This time of year, many report a sense of a “thinning veil” — a poetic expression relating the experience that the dead and often other, more nebulous, categories of spirit-beings are closer to our experience. Some interpret this to mean that different planes of existence somehow come into greater contact. I can't say that I know the full answer, but I suggest that at least part of it lies in just the fact that our minds want to turn a bit more inwardly during the Autumn season. Not only western and northern European and central American cultures but also Hinduism has an ancestor veneration holiday around this time. There are likely others I'm simply not aware of. Whether simply seasonal or based on astrological calculations isn't entirely important.
As part of this, Neopagans and witches frequently say that they experience greater contact this time of year with their ancestors and other spirits. They may feel presences, hear voices, see forms, or find their divination tools to be more cooperative. But none of these phenomena are limited to Autumn. Many people hear the voices of spirits all year round, whether they want to or not. And many of them also have trouble parsing their own thoughts and feelings from those of spirits.
Of course, a lot of us have the same difficulty with the thoughts and emotions of the living. Popular culture has taken to referring to such people as “empaths”, but this state of affairs really is quite common. I would go so far as to say that it is true of damn near all of us. Empaths are just those who become more easily overwhelmed by it.
One of the more disturbing realizations which has come from my Yoga practice, and which has been corroborated by the experiences of not only other yogis but also of seasoned witches, is that our minds are far less private and far more permeable than we are taught to believe. It is really a fairly new belief that the individual mind is sacrosanct. Anyone with a lot of experience in astral travel, hedge crossing, soul flight, or even dream journaling is likely to run into the uncomfortable fact that minds seem to overlap one another. And I will propose this: the Venn diagram of one mind’s relationship with another is far closer to being a circle than we are perhaps willing to stomach. With this being the case for all of us, the more we begin to examine our own minds moment-by-moment contents, the more we realize that many of those contents are coming from elsewhere.
Obviously, much of this detritus is cultural. Far more than we might wish is from advertising, propaganda, and other muck with which we are inundated. But more of it than anyone wants to discover is straight up the mental artifacts of the people among whom we move. One need not be a “psychic” for this to be so; it is the natural state of things. This is partly why at various points in their careers yogis of many traditions live in retreat, why many mystics become hermits, and so on.
Common magical practices of shielding and grounding are helpful for dealing with the commonly overwhelming elements of this phenomenon, but it is very much case of the only way out being through. There are many reasons to meditate, but one of them is that we can learn to see our way through the myriad alien mind-states and to block them out. There are numerous methodological options out there, but commonly known breath-following allows us to separate awareness from mental processes. This metacognition provides us with the space necessary for differentiating between our own thoughts and those of spirits, other people, and the dark sorcery of propagandists and marketers. When we can do that much, we can begin to sift through them, winnowing out what we do not wish to keep.
Most importantly, we gradually gain far greater insight into ourselves. Only by discriminating between what is helpful and true on one side and that which is distracting and false on the other do we begin to truly understand ourselves, and only then can we feel our way to authentic priorities.
A pleasure to read this. There are so many things that you wove together for which I am grateful that you did. the caption under the photograph of the graveyard is particularly poignant. I don't think I will ever look at a graveyard the same way again.