Using Imagination to Contact Spiritual Guides. Each one of us is enveloped in the loving light of a great many spiritual guides. Some of these guides accompany you lifelong, whereas others become active only for the duration of certain lessons or up-leveling in awareness. Some of these guides are people you have known in previous incarnations, or those who have passed on from this one, while others are astral entities such as elementals, fairies, nature spirits, and ascended Masters.
Whether you realize it or not, you are in constant communication with these guides— especially while you sleep, but also in your waking hours. While these guides cannot walk our paths for us or interfere heavy-handedly in the affairs of our day-to-day, they can subtly poke and prod us on the mental and emotional levels, stirring up awarenesses and prompting lines of inquiry, mentation, or action.
You may experience these nudges as intuitions, hunches, epiphanies, or illuminations; information from your guides is often entirely indistinguishable from one’s own “normal” thoughts, although it is often accompanied by an authoritative certainty, as though we know it is true, even without any rational foundation for this certainty.
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If you become more conscious in your communication with these guides, the avenues of information widen. The more you actively seek out and attune to their wisdom, the more of it you will become receptive to. You do not need the assistance of a psychic, medium, plant medicine, or shamanistic technique to access the guides who are communicating with you. All the tools you need can be found in the under-utilized faculty of your imagination.
Higher powers are energy, which is to say they are non-physical. We may understand Gods, Goddesses, deities, guides, and elemental beings as unique expressions of one consciousness, like individual strings upon the grand harp of all creation. They partake of the one energy of All-That-Is, but each expresses this energy slightly differently, just as light refracts into apparently different colors as it moves through a prism.
Being physical ourselves, we cannot directly experience or understand these energetic expressions in their pure form, as they really are. In order to establish contact with each frequency band, therefore, we conceptualize and personify them, allowing the unconscious mind to render these energies in symbolic form, communicating truths too profound for us even to consciously articulate.
These conceptualizations, while strictly speaking inaccurate, touch upon actualities. The vision of an old, bearded man in the sky conveys the omniscience, wisdom, and purposefulness of our creator. The fairy’s size, features, and levity communicate the primordial innocence, playfulness, and child-like quality of spirit. The fire-breathing dragon communicates the force accumulated by the beasts left to slumber in the underworlds below.
In this way, the guides and masters as we know them are all imagination. This is not to say that the masters are imaginary— it is our conception of them that is imaginary.
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This symbolic rendering is no superficial matter, however, because the creation of a thought-form or simulacrum provides a vessel through which the actual force of this entity may animate and speak. The crystallization of a character in your mind creates a bridge between the physical and non-physical worlds, upon which you and the guide or Master may meet and communicate.
Albert Einstein said, ”Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Einstein summarizes here what esotericists have long understood— that all discovery, and all creation, begins with imagination. The imagination is an intensely powerful creative faculty. As you let go of what you think is possible and turn your attention to what could be, you allow more of what could be to enter into manifested life.
As you imagine a guide, you create a thought-form on the astral plane, and through this focused point of your imagination, this guide may then get in touch with you. Your mental picture is not real or actual, as you are unable to conceive of the guide in its true essence; yet the results of this image are indeed real and actual.
As you relax completely, and then concentrate on the image of the communicating guide, you disconnect the conscious mind from the subconsciousness. Consequently, when the directing mind is disconnected, the subconsciousness has the image imprinted on it. Through this archetypal thought form, you get in touch with that which transcends thought and allows this energy to manifest and articulate itself.
This is a variation of what happens to writers of fiction, who at first struggle to give form and shape to a character, but eventually, marvel at the way the character takes on a life of its own and seems to “write itself”.
You must try to hear your guides. You must listen to them and reach out to them. Many of us sit passively and wait for a higher power to show us mercy or wash away our troubles, not knowing that it is we who must step forward first.
This Universe is based upon an absolute law of free will. It is your birthright to choose to know or not know, to see or not see. No guide will interfere to uplift you if you do not ask. However, as soon as you ask, you shall receive.
Visualize your guides, call upon them and try to hear the answer. The more you practice listening, the more audible the voice will be. Information from your guides may come in the form of words that you hear, see or know; it may come in the form of symbolic pictures.
There are also emotional faculties of perception; you may feel a vibrational essence of those who are helping you, see a landscape that evokes a certain emotion or be basked in a certain color of light.
To conclude
You may put out a question and receive the answer later in the day through a random suggestion from a friend, or casually overhearing someone speak in line at the grocery store. You may try posing a question, envisioning a guide, and then writing down what you think the guide is saying.
Follow the trail of these hints and suspend judgment or analysis. Of the greatest importance is your faith and belief in your guides, for it is your faith that makes the communication possible, and without it, they cannot come through. Be playful and abandon all concern with whether or not you are “making it all up”. Offer the space for the energy to speak through you, and the more you practice, the more tangible will be the effect.
Mary West is a metaphysician, writer, astrologer, and Magician. She teaches her students how to work with astral energy to enhance personal power, growth, productivity, and illumination.
