Self-Integration Work? (Standard Psychology Or Esoteric)

Post Reply New Topic

I'm curious to know if anyone is up for a chat about self-integration work?

I was considering whether or not to write a long independent essay on pdf to this topic but I thought it might be better to perhaps check in here first to see if it's anything that people have already checked into.

What I mean is that there's a lot that goes into a person keeping themselves emotional healthy and giving themselves extra buffering for both keeping themselves stable in the face of stress and challenges, let alone when you're considering taking it as far as self-actualization. That's all the more true when you're dealing with a significant notch in your life and more so if that notch is something that grates at you daily.

I got on this path because I realized that the troubles and complexities that came with ASD, for me at least, was too much for most psychological tricks let alone any external endeavors to work on. For a long time I've felt like my only really powerful advantage against the gaps this has created in my life has been my ability to see around my obstacles and recognize problems ahead of time. I've also noticed that the more I'm able to integrate my world and link one topic with the next for a steady framework the better things get.

There's a lot of approaches to self-integration and working to weave stability and consent not only between the various ideas and beliefs you have (cancelling as many situations as you can which are in unneeded opposition) but also between your conscious and subconcious reaches. I know Jung and Adler were looking in this direction, there are fields of depth and transpersonal psychology related to this. Also, for those willing to farther out on a limb (the way I have) there's stuff like Golden Dawn, BOTA, meditating on the tarot, etc..


Any takers? I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on the topic, what you think is really available to most people on the spectrum from your experience, and how the process has shaped up for you so far - ie. what advice would you give to other aspies who are looking inward to their subjective life and conscious/subconscious relationship for answers?

To give a small example:

I've meditated on what kinds of influences that I need to stabilize my internal life first and foremost. From there I've come up with a way to give my internal dynamics a voice by way of a somewhat adult version of working with imaginary friends. Part of what set me on that path were realizing that a lot of the times where I was really tearing into myself over some kind of personal failure, some threat at work that I couldn't resolve, really some area where society condoned me whipping myself sadistically - I knew the worst possible thing was to follow that prescription, I knew if I talked to other people they'd console me and tell me not to do it but I wanted to be self-sufficient and not bother them with my problems. Part of my desire to resolve these things myself was also the assumption that almost everyone has their difficulties with keeping a positive face in life and that what little energy they have to work their own solutions I'd additionally be tapping and diverting to myself.

There's another side to this also - It's fascinating, especially when you're only used to listening to your own voice in your mind, to see just how much effect a secondary voice can have. If it's not just as good as having external validation it's incredibly close. From that understanding I began drafting powerful imaginary entities (by now probably not-so-imaginary), who were interested in keeping me on track, keeping my mind healthy, keeping my life balanced, and helping me to find solutions to problems or at least better work-arounds to the ones I couldn't solve. I had to add too - they're not there to absorb my responsibility or help me dodge the obligations and challenges of life, they're there to make sure that my orientation to these challenges and obligations stays as positive and possible and that my engagement with them be as constructive as possible.

In western philosophy that balancing act was projected onto what were classically called the four elements - bearing toward the concerns of physicality (earth), bearing toward the sphere of thought (air), emotion (water), and will (fire). These would be laid out in a cross pattern, each passive across from it's corresponding active. Will articulating and circumscribing emotion within certain bounds, emotion informing will of the operationing details that it needs to address and direct itself toward. Physicality keeping the mind from launching off too far into the impractical, mind working to keep physicality from deadening creativity and curiosity. In a way one could come up with - in something of a prosaic sense - a friend for each of these elements.

The point is that you have to keep in mind that in doing this, in creating 'elemental teachers' within yourself for the lack of a better term, is that there are a few rules you'll need to establish them on and establish your understanding of them on so that they actually become part of your resource pool and assist you daily life rather than getting taken over by more self-destructive currents:

1) They're always in a position of desiring to help you better understand, decode, and engage your own life.
2) They'll tell you what you need to hear, and if your not sure what you need to hear at first they'll stay silent and simply try and help in what ways they can until you've built enough processing intuition for them to actually be a step or so ahead. When you're still just starting and building your relationships with them you'll want to deeply consider what qualities are fiery, which are watery, which are airy, and which are earthy, and ultimately build four companions whose personalities and appearances you could be deeply endeared to for a long time. During that time they may have suggestions, you'll have to see if these are ultimately in line with their function and put suggestions aside that seem to stray off course too far.
3) They will never agree with callous, self-absorbed, or impetuous judgments from the outside world - nor will they encourage you to react in kind or in violence. What they will push you to do is look at these events in their broader contexts, likely how these things relate to the people in question more than yourself, but they'll also assist you in drafting ways to overcome the obstacles simply by learning from them. If you are completely in the wrong on something or have done something terrible they'll guide you toward the resolution which is most in line with integrity and from there help you analyze the source of that action to see what needs to be healed or resolved in you so that the temptation to repeat such actions is taken care of at its root.
4) They'll always advise you when your reserves are getting dangerously low - fire being the alarm for needing to cultivate or rest will, water for times when emotional control and balance are ebbing, air for whether you're at risk of lifting off into outer space, earth for whether your either starting to shirk physical responsibilities or whether you might be dragging your will, emotions, and mind through the muck in ways that you don't need to.

Also, perhaps most important for covering all states you'll find yourself in from day to day:

5) You literally cannot offend them and equally cannot go to war with them. If they find you inconsolable they'll simply disappear, won't be there to hear any invective you throw at them, and there's literally nothing you can say to them that will either hurt them or make them go away in anger or tears. They'll behave in incredibly rational ways toward you if you lose it, rational meaning they won't be floor mats either. Rather they'll come back when you've calmed down, probably also stay away if you're swimming in too deep a pool of remorse for that behavior, and when things are back in balance that teacher will come back and calmly ask 'Are you ready to pick up where we left off?'.


That's really just one example of a balancing structure. You could have also a being who you might consider something like your 'master of security', whose both the gatekeeper of your subconscious mind and the monitor of your thoughts who becomes something like your own private prophet to let you know when things are going off course and what course corrections you may need to take. Always in deep love and altruism toward you, also giving you a hug when you need it the most. In a way this will also inevitably happen with the four elemental instructors, as you start to get the feeling - as you work with them - that there's an invisible fifth instructor who presides over and smiles down benevolently both upon the four and yourself, that is the instructor of quintessence or spirit which is the originating source of all four elements.

Again - this isn't about escapism, it's about organizing and cultivating internal resource that you can bring to your daily life. It's also about having more profound problem-solving apparatus within you and, in the best possible outcome, being able to be the kind of person where when you're around people your an energetic net-positive rather than net negative. If you're worried that this inevitably lead to escapism you may want to work more simply with prayer or affirmations, otherwise if you still wanted to utilize your imagination you'd just have to be sure to set up firm safety checks along the way and make sure that your earth teacher is particularly strong.

May I ask, why these imaginery beings and not spirits?

A few reasons I can think of:

1) Most people don't believe in them, they can cope with concepts of psychology and neurolinguistic programming as that at least doesn't demand a belief in something beyond the brain (which should really be optional). This stuff works whether Deepak Chopra's right about the universe or whether Daniel Dennett's right.

2) Assuming they are real - that's really dangerous if a person's not ready. If someone does that unprepared at best they'll find out that most of these things are pathological liars and scam artists, at worse they're looking at the possibility of harassment or obsession. While it's true that most people will never encounter anything that's necessarily malevolent there's a lot , really most of what's out there, that isn't particularly intelligent - whether it's shed astral bodies, elementals, thought forms, larvae, etc.. Whether it's real semi-intelligent debris floating around an astral sphere or whether it's the most base elements of one's subconscious - they're really better off structuring and safeguarding their inner spaces first to able to screen their calls and qualify what's allowed to talk to them.

3) The majority of what people will be working with, in either case, is elements of their own subconscious and - if ever - really just occasionally outside entities. It's just as effective to build wise/sentient structures in your own mind because for the most part it's what you'd be doing anyway even if you were seeking outside contact.

If someone wants to work with spirits I'd recommend they read Israel Regardie, any of the Servants of the Light authors (Fortune, Knight, WE Butler, DA Nowicki), or William G Gray's material because their work deals first with banishing and purifying ones self, then reaching out to higher beings, archangels, or deities for instruction and support. Regardless I'd really recommend they get a good working understanding of what can go wrong with that and how to safeguard themselves from having things go wrong.

Thank you for the detailed answer. I remember you PMing me quite a while back about experiences with spirits. I can't say I remember much of it now though.

I've understood that the spirit world is a potentially dangerous one, and along with my own experiences I kind of edged away from it. I was thinking along the lines of imaginery beings possibly (?) being linked to mental disorders which scares me a bit too.

May I ask, what resources are there around to explain what kind of spirits exist out there? I've encountered a few throughout my lifetime, and wondered if you could offer me any explanation as to who (and what) they all were?

Simple question - where do "hunches" actually come from? Is it from within, or is it a being that prewarns or notifies about things? About major turning points in life, too.

Back to topic, you say these beings help one to stay as positive as possible...I've found personally that sometimes it takes a turnaround...things going wrong, then correcting themselves again...before I really realise anything about myself or what's around me.

I hope the above is clear, I'm not able to think straight at the moment.

I think the relationship's usually the other way around - ie. people batting at imaginary entities pestering them which simply came out of nowhere and which they believe to real without any examination. When you lead the charge you'll typically maintain the gumption to have a much different relationship to what's happening. People worrying that they might go crazy, worry that some lower aspect of themselves will be able to steal their reality and dominate them - it's a societally bred fear but I've found the more I do this the more it reminds me of anti-drug hyperbole in how overblown it was as compared to the actuality of things.


Oddly enough most esoteric lit usually doesn't touch on that a whole lot. When you ask that though one name in particular stands out as far as a guy who seems to have done a lot of cataloguing of various types of entities and how to fend of demons along with his lucid dream and energy work writings - Robert Bruce.

Anything in the Golden Dawn diaspora is usually worth reading for a different reason - ie. it's energy building and mind building, the kind of stuff that typically both makes someone more sensitive and also helps with flushing out blockages in their nerve currents. Robert Bruce has some interesting stuff there although Israel Regardie has probably written the most used stuff - ie. namely he invented the Middle Pillar exercise which is the premier energy working in the west and he's written extensively on LBRP (although a lot of people more recently have decided to revamp the colors, the divine names, etc. in a lot of ways that make a fair amount more sense).


If you go with the materialist paradigm it's a subconscious parallel process surfacing. If you go with the complex metaphysical approach, particularly of the variety that BOTA tends to hammer in with their monographs, your subconscious seems to have multiple stages - both neurological and something like a local web of ideas, and in addition to that you have something like a higher form of conscious awareness, usually disconnected from the conscious self's awareness, that only the subconscious can see and which can reflect its will and communications through the subconscious (if you ever look up The Lovers card in either the Rider-Waite or BOTA decks that's a diagram of the situation with Adam as the conscious self, Eve as the subconscious, and Raphael as the superconscious). Really, come to think of it, everything along the path from the Magician, the High Priestess, to the Empress and Emperor shows a logistical see-saw of conscious vs. subconscious.


Well, with the technique I was describing you're deliberately programming that into them. It takes a while of keeping their habits in that direction. You mentioned intuition before, if your subconscious sees you using vehicles like this often it'll use those as outlets for communication so for a while you'll just get what you already know thrown back at you in a helpful or reinforcing manner (which can be quite useful at times when you're emotionally under fire and won't be able o to see the forest for the trees). After a while though more can start happening.


And you have to be fluid and roll with that. If a being you ensouled with your own thoughts pulls some averse behavior or gives some advice that seems out of range, questionable, or doesn't seem true, part of the game is giving it enough plausible deniability to come up with an excuse for it, perhaps suggesting that the error itself was a hallucination or something to that effect, and you can pull various tricks to bring it back in. You want to avoid putting such thought creations in a position where they can accidentally be put to ultimatum - otherwise you can corner yourself into an adverse relationship with it; so long as you avoid any head-on collisions like that in the meanings you give its behavior you can typically swing things back around. Worst comes to worst be a materialist of convenience by telling yourself its just a thought creation if things get dodgy, then pull it back in line and let it be more than a thought creation for as long as you can.

Something else I just got to thinking about, the idea of banishing certain kinds of visual or movement distortion if you do something like rendering a 3-D environment in your mind. For example, in AMORC, there's ascent to the Celestial Sanctum which is a place that you try to build, keep somewhat simple, but maintain exact replication of every time you go. If you ever try Samuel Rowe's A Short Course in Scrying you might decide to try to get up, move around, sense kinesthetic direction and sensation in your limbs, but when you try to walk - especially for me I've found this in an open area - you end up smacking from side to side, hitting the ground in front of you, behind you, a bit like a helium balloon that's getting battered around by the wind. It was actually helpful for me to banish that not only by someone holding my hand while I walked but also having them assure me that these bounces were an artifact - that they were a hallucination and that it the violent bouncing back and forth was just a sensation not an actuality. The Golden Dawn gets even more complex - uses the seven double letters of the Hebrew alphabet for banishing certain kinds of distortion people get when they try pathworking the Tree of Life.

Hope that was helpful rather than too much info!