After too long of a wait, I am returning to the Godphone lessons. Way back in January of this year, I posted lesson one. It discussed the necessity for inner silence and gave some suggestions for how to cultivate that type of state. Lesson two was posted in July and discussed how to determine the authenticity of what you impressions are showing you. I realized as I reviewed my notes for this series of divination posts, I skipped over something important. That was how to filter out distractions and unrelated thoughts, as well as how to isolate the thoughts that focus upon what your divination session is attempting to accomplish.
Most any exercises you encounter regarding meditation encourage the practitioner to be mindful of their thoughts but not consumed by them. This is fairly close to what the ideal divination session that is based in mental discipline strives to achieve. As I mentioned back in lesson one, the 'catch and release' practice of thought tracking is a helpful way to monitor what passes through your mind during a divination session. The first step in any of the exercises is to become aware of your internal monologue. This internal monologue is not necessarily you speaking to yourself. It can range from thoughts framed as sentences to images to emotional impressions or physical sensation. The itch on the nose that distracts me from my meditating is as much a part of my internal monologue as the question if I fed my fish this morning.
When you become aware of the thoughts that run through your mind as you attempt to become quiet and listen closely, it can be overwhelming and difficult to pick out what is part of your internal communication with yourself and what is not. This is where filtering your thoughts becomes crucial. Over the course of multiple meditation sessions, learn to identify what types of thoughts pass through your mind. As they arise, identify them and assign them to their correct category. The itchy nose becomes a passing body awareness and is filed in the same mental box as your awareness of your clothes. The worries about if the bills got paid or the pets have been fed go into the anxiety box, for myself that is it may be different for you. Over time, you will find that as a thought presents itself, you can identify and mentally set it aside for later faster. This frees up our mental focus so that you can sift through these thoughts until you find the one that fits what you need.
Isolating a thought is not complicated. It is actually the next logical step after filtering your thoughts. once some skill has been acquired at filtering your thoughts, you can move from examining each thought alone to looking at the larger category they fit into. When you seek to isolate a category, your focus moves to disregarding the thoughts that are not part of what you are contemplating. If you are engaged in simple meditation with a focus, your isolating the thoughts pertaining to the focus and setting aside the others. In the case of divination via mental exercise, your focus is on communication with deities, the dead, or other spiritual entities. Godphone is focusing exclusively upon deities.
The thoughts that are attached to deities will be intrinsically different from your running inner monologue. It may be as though it is a voice is quietly speaking to you or that you have sensations that are unusual compared to the base line of your inner monologue. For some people, they will have impressions of a figure doing things. Others will be shown something like events happening. And yet other people will simply have strong emotional pulls towards something. In the case of someone having impressions that are of someone speaking to them or otherwise engaging their five senses, it is something happening within the mind's eye. There is, generally, no instances of a person appearing to the psychic as though they were physically present and visible to the eye.
The instances where deities, the dead, and other spiritual beings appear to the eye like any other person physically present are rare. There are more frequently signs given in the physical sense that only make sense in the context of the conversation being had with the spiritual being in question. Thus, a devotee of Freyja may be seeking reassurance that they are engaged in something that she approves of. While they may have the impression of Freyja smiling with approval, they're not likely to see a physical manifestation of her standing before them. Instead, it may be finding a falcon's feather laying on the sidewalk when the step out their front door in the morning.
With all divination, seeking out confirmation of what is learned is appropriate. Even as your discernment improves with experience, it is still good to regularly make sure that what you are perceiving is accurate.
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