Has anyone here ever seen into the shadow realm? Its not lower than this world, rather parallel, and has higher and lower levels to it in itself. There are places in this world where the world of shadows overlaps, and beings can travel back and forth. My town has heavy shadow world activity. There are shadow animals, people, demons, spirits, monsters… even elves. They sometimes manifest fully visually when the veil is thin, but you must have a specific kind of spiritual sight to see them. In that world there is a certian type of light energy that is yellow and mixed with the essense of darkness, but shines brightly. Many of the beings there carry it, working with it causes interesting effects… I only know one other person that sees into it.
Yeah i’ve often been pulled there while performing shadow magick.
I can see shadow outlines or siluets in trees and bushes, objects…bhell almost any thing really. Bush scrying.
I think I may have?
During some of my journey experiences (standard Core Shamanism technique… go through a tunnel), I’ve traveled to a place that seems to be a space entirely made of shadow.
In fact, it’s usually the first place I “pop out” when I emerge from the tunnel.
I wrote these in another community after my first few experiences:
At first there was a spinning/falling sensation, but I popped out of a tunnel and was able to stabilize and first thing I saw were what looked like weird looking, faintly glowing black and white masks with faintly glowing red eyes. I wasn’t scared of them. It was real yet not. Real in a different way. Some part of me felt they were some kind of guardians. I got past them, and I was in this space mostly of dark, shadowy figures that almost seemed to be made of smoke. Some of them were just figures that looked human-shaped but smoky, some were weird dark animal looking figures. There was very little matter/substance, everything seemed to be made of smoke but there were also things that faintly glowed. It felt perfectly safe because it felt like part of me has always been there.
It wasn’t the only place I visited during that session - there were several (leaving me convinced that people really, really undersell the psychedelic potential of cannabis) but this one felt the most real. I’ve seen things in these meditations that were absolutely gorgeous/stunning (including later in this same experience - I can have intense visionary experiences with cannabis if I combine it with ritual work and intention) but this felt real and those didn’t. Those often feel like lucid dreams, the weird/unreal feeling that OBEs often have for me, or they feel like visionary experiences, but they don’t actually feel really real. This felt like I was in some kind of parallel dimension. It felt like the underside of reality or another world as real as this one. (I have been partway into this world before, but I usually don’t step all the way in. A lot of my spiritual work involves being halfway, but not going in.)
Most of all, I remembered something - that i believed in this place as a child, that this was something I called “the shadow place.”
I felt like Id been there before, it feels so real that it feels like somewhere that everyone knows about on some level. It was like being in an old neighborhood you know well, or that you are from.
This is the first time that I actually feel different after one of these trips. It doesn’t feel like merely an interesting dream the way that most of them register. It feels like a place I really visited. I know I’ll probably be back, because it seems to be a jumping off place for other journeys as well as being a place where I meet spirits (or parts of myself, depending on your beliefs) I interact with.
I feel like I’ve been here before and like most people would probably feel the same way if they’d been there.
I am having trouble convincing myself it’s not real, unlike other spiritual experiences I’ve had. And I feel like it’s significant, somehow, that I went there. I feel a sense of awe/wonder about it.
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There is no floor and no ceiling; it’s like being in a place filled with smoke and haze. It’s not completely dark, some kind of faint light is in there, enough to make out the smoky shapes. There are a lot of beings that are just standing perfectly still.
My journey that night was a lot longer and there was a lot more to it than just visiting the shadowy place, I also visited “higher” (as in, they were literally higher up on the vertical axis) places that were much brighter and observed different entities. And I’ve been to even lower places that are much darker. What struck me about this place though is how real it felt. It felt like it’s just the other side of reality, like a flip side. And my emotions are stronger there as in all the lower levels. (I do more work in the lower astral than in the higher. I mainly work with my subconscious. But again, it’s the shadow place that feels the most “real,” even in some ways more real than this world.)
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Imagine a place that has no floor, no ceiling, and is filled with hazy/smoky looking figures. It’s dark but when I focus on something, it will light up just enough to make stuff out, sort of like when your eyes adjust to the dark. Most of these were just random and vague people and animal (bird, mammal) shapes but I don’t know that it wasn’t what your brain does when you look for patterns in clouds. There were some that were clearer, that had the vaguest impression of faces. The funny thing is that emotions are stronger there, but what else, is how thoughts are, too. I am usually aware of having to reason out my thoughts, examine them, when I’m thinking inside my body in my day-to-day life. I’m aware of formulating reactions when things happen and of thinking out solutions. There was none of that there. I just felt like I “knew” things there, and I felt like I knew this place when I was there as if I had a memory of it and as if it were a familiar place. If I thought something, I thought it. There was no “mental chatter” down there. A lot is very hard to explain. Feeling had a much bigger part to plan than thinking.
I did see some specific figures who I’d been taken to meet and then they literally bounced me up to another plane of existence and onward. Which didn’t feel as real to me. It felt like the other imaginary places I visit during visualization. But the shadow plane - felt real. And still does. When I think of the shadow plane, I remember the feelings I felt there - love, missing people, yearning, need for connection. It left me with some powerful feelings about my material body, a suspicion that this world and this life and the life we live in it are important, there are things we can only do and ways we can only connect to each other because we have bodies.
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Is this what you are thinking about? My “shadow place” experiences have left me with a new take on things - I wonder what the emotions at play “in the shadows” are, what the undercurrents are, of any situation. When I started making my own oracle deck, I drew on experiences from my journey work, including the “shadow place.”
My experience going to the “shadow place” has been that… well… I can see how it would be easy for some people to be stuck there. It’s very, very easy to get overwhelmed by the stronger drives and emotions. But I do feel like the danger of a lot of “dark” work is massively overstated. I used to have a very over-intellectualized personality and be totally out of touch with my body and emotions and it’s in doing “shadow place” work that it’s like I found the connection to plug myself back in, if that makes sense. It’s valuable work.