Paracosm
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The concept was first described by a researcher for the BBC, Robert Silvey, with later research by British psychiatrist Stephen A. MacKeith, and British psychologist David Cohen. The term "paracosm" was coined by Ben Vincent, a participant in Silvey's 1976 study and a self-professed paracosmist.[1][2]
Psychiatrists Delmont Morrison and Shirley Morrison mention paracosms and "paracosmic fantasy" in their book Memories of Loss and Dreams of Perfection, in the context of people who have suffered the death of a loved one or some other tragedy in childhood. For such people, paracosms function as a way of processing and understanding their early loss.[3] They cite James M. Barrie, Isak Dinesen and Emily Bronte as examples of people who created paracosms after the deaths of family members. Literary historian Joetta Harty connects paracosm play with imperialism in her writings on the Brontes, Thomas De Quincey and Hartley Coleridge.[4] Dorothy and Jerome Singer reference paracosms in their studies on childhood imagination.[5]
Marjorie Taylor is another child development psychologist who explores paracosms as part of a study on imaginary friends.[6] In Adam Gopnik's essay, "Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli", he consults his sister, a child psychologist, about his three-year-old daughter's imaginary friend. He is introduced to Taylor's ideas and told that children invent paracosms as a way of orienting themselves in reality.[7]
Paracosms are also mentioned in articles about types of childhood creativity and problem-solving. Some scholars believe paracosm play indicates high intelligence. A Michigan State University study revealed that many MacArthur Fellows Program recipients had paracosms as children. Paracosm play is recognized as one of the indicators of a high level of creativity, which educators now realize is as important as intelligence.[8] In an article in the International Handbook on Giftedness, Michelle Root-Bernstein writes about paracosm play as an indicator of high levels of intelligence and creativity, which may "supplement objective measures of intellectual giftedness ... as well as subjective measures of superior technical talent."[9]
Examples of paracosms include Gondal, Angria, and Gaaldine, the fantasy kingdoms created and written about in childhood by Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë, and their brother Branwell, and maintained well into adulthood.[10][11][12][13] Their contemporary, Hartley Coleridge, created and maintained the land of Ejuxria all his life.[14] Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia began as a childhood paracosm as did M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel. Another example is Borovnia, the fantasy kingdom created by Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker in their mid-teens, as portrayed in the film Heavenly Creatures.[15] The modern fantasy author Steph Swainston's world of the Fourlands is another example of an early childhood paracosm.[16] Henry Darger began writing about the Realms of the Unreal in his late teens and continued to write and illustrate its epic adventures for decades. Joanne Greenberg created a paracosm called Iria as a young girl, and described it to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann while hospitalized at Chestnut Lodge. Fromm-Reichmann wrote about it in an article for the American Journal of Psychiatry;[17] Greenberg wrote about it as the Kingdom of Yr in her novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.[18]
Label:
Imaginary friend
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Imaginary friends and imaginary companions are a psychological and social phenomenon where a friendship or other interpersonal relationship takes place in the imagination rather than external physical reality. Imaginary friends are fictional characters created for improvisational role-playing. They often have elaborate personalities and behaviors. They may seem real to their creators, though they are ultimately unreal, as shown by studies.[1]
Imaginary friends are made often in childhood, sometimes in adolescence, and rarely in adulthood. They often function as tutelaries when played with by a child. They reveal, according to several theories of psychology, a child's anxieties, fears, goals and perceptions of the world through that child's conversations. They are, according to some children, physically indistinguishable from real people, while others say they see their imaginary friends only in their heads. There's even a third category of imaginary friend recognition: when the child doesn't see the imaginary friend at all, but can only feel his/her presence.
Purposes
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Kutner (n.d.) holds that:
Imaginary companions are an integral part of many children's lives. They provide comfort in times of stress, companionship when they're lonely, someone to boss around when they feel powerless, and someone to blame for the broken lamp in the living room. Most important, an imaginary companion is a tool young children use to help them make sense of the adult world.[3]
Taylor, Carlson & Gerow (c2001: p. 190) hold that:
...despite some results suggesting that children with imaginary companions might be superior in intelligence, it is not true that all intelligent children create them.[4]
A long-time popular misconception is that most children dismiss or forget the imaginary friend once they begin school and acquire real friends. According to one study, by the age of seven, sixty-five percent of children report that they have had an imaginary companion at some point in their lives.[5] Some psychologists[who?] have suggested that children simply retain but stop speaking about imaginary friends, due to adult expectations and peer pressure. Still, some children report creating or maintaining imaginary friends as pre-teens or teenagers. Few adults report having imaginary friends. Dr. Benjamin Spock believed that imaginary friends past age four indicated that something was "lacking" in the child or his environment. Some child development professionals still believe that the presence of imaginary friends past early childhood signals a serious psychiatric disorder.[6][7] Others disagree, saying that imaginary friends are common among school-age children and are part of normal social-cognitive development.[8]
Play and adulthood
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Tim Brown explains that values like a bit of shamelessness during the creative process is extremely important in adult designers.[18]
Play may allow people to practice useful habits like learned optimism, which might help manage existential fears. Play also offers the opportunity to learn things that may not have otherwise been explicitly or formally taught (e.g. how to use, and deal with, deceit and misinformation). Thus, even though play is only one of many habits of an effective adult, it remains a necessary one.[10]
Behavioral cusp
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The concept has far reaching implications for every individual, and for the field of developmental psychology, because it provides a behavioral alternative to the concept of maturation and change due to the simple passage of time, such as developmental milestones. The cusp is a behavior change that presents special features when compared to other behavior changes.
Purpose
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One theory – Play as preparation – was inspired by the observation that play often mimics adult themes of survival. Predators such as lions and bears play by chasing, pouncing, pawing, wrestling, and biting, as they learn to stalk and kill prey. Prey animals such as deer and zebras play by running and leaping as they acquire speed and agility. Hoofed mammals also practice kicking their hind legs to learn to ward off attacks. While mimicking adult behavior, attacking actions such as kicking and biting are not completely fulfilled so that they won't injure each other. In social animals, playing might also help to establish dominance rankings among the young to avoid conflicts as adults. On the other hand, this view runs into some problems; the behaviors practiced are often quite different, or even exactly the opposite of those required in the equivalent real life situation.[10]
Researcher John Byers describes how the amount of time spent at play for many mammals (e.g. rats and cats) peaks around puberty, and then drops off. This corresponds to the development of their cerebellum, suggesting that play is not so much about practicing the exact behaviors, as much as building general connections in the brain. Research by Sergio Pellis and colleagues discovered that play may shape the brain in other ways. Young mammals have an overabundance of brain cells in their cerebrum (the outer areas of the brain – part of what distinguishes mammals). Play has been evidenced to help the brain clean up this excess of cells, resulting in the more effective cerebrum of maturity.[10]
Marc Bekoff describes a Flexibility Hypothesis which attempts to incorporate these newer neurological findings. It argues that play helps animals learn to switch and improvise all behaviors more effectively. Animal researcher Marek Spinka believes that playing helps animals learn to handle new and surprising events.[11] There may, however, be other ways to acquire even these benefits of play – the concept of equifinality. The idea is that the social benefits of play for many animals, for example, could instead be garnered by grooming. Patrick Bateson maintains that equifinality is exactly what play teaches. In accordance with the flexibility hypothesis, play may teach animals to avoid "false endpoints." In other words, they will harness the childlike tendency to keep playing with something that works "well enough," eventually allowing them to come up with something that might work better, if only in some situations. This also allows mammals to build up various skills that could come in handy in entirely novel situations.[10]
Peter Smith warns against a "play ethos." He says we must keep things in perspective, and let real evidence – rather than wishful thinking – guide our beliefs about play.[10]
Childhood and play
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Many of the most prominent researchers in the field of psychology (including Jean Piaget, William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Lev Vygotsky) have viewed play as endemic to the human species; indeed, the attributions projected upon an imaginary friend by children are key to understanding the construction of human spirituality and it pantheon(s) of deification (and demonization).
Play is explicitly recognized in Article 31 of The Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, November 29, 1989). which states:
1. Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.
2. Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activities.
Childhood "play" is also seen by Sally Jenkinson (author of The Genius of Play) to be an intimate and integral part of childhood development. "In giving primacy to adult knowledge, to our 'grown-up' ways of seeing the world, have we forgotten how to value other kinds of wisdom? Do we still care about the small secret corners of children's wisdom?"[13]
Modern research in the field of "affective neuroscience" has uncovered important links between role playing and neurogenesis in the brain.[14] Sociologist Roger Caillois used the word ilinx to describe the momentary disruption of perception that comes from forms of physical play that disorient the senses, especially balance.
In addition, evolutionary psychologists have begun to expound the phylogenetic relationship between higher intelligence in humans and its relationship to play.
Children's Games, 1560, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Stevanne Auerbach mentions the role of play therapy in treating children suffering from traumas, emotional issues, and other problems.[15] She also emphasizes the importance of toys with high play value for child development and the role of the parent in evaluating toys and being the child's play guide.
Playtime
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American historian Howard Chudacoff has studied the interplay between parental control of toys and games and children's drive for freedom to play. In the colonial era, toys were makeshift and children taught each other very simple games with little adult supervision. The market economy of the 19th century enabled the modern concept of childhood as a distinct, happy life stage. Factory-made dolls and doll houses delighted the girls. Organized sports filtered down from adults and colleges, as boys made good with a bat, a ball and an impromptu playing field. In the 20th century teenagers were increasingly organized into club sports supervised and coached by adults, with swimming taught at summer camps. The New Deal's WPA built thousands of local playgrounds and ball fields, promoting softball especially as a sport for everyone of all ages and sexes, as opposed to increasingly professionalized adult sports. By the 21st century, Chudacoff notes, the old tension between controls and freedom was being played out in cyberspace.[16]
Play (activity)
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The rites of play are evident throughout nature and are perceived in people and animals, although generally only in those species possessing highly complex nervous systems such as mammals and birds.[2] Play is most frequently associated with the cognitive development and socialization of those engaged in developmental processes and the young. Play often entertains props, tools, animals, or toys in the context of learning and recreation. That is, some hypothesize that play is preparation of skills that will be used later. Others appeal to modern findings in neuroscience to argue that play is actually about training a general flexibility of mind – including highly adaptive practices like training multiple ways to do the same thing, or playing with an idea that is "good enough" in the hopes of maybe making it better.
Some play has clearly defined goals and when structured with rules is called a game, whereas, other play exhibits no such goals nor rules and is considered to be "unstructured" in the literature. Play promotes broaden and build behaviors as well as mental states of happiness – including flow.
Play has traditionally been given little attention by behavioral ecologists. Edward O. Wilson wrote in Sociobiology that "No behavior has proved more ill-defined, elusive, controversial and even unfashionable than play."[3] Though it received little attention in the early decades of ethology, and instead only existed as a matter of study within human psychology, there is now a considerable body of scientific literature resulting from research on the subject. Play does not have the central theoretical framework that exists in other areas of biology.
Ethologists frequently divide play into three general categories: Social play, locomotor play and object play. Locomotor play is the pretend playing that a very young animal participates in when alone.[4] The jumping and spinning characteristic of locomotor play can best be seen in young goats.[4] Researchers have theorized that locomotor play helps the cells in the cerebellum of the brain to develop connections.[4] Types of play listed by psychiatrist Dr. Stuart Brown expand upon these basic categories to include: fantasy and transformational play as well as body, object, social.[5] The National Institute for Play describes the previous five play types, as well as the play types attunement and narrative.[6]
Definitions
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Playing Children, by ChineseSong Dynasty artist Su Hanchen, c. 1150 AD.
A concerted endeavor has been made to identify the qualities of play, but this task is not without its ambiguities. For example, play is commonly perceived as a frivolous and non-serious activity; yet juveniles at play often display a transfixed seriousness and entrancing absorption while engaged in it. Other criteria of play include a relaxed pace and freedom versus compulsion. Yet play seems to have its intrinsic constraints, as in, "You're not playing fair."
When play is structured and goal-orientated it is often presented as a game. Play can also be seen as the activity of rehearsing life events, e.g., young animals play fighting. Play may also serve as a pretext, allowing people to explore reactions of others by engaging in playful interaction. Flirting is an example of such behavior. These and other concepts or rhetorics of play are discussed at length by Brian Sutton-Smith in the book The Ambiguity of Play. Sometimes play is dangerous, such as in extreme sports. This type of play could be considered stunt play, whether engaging in play fighting, sky-diving, or riding a device at a high speed in an unusual manner.
The seminal text in the field of play studies is Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. Huizinga defined play as follows:
Summing up the formal characteristic of play, we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary' life as being 'not serious' but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings that tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress the difference from the common world by disguise or other means.
This definition of play as constituting a separate and independent sphere of human activity is sometimes referred to as the "magic circle" notion of play, and attributed to Huizinga, who does make reference to the term at some points in Homo Ludens. According to Huizinga, within play spaces, human behavior is structured by very different rules: e.g., kicking (and only kicking) a ball in one direction or another, using physical force to impede another player (in a way which might be illegal outside the context of the game).
Another classic in play theory is Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois. Borrowing much of his definition from Huizinga, Caillois coined several formal sub-categories of play, such as alea (games of chance) and ilinx (vertigo or thrill-seeking play).
According to Stephen Nachmanovitch, play is the root and foundation of creativity in the arts and sciences also as in daily life.
Improvisation, composition, writing, painting, theater, invention, all creative acts are forms of play, the starting place of creativity in the human growth cycle, and one of the great primal life functions.[7]
A notable contemporary play theorist is Jesper Juul who works on both pure play theory and the application of this theory to computer game studies. The theory of play and its relationship with rules and game design is also extensively discussed by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in their book Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. In computer games, the word gameplay is often used to describe the concept of play.
Symbolic play uses one thing to stand for another and shows the child's ability to create mental images. There are three types of symbolic play: dramatic play, constructive play, and playing games with rules.
Researchers at the National Institute for Play are creating a clinical, scientific framework for play. They describe seven patterns of play which indicate the range of activities and states of being which play encompasses.[6] References for each type of play are also listed.[6]
James Findlay, a Social Educator, defines play as "intelligence," suggesting further that play is the "meta intelligence" behind, together with, and changing, the various forms of intelligences people have. He argues that play intelligence is not a form of intelligence, it is intelligence in all its forms. He is known for his 3-dimensional models which demonstrate the principles of how intelligence and play function together.[8]
Morgen (mythological creature)
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Morgens, Morgans or Mari-Morgans are Welsh and Breton water spirits that drown men. They may lure men to their death by their own sylphic beauty, or with glimpses of underwater gardens with buildings of gold or crystal. They are also blamed for heavy flooding that destroys crops or villages. In the story of the drowning of Ys, a city in Brittany, the king's daughter, Dahut, is the cause, and she becomes a sea morgen.
The morgens are eternally young, and like sirens they sit in the water and comb their hair seductively.[1] In Arthurian legend, particularly Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, the ruler of Avalon is referred to as "Morgen".[2] As such, the origin of Morgan le Fay may be connected to these Breton myths.[3]
Tales of morgens are preserved in the British countryside, even some parts of South West England, like the one from western Somerset, where a fisherman adopts an infant morgen, only to have her revert to the sea when she grows up.[4]
Aliens and entheogens
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Ancient traditions in the world such as those of the pre-Columbian peoples in the Mesoamerica,[174][175] and the Greek Eleusinian tradition, celebrated mystical rituals between man and ethereal Gods that occurred through the effects of entheogens.[176][177] In modern times, spiritual experiences still are seen in religious rituals of sects, such as the Ayahuasca cult, or in isolated experiences of free will.[64] Aliens realized as ethereal beings are reported by persons under effect[178][179] of thesepsychoactive substances.[180]
Although there is a large diversity of experiences and outcomes, each entheogen profiles some own character,[62][178] what allows to identify a convergent line of reports. Hence, in some of these accounts, persons who were under altered state of consciousness, claim to have made contact with the purported hamadryad of the entheogenic plant.[178] In his writings the writer Castaneda, for example, personified the Peyote’s hamadryad by the name of "Mescalito".[62][64] According to the researches and reports, some specific entheogens like the Peyote, the Ololiuqui, and those with DMT alkaloid, in particular the Tepezcohuite emphasize such features.[178][181]
Alongside a disturbed sense of reality, other shared point narrated by protagonists under these effects, it is the hamadryad showing itself as an alien, which also lives out of the Earth and already was waiting for that contact. That is, there is a strange duality that exhibits the alien being living at same time as a hamadryad on Earth, and as well in another dimension as an hallucinogenic version of the Quantum Entanglement.[182] Such aspects were well observed by American writer Terence McKenna who describes them as "Machine elves".[183]
Another recurrent elements are the loss of the sense of identity, lack of ability to think, a being which leads the person to an odd dimension, the meeting with more aliens, and the person being submitted to an ethereal abduction.[184] Afterwards the aliens elucidate secrets of the universe to the subject, and usually welcome him to return soon.[178][179][185][186]
According to theosophic author Alice Bailey, although seldom, alien beings from other planets can obsess or possess humans. The assistance of "violet devas", which are devas that perform in the etheric plane, helps to strengthen the human body to resist obsessions. Hence by means of the violet light, it is fortified the "etheric web", claims Bailey.[137] Such concept finds some similarity in the tooldreamcatcher used by American natives for protection against mischievous spirits. According to native tradition, the nightmarish spirits are trapped in the crafted web and dissipate under the effect of solar specter.[35]
Conspiracy theories and doctrines
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The connection between ethereal beings and man also comes from popular conspiracy theories, such as The Invisibles, a comic book series by Grant Morrison that was said be intended as a hypersigil,[188] as well as from esoteric philosophies,[156] where the plot would be the deviation of man’s sense of reality, and the obstruction of his spiritual development[189] by some ethereal creatures.[190]
Writers like Castaneda corroborate that sense unveiling certain type of ethereal beings as manipulators and parasites of the human mind.[191] He declares that they control the whole life of a human being.[192] As expounded by Castaneda, perception, thoughts and emotions are alien events restraining what a man realizes. To achieve such prowess, the ethereal being transfers his own alien mind to the young human.[81][193] For that reason the human ego actually is an alien self and the reality sought by men is untruth, is not the universe as fact. Victim of that catastrophic situation, the only chance to escape from that, would be an entire life of breaking off thoughts discipline and other techniques. However for governing a human, at some moment there must be an agreement between the parts because according to him as well as other occultist authors, the “world of the ethereal beings” does not know lies but recognizes humans. The first word spoken is sacred, it is a final act, and thus regrets are useless.[125] Nevertheless this does not mean that ruses could not be done by it.[69][191]
Besides involving ghostly creatures such as familiars and demons, western magic tradition deposits such mental practice of ceasing the internal mental dialogue as well a requisite in the path for becoming a magician.
In the Buddhist Tradition certain philosophic parallels concerning such discipline, also are found.[191][194][195] The Dhyāna, the meditation practice where thoughts are canceled, would be a major factor to free the man of his Samsara strands and became an enlightened Buddha.[196][197]
The psychic death of ego and the annulment of desires, that in turn provide from self-image, as well would be key elements to man understand Maya, that in Sanskrit means world of illusions.[198][199] The "non-self", the anatman, the teaching that none of the things perceived by the senses constitute a "self", represents a commitment of most Buddhist doctrines.[200] As for the sense of reality, there are variations in Tibetan Buddhism, but as clarified by school of Dzogchen, all perceived reality is totally unreal.[201]
Buddhism professes the existence of a myriad of ethereal entities pictured as demons or “angry gods”, which are accrued in the human psyche and must be overcome during the process of death to achieve theenlightenment.[202] Many teachings in Buddhism aim to face the death and fight against these creatures to achieve the freedom of human soul. A Buddhist doctrine altogether dedicated to that is Death yoga, one of the Tantra techniques in Vajrayana. That theme is very explored in the Tibetan texts written around the 8th century A.D., of the Bardo Thodol or The Liberation Through Hearing During The Intermediate State(Tibetan: bardo “liminality”; thodol as “liberation”) more known in Occident as “The Tibetan book of dead”.[51]
Armenian writer George Gurdjieff claimed that mankind does not really sense the reality. According to Gurdjieff, people could not perceive reality in their current states because they do not possess consciousness but rather live in a state of a hypnotic "waking sleep".[191] He declares: "Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies". The author, born in 19th century, at that time was considered polemic but succeeded to settle his school, also known as "the Fourth Way", teaching his esoteric techniques of "awakening". The best legacy of his work, probably is represented by work of the philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous.[203]
The reality question according to theosophist Bailey, displays a dual sight, which she describes it as the necessary and holy work by devas of one side, while on the other hand it indicates such work as rightly charming the humanity. Men became slaves of what she calls “the compelling glamour of Maya”.[189]
Inasmuch, progresses Bailey, there is the problematic control exerted by some elementals in human constitution. These elementals, which she calls "lunar lords", naturally build the own human essence. The lunar lords have own existence and power, however they are in an “involutionary arc” aggregating and arresting the human being under a world of forms. Virtually they are intelligences escorted by their will. When the lunar lords deploy a predominant command they transform themselves in the “lower personality”. In view of that fact, as a single being, “he” is a power directing the body’s energies for feeding himself in all the three basic levels: physical, astral and mental. The man must constantly hear the “formless” voice coming from “real man” for finding the deliverance from that bondage, for accomplishing the realization of this world of form.[204]
Another opposing entity it is the “Dweller on the Threshold”, who only affects persons already in the path to knowledge, the initiates.[190] What the dweller comes to be, it is not clear to most esoteric schools, outlines Bailey, but effectively it is a huge and potent thoughtform, an elemental embodying vital, astral and mental energy, a force blocking the initiated progress that must be dissipated.[135]
The “dweller” can be determined as all lower features marked in the human personality; he shifts the consciousness into a delusional and sensorial realm; he defies the human soul; he leads to the past intrinsically accompanied by its limitations and wicked addictions; he induces a fanatic mind and whilst in his worst manifestation causes mental insanity, asserts Bayley.[135][189][190]
Concerning artistic expressions, stands out the mystic painting “The Dweller in the Innermost” by George Frederic Watts, which as well inspired the English Walter Crane to write the sonnet:
Star-steadfast eyes that pierce the smouldering haze
Of Life and Thought, whose fires prismatic fuse
The palpitating mists with magic hues
That stain the glass of Being, as we gaze,
And mark in transit every mood and phase,
Which, sensitive, doth take or doth refuse
The Lights and shadows Time and Love confuse,
When, lost in dreams, we thread their wandering maze.
Fledged, too, art thou with plumes on brow and breast
To bear thee, brooding o'er the depths unknown
Of human strife, and wonder, and desire;
And silence, wakened by thy horn alone,
Behind thy veil behold a heart on fire,
Wrapped in the secret of its own unrest.
- —Walter Crane, 1907.[205]
A precursor of this theme at Victorian era was the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton who in his mystical romance Zanoni phrased the expression “Dweller of the Threshold” for representing an mighty entity opposing those in the way for the occult world:
Its form was veiled as the face, but the outline was that of a female;
yet it moved not as move even the ghosts that simulate the living.
It seemed rather to crawl as some vast misshapen reptile; and
pausing, at length it cowered beside the table which held the mystic
volume, and again fixed its eyes through the filmy veil on the rash
invoker.
All fancies, the most grotesque, of monk or painter in the
early North, would have failed to give to the visage of imp or fiend
that aspect of deadly malignity which spoke to the shuddering
nature in those eyes alone. All else so dark, —shrouded, veiled and
larva-like. But that burning glare so intense, so livid, yet so living,
had in it something that was almost HUMAN in its passion of hate
and mockery, something that served to show that the shadowy
Horror was not all a spirit, but partook of matter enough, at least,
to make it more deadly and fearful an enemy to material forms. As,
clinging with the grasp of agony to the wall, his hair erect, his
eyeballs starting, he still gazed back upon that appalling gaze,
—the Image spoke to him: his soul rather than his ear comprehended
the words it said.
Thou hast entered the immeasurable region. I am the Dweller of the
Threshold. What wouldst thou with me? Silent? Dost thou fear me?
Am I not thy beloved? Is it not for me that thou hast rendered up
The delights of thy race? Wouldst thou be wise? Mine is the
wisdom of the countless ages. Kiss me, my mortal lover.
- —Bulwer-Lytton, 1842.[206]
The characteristics of the ethereal dweller also were considered by authors such as the British Dion Fortune,[207] Russian H. P. Blavatsky,[208] and the Austrian-Hungarian Rudolf Steiner.[209] Steiner, amidst his studies, claims the existence of two dwellers, a “lesser and a greater guardian on the threshold”, and he and also Blavatsky corroborate the description made by Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni to the dweller. According to Steiner the dweller originates from man as an independent intelligence and no longer destructible.
Dion Fortune compares the dweller with the mythological riddle of the Sphinx blocking the way of men, which in the legend confronts the man with the threat: “decipher me or I will devour you”.[207] In current theosophic lines, the dweller is rendered as a being made of astral remnants originated from present and past lives of the man, whichever are bound by desires and terrene aspirations.[32] Additionally, other possible origin to the dweller is taken under an psychological approach, which regard it actually not as a proper entity but a resistance built by sum of mind’s wishes for not abandoning the familiar and mundane ambitions of the ordinary man.[32]
As delineated by gnostic author Samael Aun Weor the mind lives continuously reacting against the impact of the outside world. These feedbacks of appreciation depart from a demonic mental entity. This creature is the Guardian of the threshold of the human mental body . This mental custodian enslaves the mind of all human beings.[156]
Violence, desires and passions, hatred, bitterness, egoism, wrath, envy, and slander are responses coming from the mental keeper, claims Weor. The body of wishes is nothing else but an temper device of the mind keeper.[156]
The true being is not the mind, the Being is the Being, says the Gnostic. If temporarily the disciple has dispossessed himself from his mind, he can talk with the guardian. Then, the mind seems to be an independent individual that sits in front of him. After this deep exploration, the devotee will be aware that his mind is a wild force, which he must overcome, command and direct. Depriving himself from this terrible sentinel allows transform his matter mind into Christ mind.[156]
To succeed the spiritual practitioner works via the inner fire, asserts Weor. Awaking the igneous serpent of the mental body, it runs the spinal cord (the igneous wings) and then him daringly faces this dark beast and defeats it in an appalling wrestling match. As a consequence, after that moment, the mind of the spiritual practitioner only obeys the direct commands of the true self.[156]