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Some surround themselves with light, or pray and specify “for my highest good” in their invocations. What they do not realize is that this actually constitutes permission and invitation to any discarnate spirit who truly believes that it is acting “for your highest good” in its realm of wishful thinking and earthbound ego fixation. Keep in mind that we are not talking about demonic possession here. That is an entirely different kettle of fish, though it follows the same rules. We are talking about your garden variety, well-meaning dead dudes wandering in the lower astral planes due to ignorance or some sort of affinity to the earth. As Edgar Cayce remarked: a dead Presbyterian is just that: a dead Presbyterian! In coming face to face with all of this material and experience, I have to admit that I attempted to formulate a rationalist theory to explain it all. I could see that the jungle-like nature of the astral realms might be merely another psychological drama invented by the endlessly creative mind as a means of sorting through some current life issue. But, in the same way that I have never really cared if reincarnation was real or not, I didn’t really care if the fact that there seemed to be higher level negative beings on the astral planes was real or not; I only cared that the therapeutic applications worked. Work it did; consistently, and remarkably. One of the most amazing things about it was the consistency of the symbolic or archetypal language of the subconscious. Subject after subject, from all walks of life, with all different levels of education and intellectual development, from different religions and belief systems, all of them, when asked the same series of questions, responded with the same types of symbols relating to similar issues and relationships. Whether they were actually discarnate beings, or some split off aspect of human personality, or energy constructions of an etheric sort, which could be detected and symbolically assigned personality and history, didn’t matter to me; I knew that the mind is infinitely creative, and I was reluctant to take a hard and fast position on the subject. I continued to work with the concepts, constantly on the lookout for new data that might help me to refine, prove or disprove my theory. To remain as open as possible for new information, my working hypothesis was that it was very likely that all that existed was an artifact of consciousness; the only thing I was giving a high probability to was that consciousness could and did exist independently of matter. Consciousness could be positive or negative. Whether it was, in all cases, or even in most cases, consciously conscious, I didn’t know. remain as 51 High Strangeness — Part One