Spiritual Edgeplay, or "Psychic Attacks" as part of consciousness awakening

How being an "untuned channel" perpetuated my metaphysical misadventures

Wikimedia Commons

I am admittedly daunted by the task of broaching the intense topic of “psychic attacks,” aka greetings of a metaphysical and negative nature. Like so much that falls within the realm of the esoteric, I was skeptical that this phenomenon existed.
Thoroughly schooled in modern sensibilities, I thought it was nothing more than superstition. That is, until I found myself seemingly experiencing the adverse effects myself—and in a most terrifying and life-endangering way, no less.

Nothing like firsthand exposure to presumed apocrypha to expand the mind into new possibilities! I am reminded of the time I was studying a psychology textbook while training in hypnotherapy, in which the text was adamant that amnesia during hypnotic trance was a myth. And yet, the very next day I experienced a total lack of recall while hypnotized by my clinical supervisor as the subject of a group training demo. I recall the induction and then coming back to ordinary awareness as if awakening from slumber. The first thing I noticed being the strangely loud sound of the acoustic ceiling tiles lifting up due to slight air pressure variations (senses are often heightened in trance states). The second thing noticed being the line of other students staring back at me nonplussed. I would not be surprised to learn that the author of said textbook had never actually experienced a deep trance state themselves. The typical blindsight of the old school western approach, which excises out a holistic mechanism from its wisdom context and somehow claims it made the technique more scientific/legitimate/valid. Like the shift from wholesome food to processed food stuff. Like how they used to think formula was superior to breastfeeding. You get the drift, there are innumerable analogous examples within the past’s so-called progression toward greater civilization.

Still, the term psychic attack is not my favorite. If you search the phrase online, it mostly talks about other people sending you bad mojo. I just don’t vibe with the paranoia-inducing tone of some of the articles out there; certainly, we have seen how polarized attitudes of forces “out to get you” have destabilized the vulnerable and been used for extreme political ends.

In my own estimation, this phenomenon has little to do with other folks on this level of reality wishing you ill. I believe that it has more to do with one’s own karmic blowback as well as the sometimes fraught process of integrating parts of the Greater Self that have remained in the shadows. In this sense, it can be seen as an intrapsychic reckoning. However we may conceptualize it, at the end of the day we are all One. Paradoxically, everyone is essentially on a solo inner journey as fractals of this unified whole, where the outer reflects the inner. So how much the distinction between internal process and external interaction matters? In these kind of things, it can be hard to say.

Okay, I’ve been beating around the bush here. If you’ve read this far, you probably want to know more specifics about my experience. It still feels like a lot even to write about it, but here goes. At the cusp of 2012, I had discovered Jane Roberts’ channeling of the Seth material. Particularly as the very first channeled work I absorbed, it was a profound discovery which activated energetic surges in my body and an exhilarating sense of consciousness expansion within my mind. Immediately before this phase, I had been avidly working on lucid dream exploration. And around the same time as connecting with Roberts, I was getting trained in Ericksonian hypnotherapy at an indigenous community health center and realizing that I had been naturally trancing since childhood. Truly, the orchestration of a mutual trance state was a huge part of the allure in my domina days.

Roberts’ The Nature of Personal Reality opened my eyes to see the underlying structure of my self-limiting beliefs and false dichotomies, a vital liberation process which finally broke through my decades-long writer’s block. Her famous phrase, “You create your own reality” allowed me to finally begin to step into my own power as a creator. Traversing this previously uncharted territory was as exciting as any real world journey I have taken on this planet.

Yet of course, there was an edge. It would seem in life there always is, at least for some of us. I imagine my Higher Self planned it that way, for reasons beyond this little ego’s complete understanding. For me, it has always been a trickster universe. And honestly, it suits me. Shifting from professional kink into mind training, I couldn’t help but laugh to think that there could be a spiritual version of edgeplay. It makes sense that anything powerful would also need to be handled with care. Like playing with fire.

The Somnambulist by John Everett Millais. Wikimedia Commons

How did these so-called attacks manifest? It all happened once I fell asleep. I began to experience parasomnias: sleep paralysis, sleepwalking, nightmares and night terrors. Developmentally, these normally tend to occur in children. During these episodes, I often experienced intense fear of death by dismemberment and a panicked urge to flee. It would feel like the world was closing in, that malevolent forces were close to getting me, and that I had to escape at all costs. One time, it felt like my astral body was being dragged into a more hell-like dimension, never to return to my current body. The threat of annihilation felt viscerally real, pushing me into a panic. As I read back these words, it’s just impossible to describe how harrowing these events were. And it was dangerous—that is, my reaction to them was. A few times, I physically attacked my partner while he was asleep in bed beside me or otherwise trying to intervene. Twice, I grabbed the car keys and tried to make a dash for it.

The most terrifying incident took place when I heard a voice telling me to jump out my second story window. That it was the only way to escape impending doom; that this was the way to freedom and a new start. I remember fighting to get more lucid while this battle was going on inside, one side urging me to “Just do it,” and the other side coaxing me to wake up, telling me, “This is not a dream. You are endangering your real life.” At the culmination of that episode, I found myself standing on the slippery edge of my living room window, head hanging out in the rain—coming in and out of awareness, everything so fuzzy. The battle was raging within me. At the same time, I felt a power emerging from my solar plexus. A summoning of strength and will. A gathering and exerting of energy to overcome this self-destructive force. It felt like one of those dreams where you are slogging through somewhere and can’t move fast enough. Then suddenly you break out of inertia into momentum, and you are where you want to be in a blink. Legs shaking, on a literal precipice of physical injury or even death, I found the power to leap from the window ledge back onto the living room floor. My heart thundering in my chest, my breath ragged, I sat on my haunches as the mental fog cleared. Waking up to almost ending my life was both consolation (for the almost) and high concern (for the fact that it even happened). Whatever part of me unconsciously wanted to end it all, I silently addressed: “You can be born again in any moment. You can start over in this life. Whatever mistakes you’ve made, you can start over. And you don’t have to end this life to do so.”

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More neurotic in my inborn makeup than depressive, I have never been one to entertain suicidal thoughts. So to feel that my unconscious was dragging me to that edge felt unreal in the worst way. How was I supposed to have control over that? To my bewilderment, when I looked into it I found that there were substantiated cases of people whose suicide happened during sleep. The look of fear in the eyes of the ACT psychologist I was seeing at the time did not help. Conventional medicine prescribed me clonazepam at bedtime and advised me to restrain myself before sleep. We added extra locks to the windows and doors to help slow down any future misadventures. But it all felt superficial to the question of why this was happening in the first place.

Only later would I discover that throughout much of the world, shamanic awakening is known to carry universal themes including, at the onset, an underworld journey where the burgeoning shaman experiences visions of dismemberment and death. And it would be a good seven years before I landed upon the most resonant explanation for what I had periodically experienced. It came when I was reading this passage from The Law of One books:

It is entirely possible for the untuned channel, as you call that service, to receive both positive and negative communications. If the entity at the base of its confusion is oriented towards service to others, the entity will begin to receive messages of doom. [...] Many of your so-called contacts among your people have been confused and self-destructive because the channels were oriented towards service to others but, in the desire for proof, were open to the lying information of the [negative] crusaders who then were able to neutralize the effectiveness of the channel.

Reading this passage was a Eureka! moment for me. I instantly identified with the idea of being an “untuned channel.” That is, someone who had been swaying from the positive to the negative side of the Force. Like a good secularist convert, I hadn’t thought it mattered. I figured only irrational religionists kept track of such things. But I had thrown the baby out with the bath water, dismissing the importance of trying to live a high-minded life as just more finger-wagging fear-based dogma.

Healing of the Blind Man. Wikimedia Commons

Once I decided to become a therapist, it felt like I was definitively choosing to serve the love and the light. In making that decision, it seems that I was more likely to receive these attacks, in order to “neutralize the effectiveness” of my positive embodiment. I also definitely had a “desire for proof,” in terms of seeking some sort of metaphysical contact, inspired as I was by Jane Roberts’ channeling of Seth (at the time, I had no clue about setting a boundary akin to the vampire antidote, “You’re not invited into my home.” This is the problem with the contemporary conceit that energy is not real; you can’t learn how to protect yourself from invasive negative energy when you’re in denial about its very existence). Moreover, it seems clear to me that the sinister voice which whispered of freedom and starting anew was “lying information” meant to dispatch my light, as described in The Law of One passage.

So I was no longer useful to the negative side of the polarity once committing to the healing path. And yet, I was still vulnerable through the prior openings I had created to that kind of energy. Fast forward a decade or so, I would eventually become firmly entrenched in serving the greater good, and as such well protected from any adverse effects from these encounters. But at the time, this epic battle for my soul posed a real danger to this incarnation.

Time and again, I experienced proof around the concept of these attacks being related to how well tuned I was to the love and the light. There were times when I fell off the path and sunk into self-aggrandizement and other weakening influences. For instance, there was a Folsom Street Fair afterparty where I felt myself become flush with a sense of vain superiority and judgment of others. Not surprisingly, I experienced a psychic attack in the immediate aftermath. At least the universe was letting me know that I was not a hapless victim here, that this was a manifestation of my own private decisions—whether to choose love and unity, or not. Truly, it felt like a mirror was being held up to me, challenging me to face my inner demons with love and integration.

Indeed, when I had first come across Jane Roberts’ channelings, I quickly found myself intoxicated with a hunger for supernatural power. That messianic fever that you sometimes see in people who have taken too much acid while chasing enlightenment. My slippery ego shifted from pulling for carnal lust and worship as a domme to craven urges for metaphysical wizardry. In fact, I had been pursuing lucid dreaming in a similar vein, with similarly scary results. Like the dream where I got lucid on a rooftop and tried to dare myself to step off, but my strong sense of survival held me back—“Because what if this isn’t a dream?” I hadn’t realized it at the time, but I was hunting down ascension processes from a place of greedy ambition rather than reverence. And so I was getting b*tch-slapped back.

The positive side of the Force is about a power that can be shared, that is abundant and all-encompassing. It’s about acceptance with discernment, balance and unity. The negative side of the Force is about power that is exclusive and zero-sum, where there has to be a winner and a loser. It’s about judgment with impunity, chaos and division. The Choice we make in life counts. Positive matters (and is easier and affords greater protection than the bumpy road of the negative). The paradox is that once your choice is made, you don’t have to keep hanging out in polarity. You can shift into the quantum of unity consciousness and stop preoccupying yourself with positive versus negative. Hence, my own shift from the language of “attack” to “greeting” when considering these metaphysical experiences. The negative is simply offering learning through contrast. I do believe that in this reality, we have soul agreements to act as foils for one another.

Stumbling upon the following abstract from Adam Klin-Oron’s 2017 article in the Journal of Contemporary Religion entitled, “The cultivation of ‘wild channeling’: lived religion as a normalizing force,” was also a breakthrough in my understanding. I’ll end this post by sharing it here:

Channeling, a New Age form of spirit mediumship, is a hyper-individualized religiosity, with proponents claiming that each person can create his/her own reality. Yet, most channels hold to very similar beliefs and practise their craft in a uniform manner. This, for most channels, involves moving through two stages: first, in the wild phase, they undergo powerful experiences of direct encounters with non-material beings who can be harsh and demanding, sensations are strongly embodied, the experience can be horrifying and its meaning remains obscure. In the second, cultivated stage, channels come to understand these raw experiences through pre-existing narratives of meaning learned from friends and literature, the entities channeled are benevolent, and both the content and the form of the sessions come to emphasize empowerment. Both the phenomenology and repetition of lived religion, it is shown, can serve as a regulating force, creating institutionalization of religious practices and beliefs, even when these advocate individualism and are situated in a milieu lacking any formal institutions.