Day 2, Session 1

6/17/21

Spiritual Simulations, n. - Daydreams crafted by the gods to allow the individual, nee. Humans, to try different paths in life within the confines of their own mind.

Yes, I am making this a thing. Because they help. Significantly.

As a kid, I was always praised for how creative and imaginative I was. Mom always tried to claim I inherited it from her, but we’re not going to get into it. I, on the other hand, knew my creative skills were limited to visual art and problem-solving. I didn’t know what imagination was. As a noun, it’s the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of an external object not present to the senses. Well. When I try to draw a face I have never seen before, the uncanny valley is disturbing. But I can describe a face I have never seen, in text, just by picturing it. However, to do that, I would have to feel the details. I can sculpt a face I have never seen before, just by doing this. Because I felt it. It’s the same thing with objects. If I try to copy by sight, I can, to a point, but it’s always too dark in shaping. If I touch it, though, I can recreate it in a sculpting medium. But, to do either of these things to reproduce a likeness, I have to feel it. And, if I feel it, then is it not present in the senses?

Spiritually, I’m blind. I have to feel my way around and listen closely to the whispers. If it weren’t for the twins keeping the other spirits at bay, I would be completely deafened as I tried to block the spirits out while the universe was doing a download. There are times when I get hit with some information, like how to pronounce a word I’m trying to sound out because it’s in another language, and I suddenly just know exactly how to say it. Case in point, Siderum; Latin for of the stars which I was going to use for a surname for Astraea’s character before I saw how tragic that turned out. I was trying to decide if it was Side-rum or Sider-um when out of nowhere I get hit with “See-der-oom" with a roll to the R in the middle. My eyebrow twitched as I heard Lucifer’s bass in my head, but I had to validate it. I looked up an audio clip and sure as shit, a baritone pronounced it the same way I heard it.

So, that makes me wonder if every story I have writing hasn’t just been a fucking cloak-and-dagger bit by the gods to Shadow Work my ass without me knowing it. I’m starting to wonder if my imaginary friends growing up weren’t the spirits. All this time I thought I was a writer, turns out I’m just a character who knows how to take dictation and edit. Kinda makes sense when I think about the fact that every story I tried to write, using myself as a skeleton, never reached a climax. Fucking literary edging. I write stories trying to “imagine” what life would be like if (fill in the blank). I was writing them because I couldn’t imagine what my real life would be like past a list of goals to accomplish to keep track of progression. So, I created characters and enlisted spirits to play them in my head so I could experience it. Didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time, but it makes sense when I think about it.

The Meat Brain is a bit slower than spirit. And when I say a bit, please, feel free to feel my sarcasm. So, no shit, there I was, in the midst of a slight existential crisis as I realized I have had spirits in my head this entire time and I’m not fucking crazy. Wouldn’t have fucked Crazy as a character because he was gay, wouldn’t fuck Crazy after I realized my spiritual cousin was the one playing him. So, for my lack of imagination, I have trouble visualizing things without the gods’ help, giving the receptors in my Meat Brain a spiritual boost to see things I’ve never seen physically. Hence the Spiritual Simulations VS Daydreaming argument. Yes, an imaginative individual can create something no one has ever seen before, imagine a scenario and create a new person in a new place that doesn’t exist. Except in spirit.

Now, I am creative in every sense of the word, that’s how I can make sense of the noise in my head. And, I promise, that is not bitterness in my voice, it’s disappointment in myself for not figuring it out sooner.

Shadow Working, people. That’s why it’s important. Shadow Working is when you can start figuring shit out at hyper speed, recognize the ripples as they are happening instead of having to look at it in retrospect. Then again, that’s why the warnings come after the spells. Where was I? Yes, Daydreams VS Spiritual Simulations. So, daydreams can be contained and generated by a single consciousness. Sometimes they affect the person’s way of thinking in a way that helps them solve a problem, sometimes they’re just a fun way to pass the time.

For me, the Spiritual Simulations are a Demonic Cram school as Deimos and Phobos run me through scenario after scenario in which I am forced to face every fear and anxiety I have to the pulse-pounding beat of whatever metal song comes up next on a random Spotify playlist. And, no, I will not write out those scenes. Fuck you, that’s private. But I will share one more, aside from my fear of success. Agoraphobia. When my brain rebooted following a near-death experience, all of a sudden, I had anxieties out the ass that I had never before experienced. I get my fear of feeling trapped, by-product of being raised by a controlling parent. I get my fear of not being able to find help when I need it. Been there, done that, and its legitimate fear because of it. But, all of a sudden, I felt like I had all eyes on me to the point where I felt like the March Hare, from caffeine jitters to trying not to stab people for being unreasonable. Not going to lie, that was why I invoked the Twins in the first place.

I needed help getting ahold of these anxieties and so I could pull my shit back together. A constellation of anxieties is an absolutely poetic way to describe what I felt like for a very long time. I felt like my spirit was fractured into a million pieces and every last fragment was a hot fucking mess. Writing for my Tiefling was like drinking myself sober on madness to wake up and realize I was losing it. So, I asked for the gods of Psychological Warfare to come in and play cowboy for me after dropping the Tiefling off at school. And that was before Shadow Working when I had no idea they were actually helping me through my writing. They skipped the cinematic stuff, too, and went straight for the jugular.

Every move I made; I had the mother of all villains out thinking me. Cassia pointed out, before I went to visit, that me planning a vacation almost felt like I was planning a heist because I had to account for the toxic family I live with. But, after being trained in the Spiritual Simulations to be able to predict toxic behaviors, arming me for the battle ahead as I make my escape from the Hell that I’m in, I was able to leave with a smile on my face and was able to relax once I got to Louisianna. For the first time, I traveled on my own and reached my destination with absolutely no issues. I remember sitting back and just feeling at peace in the quiet, looking up at the stars and smiling to see they were different. I felt more in my skin and yet connected to the whole of existence than I ever had been before.

When I was up there, I felt inspired in a way I’d forgotten. For a moment, I believed in magic again. I don’t know what I was looking forward to, but I didn’t feel disappointed. I got the chance to discover what boredom felt like and have someone quantify it. I hadn’t realized that’s what that was. I just felt bad because I felt like I should be doing something productive. I felt like I was being lazy every time I tried to relax without medication. Finding out that I get bored very easily made a lot of sense. I’m not ADHD, I just crave mental stimulation. And, up there, it was the first time it had been quiet in my head; like, if I were to speak out loud, only one person would be able to hear it, instead of feeling like I’m always addressing an audience. But I didn’t know what to say, so I just listened. Unfortunately, I hadn’t completed my Shadow Work so all I could hear was static when I did hear something other than my own voice or the voices of the people present in their own Meat Suits, namely Cassia and Grizzly.

When I got home, even though it sucked because the noise started up the moment I touched down at the airport, I had a renewed feeling of purpose and motivation to finish the project I’d started, then go out and find a job to help change my circumstances. I was no longer banking on being a success at writing, but I at least wanted to finish the damned thing. But, when I sat down to write, total silence. Until Aphrodite tried to convince me that I should move to Greece all by myself, trying to stuff some kind of Romantic Comedy bullshit in my head to entice me. To satisfy the goddess when she started complaining about how long it would take for me to save enough money to feel comfortable even considering it. I decided to write Star-crossed Lovers to try and appease her, which it did, thankfully. Especially since I can’t really stand RomComs. I’d rather have something halfway between Comedy and Tragedy without being toxic or destructive. Something real and familiar while always remaining new and exciting. To me, it’s not a fairytale, I’m too much of a cynic and I have seen what happens behind the scenes in fairytales.

Am I a hopeless romantic? Absolutely. I wholeheartedly believe that True Love exists. I’ve seen it in action and watched soulmates hook up, was sitting in the seats, and smiling at their wedding.

But, I know myself well enough to know that if it smells like bullshit, I’m going to say so, poke holes in romantic notions and pretty words that have no resonation in my spirit when I hear them, and I have a sixth sense for snake oil salesmen. Romantic Comedies always rely on some kind of farce to facilitate the romance, when it should feel natural and, above all things, honest. Beginning a relationship on a lie, even if the lie is one of the ones we’ve told ourselves to make us feel better, is the best way to doom it into certain failure. That being said, the biggest lie I ever told myself was that I was happy living the life my parents imagined for me. Unfortunately, that meant John Boy was stuck with me when I believed the lie that, if he didn’t ask me to marry him, I was going to lose him and that he was perfect for me. Even when I tried to deflect the passive aggression from a certain maternal figure, it always landed in a way that made him think I believed it. So, we got married, been together ten years. Getting a divorce as soon as possible and was an amicable decision.

I had to admit, out loud, to allowing myself to become an abuser by reflecting the source of the skill. During the last part of 2019, I had a lot of conversations that started with the words, “I hate myself and here’s why,” before I vomited up my confessions to every single person I had affected negatively in a way that I could perceive, real or not, as it were when quite a few people looked at me like I’d grown a third head and asked why in the Hell I thought I’d hurt them. John Boy was not one of those people. He is, however, a genuinely kind, caring spirit whose only mistake was deciding to stay with me instead of sniffing out the manipulation and ending it. Instead, he played my sword and shield, keeping the worst of the toxic bullshit off my back to give me time to think. More often than not, he would listen to my random ramblings about my writing with a slightly passive expression, husband ear, he called it.

But, passive or not, he was another Meat Brain to listen while I stumbled through trying to explain Spiritual Simulations to someone who didn’t have any interest in Spiritualism. So, while he worked on some random project in the shed, I sat in the chair just outside the door, working on altar plates to send to Cassia for Maman Brigitte and Baron Samedi. By the end of the rambling, he at least understood enough to know I was going to be writing my interactions with my personal pantheon to do my Shadow Work as part of a project to use my own experience as a demonstration.

*****

“Makes sense,” he said with a nod after considering it silently for a little while. “So, what did Phobos say about where you need to start?” he asked, knowing that was the hardest part.

“He said, ‘acknowledge your privilege and the Ego will unravel,’” she said, chewing on the words again. “Acknowledging the privilege part, I understand. I’m a seemingly straight, white female, raised in the Lower Middle Class of the American South, living in a predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood. I acknowledge my privilege with disdain every day, because the word itself invokes the thought that I think I am better than someone else when I know that I’m not. Seeing the injustice and inequality of my friends and neighbors fucking kills me, pisses me off in ways that make me borderline violent. My Black friends accept me, warts and all, because they know I see the spirit of a person before their skin color. All I care about is that they are a genuinely good person and, when I care about them, they care about me in return. I know I don’t understand the struggle of Black people in America, no matter how much I try to relate and sympathize because I have never experienced it firsthand as they have. I don’t know what it’s like to fear for my life at a routine traffic stop, not from other civilians but the cops. I don’t know what it’s like to be met with unfounded hatred because of how I look, or to feel safer in isolation. To me, isolation is where the abuse takes place, so not feeling safe walking outside, for me, would be abject torment constantly. I hate that I can’t walk a mile in their shoes. I want to understand so I can try to help them in whatever way I can, so I can happily be rid of the privilege because it means we’re finally equal. I would rather the only privilege we have to claim as human beings is being able to walk in our own flesh when the dead can’t.”

“That doesn’t sound like acknowledging your privilege, though,” he said. “It sounds like a stance.”

“Hence the issue I’m having with following Phobos’s instructions,” she said, pausing in her work by stabbing her trowel into the plastic bag full of dirt to take a deep breath. “The Ego isn’t who you are at the core, it’s how you view yourself through the eyes of other people, your inner demons lining up to create a wall between yourself and the world.”

“Is that you or Phobos talking?” he asked.

“Probably both,” she admitted, chewing the inside corner of her mouth as she considered it. “What will people see when they take the time to look?” she asked, more to herself than to John Boy. “If I succeed in writing something that resonates with people and gains popularity, I will have everyone, friend and foe, analyzing it and passing judgment on it, commenting on my life whether I like it or not, more often than not out of context. But the human mind is not equipped to give a shit about the inundation of other people’s opinions provided by the internet in the form of social media. That’s why I avoid it like the plague, truth is, I’d rather be Shadow Working than posting online, having to navigate a minefield where everything I post could ignite a flame war with me at the center of it,” she added bluntly. “Taking into account that I also have to deal with toxic family members perpetuating it, to make me the villain in every aspect once people see the source of the traumatic inspiration in the villains I write about. If I become successful, I know, for a fact, that they will do everything in their power to destroy it if they can’t benefit from it. The only way to protect me from that is to dig up all of my skeletons and put them out on the lawn as decorations so they can’t use them as weapons against me later,” she finished and looked up to see John Boy’s dark eyebrow arch slowly up his forehead.

“And, how will that help Cassia?” he asked. “She’s not planning on being a writer.”

“That just means she doesn’t have to share her Shadow Work publicly,” she said easily. “She can do it all in private, talk to her therapist about it if she needs to, but she’ll still get the same benefits from it. Anyone can write, and it doesn’t even have to be ‘good’ to be beneficial. Cassia has trouble calming her mind, getting into a meditative headspace to run her Spiritual Simulations. It’s the same problem I deal with, but writing it helps. Autonomic writing. The only people I would suggest making their Shadow Work public to are the people with aspirations and goals that could lead them into the spotlight if they are successful with it. If I share this with someone who isn’t a writer, all I can tell them is to try writing a letter to themselves or a faceless proxy if they can’t love themselves; someone that understands you intrinsically that you don’t have to explain yourself to and will love you, no matter what. That way, when they go back and read it, they can read it from the recipient’s perspective and feel the love and have pride in themselves for their growth. I used to do the same thing by writing to my ‘soulmate’ before I decided to grow up and embrace being a sexless hermit,” she said only semi-sarcastically.

*****

Since I’m skipping over the fear-based Spiritual Simulations, I’ll spare you the details of having to face my best friend calling me a racist among other slurs that would be thrown at a 5’2” White girl in a failed marriage while living in lower-middle-class America. None of it was real and Cassia was horrified to find out that her voice was one of the many I listened to on repeat as I tried not to respond with anger or hatred, but suffice it to say I felt emotionally sandblasted and it took a while to recover.

Putting Phobos and Deimos’s altar plate on my desk helped quite a bit moving forward, that and pulling from memory instead of imagination. By picturing a real-world space that I had seen, had meaning, and was intimate with, the more solid I felt in the memory. But instead of remembering the details of the things that happened there, I remembered the spirit. All I had to do was pick a stage.

For me, it was a black box theater built in a condemned house, just outside the club district next to the train tracks. I could still smell the awful stench of rotting chocolate syrup and red food dye curdling under the stage. No matter how much we tried to clean it. With the thunderous sound of the train rolling past with its horn blaring at the crossroads, it was a running joke to point out how fantastic the idea was to put a theater right there. The rickety steps still groaned as I walked down them, house right, towards the stage that sat only twelve inches above the first row that had been deemed the splash zone for our theatrical shenanigans.

*****

6/18/21

Day 3, Session 2

Getting a handle on the mechanics of talking to him, Iona finished her to-do list as a tech, walking around in the memory for a bit with a sense of nostalgia as she remembered the feeling of her spirit back then, and called, once again, on Deimos.

“What is this place?” Deimos asked, once again taking on Crazy’s lanky frame and pink peep hair, sunglasses, and t-shirt. That time it was the “Type O-Positive" artwork from Type O-Negative.

“It was the last place I felt like I was on the right path, albeit a bit worse for wear,” she said, looking around fondly at the bowing step platforms where the chairs sat and the creaky boards of the stage. “I had just gotten the courage to leave Darren and, a few months later, I got a call from a friend I used to work with asking if I wanted to help with a project of his. It was this strange halfway point between being broken and being myself,” she added. “I remember wishing I knew how to get back to the person I was before he hurt me, and I ended up here doing special effects for a campy horror show.”

“Ah so this is what it looks like,” he said, looking around. “Spatial orientation is a little weird in the material plane. Back in the day, all I saw were battlefields and the areas where the refugees gathered. Thank you, for something different.”

“No worries,” she said. “You helping me out with this stuff is a weight off my shoulders. I still owe you more than just a mind to camp in, and I’m going to owe you more still after this shit.”

“You don’t owe me shit,” he said bluntly. “This is what the gods are for, we were born out of a need for someone to provide guidance. The translation was backward when someone said humans were created in the gods’ image. The truth is the gods were created out of the strongest, overwhelming emotions produced by humans. The last deity-level spirits to be born out in the Heavens were the Titans. The humans’ spirits gave birth to us, not Gaia. Aphrodite was the first when she was born out of a wish for True Love made by a human when Uranus’s junk hit the sea nearby. The human thought it was a falling star and wished on it. It hit the sea and she popped out.”

“Astraea?” Iona asked and he chuckled.

“Mom told me once about the day she blinked into existence and the immediate existential crisis she went into when she did. “Thankfully, Aunt Astraea had been around before Zeus was born and had a direct line to Gaia if they had a question, so they figured it out pretty quick and Aphrodite taught the others once they were freed from Kronos. We needed humans to help us learn what we were because we were pure Id suddenly slammed into an omnipotent Ego, that was limited to two senses outside of the spiritual, but there weren’t many skeptics back then. All we had to do was get a message, and we could pop in at the speed of thought with a vision strong enough to produce audio and visual hallucinations. The only one that could materialize a human vessel for himself to inhabit was Heosphoros, and he was a Titan. He understood the inner workings of the Science of existence because he was the foreman for the construction crew that built it. He knew the Alchemical make-up of the human body before the formula was even written. Even then it took Astraea to motivate him to come down to the human world.”

“Would you mind if I let you vent about the plights of a god for a hot minute?” she asked as she took a seat in the front row after vacating the stage where they’d met in the middle.

“Why?” he asked suspiciously, an eyebrow rising over his sunglasses.

“Avoidance,” she said with an unrepentant smile. “In the last three days, you and I have tackled my fears about embarrassment, things not working out as well as I’d hoped in the end, what the possibilities are if I succeed in my endeavors, and spent entirely too much time in Elysium running Spiritual Simulations to help me get an emotional imprint of what my personal paradise can be. We tapped into my Id and I felt my Ego expand so much that I could breathe. Now I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to demonstrate Shadow Work and inject a narrative for emotional After Care. Doing both at the same time, my brain is working so fast, I’m having trouble remember the paths.”

“That’s a good thing,” he said. “You have the emotional imprint of the world you want to build, yes?”

“I want to find a community within my audience,” she said. “I want to attract like-minded people that are understanding and supportive so that I can start building my real-world Elysium because I know, once I die it’ll be time to get back to work doing the same thing for other people. The world I see feels safe and equal, with people reaching out and helping people, without hatred or violence. It may still exist in the world outside the community, but that’s why the community exists; to provide a haven. I want to be able to stand up and say that magic exists and I know that because, without it I wouldn’t be here, building my Elysium in the real world. But to do that I’m going to need help. And, who better to ask for guidance on bending reality to my whim than a god. However, I still need to backtrack somehow so I can find a way to demonstrate Shadow Working for the non-natural. Those that do it naturally don’t know that they're doing it until somebody points it out to them. As soon as we got started and you pointed out my Self Care through acts of devotion, it made sense. The acts of devotion gave me space and time I needed to let my mind wander while my hands did something else. It makes sense that my autonomic writing would come out in typing as well as handwriting because it’s the same principle and I can type with my eyes closed. Occupational hazard,” she said flatly. “But it fucked me up because, when I sit back to block out scenes in my head, I don’t always remember them. However, the emotional imprint is still there.”

“I have an idea,” he said in an almost singsong voice. “Watch this.”

Suddenly, Iona’s train of thought was broken by the Discord chime from her computer letting her know that a wild Cassia had appeared. Back in her head, she heard Phobos explain his motives and started typing them out in the message box after saying hello and getting back the question of what she was up to at that moment.

ShaxoriF – Today at 9:59 PM

Working on Chapter 2 and, before I write this, I wanted to ask. You said it was ok for me to use you as character inspiration, yes?

BratticusKatticus — Today at 10:00 PM

Yes

ShaxoriF — Today at 10:04 PM

The reason I ask is that I fucked myself up (and I am literally in the middle of writing this same rank as I come to the conclusion I am going to ask). I have been writing for so long and doing the Spiritual Simulations, doing my Shadow Work happened so fast I couldn't write it down. But, by helping you (who is the embodiment of the other side to my coin, right down to the fact that you are a black woman with a fear of failure) we can give two different demonstrations that will help the project reach a wider audience. I will keep all of your private stuff private by using my case to try and figure out what kind of advice to give you, as well as making note of what I would do as an extreme case.

Would you mind if I share the points you are willing to give as an example?

BratticusKatticus — Today at 10:04 PM

That's fine

You know I like helping people and helping you is included in that

ShaxoriF — Today at 10:06 PM

And by helping me, we can turn around and help a community of people blast through their Shadow Work to make some real magic happen.

BratticusKatticus — Today at 10:06 PM

And the circle of life continues

“Cool,” Iona said as she settled back into the mental environment again. “Now, all I have to do is keep running Simulations with you for Emotional After Care. At least until I can start enacting the plans I’m cooking up to turn the world into one that doesn’t feel so bad to be in.”

“Yes and no,” he said, shaking his head.

“Why not?” she asked with a frown.

“You still have a few things you need to address publicly,” he said.