Verifying Practical UPG

  So a common question in relation to upg* is how to know if the gnosis you get is good or not. A basic rule of thumb is to take the information you get and double check it, whether that's checking it against mythology or other types of fact checking.
  I tend to do a lot of mystical activities that result in upg. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not so much. The result is the same though, information that comes into my head from outside and then requires some sort of verification. I almost never utilize a upg without some kind of checking, and when it is checked I find that while some of it turns out to be contradicted (in other words just my head talking to myself) some of it turns out to be even more interesting than I realized at first.
  One example is the phrase "Mache mind" which I had stuck in my head for several days. I knew it was from the Tain Bo Cuiligne and thought that it meant "halidom of Macha"; I had a visionary experience where I saw a sword with those words engraved on it. I initially thought the message of the vision was that the sword was a sacred object of Macha's, which is one layer of meaning and is true, but after several days of this stuck in my head I finally double checked the word mind. It turns out mind in Old Irish also means "blade, weapon", so that Mache mind also means Macha's blade. As soon as I learned that it felt as if something clicked and the phrase stopped being stuck in my head. Part of the upg had to do with me understanding the vision and the phrase on the sword, and that meant getting out of my own assumption.
   I recently also had a upg experience involving herbal knowledge. Herbs are not my forte**. I was looking for an oil to use in a cleansing bath and was feeling like I needed something particular. I tried to open myself up to find out which one I needed. On the store display my eyes went to rosemary oil, but I dismissed it. I knew that rosemary was burned to cleanse sick rooms after illnesses but not much else about it and that wasn't the sort of thing I was looking for. Nonetheless I kept feeling that rosemary was what I needed and when I tried picking out a different bottle the next one I grabbed from a different area of the display was also rosemary, even though there shouldn't have been two bottles (according to the store owner). I gave in and went to look up the uses of rosemary to see if this little upg had anything to it, and it turned out that yes indeed rosemary is used in cleansing and purification according to two different books on magical uses of herbs.
   Both of these are just small things, but I hope they demonstrate the way that different types of upg can be researched and double checked. Instead of just trusting the random information we get in visions, dreams, and intuition we can take the time to see what deeper meanings might be behind them. Sometimes they may come to nothing. Other times they may prove out, and then you will know going forward how much depth your gnosis had.


*upg - unverified personal gnosis
** any herbal upgs should be double and triple checked in my opinion before you even think of using them in any way