“Angel Mode” and Insect Visitors

A couple of weeks ago a patient was telling me how sensitive she is to picking up other people’s distress. She lives with someone who is dealing with anxiety and depression, and that person’s struggles add greatly to her own. I’m no stranger to the difficulties of being a natural empath, and I’ve never found a way to entirely shield myself, but I have learned a few tricks that help.

I think at one time I told you about “Angel Mode,” a phenomenon that showed up spontaneously in 2009, when I had taken a devastating empathic hit and was desperate to keep that from happening again. Suddenly, while doing energy work for a patient, I saw myself as turning into a golden angel with huge fluffy white wings. Seriously. That may sound like I was a bit full of myself, but it happened totally without my intending it and was quite a surprise. The image was vivid and persistent, and I felt expansive and much stronger, able to serenely rise above whatever was going on in the moment. It turned out that I was able to engage the angel image whenever I needed it, and for months I used that method pretty much every time I treated anybody, until eventually I didn’t feel so vulnerable anymore and gradually stopped.

The funniest part was that a number of patients mentioned seeing me as an angel. I hadn’t told any of them what I was trying to do.

So I suggested to this lady that we could try shifting her system into angel mode, if it was willing. She agreed. While working on her painful areas, I visualized wings sprouting from her back. Right away they did— lacy, shimmery dragonfly wings! A new kind of surprise.

“Your wings look different from mine,” I told her. “You have dragonfly wings.” She replied that dragonflies were very important to her. They had been her mother’s favorite, and she thought of them as symbolizing her. She used them all the time in her visual art. I was delighted to find that I had seen this accurately and that it was so meaningful for her.

As we continued to observe, a strongly delineated image of a complete dragonfly came into focus over the whole length of her body. A giant insect might seem disturbing to most people, but she was excited and pleased to think of it. She told me that she loves insects and wasn’t at all frightened by the idea that the dragonfly was covering her body. It seemed helpful and protective to me, too. I wondered whether it was a spirit animal manifesting itself, or simply an imaginary picture we were sharing. I didn’t have a sense of an actual entity being present.

This brought up a memory for the patient, though. When she was a child, she said, she often had dreams of giant grasshoppers who would come and take her away with them. They always went to the same place, a room she described as “gauzy.” The dreams were frightening, but the grasshoppers never hurt her, and she had the feeling they were trying to help in some way.

This gave me a start, because she seemed to be describing a common type of alien abduction experience (or what people commonly consider to be an alien abduction— not that anyone truly understands the nature of these things). I wasn’t sure if I should push for details, and I didn’t want to contaminate her memories, but I was so curious, I couldn’t restrain myself from asking.

“Um, could they possibly have looked more like mantises?” I asked.

 “Yes,” she replied, “mantises or grasshoppers.”

She confirmed that they were tall, like the insectoid types often reported in the UFO literature. But here’s the thing: she had never heard of anyone else having this kind of experience. She didn’t know that anyone else had memories of being taken somewhere by giant insects and having mysterious procedures done to them. She had never read or seen anything about abductions at all.

“I’m thinking those may not have been dreams,” I told her, gently. “If someone had looked for you, I wonder if you would have been in your bed.” Which is an open question. In some cases people who claimed to have had an abduction experience were observed to stay in one place the entire time, while psychologically they were being put through a major trauma. In others, they were verifiably, physically gone.

My patient seemed more fascinated than frightened by these concepts. I wonder if any more memories will come up for her, now that she’s been reminded of her childhood encounters. She has not had any such experiences as an adult, at least none that she knows of consciously.

The whole sequence, from the dragonfly wings through the insectoid visitors, was completely unexpected.

I have begun to wonder whether we create artistic representations of angels, humans with wings, because at some level we are all aware of our own invisible wings, just as we represent the subliminal glow of a powerful person with a halo. I’ve never figured out what angels “really” are, though I’ve met beings who were presented as angels or seemed like they must be such. I’ve never seen them with a clear image of wings, only felt them as energies or had a mind’s-eye sense of a person-sized patch of light and color. Usually I don’t see things as clearly as I did that dragonfly anyway. But the feeling of my own wings can be a lot like sensation of a physical body part. It feels like I can extend them or fold them, maybe even flap them a little.

I can hardly describe how exquisite it is to blossom into this powerful, glowing creature that is so much more than I usually am. I believe this phenomenon tells us something about our true nature. If we would pay better attention to it, perhaps it would help us to get past the pathetic pettiness of our daily interactions.

The angel mode experience is one reason I became such a fan of the Lucifer series. The gigantic, gorgeous, ultra-fluffy wings of the angel characters touched a chord in me. To manifest their wings, Lucifer and his siblings sort of shrug their shoulders, and the wings suddenly pop out. Each celestial being has an individual color and style of feathers; I note again that Lucifer’s wings are pure white, which makes total sense once you think about it for a moment.

In an episode of the final season, Lucifer suddenly gets a bout of alar erectile dysfunction, where he shrugs and shrugs and nothing happens. It has to do with doubting himself and his abilities. At about the same time, by coincidence (?) I found that my left wing was unwilling to show itself— apparently for a totally different reason, a musculoskeletal problem that blocked up the area. It was odd, another unexpected aspect of Angel Mode. Maybe it had occurred in the past as well and I hadn’t been paying attention. I think this deserves more study.

In the show, you can’t see the celestials’ wings until they intentionally unfurl them, but they’re always there in potential, just as ours appear to be. Why don’t you see if your own wings will show up? Let me know what you find.

Thanks to the late Babette Saenz for the dragonfly art; I don’t know the name of the artist.  I would like to acknowledge that person and the creator of the wings graphic if I can discover who they are.

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WandaVision: Unconscious in Our Episodes

“So long, darling….”

“Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”  — Marianne Williamson

The final episode of WandaVision has been in the past for a while now, so I’m figuring that any of you who were interested in seeing it already managed to do so. If not, I must add:

**SPOILER ALERT!**

I’m a rather vague and desultory fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That is, I’ve seen most of the movies from the past decade, and I was heavily into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., mostly because of my crush on Clark Gregg (Agent Phil Coulson), but I don’t have the wide-ranging background knowledge necessary to understand WandaVision with all its cross-references, or the memory to keep track of everything I have seen over the years.

So I wasn’t really expecting to be, but I was immediately enthralled with this oddest addition to the MCU, and now I’m seriously crushing on both Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen.

We see the origins of a whole crew of super beings in this series, and those who knew them from the comics were excited to have them show up on the screen. The superhero tropes weren’t the point, though, and like some of the critics whose work I’ve read, I was a bit jarred and almost annoyed when the final magic-fire-smiting battle of the witches came along, iconic and necessary though it was. We were in it more for the small-screen, intimately emotional story at the core. 

Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff is incandescent even when she’s not throwing red fireballs around the neighborhood. She is catastrophically powerful, exquisitely vulnerable, and most of all profoundly broken. In her short life she has lost her parents, her home, her brother, her husband, and any chance at stability or normality. Unable to bear the latest and sharpest loss, she has retreated into a comforting world constructed from the American sitcoms that she enjoyed as a child, her last memories of happiness with her family.

It’s a perfect story for our reality-warped, grief-soaked, wrenchingly surreal time.

When the story begins, we’re confused and nonplussed. There is no explanation for the sudden appearance of these superhero characters in a ’50s-style sitcom. It doesn’t take long for the characters themselves to begin to realize that they don’t belong there and something is terribly wrong. At some level Wanda realizes that she’s creating this televised reality (including the pithy commercials) but she fights that knowledge with everything she’s got. Messages break through from the outside, but she rejects them. She has to be forced to understand what she has done.

It seems to me that this is pretty much what we’re all doing every day. 

Like Wanda, we are terrified of our own power and of the responsibility that comes with it. Wanda has been told that she is dangerous and will destroy the world. As individuals, we are unlikely to do that, but as a species, we know the destruction we are capable of, even as we protest our innocence.

The sitcom world is enticingly free of such concerns. Vision is the perfect husband, devoted, caring and empathetic, poetic and philosophical with a charming edge of goofiness— not to mention able to fly, walk through walls, and protect his family from sundry technological and supernatural attacks. Yes, he’s a synthezoid, but hey, we’ve made worse choices in romantic partners, right? Don’t judge.

And of course he is perfect; he is Wanda’s creation, everything she wants him to be, and he becomes acutely aware of that. In the series finale, just before the artificial world disintegrates and he is destroyed, he asks Wanda, “What am I?” She explains, ripping our hearts out: “You, Vision, are the piece of the Mind Stone that lives in me. You are a body of wires and blood and bone that I created. You are my sadness and my hope. But mostly, you’re my love.”

We do not, most of us at least, create our lovers’ physical forms. But I will argue that in a sense we create everything else about them. Do we ever know the true nature of anything we perceive, or only what we perceive of it? Demonstrably no. So do we ever know the true nature of the people in our lives, or only our perceptions of them? The answer is obvious.

(When I was a teenager, this truth slammed into me suddenly when I saw it in a play, before I was ready for it. I had a sort of nervous breakdown in response. I remember blubbering uncontrollably while my mother held me and wondered what in the world to do with me. Since then I have made peace with the fact that reality is slippery and undefined and no one quite exists as they appear.)

We all change form over time, and adjust to the programming necessary to live different lives. This is as true within one lifetime as it is across many. As Vision begins to dissolve, he recounts, with wonder, the very different forms he has taken over time. “Who knows what I might be next,” he concludes wistfully.

There is another truth embedded in this scene. Wanda has already stated firmly that “family is forever”— and that does appear to be the case in the real world, whether we like it or not! As Vision’s body dematerializes, the two agree, “We have said goodbye before, so it stands to reason…. we’ll say hello again.” Cheesy? Perhaps, but who cares? We needed it, and it’s true. Relationships don’t end with one lifetime/series/episode.  As for Vision, we know we can expect to see more of him in other stories, and most likely we’ll see the kids as well. 

I don’t know how to tell you what I was feeling as Wanda stood alone in the midst of the desolate lot that was all that was left of her dream home, or why I experienced that specific image with such intensity. It was visceral, a twisting in my chest, as if all the losses and griefs of the past year spun together into a black hole. All that even though I have not personally experienced the great losses that so many others have.  I believe that stories have been crucial to our emotional survival during the pandemic, but sometimes the processing they facilitate can be hard going.

So much more could be said about WandaVision, and so much has been.  Here’s a worthwhile example, an interview with someone at least as enthusiastic as I and way more knowledgeable about the MCU: https://news.yahoo.com/breaking-down-wandavision-thrilling-easter-235442212.html

I can’t end without mentioning everyone’s favorite quote, which we hear the real Vision say in a flashback: “What is grief, if not love persevering?”

Wanda is the heroine of this story, but she is also its primary villain. She has conscripted other living, conscious beings into her fantasy against their will, and that, too, is a fine metaphor for our time. The past year has felt like things just happen randomly, without our knowledge or consent, like we’ve been cast in someone’s movie for which we never auditioned. It’s good to be reminded that we are the writers, directors and producers.

Wanda says that she doesn’t understand her power, but she vows to learn. Let’s do that.

May the reality you create be beautiful and filled with love, and may it harm no one.

**********************************************************************

While looking for the Marianne Williamson quote above, I found some others that seemed relevant:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  — Carl Jung

“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”  —Thich Nhat Hanh

“We are the sum of the things we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin

And the rest of the quote from A Return to Love:  “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Sorting Medical Fact from Fiction, Part I: The Two Earths

No, not the Silurians.

A couple of decades ago, a friend introduced me to the work of a person who was then known as Anna Hayes. Supposedly her teachings were “downloaded” (not channeled, she said) from a galactic council of aliens who were trying to be helpful to humanity and fight other aliens, including that perennial mainstay the reptilians, who were working to keep us confused and divided. Following her and doing the practices she taught was supposed to raise people’s vibratory states and allow them to rise above these malevolent influences and create a better reality.

Some of her practices appeared to be worthwhile for one’s health. Some of the very, very dense verbiage involved was obviously crap. And a lot was so hard to understand that one might not be quite sure. There was one contention she had that keeps coming up in my mind, though: a prediction that in the not too distant future, the earth would split into two planets— not physically, but energetically— and the two would go their separate ways, with no communication between them.

And metaphorically speaking, that is exactly what has happened. Strikingly, stunningly so.

This teaching was not meant to be taken metaphorically, though. The idea was that the people of higher vibrations would go one way, and those who hadn’t bothered to enlighten and advance themselves would go the other. The unenlightened ones would be under the tyranny of forces that wanted to use them for their own purposes.

Again, bingo. (Not that I’m being judgmental….)

Anna Hayes— not her original name— became Ashayana Deane, and now is known as E-Ashayana, which certainly sounds more exotic. Her writings are full of what appear to be made-up words, along with a sprinkling of terms that have been used in esoteric contexts for centuries. Her “alien” language makes her stories far more difficult to decipher, let alone analyze, criticize or argue against.

Sometimes, though, you can be sure you’re being given a load of sh*t. For example, the claims of another “spiritual teacher,” Teal Swan, are earth-based and relatively easy to debunk. She claims to have been horribly abused as a child by satanist— Mormon satanist!— cult members. One of her assertions is that at the age of 8 she was sewn inside the dead body of an adult. This is not physically possible.  Such deceptions unfortunately contaminate whatever may be of real value in her teachings.

I have compassion for people who are having trouble sorting everything out (all of us), because it usually isn’t so simple. To muddle matters further, I personally know people who perceive entities rather like the ones E-Ashayana postulates, and their understanding is that these beings are indeed attempting to manipulate us for their own ends. I don’t perceive such beings myself, so I’m agnostic. However, most entities I’ve encountered appear to be trying to help, and my psychic friends see those too.  I prefer to think that most beings, human or otherwise, want to work for good.  Even the farthest-out conspiracy theorists appear to have altruistic motives and believe they are battling evil, no matter how twisted their efforts may become.

But human brains are easily confused.  I suspect that for many people, the languages of science and medicine may seem nearly as unintelligible as E-Ashayana’s “alien” vocabulary. When the true story is complex and unfamiliar, it’s easy to swallow a competing story that sounds plausible on the surface. And of course if the story reinforces our preconceived notions, we’re sitting ducks for it.  Add the constant, overwhelming bombardment of messages from all sources, and how is a person supposed to keep their head on straight?

The meta-story of how a powerful They are constantly suppressing The Truth in order to control downtrodden Us never seems to get old. Of course it’s not a big stretch to believe in it. Heaven knows we’ve heard enough proven examples of deceit from large corporations, such as Exxon insisting climate change was bunk when they knew very well what a problem it was. We know of government agencies exposing citizens to nuclear tests or injecting soldiers with LSD. It’s not hard to accept the notion that powerful forces or beings, human or otherwise, might be trying to keep us in the dark. We have little reason to trust the good intentions of our corporate overlords, who appear to worship profit above all, nor certain politicians who have made it very clear that power is their sole motivation.

The two ladies I’ve mentioned also turn huge profits at the expense of their followers, and whatever they may claim about their motives, they have certainly gained power over them as well.  Since I am not personally acquainted with either one, I will say no more.  You can probably find examples of similar business models without much trouble.

Here’s where pop-culture gurus and more mainstream sources are in general agreement: We’re often told that if we stay centered and calm, keep our minds on our spiritual values and on love rather than fear, and consume a solid information diet instead of mental junk food, we are a lot harder to manipulate. That seems like an objective truth to me.

I would also like to submit that science and scholarship are real.  Science too can go astray, and can be manipulated for the sake of money or power, but the scientific process tends to right itself eventually.  Forces who want to manipulate us typically work to limit education and defund and muzzle science.  That’s one way you can recognize them. Isaac Asimov, who was very much concerned with finding truth and explaining it in a way people could understand, had this to say: ‘There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”’

No, ignorance isn’t good, ever.

Next: Ways to think clearly about touted treatments for COVID-19.

2020 Vision

… is a joke that’s going to get old real fast, so I’ll try to use it quick before that happens.

A free-to-download version of the Kali Yantra from kalibhakti.com, empty of color and ready to receive your preferred reality.

I was going to write about the terrifying prospects we face in the next year and the next decade, and the way they’re battering mental health all over the planet. But you know about all that. What do we do with it? Here are a few musings.

Some interesting takes on how to cope with this apocalyptic Anthropocene era have crossed my screen in the past week. One was the “post-doom” concept espoused by Michael Dowd: “Post-doom: what opens up when we remember who we are, accept what is inevitable, honor our grief, and invest in what is pro-future and soul-nourishing.”
https://www.postdoom.com/

I heard about this in an interview by Steve Bhaerman, the alter ego of my guru Swami Beyondananda. 
https://omtimes.com/iom/2019/12/michael-dowd-post-doom/

It reminded me of the beautiful Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Inner Light,” in which a probe from a long-dead civilization causes Picard to experience the existence of a man who lived near the end, as the planet was being roasted by a malfunctioning sun. The people knew that soon there would be nothing left of their world, but they managed to retain their joy in living despite unimaginable tragedy.

Next I was introduced to “rewilding” by Micah Mortali, interviewed by Tami Simon:
https://www.soundstrue.com/store/weeklywisdom?page=single&category=IATE&episode=14107
Rewilding is a term for conservation efforts to return land to a wilder state, including the reintroduction of large predators, but Mortali was talking about human beings reconnecting to our natural environment, knowing ourselves as animals that belong within it. When Simon asked him how he would suggest that we deal with climate change, he said something I thought was striking and potentially very useful: we should go outdoors and be with nature, and pay attention, and the Earth will teach us what we need to do.

Mortali also pointed out something that it totally obvious but that people forget all the time, that we grew out of the primordial soup of this planet and we are entirely part of her, not separate. The dichotomy of “man” and “nature” is false. Thinking further, then, how is it that nature has led herself to a situation in which one segment of life on the earth threatens to destroy all the rest along with itself?

I remember that when I was a kid I heard adults talking about a time to come, not too far in the future, when the world would be shaken by earthquakes, terrible storms, upheavals of all sorts. They spoke as if this were inevitable and as if everyone knew it would happen. I have never been able to track down whatever they based this belief upon. Nostradamus, perhaps? At any rate, dang, here it is. I think I’ve always subconsciously expected it.

I was also exposed, from early childhood, to Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, in which humanity would go through a period of worldwide crises (around the 1990s, in the Star Trek canon), then emerge into an age of peace, enlightenment and prosperity. He is not the only one to imagine this, as far as I know. My impression is that it forms a strong thread in the current human psyche.

Can we say that, logically, whatever is happening must be what is supposed to be happening? And will we create that golden age that is supposed to show up afterward?

I would love to think that God/the Universe/Mother Nature will take care of us and allow us to survive, along with taking care of all the other creatures. However, we know there have been repeated mass extinctions, where nearly all life was lost. This is something Earth has done from time to time, and no doubt will do again. Then things continue in a different form. I think often of the Hindu concept of the Kali Yuga, when things go downhill and are destroyed, to make way for a new cycle. I think also of the goddess Kali (which I just found out is a different word from the above) who performs the necessary act of destruction, without which creation cannot occur. While looking up other information for this post, I became fascinated with reading about her.

I am beginning to consider that Kali may be a perfect image for our time and our response to it. Though she is fierce and bloody, Kali is also the most loving of mothers, in her guise as Kali Ma, symbolizing the ground of being that underlies all that is. She is ultimate darkness not because she is evil but because she embodies all possibilities; she is the void which can give birth to all reality. As the force of Time, she both brings everything into being and causes everything to pass away.

If you have been reading my work for a while, you may remember a book that describes encounters with the Goddess in her dark form, Waking Up to the Dark. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/review-waking-up-to-the-dark/ It seems that She, like any loving mother, stands ready to discipline her children when they get out of line, but also as our mother, she will not abandon us in our time of need.

So many people perceive deities and entities of various sorts that are either working to protect us and back up our efforts, or are doing their best to sow discord and undermine anything positive we manage to produce. (I have encountered a range of beings myself, but for the most part they’ve been of the helpful type.) Some feel a certain complacency about things being monitored from behind the scenes, while others may despair in the face of evil forces they think are overwhelmingly powerful, controlling us without our having any choice. But even the most fundamentalist among us believe that humans must take responsibility for carrying out the will of God. I am very much a proponent of “the Lord helps those that help themselves.”

I submit that whatever cosmic beings are working for our good or ill, or their own, we are not separate from them. In the end all of reality is made up of the thought processes of One Mind. We are no more nor less important than the other myriad components of that Mind.

A while back, as I told you, I asked my friend Fryderyk if there was any help from the spirit world coming to us. ‘I wondered if they have any involvement with trying to help our dire situation on our dying planet. He said, firmly, that this is the responsibility of those who live on the planet at present, that we wanted and intended to be here and deal with this, that it is “your burden.”’
https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2019/09/17/things-you-can-do-when-youre-dead-and-some-you-cant/

As hard as it appears, this is the logical conclusion. We are here, at this time, because we wanted and needed to be here. We are the ones willing and able to take on the greatest challenge humanity has faced. We may feel utterly inadequate to the task, but it is our task.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We have to be. There is no one else.

 

While I don’t want to get overly exercised about these metaphorical ages, this very complicated explanation of the Yugas has some fascinating information about cataclysmic events within known historical periods. I think we can all agree that, one way or the other, the path of the Earth and life on it is more cyclical than linear.  
https://grahamhancock.com/dmisrab6/

 

https://www.hinduhumanrights.info/kali-as-the-yuga-shakti-the-power-to-create-a-new-world-age/
The gorgeous depiction of Kali with a tiny dragon on this site was made by Mei Huang: http://www.meihuangart.com/#/illustration/

Things You Can Do When You’re Dead! and Some You Can’t

Whatever he’s doing, it’s not this.

Lawrence Spencer wrote 1001 Things You Can Do While You’re Dead: A Dead Person’s Guide to Living, which looks absolutely hilarious.

Tricia J. Robertson wrote Things You Can Do When You’re Dead!: True Accounts of After Death Communication, which looks intensely interesting.

I haven’t read either of these books yet, but I can definitely say that both authors are among the not-dead. Descriptions of the lives of the dead— you can see that language gets tangled right away— by dead folks themselves are abundant, but not necessarily all that clear to those of us still on this side of the veil.

On 9/10/19, after reading through some short Mozart pieces that I hadn’t been familiar with at the piano, I got to wondering if Fryderyk has any kind of relationship with his idol, or ever sees him. I was pleased to find myself easily getting in touch with him and able to have a clear conversation, which is still a fairly rare occurrence.

It seems that nobody really has a relationship with Mozart or gets to talk with him these days, from what Fryderyk told me. He is something of a recluse (we both struggled to find the best word for his situation). I was surprised, since I think of Mozart as a pretty gregarious person. He is secluded in a kind of chamber in which he is in meditation and in communication directly with the Divine Source. The image of a huge column of light streaming down, cascading into him, was strong, but I can’t say I really understood this whole concept. It had almost a science fiction movie flavor.

I wondered if Mozart had become almost a sort of deity himself. I’ve thought of him as something like that, but at the same time, the original planet-based Wolfgang seems so down to earth. It’s interesting to contemplate.

I wondered if they have any involvement with trying to help our dire situation on our dying planet. He said, firmly, that this is the responsibility of those who live on the planet at present, that we wanted and intended to be here and deal with this, that it is “your burden.”

But obviously Fryderyk is involved heavily with the earth plane.

I asked about his relationship with Liszt, having recently heard a 1955 Leslie Flint track* in which the Chopin voice spoke of his friendships with Liszt and Mendelssohn. What is Liszt getting himself up to lately? Is he still involved with us groundlings too?

He showed me Liszt reaching toward us on earth, like a hand reaching down into the atmosphere to tweak things here below. 

How is that different from what he does himself? He works by entering directly into the human heart, from the inside, he said, instead of imposing something from the outside.

But seriously, I insisted, things are not looking good around here. I asked if he had any advice for those of us tasked with getting through the next few decades. He said, “Your love of life must become greater than your love of death.”

I was trying to ask about what they do all “day,” something I am endlessly curious about, especially since it is more or less what we all will be doing eventually. In the Leslie Flint session I mentioned, the Chopin voice described having a salon in which he and other musicians played over their recent works and gave each other suggestions. We’ve heard before that at least for the more recently dead, life feels much the same as it did when they inhabited physical bodies; they appear to wear clothes, live in houses, walk about in gardens, etc. At the same time, we are told that there are so many aspects of their existence that we can’t fathom with our limited senses.

Perhaps those two things are not contradictory. I’m reminded of an anecdote from Rosemary Brown, in which she described a visit with Debussy, who brought one of his new nonphysical paintings to show her. If I remember correctly, the subject of the painting was a peacock; whatever it was, it moved around and morphed in a way that physical paintings can’t manage. Apparently he was having a lot of fun with this art form.

Michael Tymn’s latest blog post uses the Eiffel Tower as a clever metaphor for the various planes or spheres in which spirits find themselves at different levels of development.
http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/month/2019/09/
He also discusses the naive and fallacious supposition that spirits should be expected to know anything and everything simply by virtue of being spirits. This is useful. My only quibble with his construction is that it is overly linear; spirit communicators tell us that they do exist in “higher” or “lower” spheres, but we are also told that any one spirit personality (or personality here on the planet) is only a part of a larger entity, and that the parts of that larger entity may have more or less expanded awareness. I think we need to consider that linear time, which is necessary for the concept of development or evolution, is not really fundamental to reality, but more a product of our way of experiencing it. Again, I don’t pretend to have a thorough understanding of these matters.

*https://www.leslieflint.com/chopin-july-7th-1955
  There are a number of new Chopin recordings and transcriptions at this site since I last wrote about it here, and the website is easier to use. Note that they are using Mary-Rose Douglas’ beautiful and evocative transformation of the 1849 photograph for their portrait of Chopin, this one:

Our Lady burning

Delighted to see that these chandeliers still exist!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notre Dame means so much to me that I used some of my photos of her as the theme for this blog. Like so many around the world, I was stricken and in tears during the fire on April 15. It turned out that things were not as bad as we feared, and at least this time it was an accident, not another willful act of destruction. But as I worked on writing about it, the church and other sites in Sri Lanka were bombed, with great loss of life, on Easter morning. I threw out what I had written before, and wrote this instead:

 

Our Lady burning

At Sacré-Coeur I felt nothing.
That gorgeous edifice towering on its hill,
seen from everywhere, unable to be unseen,
never moved me.
I read that it was made
to bring back the flock,
rekindle faith in the heart of France.
Imposed as it is imposing,
it floats above the city
without root, it seems to me.

Notre Dame is my place,
central, home to my soul,
“where God lives,” as a friend said,
and Saint Michel hovers nearby.
The power must have simmered there
long before those stones were cut.
From the depths it infuses them,
rises like sap through those square towers,
spirit soaring despite the attenuated tops.
Imperfect beloved, at times unwell,
she has been clothed with misplaced additions,
but her identity has endured, her significance,
through violation and neglect.

Here, it’s been a hard time that has not stopped.
On the same day there was a local burning;
a child dead, others hurt, homes lost.
A small building but great importance.
The week before, death after death,
other children, a strange paroxysm.
My friend murdered by someone close,
leaving her own children.
Our city reeling, impossible events,
then more impossible events.
And Our Lady burned, and it seemed
nothing could be counted upon.

But that was not enough,
because this is the world
and it has humans in it.
To add to the month of churches torched,
we must have bombs,
and now we use them on Easter,
and more children and more mothers
must be blown away.
because the founders of our faiths
never got through to us
and we think God only lives
in our own kind of house.

(In the book it says, “Jesus wept.”)

The humans inside the churches
have also killed, also violated.
Hearing of Notre Dame,
some said good riddance.
A man entered another cathedral
with gasoline.

 

Hope

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notre Dame burned, by accident, on 4/15/19. On Easter, 4/21/19, a church in Sri Lanka was bombed during the morning services. All this followed arson attacks on churches and a social service organization in the south of the US. Here are some things others had to say:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/4/15/1850518/-The-Barbarians-at-the-Gate-Rejoice-on-Daily-Kos-at-the-Death-of-Civilization

https://www.wired.com/story/the-notre-dame-fire-and-the-future-of-history/

https://johnpavlovitz.com/2019/04/15/notre-dame-reminds-us-that-we-belong-to-one-another/

https://www.thenation.com/article/notre-dame-fire-muslim-france-islamophobia/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/notre-dame-in-the-french-imagination
‘At moments of enormous and historic loss, one seeks, perhaps foolishly or with false reassurance, for some sense of continuity, including the continuities of disaster and renewal.’
‘…Still, the cathedral belongs to everyone, and everyone is rooting for its restoration. The French leftist and staunch atheist Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote on Monday evening that, while he could not see the hand of God in the cathedral, nonetheless, “If it seems so powerful, it’s without doubt because human beings surpassed themselves in putting Notre-Dame in the world. Those who feel the emptiness of a universe deprived of meaning and the absurdity of the human condition see here the apotheosis of the spirit of thousands of women and men who worked over two centuries and eight hundred years.”’

http://www.sacre-coeur-montmartre.com/english/history-and-visit/article/the-origin-of-the-construction-of
(Sacré-Coeur will celebrate its 100th birthday this fall.)

And here are a few moments of heaven:
https://www.facebook.com/eleneguschdom/videos/vb.1579282359/10216830307341533/?type=3

 

Behind the cathedral

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In happier times

The Blue Lady and Marian Apparitions

Photo of the sky over Conyers, GA in 1990, attributed to someone named Ferdinando. My Blue Lady looked a lot like this.

Last time, I told you about my vision of an entity I thought of as the Blue Lady. While looking for images that might convey something of what I saw, I came across this:

http://www.zeitun-eg.org/zeitoun1.htm

“For more than a year, starting on the eve of Tuesday, April 2, 1968, the Blessed Holy Virgin Saint Mary, Mother of God, appeared in different forms over the domes of the Coptic Orthodox Church named after Her at Zeitoun, Cairo, Egypt.”

That is, for more than a year, something or someone appeared over St. Mary Coptic Orthodox Church. The something was a glowing form resembling a woman in long robes, with rays of light around her head. This apparition was often accompanied by others, including forms like white doves that came and went suddenly and flew without visibly flapping their wings. Sometimes the strange sights went on for over two hours. A great many people saw them, and quite a few striking photos and even movies exist. No matter how skeptical we may be or how uncomfortable religious imagery may be for a lot of us, this evidence is there to confront us.

Please take a moment to boggle at the pictures at the link above.  Here is an example.

And here are some more: http://jesusphotos.altervista.org/Apparition_at_Zeitoun.htm

Even for those of us who are accustomed to Seeing Things and knowing that others see even more, this is a freaky event to contemplate, especially since it involved so many observers at once. Blessed Mother sightings are not uncommon, though, and have been well documented over many decades.

I am curious as to whether the Blue Lady I saw had anything to do with this phenomenon. I’m also wondering whether the apparitions are related to the being described by Clark Strand in his book Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age, which I reported on here: https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/review-waking-up-to-the-dark/

Recounting Strand’s experiences, I wrote: “As he progressed with his exploration of the depths of night, at some point the darkness itself, the Yin principle one might say, began to visit him in the form of a beautiful young woman, three-dimensional, visible, audible, and solid to the touch. When he first saw her, her lips were sealed by a creepily evocative X of black electrical tape, which she wordlessly pleaded with him to remove. Sometimes her appearance would change. He recognized her as Mary, Isis, Sophia, Diana, the Shekinah, the Queen of Heaven, and especially the Black Madonna. In all cases, She is the personification of Earth and Nature, the Mother we all come from and who we ignore at our peril, the feminine essence that so many human societies have suppressed with desperate force.”

I would like to know whether people in completely different cultures, not exposed to the Mary mythos, have similar visions. Certainly Mary has become conflated and entwined with the goddesses of other cultures, as we see in Our Lady of Guadalupe:

“Following the Conquest in 1519–21, the Spanish destroyed a temple of the mother goddess Tonantzin at Tepeyac outside Mexico City, and built a chapel dedicated to the Virgin on the same site. Tonantzin (the beloved mother of the gods) was celebrated around each winter solstice which occurred on different dates, the winter solstice of 1531 occurred on December 12, 1531 according to the UNAM. Even many of the newly converted to Catholicism natives then continued to come from afar to worship there, often addressing the renamed native image, as if she were the Virgin Mary, which they had known as their Tonantzin.” [December 12, 1531 was the climactic day of the visions seen by the peasant Juan Diego.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe

It would be no surprise if various peoples saw the image of the Mother in a guise familiar to them. As one of the Zeitoun website pages put it, “She sometimes made Her apparition with the Babe Jesus Christ in Her arms. It is not strange to see the Child Jesus Christ in an apparition; heavenly apparitions may take forms known to us, so that we can understand them.” The image of a powerful, all-loving, nurturing Mother is as fundamental to the human psyche as anything can possibly be, and She is real in at least a psychological and emotional sense. Perhaps seeing Her in so many times and places is to be expected.

That’s about as much as I can say about the visions themselves at this point. Your thoughts are welcome. I would especially like to know if you have experienced anything along these lines yourself.

I do want to add something about Her names. Often these apparitions are referred to by the acronym “BVM”— Blessed Virgin Mary. I have always been bugged by the Blessed Virgin concept. Virgin and Mother are incompatible archetypes! The story of the mother of Jesus being a virgin was added well after his death, and is based in Greek and Roman, not Jewish, mythology. The reason it bugs me so much is not only because it’s just plain not historically true, but because it seems to me to insult and repudiate women, and all of nature along with us. It is a perfect expression of a patriarchal culture that could not deal well with sexuality or human bodies. It’s as if God built the world a certain way, then decided that he had messed it up when He invented mammals and their means of reproduction.

Adyashanti’s interpretation made me feel a little better about this. He said the story means that the divine principle came directly into the world without requiring the duality of male and female, remaining one purely divine reality. Whatever. I prefer to contemplate the ancient image of the Mother without painting the unnecessary Virgin layer over her.

It would be wonderful to believe that Someone is watching over us with loving attention, and like any mom, will comfort us when we inevitably fall and get bruised. But perhaps, like any mom, she will set limits on our nonsense, and apply consequences. If only she could make us stop fighting with our brothers and sisters….

---

Still more photos of apparitions or purported apparitions:

Apparitions at another place in Egypt in 2009, still photos and video
http://jesusphotos.altervista.org/Apparition_at_Warraq.htm

“Photographs of the Virgin Mary in the clouds”
http://jesusphotos.altervista.org/Virgin%20Mary%20in%20the%20clouds.htm

 

Be Still: Riding the Waves of the Sea of Fear

Back in September, our house was burglarized. That was the beginning of the feeling of being under siege. Within a few weeks I developed the high-pitched tinnitus I’ve told you about, which is like having an alarm going off 24/7. On Election Day, I took a bad fall on concrete, which caused injuries I’m still dealing with and for a while made me nervous even of walking.

In early January, I saw a new primary care physician for the first time, and it was pretty much the worst experience I’ve had with a medical appointment in my entire life, truly traumatizing. It had nothing to do with “care,” and little to do with “physician,” as the woman was strangely refusing to practice medicine. But it was clear, both from what she said and from her body language, that she had been badly mistreated herself. I had never seen a doctor in such a stressed, terrified state. She was literally trembling, and I don’t mean in the sense of having a neurological condition.

I felt very concerned for this woman*, but outraged that she would think it was remotely OK to treat a patient, or any human being, the way she treated me. More critically, I was being put in danger by her refusal to take my health issue seriously. I sank into a state of complete terror myself.

Just a few days later, our house was broken into and robbed again, this time with a lot of damage. They didn’t get much of any monetary value, but they took the few shreds of a sense of safety we had left.

As soon as I could pull out from the shock and anxiety, I took a look at the big picture as best I could. Perhaps my being mired in fear had helped to attract the burglar? I scanned around my body and the perimeter of the house and found a lot of energetic holes. Big ones. I patched everything up and worked at shifting my attitude and expectations.

If the abusive doctor had been put in my path for a reason, I thought, it was so that I could perceive, yet again, that fear is the fundamental problem.

****************************************************************

One of the things I’ve been doing to keep myself on an even keel is to listen to recordings of Adyashanti, the American Buddhist teacher, which I find both soothing and inspiring. I’m in the midst of an audio course called Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic. The course invites a deeper engagement with the story of Jesus’ life by digging into the metaphorical and mythological aspects of the Gospels, treating the story as story with all its psychological connections, not worrying about whether a given event happened in the physical world exactly as described. This is a bit of a departure for me, since I have spent a lot of time studying the history of early Christianity and trying to understand what did literally happen and what was invented later. I’ve been more involved with the facts, to the extent that they can be known. But I am completely fine with the concept that a story can be true without being something that actually happened.

At times Adyashanti seems a little off the mark to me in this course, but for the most part his interpretations make tremendous sense. He even came up with a way of thinking about the myth of the virgin birth that makes it no longer offensive to me. (More on that in the next post, in case you’re curious.) He emphasizes over and over that Jesus was pointing toward the Divine Nature within all of us. I wish we had all been taught this way to begin with. I don’t think we would fight ourselves or each other as much as we do.

The story that’s most relevant to my theme today is the one where Jesus and his friends are out on the Sea of Galilee in a boat when a terrible storm comes up, one that terrifies even the experienced fishermen among them. The disciples panic, sure they are all going to die, but Jesus is peacefully sleeping in the back of the boat. He knows the storm is nothing to be concerned about. They wake him up, shouting, “Master, we’re going to drown!” Jesus simply says to the storm, “Quiet! Be still!” and everything immediately becomes calm. “Where is your faith?” he asks the men.

Adyashanti riffs on the metaphorical meaning of water, which among other things can symbolize the unconscious. The storm-tossed sea is the myriad unsettled and unsettling things roiling around in the darkness inside all of us. Adyashanti takes this even further, with an idea I wouldn’t have thought of: previously, Jesus had cast the demons who called themselves Legion out of a man and into a herd of pigs, which then threw themselves off a cliff and drowned in a lake. Wait, was that really supposed to be the same body of water which later was the scene of the storm? For now, for the sake of a good parable, let’s just go along with Adyashanti’s device.

The demons are now in the water, lots of them, all loose and ready to make trouble. Think of any demons you can identify in your present moment. Threats to the climate. Yemen, Syria, Venezuela. The Brexit fiasco. MAGA hats. Intolerance. Xenophobia. Burglaries. Murders. Interior demons like self-hatred. [Your issue here.] There are infinite numbers of “demons” that might fill that stormy sea.

But Jesus, as an advanced spiritual master, is not bothered by any of them, because he knows what is truly real and what is delusion. When he says, “Be still,” he speaks with absolute authority, and they instantly obey. The disciples, still in thrall to what appears to be reality, cannot understand this. Can we? Can we bring ourselves to be still?

***************************************************************

The look on your face when your boggle threshold is exceeded.

Meanwhile, Star Trek: Discovery continues its aspirations to create modern mythology. As you may remember, Discovery’s first officer, Saru the Kelpien, is a creature who, being a prey animal, is ruled by fear. Or at least, he was until…

*SPOILER ALERT!!!* If you haven’t yet seen the fourth episode of season 2, and you plan to, stop right here and come back later.

… he has a near-death experience that transforms all of that.

Kelpiens are fast, capable of running around 80 kph. They’re super-smart, or at least Saru is— he has learned 94 languages, and in his youth he was able to figure out technological devices without any training. The main reason the Kelpiens have allowed themselves to be kept as livestock is that they believe that the “Great Balance” demands it. They don’t resist. They don’t even consider the possibility of resistance.

At some point in a Kelpien’s life, he or she undergoes a process called the vahar’ai, which is supposed to signal impending death. At this time, the Kelpien is expected to submit to being taken and slaughtered for food by the Ba’ul. The vahar’ai is extremely painful, so the affected Kelpien presumably looks forward to the end. All this is accepted calmly as the just the way things are; one should not think of trying to change it or having any other kind of life. The village priests reinforce this belief system.

In the recent episode “An Obol for Charon,” the vahar’ai is triggered in Saru by the death throes of a mysterious planet-like entity. Seeing no alternative to death, and in great pain, Saru begs Michael Burnham to cut off his threat ganglia (the sensory organs that warn Kelpiens of danger), which will kill him quickly and end his suffering. Weeping, Michael raises the knife to fulfill his request, but before she can begin to cut, the threat ganglia fall off of their own accord.

And Saru is not only still alive, he is suddenly free of fear, transformed in a way no Kelpien ever realized was possible. He has died to one version of reality and been born to another. He says that he feels his own power.

Which, in reality, he has always had.

How’s that for a metaphor?

Earlier in the day that this episode premiered, I had been contending again with the intersections of love and fear, hope and despair. As had happened when I was introduced to the mycelial network concept, I was given a perfect parable to fit the moment.

(It turns out, two episodes later, that things with the Kelpiens are even more complex, and their power more far-reaching, but I’ll let you watch and find out about that.)

Discovery has brought up yet another image that resonates for me, the “Red Angel.” We don’t know yet what this being really is, or whether it is good, evil, or something less definable. We know that a threat to all life in the galaxy is on the way, and the Red Angel may be connected to it, but so far we have only seen the mysterious entity acting to save people, a lot of them, including Michael Burnham. (*Extra spoiler*: As of the sixth episode of the season, we have evidence that the Angel is a humanoid using advanced technology, not a spiritual being.)

The neon-like pictures of the Red Angel reminded me of something or someone I saw years ago, when my mother-in-law was in the hospital after her stroke. While I was doing energy work for her, a vision of a glowing blue being, like a neon outline of a woman in flowing robes, appeared before my eyes. It was unusual in its vividness, and because it seemed as if I saw it floating in the room, rather than only in my mind’s eye. The vision went on for a few seconds. The Blue Lady, as I called her, didn’t do anything in particular, but she had a comforting effect.

I’ve wondered if I might have seen the entity or phenomenon that is responsible for the many “BVM” (Blessed Virgin Mary) sightings that have been recorded around the world. Whether or not that is so, I am completely agnostic about the nature or meaning of the Blue Lady. At the time I felt that she was there to help. I would like to think that she is still out there, still available, whatever and whoever she is.

The Red Angel may or may not be meant to convey a similar sense of security, comfort and hope. Fans are speculating intensively. We should get some clarification in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, I will hold to the hope— I should say faith, but I have so much trouble with that word— that Someone has our backs as we navigate the murky waters of this dark and confusing time.

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Not long ago we had an alarm system installed in our home. We’re still getting used to it. I understand that, although it is called a “security system,” it cannot really create security or safety. It can’t stop anyone from entering our home; it can only make them extremely uncomfortable and discourage them from staying. True security can’t be found that way. It has to be gained from understanding what is real and what is not.

I’m working on it.

 

 

*Something is even more horribly wrong with our broken system than I had realized. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do to help support our MDs so that they can better support patients, and I have a few ideas, but haven’t found the path to put them into practice yet. Your thoughts on this matter are welcome.

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part II

“Chopin Anew” by Jan Nyka. This image is amusingly appropriate in the context of EVP, don’t you think?
http://www.jannyka.com/index.php?/commercial/people/

At the beginning of the ASCS conference, Suzanne Giesemann gave a charming, inspiring, but no-nonsense talk about her development as a medium, which included stories about striking synchronicities— and another slew of them for me. Here she outlines her journey from hard-nosed Navy commander to professional mystic: https://www.suzannegiesemann.com/about-suzanne-2/

I want to tell you about an enlightening anecdote from Suzanne. One day, during her meditations, she received a visit from an entity who called himself Odin. Ohhhkkaaayyyy, she thought. She didn’t remember much about Norse mythology, so she went off and read up about him. What she found was a whole package of synchronistic threads that connected with people close to her, having to do with lightning and runes in particular. The next time she encountered Odin, she blurted out, “Are you real?”

“I am as real as you are,” he replied.

“But you’re a myth!” Suzanne insisted.

“You’re a myth!” was the answer to that.

 The idea was that all personalities, human and otherwise, bubble up from the substrate of the universal mind, and all are pretty much the same in essence, and all equally real or unreal, depending on how you look at it. That’s about as close as I can get to explaining my experiences with such eminences as Kuan Yin or Medicine Buddha.

And as close as I can get to explaining the following.

As I described last time, I was putting a lot of effort into listening during October, and something began to happen that interfered mightily with that. At first mildly, then catastrophically, I developed a case of constant high-pitched tinnitus. By the last week of the month, it had taken over my life and I could hardly think of anything else.

I suspected that the new problem might have something to do with my trip to the conference, either the work with the spirits, the flight, the drastic changes of altitude and humidity, or all of the above. I’d also had a slight virus sort of thing right after the trip. I started looking for help to sort it out. That’s when things got even weirder.

I began with a remote polarity treatment from the person who had helped me with issues like this before. My therapist encountered a crowd of beings around me who seemed to all be trying to talk to me at once, and she thought that was creating the ringing in my ears. She came up with a strategy for communicating with them one at a time in a controlled way that would limit any trouble. Sigh… I’ve had all too many issues over the years with entities knocking hard on my doors… but I guess it’s an occupational hazard.  And it has led in fruitful directions at times.

For a while after that session, the sound in my ears died down a bit. The theory about these critters being the main cause of the tinnitus doesn’t seem to have panned out in the time since then, but they were most definitely present and they needed to be dealt with. I cautiously set about making their acquaintance, just a few of them. They were very accessible, and seemed enthusiastic and positive about communicating with me. One gave me a warm hug. Another— I’m grateful for this— reached into my head and tweaked my eyes so that colors became dramatically brighter and for quite a while the usual dryness was gone. Perhaps more ominously, another asked why I was bothered by the ringing, since they were “tuning me” and I ought to be happy about it.

I didn’t detect anything untoward, but I wasn’t comfortable with having anyone trying to control me or use me for their own agenda, especially without my conscious understanding and consent. I made an appointment with my psychic mentor, Mendy Lou Blackburn, who is always the person I turn to when matters like this get beyond my abilities. When I went to bed, I asked Fryderyk what he thought was going on, and he had something to say about it, but in the morning I couldn’t remember what it had been.

Mendy Lou and I looked extensively at the whole situation and tried to figure out how these entities fit in. They didn’t seem connected with the Big Circle, the group Vicki and friends work with. Mendy could see them clearly, as a sort of vortex containing multiple small lights. They appeared to her to be a mix of beings of different levels of development. When she used the term elementals, I remembered that Fryderyk had said the same thing the night before.

At one point I looked around for my link to the Big Circle, for comparison, and instantly Braden popped into the room in a burst of light, so Mendy Lou got to meet him and get a sense of his fun-loving personality. It was comforting to have him show up. Fryderyk also made himself known, but he stayed in the background.

So there I was with an unwanted “fan club” and still an intolerable level of constant noise. I went to the office and put my questions aside for the time being. By the next day, with the ringing still driving me nuts, I felt I couldn’t stretch my stressed and irritated self far enough to deal with the mysterious entities anymore. Apologizing, in case they were sincerely there for my good, I wrapped them up in a sort of package and pushed them out of my field. I just didn’t know what else to do at that point. Since then I haven’t heard anything further from them.

I told Vicki about all this, and she confirmed that Braden and company were not involved and didn’t know who these beings were either. The Big Circle folk told her to let me know that I was “climbing Jacob’s ladder” and all was well. All the sources seemed to agree that I was somehow being changed to be able to perceive more, and that I should be patient with the process. I felt a little bit better.

The process of clearing attachments and emotional junk continued with a remote treatment from James Rolwing, and Thought Field Therapy (the original version of tapping on acupressure points) with Diana Ristenpart. After that, the tinnitus changed, in quality though not volume, and became a less obnoxious type of sound so that it was more tolerable. A range of pure sine wave frequencies disappeared and I was left with an array of tiny chimes combined with cicadas. Strange how that is less bothersome!

After a lot of phone calls, I was able to get in with an audiologist and a nurse practitioner at an ENT office, and they found inflammation in my Eustachian tubes— a potential physical cause for the sound. Mercifully, my hearing tested as mostly intact, except for a small deficit at very high frequencies. I’d been terrified of having a significant hearing loss, which is often associated with tinnitus. Since I’ve always hated noise and have carefully protected my ears, this whole thing has seemed awfully unfair!

With the onset of the ringing, everything in my environment became oddly loud, subjectively, and my impression was that the effect was different from the hyperacusis that can occur with hearing loss. Sound is much more three-dimensional and multilayered, richer and more colorful, and I pay attention to it differently. Once Fryderyk told me that music is an environment in which one can move about, and I think I know vividly what he meant now.

So is a process of “tuning” still going on? Am I going to be able to hear more of what nonphysical sources want to tell me? Or am I taking a long time to get over a viral infection and a great deal of stress? All of these? I don’t know if I’ve had enough brain-space lately to be able to tell. No dramatic new openings appear to have occurred in my psychic development to match my increased awareness of physical sound. Meanwhile, treating for inflammation and taking Chinese herbs for the pattern I’m showing has helped, as far as I can tell.

I did have an unusually extensive conversation with my composer friend, though, and I’d like to think that I was showing a little more ability to hear what he wanted me to know. This happened on 11/17:
Fryderyk showed up when I was about to go to sleep, as he so often does. I reported that my tinnitus had lessened, and told him that I hoped to be able to hear him better through whatever process was going on with the changes in my ears.

I asked about his efforts to speak through direct voice, wondering why it seemed worthwhile to take so much trouble to make physical sounds rather than just talk to someone inside their head or through channeling. He replied that it is important for him to speak in actual words, not just thoughts, because words have a physical effect on the material world.

“In the beginning was the word?” I asked. His answer was something to the effect that in the beginning was a thought, then a word that shaped reality.

“How does music compare to words?” Up to that point he had been more or less directly dropping concepts into my head, despite the subject being the primacy of words, but this came out as a clear verbal message: “Music is a scaffolding on which we can build reality.” That was a striking idea that I wanted to be sure not to forget, so although I wanted to get to sleep, I dutifully grabbed my notebook and pen. Which, as it has done many times, broke the connection.

After settling back down, I was able to get back in touch with him, and we continued along the same lines. A direct-voice medium is like a radio, he told me; you tune the medium, tune yourself in, your own station. There were images of communicating with me, in contrast, being something like wandering through a cave with twists and obstructions.

I asked if things might be easier if I were a trance medium. He doesn’t like to work with them, he replied, because they can’t really give consent. Even though they’ve consented to the overall procedure, they can’t filter or respond to any of the communication. He prefers the relationship, the dialogue involved in working with someone who is aware of what’s going on.

(Regarding “Music is a scaffolding on which we can build reality,” a musician friend expressed something strikingly similar to this just a couple of days ago, even saying, “In the beginning was the word.”  She said she is trying to affect the world from the inside through music and meditation lately, rather than continuing to work with political organizing and that kind of thing, as she used to.  I expect that other musicians have expressed similar thoughts.)

Vicki mentioned that Braden had warned her against thinking she is communicating with any Famous Dead People, because they are likely to be impostors– although he himself had brought Fryderyk to meet his mother.  For example, he said, if someone shows up who purports to be Elvis, you should run. I mentioned this to Mendy Lou, who recounted the time she not only met Elvis, but had a lengthy conversation with him, many years ago when she was working in Las Vegas. I also mentioned it to a patient who has a strong interest in these matters, and she replied that I shouldn’t be surprised if I did run into Elvis sometime, because he’s her cousin, albeit a distant one. Six degrees of separation and all that.

So when I showed up at Vicki’s presentation, and she saw a momentary flash of her friend “Fred,” she pushed the thought aside.  Why in the world would someone associated with him walk into her workshop?  Her boggle threshold had to be raised a bit, along with mine.  The pattern that began with meeting my Famous Dead Person so many years ago seems to be building up more coherence over time, but I’m still not always certain what is being asked of me.  Now I’ve been brought into the Big Circle project in some way, and telling you about it must be part of that.  Otherwise, I’m awaiting further developments.

 

Mendy Lou Blackburn:  http://mendylou.com/
James Rolwing:  https://www.facebook.com/pg/PatternReleaseEnergetics/about/?ref=page_internal
Lunasol Polarity Therapy:  https://daynaurora.wixsite.com/lunasol-polarity?fbclid=IwAR06LGeVHFtlqrv8ALvx0qJevC3_DcmpCGHqOxl9wVyndUDZ64cFtBcf2bU

STTNG “Sub Rosa”: Predatory Love

I wrote the following in May of 2010, as part of a letter to a friend, and today I ran across it while looking for something else. It seems like an appropriate story for Halloween and Día de los Muertos, almost a ghost story but not quite. 

There has been so much news of sexual abuse and coercion lately, and our group mind is busy chewing over what constitutes abuse and what possibly is just a matter of being a jerk instead. For my own rather different reasons I have been considering this question as well. The situation in the STTNG episode I describe here is pathognomonic of abuse: one being takes control of another and prevents her from living her own life. Yet, as in real relationships, things aren’t absolutely cut and dried.
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The other night I had the opportunity to record a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that I’d been wanting to get my hands on for years, “Sub Rosa.” I hadn’t seen it in probably a decade or more. This time around, I found myself thinking, “Was Gates McFadden’s acting really that bad?” [sorry] and “I can’t believe they piled that much makeup on those poor women,” and “Why did they give Deanna Troi SO much hair?” and “Geez, none of their uniforms really fit.” Somehow the show, which honestly was high-quality overall, seemed even more dated than Classic Trek from the ‘60s!

But the story was still of interest to me. It was about almost exactly what an ex-friend and colleague insisted was happening to me: a disembodied being was making inappropriate and harmful use of humans, while claiming to love them and take care of them. The story began with Dr. Beverly Crusher, the Enterprise’s chief medical officer, beaming down for her grandmother’s funeral. The planet where her grandmother lived had been terraformed into a replica of the Scottish Highlands– which I guess was someone’s idea of the perfect environment– and the clothes and houses looked like they came from around 1800.

When Dr. Crusher read her grandmother’s journals, she discovered that this century-old lady had had a handsome lover, a guy in his 30s! Very soon the lover made an appearance and offered his services to the granddaughter. He represented himself as a ghost, a regular human spirit, nothing too untoward. She quickly fell under his spell. For short periods he would appear as a corporeal man, but then he would dissolve into a green mist and sink into her body, merging with her in a way that looked eerily familiar to me. They didn’t make it clear whether this was an overtly sexual act, but it sure looked like Beverly, squirming around most sensuously, was having a wonderful time.

The green mist guy, whose name was Ronin, asked Dr. Crusher to stay with him on the planet so that they could be completely joined forever. She was so messed up by that time that she instantly resigned from Starfleet and did as he asked, having no problem with leaving all her friends and everything she’d ever worked for. But by that time the captain and others were on to Ronin and trying to get Dr. Crusher out from under his influence. They had figured out that he was not a ghost at all, but an alien being made of “anaphasic energy,” a (made-up of course) kind of energy that was unstable and couldn’t exist without some kind of physical host. (Making one wonder how such a creature could ever evolve in the first place.) He’d been preying on the women in Beverly’s family generation after generation. They had a sort of candle, a family heirloom, that was where he lived when he wasn’t invading their own bodies.

And that’s when Ronin started attacking people, even killing one, to save himself. Finally Dr. Crusher had to kill him herself– of course, what else– blowing him away most dramatically with her phaser.

But at the very end, looking at her grandmother’s journals again, Dr. Crusher commented wistfully that whatever else he’d done, he had made her grandmother very happy.

Star Trek at its best has often managed to find stories that resonate for a great many people, at some deep subconscious or even mythological level. In this case, the plot concerned something that does appear to happen, a disembodied being interfering in the life of a human, but it also can be taken as being about physical-world relationships that are obsessive and controlling. It’s kind of the ultimate in codependent relationships.

And it’s very close to the kind of relationship my ex-friend accused me of having with Fryderyk.

I don’t have the slightest worry that I am being preyed upon or abused, but this story did make me take stock yet again. What would I be doing these days if Fryderyk had not happened to me? Would I have followed my “plan A” and studied jazz bass? Would I be a really hot lutenist? Would I somehow have become more myself if I hadn’t been concentrating on him? It seems like I might have saved many thousands of dollars by not buying a grand piano and not taking so many lessons, but then, I was already taking lessons and teaching, and I might have done all that anyway.

I do think that I’ve been significantly happier than I would have been otherwise. Maybe the happiness of romance is nothing more than a bunch of oxytocin circulating through the system, but it’s happiness nonetheless.