to respond to the title of this thread, it's been my experience that there is never a firm boundary between self and other, or between personal and transpersonal dimensions of mind. Some mental phenomena are more personal (local) than others, of course. But ayahuasca has often surprised me by rearranging my understanding of the sources of mental activity. For instance, i've witnessed the uncovering of everyday aspects of my mind--patterns that I would normally identify as my own--as what might be better described as 'spirits.'

It seems to me that a personal mind is something like an interference pattern that arises from overlapping, transpersonal currents. When these larger currents become disentangled, discrete individuality disappears.

And so, it's as if, we wait for spirits to knock on the door of our own mind, only to discover that the personal mind is actually composed of spirits.

It's like looking for snakes and finding none, until your own body falls apart and slithers away in a dozen directions.

I don't mean to negate individual selfhood altogether, but my experience is that the mind is an open space through which non-personal winds blow.

Others have very different experiences, but this is the way that I understand spirits.

Maybe the simplest way to state it is that in certain states of consciousness, 'other' entities or energies are experienced through identification. So it can neither be said that it's "just your mind," or entirely a "spirit guiding."