How do you know that you are speaking to a spirit?

The interwebs are full of people who believe information that their contact or spirit told them only to be quite surprised later in life to discover that it was all pants.

One part of magical training that has fallen by the wayside is a good method of determining whether you are talking to an invoked spirit or just the voice in your head.

It is incredibly likely that even if you successfully invoke a spirit, the resulting conversation will be clouded by the much louder “voice inside your head.”  One magician friend puts the percentage of these conversations as more than 90 per cent.

In my book Why Magic Fails I look at some of the reasons for this.

Reasons for garbled messages

1. Your unconscious wants confirmation for existing beliefs and patterns.
2. Poor magical training, so the monkey mind is not stilled before ritual.
3. Inflated self-importance – you believe you are so damn important to the universe that you can dial up the most important gods and have them talk to you (or that they will obey you).
4. Ritual shortcuts which have prevented you from getting into the correct frame of mind before “meeting the spirit.”
5. Connecting to an astral spirit far lower or more different from the invoked one.

There are many more reasons (which are in the book).

 Clues your communications are off

1. The spirit tells you stuff you already know. No spirit will come down the astral to a level where it can communicate to tell you the information you have already read.
2. The spirit bangs on about love, beauty and harmony. Waffling about “pretty things” is using a sign that your unconscious has overridden the message with things that sound good. Spirits are very often pragmatic.
3. The spirit talks about unverifiable information (what daily life was like in Atlantis or another planet).
4. The spirit tells you you are essential, a messiah, a “living god”, or anything else that might inflate your ego.
5. It commands you to do something.
6. It threatens you or someone else or encourages you to live in fear if you do not obey it.
7. It tells you the information you know to be incorrect or illogical.
8. It tells you something which you want to hear.

The old idea of insisting that you get a spirit’s name does not help clear things up because names change over the centuries. Most times, the sorts of spirits you are getting are daemonic anyway, and their names are often very different from the Godname that invoked them.

Solution

I mentioned that there was training to tell if this was an inner or spirit voice, but this fell by the wayside as schools and orders fell out of favour in the 1990s. It requires regular supervised meditation work, during which you start noticing which voices in your head are your own and which are external. Meditation also forces you to still your mind before a ritual so that internal chatter is silenced.

This meant that when you took your diaries to your supervisor, they could clearly show you which was something you might come up with and which was a contact. Recreating this process is difficult but not impossible and requires a great deal of self-honesty and awareness.