Category Archives: spirit communication

The Last Good Day, a Bird Invasion, My House Locks Me Out, and Bob Messes with My Phone

Exactly a year ago, April 3, 2023, my husband suddenly became violently ill with the pancreatitis that would kill him 10 days later. Right about this time in the middle of the evening, as I start to write this post. So very suddenly. He was fine and then he wasn’t, from one moment to the next.

I think of last April 3, the earlier part of it, as The Last Good Day. I’d had a pleasant, relaxed afternoon that included hanging out at a coffee shop and then the new library. Bob and I were at the beginning of a week of spring break, after working much more than usual in the past few months and hardly seeing each other, and were planning on a romantic getaway to take the waters in Truth or Consequences on the 5th. I had cooked a spring dinner of greens from the garden, with rice and parmesan, and he said it was good. It was the last thing he ever ate, and I haven’t made it since, can’t.

He took the trash out, as he did every week, and finished getting his tax records together for his business so that I could get the bulk of the tax work done and not have to worry about it the rest of the week. I gave him a little bit of a hard time for not putting everything in the right categories and making more work for me. Not the conversation I would have had with him, if I had had any idea what would happen just a few minutes later.

And then life as we knew it ended.

I figured that today would be difficult. It’s been tolerable, not as hard as it might have been, but of course I’m not OK. I can’t expect to be, shouldn’t be. It’s OK not to be OK. The next week and a half, I’ll be inevitably remembering, these days floating on the layers of trauma from the year before.

If that weren’t disorienting enough, in the past couple of days someone or something has seemed bent on playing April Fool’s jokes on me. A couple of exceptionally odd events occurred, and if you’ve read much of my blog, you know that’s saying a lot.

On April 1, I was taking out the trash, which is now my job along with everything else Bob used to do. I opened the garage door to roll the recycling bin out, and before I could close it again, a bird flew in! An unfamiliar species, substantial, about the size of a robin, pale yellow belly and grey and black head and wings, one who must have been passing through on migration and gotten confused.

I chased the critter around with a broom, trying to shoo it back out, but there were too many places to hole up in the rafters where I couldn’t reach, and it seemed to have no interest in freeing itself if that meant navigating in the dark. As it darted around in a tizzy it kept bashing itself into the panels of lights in the ceiling, which must have looked like sky. I was tired after my workday, and cold, and we weren’t accomplishing anything except to give the bird bruises. I put out a pan of water for it and went to bed. The bird would have a safe place to sleep overnight, and no harm done.

In the morning, yesterday, April 2, I woke up late out of a disturbing dream, strangely sore all over and a little bit loopy. It took me a little while to remember that I had a bird in my garage. I went to open the garage door, closing the door from the house to the garage behind me lest the bird should try to escape in the wrong direction. I heard a loud click behind me but thought little of it. The bird immediately found its way out into the sunlight.

Relieved, I turned to go back into the house and make some coffee. And found that the door was locked! Obviously it had been unlocked, or I couldn’t have gone through it in the first place. This made no sense. And I was in trouble, still in my nightgown in the morning chill, and of course without keys or phone.

My next-door neighbors have a key to my house, and I have theirs, so I wasn’t extremely worried. And my 90+-year-old neighbor fortunately knew where the key was and quickly retrieved it from a drawer nearby. Whew! I marched up to my front door— and was no better off than before, because my glass storm door was still locked from the inside and there was no way of accessing it. I was about to resign myself to calling a locksmith, but then, just in case, tried my front deadbolt key in the house-to-garage door lock. And it worked. I didn’t even know the two doors had been keyed alike.

So what caused that door to click itself locked? I’ve lived here almost 22 years and nothing like that has ever happened. I’ve been paranoid about locking myself out since Bob has been gone, and I always, always triple-check that I have my keys when I leave. This time it was like the house itself locked me out. Or like someone did. In the context of the weird bird encounter, this was seriously creepy.

I’ve had instances of disembodied beings having helpful effects on physical objects (like last summer when apparently Bob fixed the roller shade on the patio— did I tell you about that?), but none in which they manipulated objects to do harm. I had been broadcasting calls to Bob for days, unable to get any more than the faintest signal on the cosmic WiFi, and I’d hate to think that I caught some kind of untoward attention in the process. I do know better than to call out to just anyone… don’t I?

At a health care appointment yesterday, I told my provider about my strange morning. It seemed symbolically significant to her, and she asked me to think about what it might mean in terms of being shut out or something similar. It certainly had a feeling of significance, but if it has a lesson for me, other than that I should never shut that door behind me again, I haven’t yet gotten the message. Perhaps it will become clear. If the confused bird had a message for me, I don’t know what that was either. I could make up a story but that wouldn’t be the point.

Once the craziness was over, I decided to take a photo of the blossoms on my pear tree before they faded, with the intention of using it for wallpaper on my phone. This one:

When I opened the wallpaper settings, I was surprised to find that my phone suggested this picture:

As I was telling you, I’d been trying and trying to “phone” Bob, without success. This photo wasn’t recent or prominent in my photo stream; it was from way back in 2021. It had never come up before on the list of potential wallpaper images. And it’s an edited version– the original background was removed and the image is cropped closely around the face (which the photo program might have done on its own for some reason).

And just a little while before I had been whining at my appointment about how frustrated I’d been at being unable to reach Bob for days despite trying every way I knew how.

It reminded me of when this happened, all those years ago:

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/fryc-in-print/

I think the last really clear visit I’d had from him was back on March 17, first thing in the morning while I was still lounging in bed. When I got up I picked up my phone to text someone, and in the space where I was about to start typing, there was already a word: Bob.

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Filed under animal behavior, grief, spirit communication, the unexplained

Special

Image by Gerd Altmann at Pixabay

In early January, a patient called to say she wasn’t going to be able to get here due to the day’s worsening snow, something that doesn’t happen all that commonly in Albuquerque. And then she added that her husband had died on December 20.

Of course I was shocked, and worried for her. Her husband was 84 years old but in good health and diligent about taking care of himself. He had died suddenly of an apparent heart attack. She had left the room briefly while he was on the phone, and when she came back, he was already gone.

The snow dissipated, and C made it to her appointment after all. It was a good thing, since there was so much for her body and mind to process, a very appropriate time for a supportive treatment.

She and her husband, J, had run a business together for many years, each of them handling different facets of it. She hadn’t gotten involved with the parts that J took care of, and didn’t understand his idiosyncratic ways of keeping records. However, she told me, she was in such close communication with him that he could give her specific advice to guide her through all that. With his help she was figuring everything out and keeping the business going by herself. Not that it was easy by any means, but it was doable. My heart went out to her, knowing all too well what a challenge it is to do all one’s own work plus everything one’s deceased spouse had been doing.

C asked if I had any sense of J being around, since a number of people she associates with had been able to perceive him. I had all my antennae up, but I wasn’t noticing anyone else in the room with us.

I marveled at the rich flow of information C was able to get from J, but she dismissed the idea that it was so amazing or unusual. She was about to say, “I’m nobody special, so if I can communicate like this, anyone can.”

She got as far as “I’m nobody special,” at which point I could feel J positively jumping up and down and waving his arms at my right side. He was taking vehement exception to C’s opinion that she wasn’t special! I told her what was going on— she was aware of his presence too— and she replied that he had always given her a hard time if she put herself down that way. We had a good laugh, and I made it clear that I thought C was very special too!

Seriously, what C can do appears to be beyond what most of us are capable of. After decades of practice, I can almost never get this kind of clarity. Apparently she’s been able to do it since childhood. She also has a spiritual discipline that she has pursued for many years, and I expect that it must help enhance her awareness.

I had only had one encounter with J during his life. It was in November 2023 when my laptop died in such a way that the data couldn’t be gotten out of it, and I was in a bind. (Yes, I had online backup, but it was painfully slow to access.) He generously called me to give me the name of someone who might be able to help. I had appreciated that tremendously, even though I ended up not needing that person, and when he showed up in my office I was able to thank him again.


Last week I was getting a session of energy work, and my dear departed husband showed up and assisted, the first time he has tried that. My friend who was treating me received some messages from him. One of them had to do with my being special, and valuable to this planet. Apparently he was trying to encourage me to stay here, or to help make it less onerous to do so.

Both C and J gave me their permission to write about them.
Image by Gerd Altmann at Pixabay.

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An Ofrenda for 10,000 Souls?

The morning of Halloween, I tried to talk with Bob, but I couldn’t get a clear signal. “Hey,” I said, “It’s Halloween, the veil is supposed to be thin. We should be able to connect.” I had the impression that he was going Ooooooooo and waggling scary fingers at me!

Día de los Muertos is my favorite holiday, and I always try to make some observation of it. I would never have imagined, a year ago, how much it would mean this time. Here is the ofrenda I made for Bob, using the photo board my daughter, her husband and I put together for his memorial.

I had intended to give him this Snoopy (he was a fan) for his birthday on March 19, but wasn’t able to get it in time from my friend who was selling it on eBay. Then I planned to give it to him for Easter. So he never got it.

See the alabaster bird on a perch in the back? And the broken one lying next to it? We bought the bird sculpture on our honeymoon, and the two birds became the symbol of our marriage. (The pair of red birds in the front left is from our anniversary last year.) When one bird got broken, Bob joked, “Do we have to get a divorce now?”

I never figured out what glue to use to fix the poor thing, and it’s been sitting in the china cabinet waiting in pieces for years. Now, the condition of the sculpture is all too poignantly appropriate.

Rituals like ofrendas are supposed to help us process our pain. I think maybe mine is being reactivated more than assuaged right now, but the observance is still worthwhile and I’m still glad to do it. The light, fun touch of this holiday, the recognition that the dead can still dance, is a wonderful reminder of the deeper reality of our existence.

But this year is far from light or fun.

I don’t know how to begin to make an altar for the thousands and thousands of needless, tragic, murderous, cruel deaths in Israel and Gaza. As I write, bombs continue to fall on children and adults alike, the elderly, the hospitalized, the disabled, it doesn’t matter. All are targets. What started with unspeakable brutality was met with hugely more of the same, because our species is like that. Victims lose their lives or limbs, while combatants lose their souls, and we are all diminished. No matter what comes next, the trauma and desire for revenge will ripple and radiate throughout humanity. And our ability to respond to the crises that threaten our entire planet will continue to be hamstrung by our obsession with conflict.

Probably by the time you read this, close to 10,000 will have died in that one small corner of the world. Then there are all those being killed, maimed and emotionally devastated just as needlessly in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere. We are all human and therefore both all responsible and all affected, because we are truly, fundamentally all one.

And within that oneness, each of us is uniquely precious and irreplaceable. It keeps striking me that each of those thousands of losses is just as painful to someone as the loss of my husband is to me. Far more so, I should say, because Bob’s death was a natural occurrence that was no one’s fault, not a murder perpetrated by some blind evil.

Our minds balk at understanding mass tragedies; we go numb to those, and react far more to stories of individual suffering. But each of those thousands is an individual. Multiply personal agony by those thousands. Feel that crushing your heart. Contemplate what humans do to each other in the name of some imagined lofty principles and shrug off as merely “the cost of war.”

In these pages I’ve pointed out that dead doesn’t mean serious and that the next world isn’t a place of sadness. Today I would like you to think of the opposite aspect, the shock and damage that must be repaired when people are killed so suddenly and unjustly and at such young ages, both for themselves and those they leave behind. The damage that is done to our collective heart. Think of what we can do to calm the rage and terror within ourselves and begin to radiate something better.

Bob would endorse that. He lived it.

Once I asked Fryderyk what he thought was needed for us to save ourselves from the future that is bearing down on us. I was asking about climate specifically, but his message is relevant here as well: “Your love of life must become greater than your love of death.”



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Filed under art, human rights, mythology and metaphor, spirit communication, spirituality

The Next World Says “Hi”

Bob in 2014. Photo by Roger Baker.

The above is a clip from a recording made in connection with the Big Circle afterlife communication group. I’ve been meaning to share it with you for a while. Things happened in between that made it both impossible to do that, and more important than ever.

On April 3, my husband very suddenly became violently ill. At the ER they diagnosed pancreatitis. I felt relieved at first; a couple of my patients have had repeated bouts of pancreatitis for unknown reasons, and although it’s been painful and difficult, they’ve recovered in a few days. That’s what the hospital staff expected for Bob.

It was not to be. His kidneys were damaged, and over the course of days of desperation alternating with improvement and hope, multiple systems failed. He passed on April 13 at about 10:50 pm.

This is still an unreal statement to me, even though I have said and written it so many times since then, even though I had my hands on his body and my ear to his chest as his heart slowed and stopped, even though I myself closed his eyes.

So here I am, still a small medium, left to make sense of all this and to regroup and go on. You will not be surprised to hear that I was very much energetically in touch with Bob as he was fighting to survive, and as he found it impossible to stay connected to the body that could no longer serve him. There will be more to write about that as I can.

The story of my relationship with him across the veil is only beginning to be written. So far it’s in line with what I’ve experienced in the past— emotional tones, physical sensations, little or nothing in the way of verbal communication or any other exact messages. Except, of course, in the sense that constant love and affection is a message in itself, the most crucial message of all to receive.

It will be strange to fill out forms and check the “widowed” box, because I don’t feel widowed at all.  I feel very much still married– it’s just that my husband lives somewhere else now, as if on a remote island with bad phone and internet connections.

You might remember my previous experiences with trying to hear messages through Electronic Voice Phenomena, the technique used in the clip at the top of the page. Some were straightforward and easy to catch. Others were incomprehensible even after listening many, many times. All made it clear that the reality we live in is far more extensive and complex than we’ve been taught, and that we are far less limited than we ever imagined. Recently the Big Circle’s work came back to my attention, before I had the present need to be reminded of it, and I am grateful.

I’ve listened to a good number of clips from their weekly recording sessions, and many are striking, but it was this simple, totally unmistakable greeting from Jim, whoever he may be, that left me completely gobsmacked. “Hi.” That’s all. They are there. They are here. We are here. We are together. No one is lost.

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part I

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part II

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Filed under channeling, spirit communication

A Small Experiment In Walking Through the Veil

Comments on my post about the SoulPhone project included a pithy “the veil is there for a reason.” This phrase came from a person who is very knowledgeable about after-death issues, and it stuck with me and begged me to explore it. I decided to have a look and find out whatever I could about the nature of the interface between the worlds on my own, not depending on whatever sources on either side have told me.

I simply asked to be shown an image of the veil. What I saw seemed to contradict some other information that’s been received from the other side over the years. In particular, we’re told that “postmaterial” folk experience themselves as being more or less the same as before they died, in terms of having a solid-seeming body much like the one they’d inhabited on the earth plane. Other evidence has supported that in my experience, but that was not what this vision showed me.

The interface itself looked like a thin, black, semi-translucent rectangle, rather like smoky glass, which I saw tilted horizontally with the far edge toward the left. It looked a lot like this Plexiglas panel being sold at Amazon, but a bit darker:

There was an arm reaching through toward the right, a somewhat vague cartoon-like structure, but solid, showing up in a sort of pale orange hue. To the left, there was a blank space. Whoever was reaching through was invisible on that side.

Meanwhile, there was a figure on the right side of the rectangle that appeared to represent me, and “I” was reaching my right arm through in the opposite direction, from the material to the immaterial world. As my arm penetrated the interface, it disappeared.

So the same being could appear in material form, at least more or less, in one world and not in the other.

I tried visualizing a being from the other world stepping entirely into ours. The image on our side was of a whole human figure, with a fuzzy glowing outline— clearly delineated, but not solid in the same way as an earth-plane denizen. Like a ghost, the way they’re often pictured.

Next I tried seeing myself step through from my side, and I disappeared on the other side. I tried experiencing that in my own body, walking through to the other world, and felt my body dissipating into a mist and diffusing.

I turned the elements of the vision in various directions and tried to look at the scene from different perspectives. Everything persisted, as if I were looking at a “real” scene. No dreamlike morphing, and nothing going away. It felt like I was seeing something truthful, though I don’t necessarily understand all of it. I am presenting the vision not as an absolute description of reality, but as the way my brain found to represent an aspect of reality.

Early in this whole process, the thought occurred to me that wherever you go, you find yourself. There was a sense of being able to reach through the interface and back around to oneself from either side. I’m not sure how that fit in with the rest.

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Filed under spirit communication, spirituality

The SoulPhone: Who Ya Gonna Call?

These past few months, it’s been hard to think about anything beyond our immediate survival and how to move past the pandemic crisis. It’s a good time for a reminder that in reality, we are infinite beings and our lives are far richer than the present limitations suggest.

I first heard of Dr. Gary Schwartz’s SoulPhone project at the University of Arizona a few years ago, and at the time I was not particularly impressed. What I read then was that his research had led to success with yes/no answers to questions posed to “postmaterial” persons, by means of a sensitive switch that they could affect. Knowing that nonphysical entities are quite capable of exerting force on physical objects, and being familiar with electronic voice phenomena and other clever ways those in spirit have found to get through our thick skulls, I was underwhelmed. I was also vaguely suspicious because the “Hypothesized Communicating Spirits” were all Famous Dead People*, though of course that has been true of a number of cross-world projects.

OK, I may have been a bit jaded. I should have been jumping up and down with joy that someone had been able to accomplish this in a rigorous and unassailably scientific manner. But with communication through skilled mediums being relatively easy and this yes/no thing giving so little information by comparison, I let the SoulPhone slip from my attention.

I stayed on their mailing list, but since I was overwhelmed with email in general, I didn’t keep up very well. The other day the researchers sent out a new video summarizing their recent progress, and I did take a look at that.

WOW.

Things have moved along quite a lot! Much more than a simple switch. And this switch, if combined with 30 or so others, can theoretically become a keyboard. Which means that if all goes as planned, you may be able to text your grandma beyond the veil— and get a reply.

(Nik, if you’re listening, I know you’ve already texted your mom on her regular phone, but not every postmaterial kid is as talented as you are!)

What piqued my interest most was a statement that our postmaterial friends are actually visible to the human eye, but our visual systems can’t process enough frames per second to perceive the images properly. This was said to explain those times when you see a flash of a being out of the corner of your eye, but when you try to focus on it, it isn’t there. (It may also explain why sometimes we can get photos of nonphysical entities that we can’t see on our own.) Logically enough, the SoulPhone team is working on equipment that can capture these elusive images, and ultimately they want to stack up still pictures to create video.

It won’t be necessary for me to write a lot about this here, because so much has already been written and is easily accessible. A good place to start is this blog post from Dr. Mark Pitstick, the director of the SoulPhone Foundation. It clearly outlines the phases and goals of the project:
 https://www.soulproof.com/soulphone-want-call/

Note the “P word” incorporated into the domain name. Dr. Pitstick stated in the video that they are not ready to say they’ve proven that life goes on after death, so they avoid the P word, but that with other centers working to replicate their research, by the end of 2020 they may be able to actually say they have proof.

Let that sink in for a moment. If you’ve come with me on my blog journey this far, you probably know that there is already overwhelming evidence for the existence of human consciousness beyond the body, but we are talking about a different level of evidence here, gathered over thousands of trials with carefully designed instrumentation and rigorous controls. Proof of life after death, not just strong evidence, could change the world.

If anyone pays attention, that is. There are so many fundamental areas where humans would just as soon not pay attention. But that’s a concern for later.

Now that you’ve got an overview, if you would like to spend an entertaining and enlightening hour, it’s a good time to check out the video.

Gobsmacked yet? Mind-boggled? Excited for a future that seems a little more hopeful?

I know, it’s a stretch to accept all this, even for those of us who are familiar with afterlife research. If I didn’t know who I know and hadn’t met who I’ve met on the other side, I might guffaw at the A-list names of the “dead” luminaries working on this project. I mean, as soon as you mention Tesla, you’re likely to lose a lot of your audience, since his name is so often bandied about by questionable sources. And Einstein’s in on it too? Riiiight. But if Beethoven and friends have been trying to pour some encouragement onto our poor sphere, why not these guys. The overarching message is that the team on their side is trying to help us heal our world. Lord, we could sure use all the help we can get! I could almost begin to feel some optimism.

I’ve often thought how frustrating and painful it must be for more advanced minds to watch us screw up so gigantically here on the planet and not be able to do much about it. I have no trouble believing that many would like to intervene or at least provide some moral support. Channeled messages over the past century or more have sometimes mentioned a desire to build technologies for communication between the worlds, or even attempts to do so from the nonphysical side.

Dr. Pitstick mentioned that it seemed like a terrible waste of time for a brilliant being like Einstein to have to spend hour after hour playing something like Twenty Questions to establish his identity and refine the method. Intriguingly, he reported that the postmaterial team members had said they need to use only about 20% of their attention to do these tasks, while the rest of their mind is engaged in far more interesting activities. And we too, they say, are only about 20% involved in our earth-based lives, while 80% of our real selves is/are living elsewhere and maybe elsewhen, doing things our earth brains can hardly imagine.

(Do you ever have the sense that a lot of your energy is directed somewhere other than here? I do. I’ve assumed that it isn’t healthy for my earth life, but maybe it’s just normal.)

There is so much to speculate about with the SoulPhone and related issues. I ran across someone who is putting his wide-ranging and fascinating speculations into a blog, which I highly recommend.
https://soulphonenews.com/

Here’s a post from this author, Joshua Bagby, that asks useful questions about what a working technology for talking with the “dead” might mean for society here. For example:
“How would law enforcement and the court system handle accusations and evidence acquired from postmaterial sources?
“How would soul phone technology figure in international relations and global politics? Would postmaterial luminaries take sides?
“Would governments ever consider soul phone technology a national security risk and attempt to ban it, including by executive order?”

Those are daunting questions, and there are many more in the post. Considering all these sticky matters, I suppose I’m relieved that the SoulPhone isn’t going to be ready for widespread use for quite a while. Although a device advanced enough to cause these issues is still only theoretical, we may well have to come up with ways to deal with them. Meanwhile, we can keep developing our own awareness and openness to inspiration from those we care about who are no longer wearing their “earthsuits.”

The SoulPhone project’s official site is here:
 https://www.thesoulphonefoundation.org/

Addendum 7/14/20:  Please see an addition to this post in the comment section.

*The issue of Famous Dead People:  https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/1136/

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What Are Viruses? In a Way They Are Us

Coronavirus structure. An artistic response to the last SARS epidemic, in glass. https://www.lukejerram.com/glass/gallery/sars-corona-virus

At the beginning of the year, I wrote about the goddess Kali, having no idea how soon she’d be coming after us.

I also wrote about the interconnectedness of everything on the planet and everywhere, and how the dichotomy of humans vs. nature is false.

It turns out that even the dichotomy of viruses vs. us is false. We all learned in school that viruses are tiny beings that exist in a strange twilight zone between the living and the nonliving, and that they can’t reproduce without using the machinery of plant or animal cells. I hadn’t followed that thought to its conclusion, which is that since viruses must build themselves out of the materials of our own cells, they are in a sense made out of us. They, too, are inextricably entwined with ourselves.

This came up when I was looking for layperson-friendly articles to explain viral structures and functions to my readers and patients. Here is a source:
“Conserved and host-specific features of influenza virion architecture.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25226414

“Abstract: Viruses use virions to spread between hosts, and virion composition is therefore the primary determinant of viral transmissibility and immunogenicity. However, the virions of many viruses are complex and pleomorphic, making them difficult to analyse in detail. Here we address this by identifying and quantifying virion proteins with mass spectrometry, producing a complete and quantified model of the hundreds of host-encoded and viral proteins that make up the pleomorphic virions of influenza viruses. We show that a conserved influenza virion architecture is maintained across diverse combinations of virus and host. This ‘core’ architecture, which includes substantial quantities of host proteins as well as the viral protein NS1, is elaborated with abundant host-dependent features. As a result, influenza virions produced by mammalian and avian hosts have distinct protein compositions. Finally, we note that influenza virions share an underlying protein composition with exosomes, suggesting that influenza virions form by subverting microvesicle production.”

OK, that was not a particularly layperson-friendly paragraph, so let’s unpack it. First, what is a virus? It is simply a chain of RNA or DNA, which normally is covered by a coating or envelope of protein. A virion is the whole package of genetic material plus the coating that allows it to get into cells, that is, the infective form of the virus. Note that virions are pleomorphic— they can exist in different forms. We’ll come back to that.

 Virions contain “substantial quantities of host proteins.” That’s the part where they’re made out of us. That’s also how we know what sort of host the virus developed in originally, and can tell that the current SARS-CoV-2 came from bats.*

But there is a deeper answer to the question “what is a virus?” and it is that a virus is information. That information is constantly transmitted between species, just as similar particles are generated and used by organisms within themselves. From the same paper as above:
“Spherical influenza virions are a similar size to exosomes, membrane-bound structures which also transfer protein and RNA between cells. By comparing separately-purified exosomes and virions we show here that they also have a strikingly similar protein profile – by many measures, an influenza virion is simply an exosome that has been enriched with additional components. Similarities have been noted between exosomes and a number of other enveloped viruses, most notably HIV, for which the ‘Trojan exosome hypothesis’ was proposed to explain virion budding as a subversion of cellular pathways for exosome biogenesis.”

I’m embarrassed to tell you that in decades of reading in medicine and biology, I had never learned of the existence of exosomes. It turns out that cells are constantly releasing exosomes, which are little packets of information in the form of microRNAs with coatings, very similar to viruses, and which can turn genes on or off and affect the functions of other cells that encounter them. This includes exosomes we ingest in our food!  This is one of the mechanisms by which substances in foods create benefits to our health.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4851829/
“Interspecies communication between plant and mouse gut host cells through edible plant derived exosome-like nanoparticles”
“It has been known for decades that people eating a variety of edible plants daily are the recipients of many beneficial health effects when compared to subjects that ingest fewer types of edible plants. Ingesting EPDENs from a variety of fruits and vegetables daily would be expected to provide greater beneficial effects for maintaining gut homeostasis than ingesting EPDENs from a single edible plant.”

Exosomes are even present in breast milk, providing a way to convey the mother’s immunity to the baby.

“With the recent discovery that non-coding microRNA’s in food are capable of directly altering gene expression within human physiology, this new study further concretizes the notion that the age old aphorism ‘you are what you eat’ is now consistent with cutting edge molecular biology.”
— Sayer Ji, https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/amazing-food-science-discovery-edible-plants-talk-animal-cells-promote-healing

Indeed, you are what you eat, and you are also what you breathe in. Back to viruses. What gobsmacked me when I read all this is that I had seen very similar ideas way back in my youth, in the Seth material! It turns out that decades before these discoveries, the Seth entity (famously channeled by Jane Roberts) had been telling us the same things. And I had been thinking about his ideas when I first considered writing this post; for some reason they had stuck in my mind all these years. I didn’t expect to be able to find specific quotes, but the internet being such a magical place, I was able to come up with some right away:

“Many viruses INHERENTLY capable of causing death, in normal conditions contribute to the overall health of the body, existing side by side as it were with other viruses, each contributing quite necessary activities that maintain bodily equilibrium.”

“All viruses of any kind are important to the stability of your planetary life. They are a part of the planet’s biological heritage and memory. You cannot eradicate a virus, though at any given time you destroy every member alive of any given strain. They exist in the earth’s memory, to be recreated, as they were before, whenever the need arises.”

“Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule you think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly” in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.”

“Now: In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.

“You are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.”

“Thoughts interact with the body and become part of it as viruses do. Some viruses have great therapeutic value. The physical body will often let down its own barriers to these, knowing they will counteract certain others that are not beneficial at the time.
So-called harmful viruses are ever-present within the body. You are very rarely vulnerable to any but a small percentage, though you carry within you traces of the most deadly of them all of the time. Viruses themselves undergo transformations completely unsuspected by medical men. If one virus disappears and another is found, it is never suspected that the first may have changed into the second; and yet through certain alterations of quite natural character such is the case.” [Remember the pleomorphic nature of flu viruses that we read about above.]

“More is always involved, however, for those viruses that you consider communicable do indeed in one way or another represent communications on a biological level. They are biological statements, literally social communications, biologically made, and they can be of many kinds.”

“There are all kinds of biological reactions between bodies that go unnoticed, and they are all basically of a social nature, dealing with biological communications. In a fashion viruses—in a fashion—again, are a way of dealing with or controlling the environment. These are natural interactions, and since you live in a world where, overall, people are healthy enough to contribute through labor, energy, and ideas, health is the dominating ingredient—but there are biological interactions between all physical bodies that are the basis for that health, and the mechanisms include the interactions of viruses, and even the periods of indisposition, that are not understood.”

“The species is also always in the process of keeping within its genetic bank millions of characteristics that might be needed in various contingencies, and in that regard there is a connection, of course, between, say, viruses of many strains and the health not only of man but of other species.”

“The epidemics then serve many purposes — warning that certain conditions will not be tolerated. There is a biological outrage that will be continually expressed until the conditions are changed.”

Wow. If there was ever a time for biological outrage, surely it is now. 

Sayer Ji elaborates this “open-access” view of the biome in an article connecting it with our non-coding “junk” DNA and the Gaia hypothesis:

“This view also invites a complete re-visioning of the tree of life. Unlike the conventional model, where the DNA is hermetically sealed off within the lockbox of each species, evolving in isolation at a glacial pace, except for extremely rare horizontal gene transfer events (such as retroviral vectors that incorporate into the germline and become endogenized as endogenous retroviruses), the newer, more “open access” model would permit species to alter and affect another’s phenotype in real-time, along with potentially altering its long-term evolutionary trajectory by affecting epigenetic inheritance patterns. This speaks to a co-evolutionary and co-operative model, with all areas of the tree of life, co-developing in a highly complex and seemingly highly intelligent, carefully orchestrated manner.

… So, in the post-Genomic era, it is starting to look like the ‘dark matter’ of the human genome is eclipsing in importance the known, protein-coding sequences, which account for only about 1.5% of the DNA’s 3 billion base pairs. Why? Because it has been recently discovered that most of our genome (estimated 70-90%) is transcribed into non-coding RNAs. And why would this be so, if not for a purpose? Life does not concern itself with producing anything without reason.” [my emphasis]
https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/genetic-dark-matter-and-return-goddess

Please consider this very carefully. Species can affect each other’s structure and function in the moment, and they can affect each other’s evolutionary path by changing inherited traits, something that until fairly recently was considered laughable. And viruses are part of that web of communication. 

One might wonder why terrible diseases exist. Many explanations could be brought up, but it is important to remember that most viruses, most bacteria, most fungi do not create disease, and some actually prevent it. Among these are the viruses which kill harmful bacteria in our mouths, and of course the crucially needed bacteria that live in our guts. Like it or not, we are not so much individuals as communities in motion, ships carrying innumerable passengers and crew who must all work together to stay afloat.

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

The Seth entity and many others remind us that disease and resistance to it are largely (or entirely) produced by our thoughts, both on an individual and a population level. This does not mean that we should stop our physical-world measures to reduce transmission of COVID-19 or any other illness. Although the physical world is essentially an illusion, if you jump off a cliff, gravity will have something to say about it! We have to live in our shared reality and follow its rules. However, we can also use our thoughts to reduce the trouble we find ourselves in and to create new structures as we recover.

EFT teacher Dawson Church reports: 
“Three years ago, with a wonderful group of research colleagues, I studied the levels of immunoglobulin antibodies in people at a 2 day EcoMeditation workshop (with a lot of tapping) at Esalen (Groesbeck et al., 2018). Plus a weeklong EFT tapping workshop (including EcoMeditation; Bach et al., 2019).

“We found that the weekend retreat was associated with a rise in immunoglobulin levels of 27%! That’s a big increase in your body’s ability to fight off invading viruses!”

“While the coronavirus is a “novel” virus and we don’t know how well our existing antibodies work against it, we do know that it’s very useful to have 27% better general immunity!”

He can be found at https://www.eftuniverse.com/

Lynne McTaggart, well-known for her Intention Experiments and Power of 8 intention groups, is holding weekly Facebook Live sessions of applying group thoughts to mitigate the coronavirus crisis, as well as weekly group sessions to help with healing for individuals. https://lynnemctaggart.com/

EFT tapping, meditation, prayer, whatever you choose— you can use your coronacation time to improve your individual situation and the world. I sincerely hope that you are physically and mentally well and that you have enough material goods and finances to get by. If you don’t, please reach out for help in any way you can!

 

 

*‘But how did the outbreak occur? Solving this medical mystery is important to prevent future pandemics. What’s increasingly clear is that the initial “origin story” — that the virus was spread by people who ate contaminated animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan — is shaky.

‘Scientists have identified the culprit as a bat coronavirus, through genetic sequencing; bats weren’t sold at the seafood market, although that market or others could have sold animals that had contact with bats. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the seafood market.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-did-covid-19-begin-its-initial-origin-story-is-shaky/2020/04/02/1475d488-7521-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html

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

Here is more of the relevant Seth material, with the quotes above in context. There was far too much to include in the body of the post. I found these passages at https://findingseth.com, https://www.wireclub.com/topics/philosophy/conversations/UmK3dAOnShBELwai0, and the Seth Quotes page on Facebook.

These books contain the quotes:
NoME = The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events
NoPR = The Nature of Personal Reality
TES = The Early Sessions
DEaVF = Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment
WTH = The Way Toward Health

“The viruses and infections were of course present. They always are. They are themselves fragments, struggling small fragments without intention of harm. You have general immunity, believe it or not, to all such viruses and infections. Ideally you can inhabit a plane with them without fear. It is only when you give tacit agreement that harm is inflicted upon you by these fragments.” -Seth, Early Sessions, Vol 1

“Give us a moment … In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically (underlined), when you have an immunity to a disease you have a mental immunity.
You think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country, to “invade” scores of physical mechanisms. Now thoughts are “contagious.” You have a natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with your own purposes and beliefs, and naturally (pause, groping), you are “inoculated” with a wholesome trust and belief in your own thoughts above others. The old ideas of voodooism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. You cannot divide, say, mental and physical health, nor can you divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition.”
—NoME Chapter 6: Session 841, March 14, 1979

“The patient, therefore, often feels relatively powerless and at the mercy of any stray virus that might come along. The facts are that you choose even the kind of illness that you have according to the nature of your beliefs. You are immune from ill health as long as you believe that you are.”
—NoPR Chapter 5: Session 624, October 30, 1972

“Many viruses INHERENTLY capable of causing death, in normal conditions contribute to the overall health of the body, existing side by side as it were with other viruses, each contributing quite necessary activities that maintain bodily equilibrium.
“If (certain viruses) are triggered, however, to higher activity or overproduction by mental states, they then become ‘deadly.’ Physically they may be passed on in whatever manner is peculiar to a specific strain.
“Literally, individual mental problems of sufficient severity emerge as social, mass diseases.”
—The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Session 802

NoME Chapter 6: Session 840, March 12, 1979   5/52
[… 3 paragraphs …]
(When I arose early on the 26th so that I could wrap the proofs for mailing, however, I noticed that Billy [their cat] didn’t appear to feel well. Jane watched him while I went to the post office. He was no better when I returned, and as the morning passed we came to realize that he had a urinary problem. That afternoon I took him to the veterinarian, who kept him for treatment; the problem was serious; by then the cat was in great pain. Jane and I both wondered: Why Billy? Why should such a seemingly perfect young creature suddenly become that sick, for no observable reason? “We were shocked,1 no doubt about it,” I wrote in my notes for the 836th session, a private or nonbook one which Jane gave that evening. During the session Seth discussed Billy’s illness to some extent, while also giving the first “installment” of an answer to a longstanding question of mine: I was curious about the relationship between the host — whether human, animal, or plant — and a disease it might contract, one that was “caused,” say, by a virus. I’ll return to the question at the end of these notes.
[… 6 paragraphs …]
(“All viruses of any kind are important to the stability of your planetary life. They are a part of the planet’s biological heritage and memory. You cannot eradicate a virus, though at any given time you destroy every member alive of any given strain. They exist in the earth’s memory, to be recreated, as they were before, whenever the need arises.
[… 5 paragraphs …]
(Pause.) Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule you think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly” in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.
[… 3 paragraphs …]
Now: In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.
[… 3 paragraphs …]
You are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.

NoME Chapter 6: Session 841, March 14, 1979   8/21
[… 5 paragraphs …]
The case was startling, again, because of the obvious suicidal acts. The poison was, after all, left as evidence. Had the same number of people been found dead (pause) of a vicious disease — smallpox or whatever — the virus involved would have been the villain. I want to discuss thoughts and viruses, along with the health of the body.
You think of viruses as physical, and of thoughts as mental. You should know that thoughts also have their physical aspects in the body, and that viruses have their mental aspects in the body. At times you have both asked why an ailing body does not simply assert itself and use its healing abilities, throwing off the negative influence of a given set of beliefs and thoughts.
When you think of thoughts as mental and viruses as physical, the question is understandable. It is not just that thoughts influence the body, as of course they do; but each one of them represents a triggering stimulus, bringing about hormonal changes and altering the entire physical situation at any given time.
(Pause at 9:16.) Your physical body … give us time … is, as an entity, the fleshed-out version — the physically alive version — of the body of your thoughts. It is not that your thoughts just trigger chemical reactions in the body, but that your thoughts have a chemical reality besides their recognizable mental aspects. I will have to use an analogy. It is not the best, but I hope it will get the point across: It is as if your thoughts turned into the various appendages of your body. (Emphatically:) They have an invisible existence within your body as surely as viruses do. Your body is composed not only of the stuff within it that, say, X-rays or autopsies can reveal, but it also involves profound relationships, alliances and affiliations that nowhere physically show. Your thoughts are as physically pertinent to your body as viruses are, as alive and self-propagating, and they themselves form inner affiliations. Their vitality automatically triggers (long pause, eyes open) all of the body’s inner responses. When you think thoughts, they are conscious. You think in sentences, or paragraphs, or perhaps in images. Those thoughts, as clearly as I can explain this, rise from inner components of which you are unaware.
[… 1 paragraph …]
(9:28.) Give us a moment … In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically (underlined), when you have an immunity to a disease you have a mental immunity.
You think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country, to “invade” scores of physical mechanisms. Now thoughts are “contagious.” You have a natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with your own purposes and beliefs, and naturally (pause, groping), you are “inoculated” with a wholesome trust and belief in your own thoughts above others. The old ideas of voodooism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. You cannot divide, say, mental and physical health, nor can you divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition.
Give us a moment … While I say all of this about thoughts and viruses, remember the context of the discussion, for new information and insights are always available to an individual from Framework 2, and the body does indeed send its own signals.
[… 2 paragraphs …]
The people who died at Jonestown believed that they must die. They wanted to die. How could their thoughts allow them to bring about their [bodily deaths]? Again, the question makes sense only if you do not realize that your thoughts are as physically a part of your body as viruses are (intently).
[… 5 paragraphs …]

NoPR Chapter 7: Session 631, December 18, 1972   7/23
[… 5 paragraphs …]
You must remember that you dwell always in a natural framework — which means that your thoughts themselves are as natural, say, as the locks of your hair. In what may seem to you to be an odd analogy I will compare your thoughts with viruses,* for they are alive, always present, responsive, and possess their own kind of mobility. Physically speaking at least, thoughts are chemically propelled, and they travel through the universal body as viruses travel through your temporal form.
Thoughts interact with the body and become part of it as viruses do. Some viruses have great therapeutic value. The physical body will often let down its own barriers to these, knowing they will counteract certain others that are not beneficial at the time.
So-called harmful viruses are ever-present within the body. You are very rarely vulnerable to any but a small percentage, though you carry within you traces of the most deadly of them all of the time. Viruses themselves undergo transformations completely unsuspected by medical men. If one virus disappears and another is found, it is never suspected that the first may have changed into the second; and yet through certain alterations of quite natural character such is the case.
So viruses can be beneficial or deadly according to the condition, state, and needs of the body at any given time. It is known that one disease can often cure another; sometimes, left alone, an individual will go from a serious disease through a series of less severe ones that are seemingly unrelated to the original problem.
[… 1 paragraph …]
(Pause at 9:58.) I am not suggesting that you not visit doctors or not take drugs of that nature, as long as you believe in the structure of medical discipline that the Western world has evolved. Your bodies have been conditioned to it through the use of such medications since birth. There are many casualties, but this is still a system that you have chosen, and your ideas still form your reality. No one dies who has not made the decision to do so — and no disease is accepted blindly. Put simply, your thoughts can be regarded as invisible viruses, carriers, sparks setting off reactions not only within the body but the entire physical system as you know it.
Your thoughts are as natural as the cells within your body, and as real. They interact with one another as viruses do. While you are in this reality there is no division between the mental, the spiritual, and the physical. If you think there is, then you do not sufficiently understand the spirituality of the flesh or the physical reality of your thought.
[… 5 paragraphs …]
It is natural to live after death, and natural to return the body to earth and [then to] form another. It is natural for your thoughts to be as quick, responsive, and alive as viruses. It is natural for you to have probable selves as well as reincarnational existences.

DEaVF1 Chapter 6: Session 906, March 6, 1980   10/39
[… 8 paragraphs …]
Subject: Viruses as part of the body’s overall health system, and viruses as biological statements.
Viruses serve many purposes, as I have said before.1 The body contains all kinds of viruses, including those considered deadly, but those are usually not only harmless, or inactive, but beneficial to the body’s overall balance.
[… 1 paragraph …]
(9:01.) In certain fashions (underlined), that system also keeps the body from squandering its energies, preserving biological integrity. Otherwise it would be as if you did not know where your own house began or ended, and so tried to heat the entire neighborhood. So some indispositions “caused by viruses” are accepted by the body as welcome triggers, to clean out that system, and this applies to your present indispositions.
More is always involved, however, for those viruses that you consider communicable do indeed in one way or another represent communications on a biological level. They are biological statements, literally social communications, biologically made, and they can be of many kinds.
(Still quietly, but at a good pace:) When a skunk is frightened, it throws off a foul odor indeed, and when people are frightened they react in somewhat the same fashion at times, biologically reacting to stimuli in the environment that they consider alarming. They throw off a barrage of “foul viruses”—that is, they actually collect and mobilize from within their own bodies viruses that are potentially harmful, biologically trigger these, or activate them, and send them out into the environment in self-protection, to ward off the enemy (more vigorously).
In a fashion this is a kind of biological aggression. The viruses, however, also represent tensions that the person involved is getting rid of. That is one kind of statement. It is often used in a very strong manner in times of war, or great social upheaval, when people feel frightened.
Now, your friend had been to the Olympics (last month, at Lake Placid, New York), and he was charged by the great physical vitality that he felt watching that athletic panorama. [Because of that, and for other personal reasons], he could find no release for the intense energy he felt, so he got rid of it, protected himself, and threw out his threatening biological posture: the viruses.
[… 2 paragraphs …]
(Pause at 9:17.) There are all kinds of biological reactions between bodies that go unnoticed, and they are all basically of a social nature, dealing with biological communications. In a fashion viruses—in a fashion—again, are a way of dealing with or controlling the environment. These are natural interactions, and since you live in a world where, overall, people are healthy enough to contribute through labor, energy, and ideas, health is the dominating ingredient—but there are biological interactions between all physical bodies that are the basis for that health, and the mechanisms include the interactions of viruses, and even the periods of indisposition, that are not understood.
[… 12 paragraphs …]
1. Seth first mentioned viruses in the 17th session for January 26, 1964, when I asked him to comment upon the recent deaths of our dog, Mischa, at the age of 11, and of a pair of kittens Jane had obtained from the janitor of the art gallery where she worked part time. (The kittens had the same mother, but had come from successive litters.) I was 44 and Jane was 34, and in conventional terms both of us were still struggling—not only to learn about ourselves and the world, but to find our creative ways in that world. Seth’s answer to my question was more than a little surprising and saddening to us, and opened up a number of insights:
[… 1 paragraph …]
“The viruses and infections were of course present. They always are. They are themselves fragments, struggling small fragments without intention of harm. You have general immunity, believe it or not, to all such viruses and infections. Ideally, you can inhabit a plane with them without fear. It is only when you give tacit agreement that harm is inflicted upon you by these fragments. To some degree, lesser, dependent lives such as household pets are dependent upon your psychic strength. They have their own, it is true, but unknowingly you reinforce their energy and health.
[… 5 paragraphs …]

DEaVF2 Chapter 7: Session 906, March 6, 1980   1/34
[… 11 paragraphs …]
The species is also always in the process of keeping within its genetic bank millions of characteristics that might be needed in various contingencies, and in that regard there is a connection, of course, between, say, viruses of many strains and the health not only of man but of other species.

WTH Chapter 2: January 28, 1984   2/33
[… 9 paragraphs …]
— is instead the result of an exaggeration or overextension of perfectly normal body processes. You are not attacked by viruses, for instance, for all kinds of viruses exist normally in the body. There are no killer (underlined) viruses, then, but viruses that go beyond their usual bounds. We will have more to say about such issues later on in the book — for I hope to show you how certain feelings and beliefs do indeed promote health, while others promote an unfortunate extension or exaggeration of perfectly normal bodily processes, or viral activity.
[… 3 paragraphs …]
(Long pause.) People have been taught that their bodies are a kind of battleground, and that they must be in a constant state of readiness lest they be attacked or invaded by alien germs or viruses or diseases that can strike without warning.

NoME Chapter 1: Session 802, April 25, 1977   9/63
[… 4 paragraphs …]
Dictation: (Pause, one of many.) Now: To a certain extent (underlined), epidemics are the result of a mass suicide phenomenon on the parts of those involved. Biological, sociological, or even economic factors may be involved, in that for a variety of reasons, and at different levels, whole groups of individuals want to die at any given time — but in such a way that their individual deaths amount to a mass statement.
[… 8 paragraphs …]
Now if you believe in one life only, then such conditions will seem most disastrous, and in your terms they clearly are not pretty. Yet, though each victim in an epidemic may die his or her own death, that death becomes part of a mass social protest. The lives of intimate survivors are shaken, and according to the extent of the epidemic the various elements of social life itself are disturbed, altered, rearranged. Sometimes such epidemics are eventually responsible for the overthrow of governments, the loss of wars.
[… 1 paragraph …]
The epidemics then serve many purposes — warning that certain conditions will not be tolerated. There is a biological outrage that will be continually expressed until the conditions are changed.
[… 1 paragraph …]
The sight of the dying gave them visions of the meaning of life, and stirred new [ideas] of sociological, political, and spiritual natures, so that in your terms the dead did not die in vain. Epidemics by their public nature speak of public problems — problems that sociologically threaten to sweep the individual to psychic disaster as the physical materialization does biologically.
(Pause.) These are the reasons also for the range or the limits of various epidemics — why they sweep through one area and leave another clear. Why one in the family will die and another survive — for in this mass venture, the individual still forms his or her private reality.
[… 17 paragraphs …]
They do not “worry.” They do not anticipate disaster when no signs of it are apparent in their immediate environment. On their own they do not need preventative medicine. Pet animals are inoculated against diseases, however. In your society this almost becomes a necessity. In a “purely natural” setting you would not have as many living puppies or kittens. There are stages of physical existence, and in those terms nature knows what it is doing. When a species overproduces, the incidences of, say, epidemics grow. This applies to human populations as well as to the animals.
[… 2 paragraphs …]
There are also “trial runs” in human and animal species alike, in which peeks are taken, or glimpses, of physical life, and that is all. Epidemics sweeping through animal populations are also biological and psychic statements, then, in which each individual knows that only its own greatest fulfillment can satisfy the quality of life on an individual basis, and thus contribute to the mass survival of the species.
[… 2 paragraphs …]
Many children, who, it seems, should have died of disease, of “childhood epidemics,” nevertheless survive because of their different intents. The world of thought and feeling may be invisible, and yet it activates all physical systems with which you are acquainted.
[… 1 paragraph …]
Love involves self-respect, the trust in individual biological zest and integrity. To that extent, in their way animal epidemics have the same causes as human ones.

https://www.wireclub.com/topics/philosophy/conversations/UmK3dAOnShBELwai0
from The Individual And Nature of Mass Events.–by Jane Roberts———–
—— “Unfortunately, many of your public health programs, and commercial statements through the various media, provide you with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind. I refer to those in which the specific symptoms of various diseases are given, in which the individual is further told to examine the body with those symptoms in mind. I also refer to those statements that just as unfortunately specify diseases for which the individual may experience no symptoms of an observable kind, but is cautioned that these disastrous physical events may be happening despite his or her feelings of good health. Here the generalized fears fostered by religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs are often given as blueprints of diseases in which a person can find a specific focus-the individual can say: `Of course, I feel listless, or panicky, or unsafe, since I have suchandsuch a disease.’
————— “The breast cancer suggestions associated with self examinations have caused more cancers than any treatments have cured. They involve intense meditation of the body, and adverse imagery that itself affects the bodily cells. Public health announcements about high blood pressure themselves raise the blood pressure of millions of television viewers.
—— “Your current ideas of preventative medicine, therefore, generate the very kind of fear that causes disease. They all undermine the individual’s sense of bodily security and increase stress, while offering the body a specific, detailed disease plan. But most of all, they operate to increase the individual sense of alienation from the body, and to promote a sense of powerlessness and duality. Your “medical commercials” are equally disease promoting. Many, meaning to offer you relief through a product, instead actually promote the condition through suggestion, thereby generating a need for the product itself.”

“Examine the literature that you read, the television programs that you watch, and tell yourself to ignore those indications given of the body’s weaknesses.

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Filed under channeling, health and healing, history, nature, psychology, spirit communication

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/

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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:

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Katie Does Grief Counseling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most people, and maybe animals too, feel better if they know their deceased loved ones are OK.  In this sweet story, given to me by someone who has lived with many fine dogs, a beloved pet takes it upon herself to deliver the news of her death:

Katie Scarlett

My partner and I found a German Shepherd/Blue Heeler puppy on Central Avenue. The puppy was trying to lick water from a puddle and tossing her head back with each lick. I ran to pick her up and saw that a very tight flea collar had grown into her neck. We rushed her to the vet and had it removed.

We named her Katie Scarlett because of her strong will to survive. Katie was severely dehydrated and malnourished. We thought she was about 3 months old, but the vet said she was closer to 6 months old and severely deprived of care.

Katie became the sweetest, most gentle dog we had ever known. She was so careful with our grandkids, cats and other dogs. She was fiercely protective of our home and our family.

When her fur finally grew back, Katie was a beautiful brindle girl. We affectionately called her our “Jamoca almond swirl girl.” She slept on the foot of our bed for 15 years. We took her to work with us, camping, hiking, and swimming in the lakes, ponds and rivers.

As Katie aged, her hips began to cause her discomfort. We found alternative treatments so she could live life to the fullest pain free.

At the end of her 15th year, mobility once again became an issue. My partner knew that Katie was beginning her transition to the other side. Katie had always loved to sleep late, but she began to rise early and stare out the windows at the sky. It appeared she was seeing things not available to us.

My partner needed to go away for a few weeks and she was fearful that Katie might pass while she was gone. She spent time with Katie letting her know how deeply she would always be loved and how cherished she would always be. She told Katie if she had to leave, it would be okay. She assured Katie that we would miss her terribly but we would be okay and we would all be together again someday.

A week after my partner left on her trip, Katie left her tired earthly body behind. I was devastated and did not want to ruin my partner’s trip by sharing the sad news. I saw no need to tell bad news in a hurry.

Katie handled that for me. Late that evening, my partner called in tears. She told me Katie had come to her room and laid on the foot of her bed. As she reached to touch her, Katie flew away.

We do not die. We will all be together again. This life is but one of many. Katie was one of the very best blessings I ever received. I will be so happy to be with her again.

— Judy Talley

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