On Holy Guardian Angels

The highly personalized "DIY" approach that Mace and Fries give, both of whom share a certain notion of the "Holy Guardian Angel" being the mediator within consciousness that folks like Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin termed "The Psychic Censor", can be a very effective way to learn more about yourself. Basically you're learning to make feedback loops within your self-complex, thereby opening up new modes for communication. How long that is going to take is going to vary significantly from person to person but you'll sense some headway when the symbolic language of your dreams begins to seem more coherent and meaningful to you. See if you can find anything on the Semiotic Theory of Magic, since it might help to make sense of what's taking place.

This sort of thing does not make a good "this way only" approach since it is far too easy to master something you've created yourself in contrast to a traditional or neo-traditional approach. It does make a good "backdoor" methodology while you are engaged in learning and mastering such a system and can ever teach important lessons in how to better enliven such a system.

There are a number of other metaphors for essentially the same idea as the "Holy Guardian Angel"...the Atman, the fylgia, etc...but I tend to prefer the slightly less sectarian "Daemonic Self." The Deamonic Self refering to the idea that somewhere within your overall Self-complex there is an aspect which is attempting to get into communication with you to help unify your Self-complex and make it more effective. What I find interested is that however one approaches this part of the Self-complex they'll get experiences that match their metaphors.

People looking for their Holy Guardian Angels get Holy Guardian Angel experiences. People who see it as the Atman get Atman like responses. People who posit the Daemonic Self as a supercomputer from the future get experiences that match it. People who see it as aliens from Sirius get Sirian messages.

Some folks will go so far as to try a bunch of different metaphors to get into the experience: Space Bunny at one phase, Ancient Chinese Sages at another and Irish mischief spirits at still another. Their experiences tend to match whichever metaphor they're using. It is almost as if these metaphors acted like languages or maps, providing orientation to the same territory, only with different flavors.

Note: Personally I've never gone in too much for the "Holy Guardian Angel" metaphor. I can understand why it was continued by Crowley as a legacy from the Golden Dawn system, especially his hope that no one would take it literally, but he left the door open for a lot of misunderstanding and a few generations of literalism.