I’m sure there are people here as well who lets say might indeed be top flight practitioners with decades of experience who just don’t do nearly as well by chipping away at it intellectually as they do by having an overpowering emotional connection, getting taken through visions, and as a byproduct more intellectual apprehensions sort of accrete as a side effect and that’s totally fair - especially if scrying in the astral comes to them almost as easy as dreaming, not everyone’s wired like that though.
My balance has been more about working myself into the kind of state (with or without the aid of psychedelics or dissociatives) where I could get enough noise to then add more elements (like sexual work when I first started) to… kind of strange metaphor maybe… but to get the ‘rabbit ears’, like on an old analog TV, up in the astral and start sifting signal from the static. More recently what I’ve done has been somewhat less extreme but I’m sort of fishing for these spikes, and those spikes sort of reminds me of how Dostoyevski described his seizures (approximating all knowledge right up until the seizure hits), like you’re spiraling toward either a psychotic break or seizure, see increasing layers of connection and feedback loops in front of you, many causal worlds conjoined, and at least in my case I pulled myself back from one of those events partly because I ended up posting on my facebook wall ‘I get it now - we’re the geese crossing the road when the gods are going to work’, and few minutes later I pulled it down because I realized just how many people I have professional connections with who’d be like ‘WTF is he talking about - is he doing drugs?’, ie. it’s much too dangerous a social world to go out there and leave social media open even if you have something profound to say that may even have a good shot at being true.
My point above though - I tend to take those launches into the deep, or the odd moments where the inexplicable happened like touch at a distance (a halo of three feet around me) where it was like a kinesthetic Dare Devil vision, the contacts with what may have been gods, goddesses, or pieces of their current, and when I have more of these I have a lot of time to extrapolate them, and I’m especially interested in truing up the difference between the white-light overdose aspects of the divine with the very brutal, nasty, ‘life isn’t about truth it’s about survival’ layer where so much of what we have around us are apes trying to (within the lines of the law) rape and kill each other to possess each other’s stuff, take their social status away from them by hook or crook, etc…
It’s a big project, it’s sort of an unshakable long-term interest of mine, and for as much as Donald Hoffman’s theory of conscious agents might hurt from the standpoint of being a very egg-headed technical description of what this might be I think he’s done something that very few people have succeeded at doing - ie. giving the theory of mind called functionalism (which seems to house egregores and thoughtforms better than anything else) and reified it down to a testable theory.
I’d have to think there are some other people here though who are prone to get intense downloads from time to time (maybe a dozen per decade) and spend more time in the interest of tree-shaking them to see what intuitions can come out of that which seem knock-on solid when applied to reality. I’m sure it’s not everyone’s thing and I’m sure there are ways where it could be mishandled and lead to people thinking it’s a nested ‘look how smart I am’ sort of aristocracy, IMHO there has to be a way of doing it where such conversations can be had and the tendency for it to rub people the wrong way can either be avoided or that in some way the conversation perhaps can be semi-closed just so that people who’d be triggered don’t need to see it…