Tag Archive for: visionary fiction

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Reality ~ Enough Already!

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Reality and Imagination

Reality ~ enough already! We need a break. So . . . where to go? There’s a story. It ushers into the imagination. After a tough day of seeing patients, I look forward to watching and reading stories that entrance and reset my mind.

As a psychologist, I know the imagination as a wellspring for healing and consciousness. Helping patients with troubling dreams is a lot like taking my readers on a soul journey through stories. The books I write are like dreams, a free-flow of imagination that bypasses outer reality and taps into hidden worlds that offer unthought secrets.

Clogged Emotions and Stories

Visionary stories take you into a different zone. I need to go there. You need to go there. It blows out what’s been clogging up your emotional and spiritual life.

Stuck emotions translate to a stuck life. We’re working harder and harder and getting nowhere. Everyday problems get blown out of proportion because we’re dealing with the small stuff. Soon, one small issue leads to another and our heads are crammed full of anxiety and weighed down by care.

Picking up a story gives your conscious mind a rest so your unconscious can enter reverie. Yeah, reverie. It’s a word that means “pleasantly lost in thoughts,” as one dictionary states. Without needing to know how it works, it’s enough to experience a good visionary thriller. Somehow, in a way mysterious to logic and linear thinking, it cuts to the quick. And, we feel better, our mind a little more unclogged and our disposition a little lighter.

Inspiration and Wisdom

Friday through Sunday I both read and write visionary stories. Folks who write and read visionary books are seekers. We sense a tug from the unconscious mind, the realm of spiritual inspiration, and old wisdom.

Daily challenges hit us one after another. They seem unending. In my stories—The Unholy, Goddess of the Wild Thing, and the soon to be released Goddess of Everything—there’s one fright and then a bigger one and then (you’d never guess it!) a seemingly insurmountable obstacle that threatens life and limb. There seems to be no way out.

When you lose yourself in reading a visionary thriller, your unconscious mind feels understood. People go through things, and the things they go through can leave them on edge. They’re dangling from a precipice, hanging between life and death. Admit it—you know the feeling.

Pick up a visionary read. Browse through your favorite online book retailer under visionary/metaphysical fiction if you don’t know where to start. Discover worlds where unthought wisdom comes to the aid of a sincere soul at a dead-end time of life. You’re in for a time of mind expansion and soul finding.

So . . . enough of reality! Let’s consider the inspiration of Albert Einstein who wrote that imagination is more important than knowledge. It births human evolution. Let’s do this! Let’s take time to take leave from outer reality, plunge into the imagination, and evolve.

“Live Deeply…Read Daily”

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Tap Into the Life Vibe

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Bad Contagion and the Vibe

In the midst of the creeper contagion of Covid-19 and any other bad creature inside or out that comes our way, we can tap into the life vibe. It’s there and in you and surrounding you. In visionary fiction and occult horror (good books one and the same), there’s a horrid contagion. It’s usually in the form of a person or people. If it’s people, then it’s a cult. A cult becomes occult when it’s kept secret. That’s what occult means – secret. A chosen few, think they have the truth, and pity those who stand in their way.

The Vibe Will See You Through

There’s a tension in thrillers. Real life has tension. Daily is packed with tension. If we try and live so that it’s tension-free, we’ve got one hell of a problem that will translate to our soul. What you try and escape will get you. It’ll bite you in the ass. Stories, occult thrillers, are visionary because they raise consciousness. That’s the vibe—heightened awareness that gets you through the hell that’s come your way and out the other side in one piece and a better person for it. You’ll learn to stop the running, face the issue, and get on with the decision that needs to be made.

We can’t outrun making decisions. They’re either bad or good, but they are ours to make. And, we live out the consequences. Hopefully, the reading of stories helps us become a little wiser about the choices we make. They are critical because they determine the course of our life.

Vibe Restored and Replenished

As a depth psychologist in private practice for forty years, I’ve seen people repeatedly choose the bad and suffer terribly. The vibe’s gotten dulled down. It’s barely pulsing, beating, breathing. Often, folks have gotten enmeshed in cults like dysfunctional families (yup, they qualify), oppressive religious groups, dogmatic professional associations, and a legion of other nasty entities. I’d rather my patients not have suffered. But, it was their road to take, their path to walk. I help them regroup, learn what they need to learn from the experience and how dreams have spoken to the pain. Then the vibe returns like the morning sun rising over the Sandia Mountains in my native New Mexico. There’s wisdom gained, vibe restored and replenished, from stories, the living out of our own, and the reading of cut-to-the-chase visionary fiction.

“Live Deeply…Read Daily”

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Image: Moises Llerena and Alfredo Zacateca

How to Get it Together!

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Good Reading Helps

I couldn’t resist writing a How-to Article. It pops out of a piece I read in a high-brow online magazine about how-to books considered an embarrassing facet of the writing and publishing world. Oh . . . get real. All good reading helps us, it takes us into new thoughts, it inspires new ideas, it’s a way for us to get our life together.

My specialty has turned from books in inspirational psychology (starting thirty-five years ago) to essays in depth psychology and visionary fiction. There are no two ways around it. They, the essays and novels, are purposefully embedded with insights, life wisdom, culled from forty years of clinical experience, research, and painful living through life’s humdingers.

How-to Reads Help

How-to . . . is a literary voice, sometimes a whisper or flash, that makes a difference. We feel different after the words, sentence, paragraph, story. It changes the way we see a problem, feel about ourselves, relate to others. It’s a how-to that happens spontaneously and mysteriously.

We’re drawn to read what we read because something in us is hungry. I prefer stories oriented to consciousness and archetypal themes. They play out numinous dramas, the way the human psyche uses dreams, images, vital feeling states, and synchronicity to get through to us. The psyche is always at work helping us get it together.

Check out Soulful and Helpful Reads

I’ve been criticized (a couple of times – still stings) for not being more nuanced in my storytelling. Critics have said I should have left things understated, implied, maybe at the most slightly suggested. When we’re in crisis, the unconscious mind does not dawdle with nuance, far-off whispers, or subtleties. It speaks, shouts, if necessary. And, that’s how I write—good and evil squaring off, the crazies set loose, and then we see who survives and thrives.

So, shy not away from picking up the supernatural thriller you secretly want to read but have put off. Check into a work of soulful nonfiction and let the words seep in and nourish. It’s all about what books our innermost self is drawn to. It will speak the words we need to hear, it will feed our depths, it will help us get it together!

 

“Live Deeply…Read Daily”

pauldeblassieiii.com

When Life Gives You Lemons, Call the Alchemist

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Alchemical Books

We are all alchemists. In depth psychology and visionary books, alchemy is at work. Alchemist Awakening speaks to the amnesia within, sleepwalking through life until we psychically wake up. Everyday Enchantments lifts the veil from our eyes so we can see the magic in daily life. Daily alchemical magic transforms base, raw emotion into meaningful experiences. Love trauma in Goddess of the Wild Thing rips the mind apart and makes room for alchemy. The Unholy shocks us with religious horror then transports us into a realm of dreams and natural magic. Literally, everything that happens in life can transform us to the core.

Depth Therapy – Visionary Thrillers

When I do psychotherapy, write visionary thrillers, and live everyday life, I call on the alchemist within. This is a psychological dynamic that energizes experiences so daily happenings help and heal even as they can upfront hurt and sometimes shock.

We tend to this vitalizing force in the human psyche by raising our awareness. It’s a quiet and gentle knowing. Therapy assists patients in discovering this realm, reading ushers the attentive into imaginary states of mind, awareness then transforms dangerous and horrid experiences into meaning. That’s the luscious juice in the lemons life dishes out, the alchemical gold in the base metal of human suffering.

Alchemy and Unconscious Mind

When visionary writers write, they live out their characters and stories. Depth therapists have to descend into the unconscious mind and learn its ways before helping others make the inward descent and heal. Therapy is an alchemical awakening, and reading visionary fiction also wakens the alchemist within.

Awakening is a must lest we perish in a black hole of despair. We’ve all gone down the tube at one time or another. We’ve needed help. More times than I can count, I’ve opened a book randomly (to include novels) and found a paragraph that speaks to me. It’s uncanny, moving, and more than a wee bit mysterious. It’s the alchemist within spontaneously guiding us to awakening, however small or revolutionary.

Alchemy and Enlightenment

During the middle of my day in psychotherapy practice, I have lunch and read. Frequently, I turn to alchemical texts, let my eyes land where the text falls open. One noontime, the writing spoke to the therapist’s need to sit silently, act as a quiet container of practically unendurable pain until the patient sees for herself the meaning behind the crisis. Wisdom lies in not speaking what the patient cannot yet see or understand. They must, with the caring presence of a depth psychotherapist, feel all that must be explored and then and only then will the clouds part and enlightenment, perchance, dawn.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the first session of the afternoon ushered the patient and me into a realm of nearly unendurable trauma. Listening without rushing into words allowed her to go through a dark emotional tunnel and, fortunately, by session’s end gain insight. It was soulful enlightenment regarding heart-rending pain birthing tearful insights and a release of pent-up emotions. I breathed a sigh of relief, grateful for the noontime reading that prepared me for the rough time ahead. It awakened the relational alchemist inherent in depth therapy and visionary/alchemical books

Reading Awakens Inner Alchemist

Visionary reading awakens the inner alchemist as we enter a dark emotional and spiritual tunnel through the challenges of the protagonist and the horrors of the antagonist. It’s a story like our story, the narrative that is our life replete with hopes and dreams gone south and turned sour. The inner alchemist awakens within our imagination as we delve into the feelings and the ensuing meaning of life experiences and visionary books.

“Live Deeply…Read Daily”

pauldeblassieiii.com

Step Into a Visionary World

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Reading visionary fiction ushers us into an imaginative outside of everyday space and time. The human psyche nourishes itself via reflection of archetypal images and symbols. Realms of mystery occur in dreaming time and reading. In many ways, reading and reflecting on visionary fiction is a waking dream.

As a depth psychologist of forty years, I’ve tended hundreds of dreams with patients. We’ve explored and worked through intense emotional and spiritual crisis, physical and sexual trauma, and daily life stress. Inevitably the images and symbols discovered in dreams helped them to heal.

Images and symbols in visionary fiction reflect the archetypal workings of the unconscious mind. Archetypes are the age-old transcultural symbols which, for centuries, healers and seekers have sought understanding and transformation. Quietude, meditation, and reading encourage their appearance from the depths of the soul.

Yesterday, a person told me how important novels are for them. They said, “I really get into the characters. When magic and mystery are there (that’s the type of novels I read), then I’m pulled in right off. I look forward to opening the e-book every day. By the end, I feel like I’ve lost a friend. Then it strikes me that I’ve made a friend, a story that I’ve learned from and that’s changed me a little bit – just a little bit. But that little bit makes a big difference.”

Readers are sometimes shocked that elements of urban fantasy and even horror find their way into visionary reading. Well, life brims over with unseen, phantasmagoric dimensions. We’re usually not aware of these realities. Reading, entering a world of wakeful dreams, sensitizes us to the otherworld. It operates behind the scenes of daily life.

Raising consciousness via visionary fiction happens as images and symbols waken in the psyche. They live within, they sleep within, and they waken within us with awareness and attention. Stories bring awareness and attention to numinous energies. Suddenly, what’s taken place in the narrative occurs in your life. Or, perhaps, it’s already taken place. Awareness gives us pause, stirs reflection and meditation. We wonder. We stay open. We step into soulful stories, a visionary world, and images and symbols quicken a sense of mystery that lies behind the scene of daily life.

“Live Deeply…Read Daily”

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Vilifying Gayness ~ Religion, Horror, and Reality

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Gay and Predatory ~ I Think Not

NYT’s today (2.17.19) reviews Sodoma, a troubling sensationalizing of sexuality gone awry, all too tragically at times in an abusive manner. I’m a sure critic of organized religion and its inherent potential to abuse power; but, this book appears as vilifying gay priests, the wonder and pluralism of sexuality. Not all gay priests are pedophiles any more than all straight men are misogynistic. The religious and humanitarian issue at hand is power and abuse. Let’s not confuse pluralistic human nature with the thwarted and damaged men and women who propagate rapacious acts under a religious guise: “All else aside, the book speaks to the enormous and seemingly growing tension between a church that frequently vilifies and marginalizes gay men and a priesthood dense with them. “This fact hangs in the air as a giant, unsustainable paradox,” wrote Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic and gay, in an excellent cover story for New York magazine last month. It explains why so many gay men entered the priesthood, especially decades ago: They didn’t feel safe or comfortable in a society that ostracized them. Their sense of being outsiders gave them a more spiritual bent and greater desire to help others in need.”

Dark Religion ~ Abuse and the Mind

In The Unholy, I searingly explore the dark side of religion. The dramatic tale delves into religion gone bad, horrifying mind manipulation and sexual abuse taking the reader by storm. Various reviewers criticized it as too severe. I disagree. As in Goddess of the Wild Thing I pop out reality, take it from the subtle to vivid dimensions. This speaks to the unconscious mind, confirms realities repressed by the conscious mind. We deny or forget what traumatizes us. Visionary thrillers help us to face the reality behind the illusion, usher us into what’s been locked up tight and put away in the basement of the unconscious.

Reality ~ Healing What’s True and Hurting

For all of us, we’re no more or less than human. Our life story, if read well and lived well, gradually forms us into a truer human. We’re more sensitive, even if that requires ongoing questioning of self and realigning self when we get off our path. Reading develops a human sensibility for a truer take on reality in matters of sexuality, healing, and spirituality. Let’s take time to read, ponder, and wonder every day. I know there are challenges to our time commitments and other voices telling us to do this or that. We can satisfy those other necessary tugs without forsaking the quietude and reading that nurtures our evolution into a truer perspective on sexuality, spirituality and what it means to be human.

Live Deeply . . . Read Daily  

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Blowing Out the Crazies

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If you say you haven’t felt the crazies, you’re bold-faced lying. All humans do. It’s a human thing. The crazies are what they are—severe anxiety that grips you by the throat and squeezes real hard. That’s why stories are so important.

When I write visionary fiction, I get into the crazies because there’s no light unless you get into the dark. As a psychotherapist, I guide patients to understand that their crazies are a gift. In my novel, The Unholy, Archbishop William Anarch reigns supreme as an incarnation of crazy bad evil. He cloaks it with religion.

The crazies are always cloaked. You don’t think they’re in you or the person you’re troubled by. In fact, they signal there is trouble. It needs attention, working on and working through. In Goddess of the Wild Thing, Eve Sanchez has so much in her life together. But, she’s also got crazy denial going. She wants perfect love. On some level, she thinks it’s there. Then she needs to confront whether she should settle—is bad love better than no love? It’s a crazy proposition in her head that drives the story forward.

What drives us forward is desire. If got good things going for us, it’s a desire to get through what’s bad and find good. If there’s bad settling in nice and tidy and unreachable, then folks settle for crazy—for no love, for bad religion, for a horrid and insane life. It’s merely comfortable to and for them.

Well, since you and I are readers that says we’re searching. We’re searching for something more than settling into crazy. We want release. We read what evil does like in my supernatural thriller, The Unholy. We take in the ravages of bad love like in Goddess of the Wild Thing. It makes us wonder, ponder. And, finally if we read and let the reading soak into us, the crazies are blown out a little more, and we’ve come closer to life, light, and sanity a little more.

“Live Deeply…Read Daily”

pauldeblassieiii.com

There’s a Plan Going On In Our Life

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There is a plan

There’s a plan going on in our life. We can’t see it day to day, but it’s there. We’re busy living out our stories. Meaning happens once time passes and we look back, we see it all had a purpose.

We get into trouble due to anxiety that pops us out of soul. When I treat patients in depth psychotherapy or write visionary fiction, I’m caught by the power of anxiety. With patients, it lures them out of self. It takes them down dark alleys of despair. Characters in visionary stories lapse into waves of overwhelming stress, a toxic situation that clouds their mind and at least temporarily cripples positive behavior.

Reading visionary fiction taps us into a realm deeper than our anxieties. We step into another imaginative space and time that offers us a way out of a mental rut. The imagination, as psychologists have explored, opens us up to psychic energies that pop the top of our rule-bound heads off—they get what’s old and worn out and present an invigorating challenge and life-changing revolution.

The soul knows

The imagination is the home of the soul. It knows how to take us back inside so we find ourselves again. Dead-end troubles in life, as visionary fiction highlights, often tear us out of what’s true and real. They shake up the good and make us believe there’s only bad. The soul, the source of age-old inner wisdom, knows better. It knows the way back inside. It gets what’s terrible and awful and says voila I  have something new for you. It has a plan to get us into the new, the better, the revolutionary.

Some say it’s a leap to believe in soul. Actually, there’s no leap. There is no stretch of mind or faith. Soul simply is, whether we believe in it or not. Mind-numbing pain jettisons us into a wall that forces a decision to either believe in self or not. That’s soul or soullessness. It’s a plain as a New Mexico sunshine-day reality and depth psychological psychic truth.

If you’re up against an emotional/spiritual wall, stop and take a deep breath. Maybe it’s time to get real quiet, do a little online or favorite bookstore search, and read. Go to an imaginative place that speaks to you with a read that offers a tug. There’s a gentle or strong pull to reach out to that bookshelf or click the online button and download. As you start with the first word, sentence and paragraph you’ll feel like you’re settling into a well-worn chair in a warm and comfy home. A soul place. Read and take to heart the visionary story.  It will speak to you and show you the way. There’s a plan going on in our life, and the soul knows what it is.

“Live Deeply . . . Read Daily”

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Paul DeBlassie III, Ph.D.

Paul DeBlassie III, Ph.D., is a psychologist and award-winning writer living in his native New Mexico, crafting visionary thrillers energized with trickster mischief and natural magic.

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