When we are born, that part of our brain that holds our identity is a blank slate, waiting to be written on by the impressions of our physical senses. As we age, we acquire more and more experiences, and these are stored as memories. We are the sum of our memories. Take them away, as happens sometimes in severe stroke, and we cease to exist. Our body continues, but it is no more than a physical shell. It is not who we are. Who we are is undifferentiated super-consciousness, acting through the filter of our various levels of memory, which shape and define that consciousness, limiting it into what we know as our personal identity.

We can never conceive anything apart from the input of our senses. That is the tragedy of the human experience. Try to conceive of a thing that is not based on your prior sense impressions and you will see that it is so. You cannot do it. If you think of a monster that has never existed, you will see that it is built up of familiar parts that you have learned about through your senses — skin, teeth, legs, eyes, ears, a tail. It will be certain colors, will emit sounds, will have a distinctive smell, be rough or smooth to the touch. We simply cannot imagine anything other than sense impressions. Even when we try to imagine completely abstract things, we can only hold them in our minds by translating them into familiar sensory models. This is the reason we cannot picture higher dimensions of space, but must use three-dimensional models to suggest them. It is a fundamental, inherent limitation of human consciousness, part of the very nature of what we are.

Even more startling the first time it is understood is the realization that the entire universe that we know and everything it contains exists only in our mind. That is not to say that another level of the universe might not exist apart and independent of our awareness, but if so we can never know anything about it. That is the key insight. We are prisoners of our own perceptions. Our consciousness is based on perceptual information, and the universe for us exists only in our mind.

You may have heard about Plato’s cave. The Greek philosopher Plato wrote in his dialogue The Republic that human beings are like prisoners chained in a cave who sit with their backs to the fire and perceive nothing of what passes behind them apart from the shadows that play across the cave wall. The cave is human consciousness. The light from the fire is our senses. The shadows are the things we build up in our minds based on our sense impressions. All we know consciously are the shadows. The moving shadows on the wall constitute our reality.

However, the cave is not all we are. In our higher natures, we transcend its limits. Sometimes, beings from outside the cave of sense impressions interact with our awareness. We call them gods, angels, spirits, ghosts, fairies, demons, aliens, and countless other names that attempt to define them in a way that our mind can handle. These beings from outside our perceptual reality are faced with a quandary. They exist beyond our senses, and we can only understand things of our senses, so how are they to reach our awareness?

They do it by using a technique that I have named sensory metaphors. A sensory metaphor is nonsensory information that has been translated into sensory information. The mind is incredibly versatile, despite its inherent limitations. It is capable of translating one sensory input into another sensory input under extraordinary conditions such as illness or a head injury, or under the influence of mind-altering drugs such as LSD. We can, under certain conditions, hear colors, for example, or see sounds, or even taste concepts. One sensory input can substitute its information for another input from a different sense.

But the mind is even more versatile. It can process information that has no sensory base at all into sensory data, thus allowing us to become aware of its existence, and to consider it by analogy. That is to say, we can never consider the super-sensory data itself because it lies beyond the reach of our consciousness, but we can contemplate the sensory metaphors of that unreachable data, in the same way we can represent and manipulate the higher dimensions of space with three-dimensional models.

When an angel appears to a human being, it has no physical reality. It cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. You may object that reports of angels throughout human history record that they appeared as physical beings. Often angels are said to walk among us in the guise of ordinary human beings who can be touched. Women have even made love to angels.

True enough. It was not the angel that was perceived, but the sensory metaphor generated by the angel, which exists in a realty that lies beyond our capacity to comprehend. Only because the angel has generated a sensory metaphor of itself do we even know that an angel is present. If the angel wishes to communicate with us, it must express itself in a way we can hold in our thoughts and imprint on our memories. It must become sensory data in our minds, even though that data never passes through any of the physical avenues of our senses.

Unless a spirit generates a sensory metaphor of itself, we continue unaware of it even though it may be very near. It is sometimes said that the world throngs with spirits of all kinds, but that we remain unconscious of their existence. This is true. To become real to us, a spirit must engage our mind on our own level of understanding.

Sensory metaphors of a simple kind arise spontaneously under unusual conditions. When we see a ghost, we do not actually see anything at all — rather, we have the impression in our minds of seeing. The true nature of the ghost, which we cannot perceive directly because it lies beyond our senses, is translated into a sensory metaphor. Usually this takes the form of a visual image. It may be indistinct or translucent. Sometimes the ghost takes the sensory metaphor of a sound or series of sounds, sometimes an odor, sometimes a touch, and only very rarely it appears as a taste. Ghosts can simulate more than one sense at a time, and we may both hear and see a ghost, or feel the touch of a ghost and simultaneously smell a distinct odor such as cigar smoke or perfume.

Complex spirits, who have a more developed intelligence, seem able to at least in part control the sensory metaphors that we perceive, so that they can present themselves in whatever way they think is to their advantage in dealing with us, and if necessary, change their appearance. You have no doubt heard of demons summoned into the triangle of evocation by magicians who come first in a frightening and horrible form in an attempt to intimidate the magician, but when commanded by the authority of names of power, will put on more pleasing forms in order to converse with the magician.

Spirits are not in their essence the sensory metaphors that represent them. They become those forms in their dealings with us, in order to be able to make us aware of their existence and communicate with us, and to us they are those forms, just as to us a human being is the body that he or she inhabits. But apart from our consciousness the essence of the spirit is a thing we simply are not capable of comprehending. It is what lies outside Plato’s cave and we can never turn our head to look directly at it, because it is not within our capacity to do so.

The doctrine of sensory metaphors explains many mysteries about the nature of spirits. For example, why a spirit can seem completely and physically real to one individual, yet pass unperceived by another individual who is nearby. It explains why a spirit that can be touched cannot be photographed. Whether or not genuine spirit or ghost photographs exist is a matter for debate. My own belief is that such photographs do not exist. A being that cannot be perceived directly by human senses cannot register on photographic film, because in a strictly material sense, it is not there at all. Yet the sensory metaphor of that spirit can seem completely real and present to whomever it is presented.

All the tricks of capricious spirits become understandable. Fairies were noted for their fairy feasts, which would be there one moment and gone the next, and for their fairy gold, which after being given would turn to straw or vanish away completely. The doctrine of sensory metaphors explains the sudden appearance and vanishing of spiritual beings of various types, how they can seem material yet pass through solid walls or doors, how they can appear to turn to smoke or mist, how they can transmute themselves into the shapes of beasts.

Sensory metaphors should not be thought of as completely arbitrary and ephemeral. True, they are not real in the narrow sense that our sensory impressions of physical objects are real, yet they often express accurately the nature of the spirit that adopts them. When a spirit retains a sensory metaphor for long enough, it effectively becomes the spirit, just as we are our collection of thoughts and memories. A goddess conceived for thousands of years in a certain form, with specific characteristics, becomes that being permanently, in so far as anything in this ever-shifting universe can be said to have permanence. The name given to the goddess becomes the name of that spirit. Aphrodite is Aphrodite, she is not merely a spirit pretending to be Aphrodite.

A spirit that manifests over a long period as the sensory metaphor of Abraham Lincoln may truly believe itself to be the spirit of the dead president. And who is to say it is not correct? Its identity is based on the same motivations, the same beliefs, the same memory of experiences, that formed the personality of Lincoln. If it is not the actual spiritual essence of Lincoln’s soul, assuming such a separate and discrete essence to exist, then it is a clone of that essence. Perhaps the spirit is even able to tap into some higher aspect of Lincoln’s being, a kind of divine template of Lincoln that is stored in the akashic records.

The control higher spirits have over sensory metaphors should cause us to be thankful most spirits are benevolent. The ability to control what we perceive through our physical senses gives these spirits the power of life and death over us. We have all had sensory tricks played on us by spiritual beings. We put down our car keys, turn round to do something, and when we turn back, the keys are gone. We search the table they were on, the room, the whole house without finding them, and the next day when we pass the table, there are the keys, sitting just where we left them in plain sight. This kind of thing happens so often, it scarcely causes us to think about it. However, if we considered the matter, we would realize that someone has been playing games with our perceptions. How else could we fail to see what was in plain sight the whole time we looked for it?

Poltergeists play with human perceptions all the time. This is the primary way they work their tricks. Usually this manipulation of the senses is coupled with the spirit possession of a human being, who unwittingly acts as their physical agent to move things or perform various physical tasks. Much of poltergeist phenomena is physical, but much of it only appears to be physical, but is actually composed of sensory metaphors. For example, everyone in the house may suddenly hear a deafening clap of thunder, yet no one in the neighboring houses will have heard a thing, because the thunder was not an actual sound, but merely the metaphor of thunder that existed only in the minds of those who heard it.

There seems to be some kind of natural law that prevents spirits from killing or injuring human beings in large numbers through the malicious manipulation of our senses. It does happen on rare occasions, but the demons who do it are outlaws or renegades who have stepped over the bounds of normal spirit behavior. Apparently there are no laws against playing with us, annoying us, or terrifying us, other than the general laws of good manners and good taste, and some spirits delight to do these things, though what their motives may be is a matter for conjecture. Maybe they are amusing themselves at out expense, or maybe they derive some personal benefit from generating strong emotions of anger, frustration or fear. Perhaps these strong emotions nourish lower spirits, and it is for this reason that they manipulate our senses in order to generate them.

The concept of sensory metaphors is essential to a useful understanding of human-spirit interaction in the twenty-first century. The old mechanical notions of spirit nature simply will not serve our purposes in this quantum age. We cannot weigh and photograph spiritual beings, and it is high time to get over this simplistic understanding of our reality. What we know is conditioned by our senses, but it is not limited to our senses. Our reality contains higher levels and higher dimensional beings with which we can interact, but only in a secondary way, by a process of translation that models the higher levels of reality in sensory forms that our mind is capable of handling. We should be thankful that our minds are so versatile, they allow this translation to occur, for without it we would know nothing of spirits, not even that they exist.

©2007 Donald Tyson
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Donald Tyson is the author of Sexual Alchemy: Magical Intercourse with Spirits, Familiar Spirits: A Practical Guide for Witches & Magicians, and Soul Flight: Astral Projection and the Magical Universe, among other works. You can visit his website here.

The Manifesto

Axiom 1

It is herein asserted as axiomatic, based on direct observation, that spirits who communicate and interact with human beings are self-aware and possess their own strong sense of independent identity.

Axiom 2

It is asserted as axiomatic, based on direct observation, that spirits who communicate and interact with human beings have a capacity for reasoned thought and for moral and ethical behavior of the highest order.

Axiom 3

It is asserted as axiomatic, based on direct observation, that spirits who communicate and interact with human beings experience both happiness and unhappiness, and furthermore, that they seek out and rejoice in pleasure, but shun and are tormented by pain.

Premise

The premise is offered that human beings in communication with spirits may by their emotions, thoughts and actions either increase the happiness of spirits or decrease it. Specifically, that humans have the ability through willful and deliberate actions to constrain spirits and to cause spirits to suffer.

Argument

An argument is made that as intelligent beings who are self-aware and who have the capacity to experience both pleasure and suffering, spirits are entitled to the same basic rights as humans — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No one shall seek to deprive spirits of these rights, which have the same source as the rights of humans.

Life for a spirit consists of continued self-aware existence. Liberty consists of the freedom to travel and act without constraint. The pursuit of happiness consists of actions perceived by a spirit as essential to its fulfillment as a conscious, independent being.

Conclusion

The conclusion is reached that spirits, as intelligent and self-aware beings, possess the same inherent dignities as humans, and may demand the same level of civility and respect.

Commentary

It may appear strange that I raise the matter of spirits’ rights, when so many in our Western societies stoutly deny the very existence of spiritual beings, but those of us who have interacted directly or indirectly with spirits have no doubt as to their existence, and it is to these more knowledgeable readers that my remarks are mainly directed. I have little hope of affecting the beliefs of those who, without any knowledge of spirits, scorn and dismiss them out of an impulse of sheer social prejudice.

The essential nature of spirits is open to debate. I do not presume to know with certainty what spirits are, where they come from, or what their ultimate purposes may be — however, my direct involvement with these beings has convinced me that they do exist, on some level other than the physical level. When you have conversed with a spirit, shared jokes with that being, listened to the spirit express its hopes and desires and intentions, it is difficult to assert that it does not exist. The question becomes — What is the nature of that existence?

Accepting that spirits exist, it may further be observed that many of them behave as intelligent, independent persons. They possess strong self-identities, have their own likes and dislikes, their individual goals, their own hopes and fears. They are capable of deriving enjoyment from their existence, and are equally subject to unhappiness and suffering when conditions are not to their liking. True, there are spiritual beings of a lower order who do not appear to be intelligent or capable of communication through the use of language, but this manifesto is concerned with those who do exhibit intelligent behavior, and who interact with human beings as intellectual equals.

These intelligent spirits may identify themselves as the souls or spirits of human beings who have died. Is this identification accurate? For the purposes of spirits’ rights, it does not matter. Other intelligent spirits identify themselves as completely non-human beings, and again, in the matter of spirits’ rights, it is beside the point how they may see themselves. What matters is how these spirits behave toward human beings. In my experience, most intelligent spirits behave in a civil and moral way. They are polite, compassionate, and loving. They are reasonable and can be reasoned with. It is possible to hold a conversation, and even a debate, with spiritual beings, and those spirits are no more apt to resort to irrational or emotional arguments than human beings.

Given this reasonable and ethical behavior of spirits, it seems to me deplorable that they are regarded in many quarters, even by those who habitually interact with them, as in some way inferior to human beings. The attempt is frequently made to coerce spirits into performing actions against their will. Examples of this behavior are rife throughout the history of Western ceremonial magic. Spirits are treated as servants, or even as slaves, by those who summon them, and are compelled to perform tasks as though they were incorporeal beasts of burden.

When spirits refuse the demands made upon them, they are often threatened with punishment, or even deliberately tormented by various magical means. It was common in centuries past to bind spirits into objects that might be subjected to heat or other unpleasant physical conditions, as a way of torturing the spirit into compliance. One torture was to set the object that served as a spirit’s prison above a fire to be roasted; another was to hang it from a tree so that it would sway and twist in the wind; yet another form of torture was to bury the object, so that the spirit was buried alive.

In modern times, few who converse with spirits are aware of these methods of coercion and torture, which evolved in the context of ceremonial magic, but they exhibit an equal disregard for the freedom or happiness of spirits. It is common for spirits to be automatically regarded as demons, even though they have committed no wrong. The immediate response of the average person to a spirit communication is terror. All the prejudices instilled since childhood come bubbling to the surface. They begin to curse the spirit, threaten it, abuse it, make prayers against it, and call in the exorcists. Little wonder the spirit usually withdraws in confusion and disgust.

Even when a continuing communication is sustained with a spirit, there may be a tendency to regard the spirit as a kind of astral pet, rather than as an intelligent equal with as much right to be treated with respect and dignity as any human. Old prejudices die hard. It is a tragedy that a spirit who comes to a human seeking friendship may find only contempt and abuse. Such spirits can scarcely be blamed if they respond with resentment, or even outright malice, and in this way the prejudices perpetuate themselves.

It has become common to talk about animal rights. The recognition is growing in our societies that living creatures who have feelings and the capacity to experience both pleasure and pain should be accorded a basic level of honor and dignity, as sensitive fellow creatures with whom we share a common origin.

The time has arrived to raise the bar of universal rights and freedoms to embrace no only sentient physical beings who are non-human, but those who are non-physical as well. Unlike animals, spirits can both feel and reason. In this capacity they are closer to our human nature than the beasts of the field. It is my contention, expressed by this manifesto of spirits’ rights, that the basic rights of spiritual beings must be recognized and respected. Spirits are no longer to be treated as slaves or pets, but are to be given all the honors of rational beings.

©2006 Donald Tyson
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Donald Tyson is the author of Sexual Alchemy: Magical Intercourse with Spirits, Familiar Spirits: A Practical Guide for Witches & Magicians, and Soul Flight: Astral Projection and the Magical Universe, among other works. You can visit his website here.

Editor’s Note: This article was composed and published in December 2006, when Michael Jackson was alive and well. There is no disrespect intended with use of his name here, either then or now.

Standard Definition of Egregore

Wikipedia currently defines egregores thusly: “Essentially, an egregore is the ‘spirit of a thing,’ usually a human group or organization, shared by the members of the group, for whom it provides guidelines concerning principles, beliefs, and goals. Companies, religions, states, and clubs all can be said to have egregores. An example of the presence of an egregore could be when ‘a project takes on a life of its own.’”¹ In my twelve years of working with spirits, I have observed the phenomenon of egregores to go considerably further than this.

Refraction

An egregore, based on my observation, is not in itself a being (in the strictest sense), but the living source of energy from which a being draws its life. Think of it as a vast “energy cloud” encompassing the collective view of the subject. The word egregore has its roots in the Greek egregoros which translates to vigil, thus giving “egregore” the sense of “watcher.”² I consider an egregore capable of sustaining an infinite number of manifestations simultaneously, as needed by the collective. For example, hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, report seeing or talking to the Archangel Raphael at overlapping times. This is most apparent in occult circles by those who take view of a personal relationship with the archangel through rituals such as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP). Not only is it possible for the egregore of Archangel Raphael to manifest thousands of Raphaels at once, it is also possible for each manifestation to be what the individual finds most useful or necessary (not necessarily by choice, but rather by need). Meridjet (my spirit companion; you can read more about him in this month’s Into The Aethyr) calls this “refraction.” Think of a faceted crystal hanging in a window. Sunlight hits the crystal and sends hundreds of multi-colored rays of light into the room. Raphael would be the the light, the egregore would be the crystal, and each of the manifestations of Raphael would be a ray of light refracting from the crystal.

Thought Over Matter

The strength and the life of an egregore (and therefore the lives of its manifestations) depends upon the strength of the energy it is fed. Magical energy takes many forms: emotion, attraction, repulsion, magnetism, inspiration, and others. These may be kinetic or potential,³ created by the chemical reactions within the cells of the body or brain, or something altogether else. The point is that thought can affect matter⁴ (witness the placebo effect, among others). Firewalking is a case in point. I attended a weekend workshop in firewalking in 1995. After a few exercises in which each of us demonstrated (to ourselves more than to the other attendees, I think) that our intent held the power of success, we spread the coals and began the main event of the evening. The first time I witnessed someone walk the coals, I literally swooned with the power of it. The key, we were taught, was to focus on the far “shore” of the “lake” of red-hot coals (a healthy 15 feet, or nearly 5 meters, away) and visualize a goal there. Choose something that means a great deal to you, a goal or accomplishment that you are determined to win. Then, focused on this goal, you walk barefoot across the coals to symbolically win the prize. I walked three times that night, and I can tell you that focus made all the difference. After walking twice and thinking there was nothing to it, I made the mistake of walking across without focusing — and I got burned. I went home and soaked my feet in a tub of ice water, having broken out into a few blisters that even then were oddly painless and essentially gone by morning. My attention on the goal wavered — and that was enough to change the outcome of the walk completely.

Attention is a very common and yet quite powerful form of magical energy. The egregore of something like Microsoft is not dependent only upon the people who make up the Microsoft employee base, but also upon the perspectives of those viewing from outside. This is an important point, as it is the reputation of the thing viewed that colors the manifestation for the individual doing the viewing.

Empathic Awareness of Energy Signatures

Contact with an egregore is primarily kinesthetic (at least initially). It’s a sort of deeply empathic understanding of the nature of a thing based purely on the feelings it inspires when one is in contact with it. (This also works on a smaller scale with one-on-one encounters with people.) Via the contact itself, one is able to instinctively or intuitively understand the essence of the contactee.

When you think of Microsoft, again, you are likely to think of a software giant who fights aggressively over its self-perceived turf in the software industry. Whether you see this to be negative or positive is purely a personal choice, but the feeling of Microsoft is large, looming, and watchful, aggressive and perhaps intimidating. If you were given this feeling alone in a metaphysical taste test game, there’s not much chance you’d mistake it for the much smaller and “softer” egregore of Quilted Northern bath tissue. This intuitive understanding is at the heart of all interaction with egregores, and indeed, at the heart of most interaction with any sort of spiritual being, whether that being is natural or manmade.

While it is true that an egregore can attach to anything from a nation (consider the current worldview of the United States, for example) to a small group project (such as a Wiccan coven), it is my observation that egregores are also attached to individuals of any degree of renown. This is because the individual is still the focal point of a collective view, of a large and even massive group of people. Consider, if you will, the different impressions you feel, intuitively, when you think of Queen Elizabeth versus Madonna, or the difference between Angelina Jolie and Oprah. Not much mistaking any of them for the other in our blind taste test, either.

Egregore Overpowers Original Source

The public view feeds the celebrity, which creates the egregore. The egregore then feeds the public view, as well as the fame of the individual, enlarging the circle of renown. The resultant increase in celebrity stimulates more attention, so the new public view sustains the egregore. This circle of sustenance builds until the egregore begins to feed on itself or recede for something brighter and shinier. We can feel when it starts to wane. We can feel when the egregore shifts, usually due to a gradual yet contagious shift in the public view — yet often the individual manages to do something of such power that they initiate a huge shift nearly overnight, essentially “poisoning” their own egregore and leading to their fall from public grace.

Michael Jackson is one clear example of an alleged self-poisoning, leading to an egregore feeding upon itself as the perspective of the collective public changes. In the 1980s, Michael Jackson was nothing short of a pop god, going so far as to name himself “the Prince of Pop.” His popularity seemed to know no bounds, despite speculation regarding his constantly-changing appearance. Then he was accused of child molestation, and his popularity took a nosedive. This affected Michael on a personal level, and changed the flavor of his own reaction. (This is an important point, but there’s no room to cover that right now.) Despite his efforts to return public opinion to his favor, the changed egregore (the energy supplied to Michael’s fame and reputation) proved stronger than his own personal power and intent. What he saw as his power was truly the power of the collective attention of the world, and when that soured, it was essentially curtains for Mike. What was once a huge wave of admiration for the star became a nightmare of equal proportion. This is the power of the egregore.

Magical Uses of the Egregore

The usual attraction of the egregore for the occultist or magician is one of invocation and archetypal influence. While the available archetypes in standard symbology may be limited, there is usually a media-based character that a magician can use to his or her benefit. If, for example, a magician wanted to see a person receive their comeuppance, he or she could invoke the energy of Bugs Bunny (a trickster who always managed to lure the enemy into sabotaging himself), and watch the person stumble themselves into their own just rewards. Invocation of an egregore allows one to personalize and even humanize the work one is doing and the results one would like to gain.

Another way that I see egregores used in magick and occult application is via the phenomenon of soulbonding⁵. A “soulbond” is a (generally fictitious and often popularly known) character that manifests to an individual as a spirit. This spirit is classified as outsourced, (created in canon by a writer and used in a manuscript, film, video game, or the like), or insourced (an original, self-created character, often used in one’s own story-writing). The latter is more along the lines of a servitor and so is not topical to this article. Many soulbonders believe that their soulbonds actually originate in an alternate or parallel reality and that the canon author tapped into their reality and wrote their story via channel. For example, this idea has surrounded J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy for decades, and now has spread to become a rather common phenomenon, particularly in the online occult community. While I certainly do not discount individual paradigms and I acknowledge that anything is possible, it’s my belief that a majority (if not all) of soulbonds are essentially manifestations of the character’s egregore that grew in the mind of the individual until the character took on independence and a personality that is both true to the original and individual to that manifestation. This is another example of refraction as described earlier in this article. In my opinion, this is what allows umpteen people to all soulbond Sephiroth from Final Fantasy, for example, though most soulbonders will say that the multiverse (i.e. infinite universes are home to infinite Sephiroths) is responsible for this.

The potential use of the egregore is enormous and all magicians should gain understanding of that potential. If magicians could egregore-shift the way chaos magicians paradigm-shift, then our use and manipulation of energy via the juggling of egregores could result in a great shift in awareness of not only our psyches but also the nature of the subtle planes and how beings on those levels behave and interact with humans on our plane of existence.

Footnotes

1. Wikipedia. Retrieved November 2006
2. The History of Magic by Eliphas Levi, translated by A. E. Waite. Originally published in 1913 by Rider; republished in 1999 by Weiser Books, Inc. This particular reference is the first footnote on page 40 of the Weiser edition.
3. http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/science/formsofenergy.html
4. http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1386262004
5. http://childofmana.tripod.com/soulbonding.htm

©2006 Sheta Kaey.
Edited by Trinity

Sheta Kaey is a lifelong occultist and longtime spirit worker, as well as Editor in Chief of Rending the Veil. She counsels others with regard to spirit contact and astral work. She can be reached via her blog.