made to each questing nervous system that seeks them.
But beyond this warmth, beyond the steady new cultural realities that are being born out of the decline of the old religions, lies something much older, yet at the same time something that speaks of the future. In the Hyperspaces of DMT trips and Salvia besagements are spooks located where shamanism, aliens and spirit guides meet, and transform into something beyond reality.
(c) Bruce Rimell, June 2005
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