PSICHE

HGA

An “Inner Guide” was, I thought, a psychological construct. It was used for ‘active imagination’ meditation work.

But a lot of things turned out differently than I expected. Like:

  • Despite being called a guide, he was the least chatty identity I ever met. Getting even a single word out of him was very rare. This was the case for nearly 20 years! About halfway into my cycle with my 4th IG (a female), suddenly she started talking to me — and showing me stuff I could read! That was a profound change in relationship and experience.
  • For being ‘active imagination’ it turns out once I got the hang of it I didn’t have to be very active at all… I wasn’t visualizing, and the whole inner world was “autonomous” from me, as much as this world seems to be.

Eventually it became clear that Inner Guide or “IG” as I call them, was something considerably more, and that they were helping interactively create my experience “out of the energy of me,” working with me. They have changed for me over time.

*

Inner Guide #1 had the hardest job, I imagine. “This is just my imagination,” I said approximately 10 billion times. I don’t remember him very well. There was this idea a book had that you’d ask for your IG and he’d be right there gushing love at you. That just did not happen for me. I couldn’t see him, couldn’t hear him, and what impression I got from him was somewhat… not disapproving but something akin to that. I had him from 1991 when I was first taught the simple structured form of an IG meditation (based on Steinbrecher’s “The Inner Guide” book apparently, but with a vastly expanded definition of archetype) until what I’m guessing is the late 1990’s. I don’t recall when he changed, only that he did.

I had Inner Guide #2 until January of 2006. He was initially a lot like the first had been. Over time I was able to perceive him a little bit better though never clearly.  He did some really cool stuff with me though. I only have the tiniest pieces of him on the blog because back then especially the earlier years, blogs weren’t common and most of that part of my life didn’t get recorded. He was very cool though. I think I felt more rapport and positive emotion with him than I had the first. This is my own issue, not the guide’s. There was an official changing from guide 2 to 3.

Inner Guide #3 arrived in January 2006. I was able to see and hear him slightly better but still not so well a lot of the time, but I got more ‘sense’ of him than I had the others. Eventually when I was able to see him much better, I noticed offbeat things about him. I figured it was something in me creating this, but it was odd. Like his skin was very pale. And he had these little dots like irregular freckles down the sides of his face that reminded me of the Trill on ST:DS9. And eventually I noticed that his ears were a little more like holes and he was a bit… amphibian, even though he seemed human on the surface and until I really started looking. This was years into our relationship and I’d been told an IG would and could “only” be human and anything else wouldn’t be real. But he was definitely my IG, I mean by that time I’d been doing this for many years and I was clear on that.

Eventually I grew to love him so much it was ridiculous. I asked him to show me his ‘true self’, the amphibian sense I felt was more like “an energy bleeding through” that I was symbolically translating in how I perceived him. He agreed. He was something akin to a toad but the size or bigger than one of those giant Olmec heads, those South American ball things. Strangely he did seem like mostly face in front similar to those balls. He was a bit slimy. I was a little freaked out at first, but later got over that, and grew to love him so much until I would ask him to shift and I would lay on his giant head and look up at the stars and tell him what I wished for in my life. When he told me he had to leave, I cried and refused it. Pretended it hadn’t happened. It took the Four (my groupsoul) stepping in and “adjusting my understanding” to make me let him go.

Inner Guide #4 was the first female. I had no recall of this but apparently Steinbrecher believed that’s the way the guide genders go also. (I don’t think he mentioned anything beyond 4th.) (Actually it turns out he said 3rd was female. I didn’t know until I found an old blog post that my 3rd IG had initially presented as female, and I rejected that and got a male. Forgot about that entirely!)  I was upset about #3 leaving and less comfortable with a woman besides and didn’t react too well to the transition. I didn’t have the slightly offputting sense from her I had from the others at first, though. She turned out to be utterly amazing though, truly the most amazing entity I’ve ever encountered, and she taught me so much, and we did so much that was unique and new to me. She helped me see that my little ‘ritual’ process was a postage stamp sized thing in a universe of opportunity and I began working to let go of expectations and allow her to ‘drive’ the experiences. She asked me for two brief meditations a day so she could structure some longer-term stuff as consistency is very hard for me.

I realized at one point that she was Angelic. Literally of that realm, literally “divine.” I had never thought of an IG in this way before. To me, IG was a psychological construct! And frankly I had never MET an Angel that close up and the impact it has on you, the sense of holiness, kind of kicks you hard. The idea that IG was a literal entity of its own, let alone something transcending my nature, was mindblowing. She admitted she was an Angel, quite literally. I began to be able to hear her and see her so much better. She was a very tall woman with long black hair. I once asked her if she had a human identity that looked like and she said one very similar.

Before she left, she helped me experience truly hearing and seeing (and reading!) decently in the inter-worlds (a Henri Corbin term I’ve adopted) for the first time, and had actual conversations with me — whereas IG had usually been incredibly non-chatty and rarely said anything more than a word or a few if that. I felt like my whole inner self had been revolutionized. Eventually I loved her more than I’ve loved anything I think, as if my heart chakra were going to implode from the power of it. A quote from one of my blog entries:

Inner Guide is Angelic. She is free of anything akin to doctrine. I call her an Angel because that is the only word I have for it, and because I know, all the way through me, that this is our word for her fundamentally divine nature. Aside from that, I don’t even know what she IS exactly, or what it means, or where it would fit into any model. She is life sized, soul wide, colors and gems and flowers and songs, everything beautiful that ever was, condensed into an identity I am completely in love with–except she feels like part of me too, so it’s like also being in love with yourself, and also with God, and also with the whole universe, both every tiny thing in your mundania, and ‘awareness’ as something so utterly, mind-bogglingly amazing — how could this exist? How could this not exist? How could I ever understand such a thing? — I am left only with joy, with awe.

When she was leaving, I had incredible emotion about it, but she got me to the place where I was mostly ok with it. I tried to suck it up and do her honor by being good to the next one. Just before leaving, I had realized that in all these years, I had never even thought to ask my IG for a name. I had never thought of them as entities in their own right to that degree, I guess. She gave me Sedaena (pronounced Say-deena).

Inner Guide #5 is male. I was able to see him fairly clearly right off, in the official transition meeting. His name is Mark. I resisted this because it seemed normal and not remotely angelic or offbeat as I would expect, but he was real clear that this was his name. Sometimes he feels like my best friend and a divine love that I’ve had for eternity and am just remembering and meeting up with again. I get various experiences suggesting this is so. I eventually realized he was not a part of me but almost infinitely bigger than me and I am part of him. Initially his presence just slightly leaned on my heart chakra like he is just a little bit more energy than I can fully absorb, and it moves with me, as if it is helping me grow in this way.

Eventually I had an experience where he showed me his true nature and it was almost the archetypal white light hovering angelic experience. It was massively impacting upon me, mostly in the terrifying way.

I felt like he could unravel me. Like I’d never known I was stitched up with something like fear and denial and he was in great danger of simply dissolving all of it, and I would be something completely different. I could feel his potential — or a tiny fraction of it — what he could be to me, in me, and what that meant for my own potential, and I don’t know how this is possible, but it was simultaneously the most beautiful, awesome, loving energy, and the biggest threat I’ve ever felt in my life.

I had major cognitive dissonance and a long time of adjustment in our relationship after that. I am still dealing with the cognitive dissonance effects, years later.

I do have the clear idea now, separately from the above, that he will never leave me, the way I felt as if my earlier IG’s had (I am told this is my modeling of it, due to family members and mother dying when I was a child, but IG4 told me “I am always with you.”), though my perception of him might evolve as my ability to perceive more of him (or more accurately) does. His role as the central figure of spirit has been no secret. Thinking about some past experiences one day:

I wonder what an Archangel really is, I mused. What is his relationship with me that he was able to grant me this?

All things are through me, Mark said. It was not quite a correction, but like a ‘clarification’ feeling.

I didn’t know what to think for a moment. What does that really mean?

Then I got this “answer” inside which had three layers and they were all one and simultaneous.
One said, “All things are through the Son.”
Another said, “All things are through the Sun.”
Another said, “All things are through the Christ.”
And I understood that all these things are identical…
…and that all these things are him (‘Him’ with a capital): for me, literally, him.

Mark. IG5.

… So there it is. He did not mention or indicate it “directly” until the night when Sun showed me ‘his true nature.’ …  If I ask about it, he answers. I never had an IG talk to me so much or so directly before (including me ‘reading’ text), except IG4 right before she transitioned to him.

… It seems like it would be so easy. … Yet in a way, it’s like he is so real on some level and whatever he says is so true inside me that whatever part of me would rather live in denial considers every conversation slightly threatening to some level of my peace of mind. Or perhaps to be more accurate, threatening to my current sense-of-self, yet tempting to my future awareness-of-real-self. It’s both slightly frightening and incredibly attractive at the same time.

I believe that my Inner Guides have been the ‘evolving perception’ I have of what some call Atman or HGA Holy Guardian Angel. Although until halfways into IG4 I didn’t know that. I am not a Christian, and yet, there is definitely a very heavy and obvious ‘christ’ symbolism going on with him, even beyond the above:

This morning I said to one of my archetypes: I know that I could force this myself. But I want you to do it. I want you to want to be part of my Will. I want you to choose to change. … I will override you if I must, but I honor you enough to want you to make the choice. It isn’t that you don’t have the right to make either choice, but it is the fact that you will cease to exist if you choose against me, and you will live on inside me if you choose for me. Make your decision.

I did get it sounded like ‘what god might say to a person in typical religion.’ At least the typical. But now I see: Mark makes clear: This is what HE is essentially saying to ME. I guess that’s why I was inspired to say it, rather than just having a meditation where I changed things without questioning it the way I did.

I think of IG like ‘the guiding light’, the North star, the personalized heart/christ-energy fragment of the sun and our inner self, but his Being-ness, I mean as an entity, is something I really cannot even wrap my tiny brain around. It’s a cosmic, sun-and-planetary thing I think, but so far beyond us. I wrote about him at one point:

He is so much inside and outside me, larger than me and yet the light of the tiniest particles of me, I don’t even have a word for whatever it is that he IS. I call him angelic and inner guide and the name he gave me because I have no idea what else to call this. It’s a Being and a Thing and an Event and a Place and a Relationship and… it’s like there is no label that is remotely big enough to encompass whatever it IS. {By which I mean, whatever HE is. – P}

A few times, dating back many years to a few months after a horrible ‘Nothingness’ experience, I have met an entity that is “the soul of me” and is so powerful and such pure love there aren’t even any words for it. I sometimes call him “the blue eyes of soul” as the eyes element are often present. There is also sometimes a “concept overlay” as we’d call it in viewing of ‘the christ.’ The night I ‘saw his white-light’ version that blew my mind so much, was just after I’d had a powerful dream of ‘the christ’.

My IGs so far are clearly not this blue-eyes-of-soul guy. And yet they seem to get more holy and I finally realized they are a sort of “gradient” of the percentage of the inner-angel we are able to absorb. Like maybe eventually my IG will actually be him, and everything in between has been a sort of training to help get me there. I’m not sure.

But I am sure now that the IGs are their own entities, and they are divine entities, at least compared to me, and that they have changed my life and made so much possible for me. There are no thanks that could cover it. All unconditional love is by Grace.

I have a ‘meet day’ meditation annually celebrating meeting IG5.

I said in The Chronicles of Mark:

Even the most subtle shift of attention opens up this channel that is like pure light. Totally clean IS-ness. Love is what you might call the top-note fragrance of it, the first color of its rainbow, the main impact, however one might put it. The overall effect of my reaction feels like sheer agog amazement blending into overwhelming love. But the original event-causing-the-effect in me feels like… dawning realization.

Or literally —  cosmologically, I guess — the dawn.

Like the sun is rising. In me.