An interplanar experience?

One of the reasons we need other people to talk to about our practice is so that, when we have an experience which we have not read about, we can talk it through, apply language to it, and understand it.

Not too long ago, I was talking with a fellow child of Hermes (Hermian? Hermesian? Hermetic? Hermei?) about The Dude, as we call him, and his propensity to, for lack of a better word, engage in Maximum Cuddles with humans that experience him in a gnostic sort of way. I’m telling you this for a reason, I swear. Just bear with me for a moment.

We shared a sort of “wow” moment about our mutual experience of ghostly tactile sensations: a feeling of soft, warm electricity on the skin, in the shape of a hand, or whatever body part. Then I asked, “what do you suppose it is when deities appear to be physically present?”

There was a long awkward pause, and then I had to clarify:

– I say “appear” to be physically present because I was lying next to someone when it happened, and he did not notice.

– I was awake. In fact, the manifestation woke me up.  After that, I was awake for the day. I might have noticed waking up a second time.

– I say “physical” because the manifestation appeared solid. He seemed to have weight, and even a scent.

This experience, it turned out, was not one we shared. If you have had this kind of experience, please contact me. I have some ideas about how this might be happening, but I need more data. In the meantime, I wanted to run through some of my thought process about this sort of experience.

Not an OBE

If you have the ability to move your physical body, I’d wager, you aren’t having an “Out of Body Experience.” Still, this experience shared some similarities in common with the early stages of an O.B.E., namely,

– Large body movements, such as actively flipping over from lying on your stomach to lying on your back  will cause the experience to end.

– The visual aspect of the manifestation (though curiously, nothing in the scene around us) looked very much like what one tends to see during an OBE. He looked overly perfect, and the physical dimensions of body parts seemed fluid. A hand might grow in size, for example, and then become smaller again.

– You know that sensation you have when you are underwater, and physical motion is slower? My thoughts felt a tad like that. It was not normal waking consciousness. It’s a consciousness that feels similar to what happens during early stage OBE, in contrast to the incoherent thoughts that occur when I enter sleep.

When you have an Out of Body Experience, you can see, hear, feel, and even smell. These sensations are not dependent on your physical senses, but feel very real. Is this what is going on?

Like scrying, maybe?

When a person attempts to scry, the object is to allow the non-physical vision of the soul to bleed together with physical vision. The technique, generally, is to look two or three inches behind the black surface. If you are successful, you should feel what is called “the crawling of the ants,” or a strange, electric tingling between the eyes.

Is this similar to the small, local vibrations that are described during the early stages of an OBE? Is it possible that, during scrying, you are allowing  just the eyeball part of your soul to go slightly out of body? What if other senses had the capability of precisely that kind of bleeding together? If so, then the electrical tingling which both my colleague and I experienced may be the first sign that this is beginning to occur. The next question becomes, what do you actually need to do in order to accomplish the whole enchilada?

My friend and I decided to call this sort of thing, “an inter-planar experience,” or IPE.

OMIGOD MAYBE THIS IS A THING THAT WE CAN MAKE HAPPEN TO PEOPLE ON PURPOSE IN A RITUAL!!!

Honestly, that was the thought I had about thirty seconds after this happened to me, which is why I jumped out of bed and paced around my house until the sun came up, rather than going back to sleep.

I do not know how I will do it, yet, but to me, having multiple people see the same apparently physical manifestation of a spiritual being is the Holy Grail of theurgic ritual, and I am now completely convinced that it is possible. It may be that just by giving the thing a name, and making people aware that it exists, it will simply become a more common experience.

I hope so. 🙂