Special

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.

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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.

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

EVP and the FDP

I’ve written before about the challenges of discernment when working with the worlds of discarnate beings.  (See “When Is an Entity Not an Entity?” among other posts.)  The following is a somewhat condensed version of a December email conversation with Vicki Talbott, who you met in my recent post on Electronic Voice Phenomena and other technologically-mediated methods of communication.  It begins with more on the potential confusions of dealing with Famous Dead People and those who only pretend to be such.  Vicki’s comments are used with permission and appear in bold.  I have added comments that were not part of the original exchange, in brackets.

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

Vicki: Well and truthfully, as mediums we do not normally go around having convos with FDP right and left. Our spirit guides, guardian angels, whatever we have and however we refer to them, are not normally famous. A medium can go a lifetime without coming into contact with many world famous FDP. As above, so below. So it seems strange to me that some organizations and ITC practitioners are promoting this end of EVP communication, the FDP connection. As if that validates their work in a way that your average Joe coming through doesn’t.  [Gary Schwartz’s group working on the “Soul Phone” has apparently been attempting to contact only the Famous Dead.  I find this mystifying.]

The question is why would we believe what we hear from spirit more than we believe what we sense or intuit? Because it’s physical confirmation of communication, which is quite powerful, but still it is NOT confirmation of a famous person coming through. Yes, we know it happens, but no, it is not common. As well, many if not most enlightened FDP do not like to give their names, saying that self-identification injects ego into the mix, not a good idea. So nowadays you see all these folks giddily saying they’re communicating with the likes of Einstein and Tesla. They might very well be. Then again, given the nature of most high-level discarnate FDP who shy away from earthly distinction and name dropping, they might very well not be. It’s just a caution is all, to be very careful about whom you think you are speaking to and whom you tell about it….

I’ve watched critiques of a few of the wayward who 1. use their mental instead of physical mediumship skills to ‘tune in’ to the deceased, and thus 2. allow for tricksters to, accidentally or no, make us think we’re hearing the voices of people we aren’t. In these cases it’s sometimes NOT an FDP. What is unfortunate is that some very good people are hurt this way, often without realizing it, as everyone, including the best of mediums, has lessons to learn. 

Braden* has concerns about some mediums thinking they are talking to anyone at all, when actually they are at times resourcing their own higher self and/or the mind of the client, as well as entertaining imposters. 

Elene: Indeed, this can be very complicated.  I’m much more a clairvoyant and empath than a medium (and not very ept as a telepath), but as you know, I do have some mediumistic ability, so I see both sides of this. I do a lot of work with my patients that involves reading what’s stored in their bodies and minds, but also often reading their family members or other close associates.  I don’t advertise about this, but it’s often crucial to healing, and sometimes patients ask me specifically for that kind of work and trust me to be able to do something meaningful.  One thing that helps keep me out of trouble is that even then, I’m not really under pressure to come up with anything– nothing to prove.  If I can’t get any useful impressions, we can still do other energy work or just do acupuncture.  But usually I do get something.

I find that there is typically a representation of the patient’s mom, husband, or whoever in a region of the field around their body, and I can interact with that.  On occasion it has appeared that I actually ended up in contact with that person in real time, but usually it’s more like a recording or template of the person.  It’s not critical to know which is which for doing this kind of healing, as the patient and I can clear whatever needs clearing one way or the other, but I think generally I can tell if I’m in direct contact with a third entity.

(This kind of experience can be quite wearing on me, but is also among the most worthwhile types of work I ever do.)

V: This concern is not a huge one for Braden as he thinks the deluded and the shysters will be discovered and fall by the wayside, but it’s interesting to note, and it’s been helpful to me in determining whether I’m talking to an FDP or my own higher self for example….

The Technician, one of The Seven (high level beings associated with ITC), has stated that with mental mediumship, 1/5 of what is heard is directly from spirit, while up to 4/5 is filtered through the consciousnesses involved, hence some well-meaning yet mistaken psychic mediums out there spouting their own and their clients feelings on matters, peppered with info read from the deceased to bolster the information. Here’s a scenario. The medium says the client has a black dog, a red car, and a bad relationship with a relative, all correct, and anything that comes after that, like a serenade from Frank Sinatra, is taken as gospel truth. 

[Vicki had suggested that I give her questions for our mutual friend Chopin, and I had requested that she ask about Rose Creet, the sitter in the Leslie Flint group with whom he claimed a centuries-long close relationship.  As I told Vicki, I was desperately curious about Rose, but had never been able to get a word out of Fryderyk about her, so I wasn’t expecting much.  Vicki did get an extremely intriguing recording, though, which contains an exotic, difficult-to-understand voice, and then someone who sounds much like Rose as she did in life.  As with some of the other clips, her words are distinct but I don’t understand the meaning of the message.  See if you can do any better than I:

https://app.box.com/s/iikj6re96kfgefouv3zvdrnkcp29ngec ]

E: The very metallic, inhuman-sounding voice that you heard as saying, “Rose, stand up”— would that have been one of The Seven?  Or just a very distorted deceased-person voice?  Can you tell me anything about The Seven?

V: It could have been but I don’t really know. That voice, that entity, has come through on Big Circle recordings for all of us for years. But we work with a high level group of entities who work with even higher entities and on it goes, who don’t think hanging one’s FDP shingle is a good idea….

In a nutshell, some mediums try to read the deceased rather than link with the deceased and thus much of what they say is muddied with earthly human consciousness. When one tries to read rather than link, inaccuracies accumulate, especially regarding feelings and emotions. ITC, on the other hand, by virtue of its method and means, ‘forces’ the physical medium into a direct link, with the deceased being the primary communicator (4/5) and not the other way around. 

E: I’ve had a great deal of practice at distinguishing my own thoughts and feelings, including [apparent] past-life thoughts and feelings of “another me,” from the input coming from discarnates or from my patients and their own associated beings, but there is always plenty of room for error.

Once I asked Fryderyk whether, in direct voice communication, the mind of the medium is involved, since the voices don’t seem to be coming directly from the medium.  (I was particularly concerned with that since in the Leslie Flint opus there are turns of phrase that to me are quite unusual and even incorrect, but occur over and over.)  He replied, “The medium cannot turn off his brain just because he is a medium.”

V: Yes as I said this is not such a huge concern for the likes of you according to Braden. But apparently there are many mediums who aren’t really communicating with whom they think they are. Perhaps it’s a matter of skill and experience, not sure. The medium can never turn off the brain, but with ITC, the human influence on the communication is far less pronounced than with mental mediumship, according to afterlife sources. Which means these guys can say they are someone they aren’t and get away with it more easily perhaps? Especially since we can all hear the EVP for example. Still wondering. 

…That 4/5 packs a powerful ITC punch, so imagine this coming from a prankster, hence the strong caution from the Big Circle.

E: I don’t think I’ve told you anything about my [apparent] encounters with the ultimate FDP, Jesus, as yet, though you may have seen something about that on my blog.  That brings up one aspect that can help with knowing a communication is authentic: when it is not at all what we are expecting or wanting.

My first experience with him, channeled by my now-deceased friend H., was much as one might expect him to be— a very large, loving, compassionate being of great power and yet infinite kindness and gentleness.  When he came to my office with H., a couple of years or so later, I didn’t recognize him at all.  All I knew was that there was a man sitting at my elbow while I worked with H., who was lying on my table.  He seemed quite ordinary, and chatted on and on with messages for her.  She kept asking me if I knew who he was, and I kept replying, “I don’t know, it’s some guy.”  H. was beside herself with amusement at this, and eventually let me in on the secret.

I was astonished, and commented that he seemed so small compared to the way I had seen him before. “Yes, he does that,” she replied— he could present himself in a form that we could deal with more comfortably.

The dissertation he gave through me was completely clear, words and images, and profound.  Something H. would benefit by hearing but didn’t want to hear.  I asked her if it sounded meaningful to her.  “Yes, it’s what he tells me all the time,” she said.  Perhaps he thought that if she heard it through someone else she would finally accept it?

It seemed to me that it was best that I didn’t know I was in communication with this extremely Famous Dead Person.  Since to me he was Just Some Guy, I didn’t get intimidated or freeze up, and I was able to transmit his message smoothly.  It was a wonderful afternoon.  I still profit from the message he gave that day.

V: You hit the nail on the head with your Jesus encounter.  This is exactly what Braden has been saying about it. He once said I’d be too intimidated to know who some of these entities were, and he’s right. Of course, others may react differently and hobnob with The Christ for lunch. Not me.
[Anecdote about someone who was in a clearly fraudulent séance but received a message that was useful and comforting to her.]

E: Which is another important point– often it doesn’t matter so much if we know the exact source of the material, as long as the message itself is valuable.

V: This is also true.

 

*Vicki’s deceased son, a strong and humorous communicator.  See previous posts on EVP.

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part I

In the past couple of months, my boggle threshold* has been raised a few more notches. I’m getting more and more “whatever” as time goes on.

The annual conference of the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies was held October 4-7 in Raleigh, NC. I had belonged to the organization for about a decade, but had never been to any of their events. This time I felt that I needed to be there, and the second day in, the reason became clear.

While waiting to register at the beginning of the conference, I found myself sitting next to and chatting with Terri Segal, who told me she was there to present about Electronic Voice Phenomena. This was the first synchronicity of a series. The next afternoon, I went to see what she and her cohort Vicki Talbott had going on. It turned out that they were giving not just a talk but a workshop in which we were able to actually try out the process.  Here’s a description of the session: http://ascsiconference.com/team/vicki-talbott-and-terri-segal/

Electronic Voice Phenomena are a subset of Instrumental TransCommunication, a range of methods of recording images or sounds produced by discarnate beings by means of electronic devices. For those who hadn’t heard of EVP, it might be helpful to stop here and read these:
https://atransc.org/recording-evp/
https://atransc.org/about-aaevp/

The conference had two tracks of presentations at the same time throughout, so it was sometimes hard to choose between them. Only a very few people attended the EVP session, which surprised me as well as the presenters, because this is usually such a popular subject. (Later, a number of people said they hadn’t been aware it was happening, although it was clearly indicated in the program— I had the feeling they might have been steered away!) I was fairly familiar with the idea of recording discarnate voices, but hadn’t heard many examples, and didn’t know a lot of details or much about the technology involved.

As we started the workshop, I became aware of Fryderyk being vividly present at my side.  He seemed to be practically jumping up and down with excitement. It was the only time he was around during the conference, in fact the only time he had contacted me during a period of a few weeks. I had no way of knowing that he had already made the acquaintance of this group!  We got brief recordings of him during the workshop, but there isn’t anything earthshaking– except, of course, the existence of the recordings in themselves.

The recording process went like this: Vicki had each of the attendees in turn ask a question of one of the discarnates, then let the recorder run for ten seconds so that they had time to answer. The equipment used was very simple, a small, rather old-fashioned hand-held Panasonic recorder. At the time, nothing at all out of the ordinary appeared to be happening. We spoke our questions, and then there was no sound but the slight whir of the instrument.

The fun began when the recording was played back, and voices that had not been present before showed up. I witnessed this in real time.  Even though I was already familiar with the concept, actually experiencing it was positively freaky.  I’m including links to a couple of clips so that you can share my freaked-outedness.

My question for Fryderyk was quite simple. I told the group that I was in touch with someone who very much wanted to speak, someone who I knew had a lot of experience with direct voice and other methods of spirit communication. “I know you’ve been wanting to say something. What would you like to say?” His reply is unclear, to my ears; the only part I can pick up for sure is “it’s helpful” at the end of the message, but that part is definite. The fact that there was any audible reply at all was enough to leave me pretty stunned. https://app.box.com/s/t9j5uactcum3evvcvdzf368gqj1ms7ho

In addition to Fryderyk, we called upon Vicki’s son, Braden, and someone close to one of the attendees, unknown to the rest of us, who was not named. All three replied immediately. I didn’t get to really hear what was said by that third person, only that a voice had come through, and since it was none of my business, I didn’t ask further.

I wanted to ask Braden something, and as I did so, I got to wondering if I could perceive him somewhere in the room.  I looked around, and my eyes stuck to a patch of air near the ceiling, about two feet wide, that looked somehow different from the rest.  As I was realizing that the odd patch was Braden, he suddenly reached out toward me with a considerable amount of energy, so that the effect was that he bopped me between the eyes!  It didn’t hurt, but I was knocked back a little in my chair, and everyone saw that.  I explained to the group what had happened.

Later, Vicki found that the discarnates were talking about Braden bopping me, just before I told her about it.  You can hear “he’s tapped her” near the beginning of the clip, and “I’m quite amused”; the rest is fuzzy to me.  https://app.box.com/s/0w9achce66o378g022t6x998mojh4xq6

Although Vicki is addressing Braden in this clip, I am reasonably certain that the voice saying “Very good. It’s me here” belongs to Fryderyk. That message is 100% audible and definite. https://app.box.com/s/seb9mfix0585y4zq1dvbultwey80r37f

Let’s stop a minute and contemplate this. After 25 1/2 years of contact with Fryderyk, struggling to get verbal messages, his voice, physical vibrations of sound, captured in a form that I can not only store and listen to myself, but can send to you. His voice, so similar to the one I had heard in the Leslie Flint recordings, where I had never been absolutely, entirely sure it was him.

When I was next in touch with him after the workshop, the first thing he conveyed to me was immense relief at the ease of communicating directly instead of through layers of cumbersome instrumentation. It struck me, though, that the brief messages that come through by EVP are not so different from the almost aphoristic verbal messages I receive from him, when I can get any definite words at all. It seems to me that when he is able to convey words directly to me, he’s put thought into boiling the concept down into a short, pithy phrase. It must take a lot of energy to get even such small transmissions through my thick skull.

There is a significant difference, though, between getting advice from him inside my head, especially controversial advice— say, being told that it’s fine to experiment with styles of trills and have fun with them— and hearing it objectively in an .mp3 file. The physical recordings have a unique value.

You will notice, if you listen to even a few examples of EVP, that sometimes the voices sound pretty ordinary, sometimes they sound electronic or robotic, and sometimes there’s a lot of fuzz, rather like a phone call with a really bad connection. Sometimes individuals are easily recognizable, sometimes not. Researchers use a witness panel to rate the clarity of the messages and to make sure there really are words in the first place. Some “scientific” folk say that there is only noise and listeners convince themselves that they’re hearing words because they want to so much, but I think you can already tell, if you’ve listened to even the few clips I’ve linked here, that this is simply not the case. The phenomenon is quite real, and one must deal with it. Nonphysical beings can manipulate physical sounds to create verbal messages. We are way past arguing whether this is actually happening. Now we need to understand how it can be possible, what the physics of it is.

You’d think I would be over the moon with joy at receiving even a few electronic words from my old friend. Instead, I found myself near weeping and in a kind of shock. It was strangely hard to deal with this new evidence of his existence. Suddenly, despite all the overwhelmingly intense moments I’d experienced with him over the years, he was somehow more real than I could handle. And although I knew very well that he’d worked closely with other groups and had multiple intellectual and emotional connections, walking into this room and finding him engaged in a major project with people who were complete strangers to me was also a little more than I could take in at first.

(It was not the first time I’d observed Fryderyk messing with electronics; that had occurred back in 2009. You may recall the anomalous behavior of my printer when it spat out three portraits of Chopin, which were not on the document I was attempting to print. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/fryc-in-print/ That constituted a form of ITC, I would think. The EVP was just another order of magnitude weirder for some reason.)

There is also the frustration of trying to understand the meaning of the messages. Sometimes the words sound perfectly obvious, yet the message is still obscure. One of the later clips of Fryderyk that Vicki sent me sounds to me for all the world like “I’ve made a cologne for her.” Here it is:  https://app.box.com/s/izaal6l0fhwyqqbgo37ixq08gwapn8ob  Can you make any better sense out of it than I can? And if I am hearing it right, exactly how am I supposed to obtain this otherworldly cologne? (I haven’t experienced any anomalous scents lately!) My husband jokingly suggested that he’d made me a clone— that would be great, I could get so much more done!

After the conference, Vicki and I began a correspondence, and I was interested to find that her impressions of Fryderyk, who she knew little about as a historical figure, were identical to mine— including his dry sense of humor. And I was amused at the idea of him joining forces with Braden, who is also a composer, but in what seems like a diametrically opposite genre, hip-hop. So Chopin is collaborating with a rap artist these days….

Like Fryderyk, Braden— as you might have guessed from the bopping incident— is a comedian as well as a musician. I mentioned to Vicki that Chopin used to do a Victor Borge-like act at the piano, something she hadn’t been aware of. She replied, bemusedly, “So that’s why they wanted me to watch that Victor Borge video on YouTube….” (Both of them left the planet before the existence of YouTube, but it seems that is irrelevant.)

*The boggle threshold is the level of weirdness at which one’s brain freezes up and can’t process what it perceives any more. Thanks to Michael Tymn for the concept.

https://www.transcommunication.org/index.php
https://atransc.org/big-circle-recording-sessions/

An Invisible Patient

I thought I’d be writing Part II of my last health-care post at this point, but meanwhile something fascinating came up that I’d like to share with you.

More and more, I’m being called upon to do psychic work with my patients, although I never advertise or warrant that I can do that. They assume I can do it and trust me to come up with something useful, even when I don’t trust myself. Two weeks ago, on September 3, a patient asked me to help with something that seemed a bit outside my abilities. She, and the other person involved, have authorized me to tell about our experience.

The other person involved was my patient’s dear friend and business partner, who killed himself a couple of months ago after grappling with intractable mental and physical health problems and other frustrations. I’m going to call him G for Ghost, and his friend simply P for my Patient, even though in this case the patient was actually the ghost himself.

G has been in persistent contact with P since his death. Not in a frightening way, not any kind of possession, no attempt to control P, but he’s just always around. He’s talked with her often, with perfect clarity. He’s even commented on conversations she’s had with other people, which were not intended to include him, leaving her a bit peeved. When P asked if she could bring G to my office so that he and I could communicate, I didn’t understand what she wanted. Since she could hear him so well, and I likely couldn’t, why would it help for me to try to converse with him?

“He needs to talk with someone who isn’t me,” she told me firmly. The truth of this became obvious later when we had our meeting.

I’d already met G, briefly, at P’s last appointment. It’s not particularly unusual for spirit entities of various flavors to come in with patients, but finding myself nose to nose with a recently dead human being was still a little startling when it happened. I asked G if he had anything to tell us, and he hung his head and repeated, “Sorry sorry sorry sorry….” Poor guy, I thought. I tried to tell him that nobody was judging him and everything was OK now.

Later, P told me that G had been feeling terrible, both before and after his passing, about how much he had needed her to do for him, how much of her energy and resources he’d taken, and how he had hurt her by committing suicide. She said that the “sorry” message was very real and I had heard correctly.

It seems that G has been making every attempt to be helpful since, but his helpfulness may not be any more balanced or healthy than his guilt and shame. I wasn’t sure what to make of the message P relayed next, that G wanted to help me with my “balance of giving and receiving” because he felt that my patients were draining me. OK, I can somewhat see where he’d be getting that, but overall it’s not the issue he thought it was, and at any rate it wasn’t happening at the treatment he’d observed me giving to P.

I set up an appointment with P, and tried to prepare every way I could during the time leading up to it. I sent out repeated calls to Fryderyk, requesting his presence at the event; I had the feeling that things would be difficult, and I was hoping for backup. I got very little response.

P and I agreed that if nothing happened, we would just accept that and not worry about it. I set our chairs on either side of the treatment table, as if we were about to work on a physical patient who was lying there. On the table was the MacBook on which I’m writing now, with GarageBand open to record the session. We needn’t have worried that nothing would happen– as usual, G was right to hand.

G immediately reiterated his desire to be of assistance to me, and a moment later he was inside my body, trying to move my hands and look out through my eyes. This would have totally creeped me out if I hadn’t had such experiences with Fryderyk before; as it was, I stayed utterly calm. I didn’t think that G was any threat to me or that he had any ill intent, but still, this was exceedingly inappropriate. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to use my body in this way.  It was useful that he made the attempt, though, because that showed me where he was coming from and what he was trying to do.

I told P what was going on, and added a bit about why I thought G was incorrect in thinking that he needed to save me from being drained by my patients.* P marveled that even after death, we can still project our own issues onto others. Well, as we discussed, we’re still ourselves when we die, and we don’t immediately become hugely enlightened, though I hope we can get a bit broader of a perspective even early on. G, it seems, had major issues with being able to ask for help and to feel OK about needing it. I can understand that, and it’s not foreign to me by any means, but as I told him, I get a great deal of help from both Earth-based people and the spirit world, and I’m very aware that I couldn’t manage without it.  Anyway, I thanked him for his offer, but made it clear that we would not be working together in that way, period.

It was becoming apparent to me that G believed he needed to work through a physical body, even though he had given up his own. I tried to convince him that he was far less limited in his present form, and could do whatever he might want or need to accomplish perfectly well. “I don’t even work in my own body half the time!” I exclaimed. But G looked to me (through my mind’s eye, not as a vision in the room) like a small, contracted, grey figure, not a powerfully glowing ball of energy, which is how I see a person in a healthy state. He didn’t look like he could accomplish much of anything, he was so closed up and shut down.

“Isn’t there anyone helping him?” I asked P. Normally, we all have our connections to current family, ancestors, guides and so forth, and we’re always told that when we die someone comes to take care of us and show us the ropes. I could not detect anyone or anything around G, and P couldn’t either. This seemed unimaginable, but my own vision, the messages P received, and her subjective experiences all said that G was completely alone except for his connection to his one friend. When I asked G about this directly, I heard the only verbal message I got from him that day, which was an impassioned, “I LOVE [P]!!!!”

Feeling perplexed, I set about trying to help G open up to the universe beyond the small area in which he’d confined himself. Right away, I sensed extreme resistance to this. Looking further, I discovered that G believed that if anyone out there saw him, any higher beings, they would immediately judge and reject him. I did my best to convince him that this was not the case at all, but he wouldn’t take that in. I talked about other messages I’d channeled and been told about, in which I’d heard how valuable and beautiful and precious an individual human personality is, and how loved we all are, as well as how much fun he could have in his new expanded state of being and how much good he could do. P and I kept up this encouraging conversation for a good while. At the same time, I kept doing energy work, as I would with a physical patient. I brought a column of illumination down into him (best I can describe that), and G began to expand and light up a bit. He still seemed extremely skeptical about what we were telling him, though.

At this point, I felt like I really needed some outside support. Unable to find anyone naturally connected with G, I sent out a plea toward Fryderyk, who I knew had done this sort of work before. I felt only a vague tendril of contact; it appeared to me that he and G reached their hands toward each other, but the connection felt tenuous, and I wasn’t sure anything was really happening.

Over an hour had gone by, and we were all beginning to feel that we’d said everything that could be said in that session. I knew that G still wasn’t the least bit ready to Go Toward the Light, but I had no more incentives to offer him. P reported that G was telling her, “She needs to go and have lunch.” I was feeling that way too. It was a day of 7 patients in a row with this in the middle, and I definitely needed a break.

When I checked my laptop, there was a message on the screen saying that GarageBand had crashed because there was too much data coming in too fast for it to handle. A simple recording of one track of ambient voices, with a lot of spaces between sentences– how could that be too much or too fast?

G left the room, and there was no question in my mind that he was gone. I didn’t feel that there was any residue left in my body or in the space. P felt him go, as well– giving her a little break! And the moment he was gone, Fryderyk was all over me, embracing me warmly, almost overwhelmingly. No words, but a feeling of “Good job! I knew you could do it!” He must have been observing the entire time. And really, I could do it. P and I were both completely capable of handling this sticky situation, and we both felt fine afterward.

But we didn’t succeed in helping G on to the next phase of his existence. When I saw P a week later, she reported that he was still around. All. The. Time. Her strategy at that point was to sit in her yard and meditate, expanding her own energy outward, trying to model this behavior and encourage G to do it along with her. It sounds like a reasonable response to the situation. This is all I know so far about the results of our session.

 

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

 

As you know if you’ve been reading my posts for a while, I am all too familiar with the feeling of a malign entity invading one’s system. (See “A Case of Possession.”) G isn’t like that, and I don’t mean to lay any blame on him, at least not much– he’s doing more than enough of that himself, after all. He’s just confused, as far as I can tell. When my other patient died at her own hand last year, she had become much clearer and in a way well by the time she passed over**, but G died in a state of great distress, as far as I know, and didn’t have a chance to resolve anything. I don’t know how typical this is of suicides, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens a great deal.

I am also familiar with the feeling of having an invisible friend hanging around for days on end. Now that I don’t get a lot of concentrated time with Fryderyk, I’m nostalgic about it, but early in our relationship there was occasionally almost too much togetherness. Sometimes, after it went on for a while, I would begin to wish for time to myself, like can’t I even go to the bathroom on my own for gosh sakes? It was not unpleasant in any way to have him around, and I didn’t experience any interference with my daily activities, but I would just start to feel like I needed a little more room to breathe. I can certainly empathize with P’s desire to have her own space again.

There is another close parallel with my experiences with Fryderyk: the form that my interaction with P and G took was exactly like the “afternoon teas” Mendy Lou and I used to have with him. In both cases, the other embodied person in the room was getting verbal messages and for the most part I was not, but I was clearly picking up emotional and energetic impressions. Combining our two streams of communication, we were able to put together vivid and complete pictures of what was going on. The similarity says to me that the type of communication I received from Fryderyk when we were with Mendy Lou was more related to my personal mix of abilities than to his specific way of interacting with us. I’m still much more an empath than a telepath, and still a pretty small medium, I’m afraid.

As I worked on this today, I couldn’t help but radiate wishes to spend some quality time with my dear departed, and apparently those got through to him. When I settled down to rest for a while, my wish was granted. I’d been hoping to ask him about a subject that had come up in the past couple of days, the types of keyboard temperament (tuning) in use in his time. I wondered what sort of tuning he had preferred. It was a fairly technical question and I didn’t know if a reasonable answer was possible, but I asked anyway. The first answer was that if an instrument could be competently and completely tuned in some temperament, any temperament, and stay that way for a while, that would be great! Yes, for sure…. So then I asked him, “If you had an ideal instrument and an ideal tuner, what would you ideally prefer?”

As so often has happened, he gave me a reply that came in from a totally unexpected angle. Showing more than telling, he conveyed this to me: If he could have had anything he wanted in terms of tuning, what he would have wanted was to sing, to be able to shape the intonation and tone quality of each and every note without limitation. I felt a huge rush of air and sound through my body, vibrating everywhere, tremendous power and freedom. It was exhilarating, and it was something I want as well and have experienced all too rarely.

It was something his small, struggling body could never have done, but somehow he deeply understands what it can feel like. Perhaps I should see if he and I can try it together.

 
*This strikes me as amusing in light of what my former friend and colleague, whose patients I inherited, said about me– that because of the “evil spirit” Fryderyk hanging around me, I was draining the energy of my patients and everyone near me. Here another “evil spirit” was seeing things exactly the other way around.

**I had been pleasantly surprised, when I encountered her after her death, to find that she seemed peaceful, not stuck or confused. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/get-right-while-you-can/

Dead Doesn’t Have to Mean Serious

Thanks to http://www.hobbytron.com

Death is profound, but being dead doesn’t have to be serious.  As a devoted follower of Swami Beyondananda and the fortunate friend of that famed comic actor Chopin, I am pleased to pass on this story of humor and lightheartedness from the beyond.

A teenage boy who I’ll call N was killed in a car accident late in 2012.  His family was devastated.  There is nothing funny about any of that, but his mother and his aunt have been telling me about the amazing and amusing lengths to which N has gone in trying to communicate with those he left behind.

N was in JROTC in high school, and had always been interested in shooting.  After his death, yellow BBs started showing up around his family’s environment.  It would be easy to say that there must have been some he had dropped or left lying around the house during his life, and they just happened to turn up over time.  However, they were placed much too creatively and implausibly for that to be the case, and in places where N could not ever have been.  Why BBs?  Well, it seems that N’s stepfather was always giving him a hard time for leaving them underfoot!

N’s mom went on a cruise and found a BB in her stateroom.  His aunt found one in her car.

On N’s 16th birthday, the family gathered at their old house, which had been completely cleaned out and gotten ready for sale.  They held his party outside, but the went into the house for a little while to blow up some balloons.  They checked the floor carefully, because they had a baby with them, and they didn’t want to leave anything lying around that he could put in his mouth.  N’s aunt reported: “Then, my mom and younger sister went back into the rooms they had just checked and little BBs started appearing: 8 total. They stated they just started showing up, N was there at that moment putting them everywhere they looked.  It was trippy and funny at the same time.  My husband found the 9th one in the bed of his truck.  He happened to be in the bed looking for a jack.  He had been in that bed many, many times before and POOF there was a yellow BB.  So, my mom and younger sister gave each of us a BB because there were 9 total, one for each of us.”

You might still be thinking, “Well, those BBs probably just didn’t get vacuumed up when the house was cleaned, and they didn’t check as carefully as they thought.  The one in the truck bed had been there all along.  And the one in the stateroom had been stuck somewhere in the mother’s luggage.”  But how about this:  On another trip, N’s mom brought a bottle of medication straight from the pharmacy.  It had not even been removed from the bag, which was still stapled closed.  Yup, you got it– when she opened the bottle, she found a yellow BB inside among the pills.

This seems like incredible virtuosity to me, especially for someone who was very young and hadn’t been gone from this life all that long.  I’m wondering if N’s little cousin, B, who says that she sees him on a regular basis, might be helping to provide an opening for him to get through.

On the Valentine’s Day after N died, the little girl, now age 3, received one of those mylar balloons filled with helium.  Her mom, N’s aunt, told me that the balloon stayed aloft for months.  Every time it started to sink to the floor, it would magically reinflate and head for the ceiling again.  It would also follow B’s mom around the room, so that she laughed and told N that she knew he was there.  One night it somehow passed through three closed doors to show up in her closet, floating as usual.

Recently B was playing a board game with her family.  The game included cards with printed questions, and B appeared to be reading the cards.  Now, she’s a smart girl, but she’s still only 3, and she’s definitely not reading yet.  “Is N telling you what’s on those cards?” her mother asked.  B admitted that he was, and as she’s done many times, said he was right there.  I wonder if she’s mystified that other people don’t see him the way she does.  Her mom does her best to be open to seeing, but so far it hasn’t been possible.  At least no one laughs at the child or tells her that she’s making it all up.

In the midst of all this, N’s mother and grandmother went to consult with a medium.  They were still mired in grief, and we know that making contact with the deceased can help tremendously with the pain that loved ones feel after a death.  They received quite a few meaningful messages, and indeed this has helped them to feel better, although things are still very difficult.

One day N’s mother got a text message that simply said “Hi” and appeared to come from her son.  He had known another boy with the same name, so she asked if the message was coming from his friend.  The reply was just her son’s name again.  She didn’t know what to make of it.   At the next session, the medium reported that N was asking, “Did you get my text?”  I guess for a teenager, there could be no more natural way to communicate than to send a text.  (Could Fryderyk figure out how to do that?)  And it seems that N’s mom had received some other anomalous texts before that, starting about 9 months after the accident, which contained the letters of N’s name but didn’t make any sense.  Unsuccessful attempts, apparently.

[Ironically, as I write this, the sound system here at Annapurna is playing “Up above my head/There’s music in the air/And I really do believe/There’s a heaven somewhere.”  N’s aunt wrote, “I hear the songs we put on his memorial slide show for the funeral all the time!  I will be in yoga listening to their nature music and all of a sudden a song will play.”  I have often heard of songs showing up anomalously as apparent messages from the beyond.]

N’s aunt continued:  “My stepdad spends a lot of time at N’s and his spot (my parents’ land).  He has said that he will go up there and clean the land up from weeds, move rocks etc.  Every time he goes up there, all the things he has done with the rocks are back to where they were.  You see N used to make “ramps” out on the land to jump his bike and/or motorcycle.  During a time when his mom and my mom talked to the medium, N asked if Papa got his signs.  Also, a hatchet that N lost of my stepdad’s at the land miraculously showed up too.  Just sitting by the garage on the land as if it had been there the whole time, nice and clean too!

“N is aware that my dad is rebuilding his race car.  It was always N’s car.  They wanted to make it street legal so N could drive it when he turned of age.  My dad has been hard at work rebuilding it.  N knows about it and states that he sits there with my dad when he is working on it and can give details about it.”

N’s maternal great-grandfather has also gotten in on the act.  His daughter, N’s grandmother, had a terrible time dealing with his death a few years ago.  He has told her, through the medium, that he’s tried very hard to get through to her but that she hasn’t been open to his messages, including the pennies he’s put in front of her.  From what I’ve read and been told, spirits often express such frustrations.  It’s sad to think of that, but at the same time I’m giggling at the idea of N and his great-grandpa having so much fun thinking of new tricks to play on the family.  I wonder what they’ll come up with next.

Update, 6/3/14: 

Well, here’s what they came up with next.  Recently N’s great-grandmother died.  At the cemetery, when the mausoleum was opened to inter her body, dozens of yellow BBs came rolling out.  The family didn’t count them, but there seemed to be about enough to give one to each person who was present.  Of course it had been many years since this mausoleum had been opened.

Get Right While You Can

On the night of November 5, way back last year, Fryderyk came to visit, and we had an intense encounter.  There have been very few times that he has been so nearly materialized, so focused in this plane.  It was so powerful, nearly blowing all my circuits, and I wondered if he could be experiencing something similar.  “What are you feeling?” I asked, during a brief moment when I could manage an organized thought.

The answer was not remotely what I might have expected.  He showed me the pain, regret, and frustration of “our” life in the 19th century, how he and Delfina had never gotten their relationship into balance and never finished what they needed to do or be with each other.  Why is he telling me this now? I thought.  In the midst of so much love and pleasure, why would he even be thinking of this?  We had been over it all so many times during my present life, worked out everything that needed to be worked out, it seemed to me.

The message seemed to be, “Get right with people while you can.”  I took it to heart, and in the next few days I took steps to do just that.  There was one person in particular with whom I had been avoiding some much-needed communication, and I thought that Fryc might have been trying to give me a push to deal with that.  Otherwise, I felt that I was OK with most people and they were OK with me; the very few with whom that was not true had resisted all my attempts to get back in touch with them, and there was nothing more I could do about it.  I told Bob about Fryderyk’s message, and said that even if he or I were to die in the next five minutes, there would be nothing that needed to be fixed between us.  He agreed.

Then, on November 8, my colleague Michael Spottiswoode died suddenly of an aneurysm.  When I found out, I had the sense that Fryderyk, unstuck from linear time as he is, was trying to tell me something about this future event as well.

None of us DOMs knew about Michael till two days later, the day on which he was supposed to teach a class on his life’s work, a unique way of combining acupuncture and osteopathy.  Just a few days earlier he had posted on Facebook about how excited he was about the class, saying that he felt it was finally time to bring this work to the world.  He had put off teaching it before, as far as I know.  Why it all came to be the way it was, why he had to die no more than 48 hours before the class, is a great mystery to me.  It seems so massively unfair.  Why could he not have lived a mere 10 days longer and gotten through both sessions of the class?  Perhaps it made unconscious sense from his inner point of view, or from someone’s.

There was something I’d been meaning to tell Michael for a long time, and I had intended to say it on the day of the class.  It wasn’t anything of earthshaking importance, but I’d put it off and then I never did get to say it.  Michael, wherever you are, I really appreciate all that work you did on the NMSAAM website, and I wish I had made that clearer to you when I had the chance.

Our DOM community was in shock, but there was a blessing inside this terrible event.  As funerals tend to do, Michael’s memorial brought a large group of us together and generated a lot of positive, loving energy.

On November 22, our 12-year-old cat, Angel, reached the end stage of her kidney disease.  After a week in which she seemed to have much more energy and was more active and playful than usual, she abruptly became unable to use her back legs.  She got a bit better for a while, able to walk a little, then deteriorated again.  We couldn’t get hold of her vet, who works alone, without office staff.  Eventually he left a message saying that it sounded like “decompensated renal failure.”  Pretty much what I was thinking.

During the evening, I did energy work for her, and she stayed next to me, propping herself up against the back of the sofa, because her poor legs wouldn’t even hold her for sitting.  She seemed calm, interested in everything and not in any pain.  Strangely enough, she ate normally.

I had some hope that Angel would die peacefully during the night.  That was the night that we had the severe cold and snow with 50 mph winds, and I didn’t think it would be helpful to stress her by taking her out to the emergency vet hospital.  I didn’t want to take her to be put to sleep without my mother going along, either, because Angel was very much her cat, and I didn’t want to put my mother through a trip like that.  So I just waited till the morning.  I told my mother, “If we take her to the vet, she probably isn’t coming home.”

Angel was still with us in the morning, and I found that Petsmart’s clinic had an opening for her.  Bob and my mother and I bundled her into her carrier right away and got her there.  The very kind vet said, “I think we need to have the end-of-life conversation.”   “We had it last night,” I told her.

It was my mother’s 89th birthday, and she spent most of it in tears.

When we had to face this with Rico, our cat who had cancer, some years ago, it was a terrible day.  We’d waited as long as we felt like we could, until we thought it would be cruel to let him go on, but he still didn’t seem ready, and he fought the sedative with everything he had.  I never really got over it– I hope he did.  So I tried to give Angel a choice, or at least get a sense of what she would want.  I’d never had a great connection with this cat, but I tried to make contact as best I could.  I visualized needles and tubes and trying to keep her alive for a few more days.  That didn’t feel good at all, very agitated and uncomfortable.  I visualized, as best I could, causing her to die right away.  She relaxed under my hands; my mother said it looked like she was going to sleep.  “Let’s do it,” I said.  To Angel, I said, “I won’t leave you.  I’ll stay with you as long as you need me.  Hang on to me if you want to.”  I didn’t know whether I was getting through to her in any way.

When Rico died, I felt nothing, saw nothing, even though I was holding him and I paid attention.  This time, as the drug took effect, I felt something rush toward me.  Afterward I could still feel her if I tried to find her.  Over the next couple of days, whenever I looked for her, this small, warm presence was still nearby.  At some moment, I had a brief vision of her.  She was moving quickly and her coat was silky and smooth and healthy-looking as I had never seen it in life.  Since then, nothing.  And that’s OK.

Angel’s death was hard on my mother, but the suddenness of it was a relief for us, and our quality of life went up immediately.  It bothers me a little that I was so glad to be rid of the litter tracked everywhere and the gobs of fur all around and her astonishingly loud screechy voice.  Not to mention the smell from her inappropriate use of the carpeting.  She was an inconvenient cat, frankly, and she didn’t give a lot back, in part because her illness left her little energy for fun.  When we were deciding what to do at the end, I did my best to get clear about what she needed as opposed to what was easiest for me.  I hope we got that right.  I think we did.  She had an excellent quality of life during the three years she was with us, and other than the days when she was obviously ill, I think she must have been content.

And I think this preparation was important for me in dealing with what was soon to come.

The week before Christmas, the life of one of my patients reached a somewhat similar denouement.  One door after another closed for her, and she concluded that it was time for the end.  As she had often said, we would never allow a dog to go on in the painful and hopeless condition she was in.  She should have had the option of the kind of quick and painless solution Angel was given.  Unfortunately, we don’t live in a state that allows assisted suicide, and she had to make her own plan.

No one close to her argued with her decision; we all knew it would be for the best.  Once she did decide, in a way, she became well.  She was still in tremendous pain, but somehow she didn’t seem to be suffering in the same way.  She became calm and completely lucid, and the brain damage from her illness seemed to recede.

I had the opportunity to spend a few more hours with her during the last week of her life.  The whole atmosphere of her house had changed to a new peacefulness.  “Is there anything I need to do to make amends with you?” she asked.  I thought and felt around, and replied truthfully that we were fine with each other as far as I knew.  I hope I didn’t miss anything that I myself needed to make amends for.

Before I left, my patient asked me to scan her and see if I found anything energetically amiss that needed to be cleared.  My own emotions were getting in the way, but I did my best.  There didn’t seem to be anything to worry about.  What I did find was an entity hovering around her left shoulder.  I couldn’t tell what it was, but it felt like someone helpful.  This was reassuring to both of us, and I said “Thank you” to the being.  It was odd to simply go out the door that evening, not to stay as long as possible, but she was getting so tired, and I would have done harm by staying longer.

During the next few days, I was on strange pins and needles, not sure what would happen or when.  I wrote the following:

Glad that most of my body works most of the time.  I am annoyed at the instability in my leg that keeps letting bone hit nerve and cause damage over and over and over, but the muscles are strong and the leg carries me.  Right now I seem to be getting a cold.  Viruses have come to live and grow in the mucosa of my nasopharynx, and they are doing their little virus things, while my own cells are doing their best to give them the boot.

Life is bursting all over, even now in the darkest days.  It’s like what Jesus said in one of the apocryphal gospels:  “Hallelujah, I eat.  Hallelujah, I am eaten.”  Hello, viruses.  Please move on now.

This lady died very early on December 23.  About that time I felt a wave of extreme distress and anxiety, then total calm.  I figured it must have happened, but of course I couldn’t be sure.  The next day I found myself kneading cookie dough with one hand while holding the phone with the other, talking with a deputy from the sheriff’s department.  The authorities handled everything with great kindness and with excellent efficiency too.  The job of informing her family fell to me.  I’d never had to do that before, even though it is a basic part of the work of doctors.  It was all stressful and painful and terrifying and a great gift and privilege and blessing.

I have many jobs left to perform for this patient, because her family is far away.  There is so much to do with her home and her property.  There again, it’s a lot of stress, but I’m receiving a great deal too, spiritually as well as materially.  I have been feeling a circle of loving support around me, my friends and family and hers, and I need to remember that I can rely on it.  2014 will be the year of learning to delegate, I think.

A few days after my patient passed, I went to visit with Mendy Lou.  Immediately I could feel Fryderyk at my right side, but something seemed different and I couldn’t put my finger on what.  “Who’s here?” I asked Mendy.  She was confused by the mixed signal for a moment, too.  We soon realized that someone else was there, behind Fryderyk.  “It’s small.  It’s a human person,” I said, meaning that it wasn’t an angel or deity or other type of wondrous being that is likely to show up at Mendy’s office.

“Wait a minute, who did you say just passed away?” Mendy asked.  Yup, it was my patient.  At first it felt like she was scared and apprehensive, but that was because she was afraid I’d be mad at her for “leaving such a mess” to be taken care of.  I assured her that she’d done a great job of organizing everything and made it much easier for those of us who are still here.  As far as Mendy and I could tell, she was as well as anyone could be under the circumstances.  She said that she was getting clearer all the time and getting out from under the confusion and negativity her illness had caused.  I could feel that this was true; there wasn’t any sense of disturbance or suffering about her.

It surprised me that she had come along with Fryderyk, because I didn’t think of him as having any connection with her.  But of course he did– he couldn’t have missed the many times I had asked for help when I was treating her, or the angst I had gone through over and over when there was nothing I could do to make anything better for her, or the exhaustion I had felt because her situation was so draining for me.  Of course he would try to assist us both, just as he always has.  We are in good hands.

In some ways it is much easier now to grieve and to deal with even overwhelming practical matters than it was to try to help keep my patient going against impossible odds.  And I notice that the “inconvenient” aspects of her life, as with Angel, seem completely irrelevant now.  They are transcended, wiped away by a kind of transforming grace.

Thank you.

Hearing Voices Again: Wilde

After I wrote my last post concerning Oscar Wilde, I realized that I could have included his contact with the direct-voice medium Leslie Flint, which occurred in 1957.  (Search this blog for extensive information about Mr. Flint and my take on his work.)  I went back to a recording of the Wilde voice that I had acquired back in the ‘90s, and put it up on Box.com so that it could be shared.  Inexplicably, when I tried to go back to it just now so that I could give it to you, the file was gone and the link no longer worked.  I uploaded it again, and I could swear that this is the same URL as before: https://app.box.com/s/iybw0f9a2kha935jhsfo.  I hope it will stay there (as all my other files at Box always have) long enough that you can check it out if you want.  What most struck me about this conversation is that Wilde was so reluctant to state his identity, apparently believing that everyone still thought ill of him.  However, it is also clear that his overall awareness has expanded and that he perceives himself as something much more than he was.

I expect that there is a mundane explanation for the disappearance of my Box file, but perhaps Someone Up There didn’t like me sharing that recording?  The Leslie Flint Educational Trust insists that all their recordings and other materials are copyrighted, and that copies from other sources, such as the one where I purchased the Wilde recording, are illegal.  I think I’ve discussed some issues about copyrighting channeled messages with you before.  But at any rate, the Wilde session is not currently available at www.leslieflint.com, so I think I’m in the clear.  I have also cleaned up the sound as much as I could, and although it’s still full of static, it’s easier to hear than what I started with.

I hadn’t visited the Flint website in a couple of years or so; I had been trying to make transcriptions of the Chopin recordings, but found it impossible because I couldn’t download the audio, nor would the Flint people sell me any of it, and without being able to go back and listen to the same section over and over I just couldn’t manage to write the stuff down.  The tapes were old and fuzzy, and Chopin’s English can be a bit strange.  I even tried recording with an air mic on another device and going from there, but the quality was even worse and harder to understand.  I’m sure there must be some technological solution, but now I don’t need one, because ta da! transcriptions have been made by an infinitely patient person belonging to the Flint organization!  Thank you, thank you, thank you to Mr. Simon Lovelock for taking the many hours it must have required to transcribe all these messages from the Chopin voice and others.  The Chopin sessions can be found here:
http://www.leslieflint.com/transcripts_chopin.html

And thank you to Guilherme Tavares for pointing me toward the updated Flint site.  It turns out that some of the recordings that wouldn’t play before now run just fine.  I discovered that I can right-click on my MacBook to rewind or fast-forward, although the recordings are still not as user-friendly as those on many other sites.  There is now a YouTube channel as well:
http://www.youtube.com/user/LeslieFlintTrust?feature=mhee

Recordings of the Chopin voice are at http://www.leslieflint.com/recordingschopin.html.  When I clicked on a session I hadn’t been able to hear in the past, one from December 1955, I was greeted with “People don’t seem to realize, you know, how very much mixed up you are.”  Oh, my, did that sound familiar.  When I ask Fryderyk about anything pianistic, if I get any verbal answer at all, it is likely to start out with, “You are thinking about this all wrong” or “You are looking at this backwards.”  Next time that happens, I am going to reply with, “Are you as tired of saying that as I am of hearing it?”

Not that I would disagree that people are very much mixed up.  Far from it.  Guilty as charged.

“When you play it you are touching my soul”

For some background and a summary of my concerns and conclusions about the Chopin Voice in the Leslie Flint material, you can have a look here: https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/hearing-voices-part-iii%E2%80%93-chopin/

The opening measures of Op. 10 No. 3, manuscript

I’ve been trying to organize my collection of musical insights gained over the years from communications with Fryderyk Chopin.  In the process, I came across a presentation given by the Chopin Voice to Leslie Flint’s sitters on February 25, 1955.  It contains some comments that so many of us who play Chopin’s works would find greatly comforting, especially those whose physical ability often lags behind their understanding of the music and the depth of their connection to it.  Some of you may feel that this is all too sweet, too good to be true, or too religious-sounding for your taste.  I understand, but it’s worth putting in front of you nonetheless, and what the Voice says does fit my experience of him.

Today is a good day for me to hear this message again.  I’ve been exploring the emotional landscape of Chopin’s E major étude, Op. 10 No. 3, which he composed at the age of 22, too inexperienced to fully understand what he himself was writing, one might think.  It’s one of those pieces that seems like the angels of music must have been whispering in his ear with special clarity.  I’m at a point where I have a solid understanding and deep feeling of the meaning of the piece and the story it tells– or at least, one possible story– but I am not yet quite where I can stay immersed in the emotional and psychological experience and bring all that to the listener because I just don’t have complete physical control of the entire piece.  I will soon.  Really!  It’s exciting to be so close to something so wondrous, but of course you know how frustrating it can be too.

Rose Creet, you may remember, was a great fan of Chopin and a dear friend to this version of him.  At one point in another year, the Voice half-joked to her that sometimes he listened to her playing and said to himself, “Hmm.  She is get a little better.”  I can only hope that at times he says that about me!  I do think that he is often quite aware of what I am doing technically, what the actual sound is, and how close I am getting to a clear physical expression of the music.  But it makes perfect sense that it would be easier for him to perceive a player’s emotional state and thought patterns than to hear the molecular vibrations of the Earth-plane air.

I transcribed this session from an online recording at http://www.leslieflint.com.  Between the Voice’s rather bumpy English and my inability to hear clearly at many moments, there are likely a fair number of errors.  I’ve added question marks in instances when I just couldn’t be sure.  I’ve also bolded passages that I think are of particular interest to players.  Here goes:

Sitters: Rose Creet, Leslie Mannington[?]

Voice:  Hello.

Rose:  Hello?

Voice:  Madame et monsieur, good evening.

Rose and others:  Good evening.

Voice:  Well, you have not said it, but it is me all right.

Rose:  Yes, I know.  Frederic.

Voice:  It is.

Rose:  Yes, Frederic.  And we’re so happy you have come to us again.

Voice:  I was trying to think what I should speak to you about this evening, and I thought the most appropriate thing would be what is common to our hearts, music.

Rose:  Yes, please.

Voice:  I have tried very much to find a way of expressing certain things to you regarding music in the spheres of love, but I don’t know how I am going to find the words which can possibly give you the right understanding.  I think the best comparison, the best way to do it, is to tell you that that which is music to you on Earth, beautiful though it is, important though it is, and essential as it is to those who feel and know and understand these things, yet in comparison to the things of spirit, where music is supreme, it is infinitesimal.  When I think of the compositions, the music that I have written in my Earth life, although I am in a sense pleased with it, I realize it is so small in comparison to that which I have been able to do here.  Here there are no limitations.  On Earth, I used to struggle… ah! the limitations seemed many.  Things that I had in my heart, in my brain, things that were running through me— I just found that sometimes the compass of the instrument was insufficient.  There were notes that in my heart I had felt so strongly, that could not be expressed, for the instrument was insufficient.

Here, there is such a wide range.  You see, here we are not limited as you are.  You can only hear to a certain pitch, or to a certain point.  Beyond that your ears do not hear.  With us it is different.  There is a much greater range of which we can hear.  And in consequence the instruments which we have are composed or [?] made in a much larger scale.  Therefore, we can strike notes and chords and create harmonies which are beyond your imagination.  Take something which you think today on Earth is a grand study, or something that is a great flowing piece of work, with great harmonies, great though it is, it is so small in comparison.  As the spirit is larger in its experience and in its wisdom and in its knowledge and in its expression when it is freed from the physical body and the earthly condition, so is music also.  It is only the limitation of the Earth that limit the human heart, that limit the human ability to create.     

Any artist who is an artist, whether it is in music or in any other field of activity, as you know, often will express the same thing.  He will say, “Ah!  I just cannot get it.  I do not feel, and it just will not come.”  He has the moment of mood, when he knows that he can do a work, and he will go at it day and night until it is accomplished, and then no doubt he will sit back and think, “Well, it is finished, but it is not as I would quite have liked.”  In other words, his materials limit him, and yet what he has created is accepted by the world as a great work, which it is, within the limitations of the Earth.  But here, where there are no limitations, where the power of the spirit is such that a man can become as great as he desires in a spiritual sense, and his work can become also as great, there are no limitations to those who strive, to those who seek, to those who try to express that part of God which is in themselves.  For in music is God, as indeed are in all things that are good.  There is the prize[?] and the heart and the emotion of the Most High.  For we see with the eyes that are not of the Earth, and we hear with the ears that are not of the Earth, and we express in volume and intensity, with things which cannot be confined as you understand it in a material sense.  All the limitations of the artist are broken over here, and he or she can accomplish great things.  And all those things are an expression not only of man himself, but of God working through man.  For God is perfection, and all we who are artists are striving for perfection in our art.  In other words, we are all becoming more like God, part of God, and in consequence our work and art grows also.

And therefore, in the different spheres you find that as those who have gone through one sphere to the other of progress, they leave behind in their particular sphere (the same as when a person leave your world to come to this), they leave behind some expression of God, some expression of the emotion of the spirit and the beauty of the spirit in all its purity and grace.  In my life, I try to leave behind some expression of God in my work, and the artists and the poets, and all those who strive to express themselves, the soul, which is a part of God, have left behind a heritage for those who follow after.  And so in the spheres as we progress from one to the other, as we learn and assimilate and utilize all the opportunities in each particular individual sphere in which we live, we create and leave behind for those who come from your world into that particular sphere some of ourselves, to leave behind in love to help those who follow after, the same as those musicians in your world today take the works of the great masters and find in them great beauty and reverence and harmony and sound of… great, joyous music.  They feel and know there is some part of God in the soul of a musician who has made progress beyond material things.

So it is that we all help each other.  We are all brothers and sisters.  You were surprised, long time ago, when I first come to you.  For a long time you could not really believe it.  You thought, “Ah, it is not possible.  Why should he come to me?” because you are humble in spirit, because you realize the greatness in music, you realize the greatness in art, and you realize too that there was some part of the soul, and you felt perhaps you could not touch it.  But my child, that is exactly what we are striving to do, to touch you, that you might in some measure link with us in harmony of the spheres.  It is our gift to humanity to help those who follow after, that they might be inspired also to express and to give to the world in the darkness in which it finds itself the harmony and the love of the spheres which is expressed in the music that we have been able to give through our sojourn on Earth.  We are all tied together in bond of love and affection.

Music is the harmony of love which flows through all human beings and links us together.  In my music when you play it you are touching my soul, and I am conscious of it.  When you love it and when you try to express it with all that you have to give to it, I am conscious of it, and when I find there is such love, then I am drawn.  And how often we have striven from this side, to make links with people on Earth, who do not understand.  There are here and there a few artists, a few people in music who, though they do not know the meaning of what you call spiritualism, yet in their deeper selves there is a consciousness of being attached through the music with the soul who created it, and they try to express it.  And if they are good artists, if they are talented, if they have a natural ability, then we can use them, as we often do, trying to help those that are struggling in your world as we would have liked to have been helped, and often were, when on Earth.  So we strive to help them.  There are some in your world who I often help, some that you know.  And so, because we love with all the fullness that love means, we do not necessarily only go to those who can become accomplished musicians in the Earth life, but to those who feel so intensely, which sometimes, in fact, I would go so far as to say is even more important than the execution of the music, for where there is an intensity of love, or a great understanding within the heart, to express, in my case, my music, then I am one with that person, and if I can help them, and help their trembling fingers over the keys, that is my joy and privilege, for I come in love to serve.  For my music is to serve humanity, to help them rise above mundane things, into the harmonies of the spirit which I now enjoy.

And so it is that music links us together, much more perhaps than any other form of art, but it is in music that we find such a peace, and it is in music which we find solace in our soul who are in trouble, as I know I did so often in Earth life.  For I have many times gone to the piano with a heart that was broken, and yet found peace and great harmony and great solace in it.  And some of my greatest composition was done in my most terrible hour, for it is always when God calls strongest to the heart that out of it falls the harmony of the spirit, which nothing can take away from the world.  For it is left behind, as indeed it is for service.  For even in death, as you call it, we serve still in various ways.  I am not dead; I am more alive than ever I was when on Earth, more conscious, more able to serve and to help, and greater harmonies I can now create than ever I was able to do in the confines of the material earthly body, which was always a sorrow to me, and ofttimes a nuisance.  But this I know, that your love, your desire for expression of that within you, makes possible that link I have with you, and if you do not execute my work as you know you would like to do it, it is the heart within you that makes possible that link between us, the desire.  It is always the desire, the sincere desire in the heart and the soul that calls to us, more than even the other things which often people around and about you admire most.  I know that there is disappointment and disillusion to the artist, to the soul who strives and feels so intensely and yet whose physical… physical body has not the power to do what the heart tells them.  But nevertheless, you are creating, in some sense, a great harmony, because you feel.  How often do we know of people who execute technically brilliantly the work of a great composer, but there is something lacking which makes it dull and uninteresting, because it is without feeling, it is without soul.  They have not touched the soul of the composer.  And unless the soul of the composer is put into the technique, if it is not behind that which is being done, there is in spite of its brilliance of execution, nothing but deadness, and there is nothing but disappointment.  But those who feel so intensely, those who appreciate music, and yet cannot play it, are the greater musicians, for they have something which the man with all the technique in the world has not got.  He has not got God in his heart.  He has not touched the heart of a musician.  He has not felt that wonderful union that comes between those who so love that which is and which has been created in love.  For in love do we who create music serve humanity.

Every great work of note in your world has been created, through the instrumentality of the musician, in some way, by the hand of God, for it is the hand of God that helps all those who strive to send into the Earth beauty and glorious harmony.  It is the fingers of God that move behind the fingers, often the stumbling fingers, of the humble musician.  For God is knowing all things, and God is expressing himself in all ways, through the artist who paints, through the musician who creates and plays, through the singer who sings the harmonies that others have composed, and all the beauties of the Earth.  Always you find God, and behind the musician, God is.  And when those who feel God in music, though their fingers cannot play the notes, there is a musician, there is harmony.  There is glorious music, for it is music of the soul that swells out and in the spheres is heard, and we are conscious of it, and we are drawn to those who, though they want to do so much, can do so little because of the limitations of their earthly life.  But their hearts are full of love, and their hearts are conscious of all the harmonies of the spheres, and their thoughts are with the great musicians and the great composers who have gone before but who have left a heritage for the children of Earth to follow.  I know how you feel, and because I know how you feel, it is a joy for me to come, and to serve and to help and to bless.  I do not ever feel that I am giving a second away if it is spent with those who love as you do the music that is God’s.  I must go, but do not feel sad, and feel joyous, for there is great beauty in all of us.  For we are all God, in harmony with each other.

Rose (in a reverent tone):  Thank you, Frederic.

Male voice:  Thank you, Monsieur Chopin.

Where Does Music Really Come From? More on Rosemary Brown

Rosemary Brown at work on the mazurka in D flat

The music of Rosemary Brown is the subject that has brought people to my blog more than any other.  My writing about her has put me in touch with some fascinating people in faraway places, and just recently that has led to my being given another album of Brown pieces as .mp3s, plus a collection of Brown sheet music I hadn’t seen before.

Through a series of e-mails begun with, if I remember correctly, a reprint of my original article on Mrs. Brown in The Ground of Faith, I’ve had the good fortune to become acquainted with a Brazilian musician and composer, Guilherme Tavares, who has supplied me with a lot of these materials, and also did me a tremendous favor by editing my own recording of “Grübelei.”  A circular sort of Web process brought some of the recordings to Guilherme, involving other people with strong interests in the Brown phenomenon:  Ademir Xavier left a comment on my blog about Érico Bomfim, who is trying to record all of Mrs. Brown’s work, then Guilherme contacted Érico, who sent recordings to him, which he passed on to me, and I am now making available to you.

Guilherme also found a BBC radio program about musical mediumship, from three years ago, and recorded the section about Mrs. Brown.  He asked me to transcribe it, and I am posting it here.  It includes the moment when “Grübelei” came into the world– a fascinating moment in which the most hardened skeptic would be hard pressed to believe Mrs. Brown was faking.  I’m going to save further comments on the new material and on Mrs. Brown in general for the next post, but for now, I’ll say that I’m especially intrigued by what she said about all composers perhaps getting music from a central source beyond themselves, possibly transmitted to them by intermediaries, just as the composers themselves were transmitting music to her.  This has been my meta-question about Mrs. Brown’s work all along– where does music really come from?  If Liszt or Beethoven or whoever give music to Mrs. Brown, where are they getting it?

I remember one of my piano teachers, Jane Viemeister, who’s a competent composer herself, saying that music is like an endless waterfall; all you have to do is take your bucket and scoop some up, and there’s always more where that came from.  Arlo Guthrie once said that music was like a stream going by, and it was his job to dip out the good stuff before Bob Dylan could get it!  Many composers have reported feeling that they were simply writing down music that was being dictated to them by some higher Source, perhaps even God.  Yet, every composer has a recognizable, individual style.  I still find this all mysterious– especially when a poem pops unbidden and fully formed into my head.  I can’t write music, but my best work does tend to happen in much the way those composers describe.

The conclusions, or rather non-conclusions, reached during this radio program are pretty close to my view of the subject.  Except that, having lived with a spirit close by much of the time, getting mixed up in my daily life, I don’t have any problem believing that Liszt could advise Mrs. Brown on the price of bananas in the supermarket.

“Music from Beyond the Veil,” hosted by Professor Paul Robertson on BBC Radio 4, first aired July 14, 2009.

[A rather rough recording of “Grübelei” plays in the background.]

Mrs. Brown:  It really began when I was a child.  I had a vision of Liszt, but at that time I was not aware that this was Liszt, because I was too young to have seen pictures or photographs of him.  And he told me that when he was on the earth, he was a famous composer and pianist, and that when I grew up he would give me music.  After Liszt had established a link with me, he first brought Chopin, but then he began to bring others, and there is now quite a group communicating fairly regularly.

Robertson:  A group which included many of the greats, Brahms, Debussy, Schumann, Schubert, even Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.  This piece of music, recorded in 1969, is attributed to Franz Liszt, yet it was recorded nearly 80 years after his death.  He chose as his musical intermediary, if we are to believe her account, a quietly-spoken, unassuming housewife from Balham.  Her name was Rosemary Brown, and she created a stir in the late ‘60s, when her musical mediumship added dozens, and eventually hundreds, of new compositions to the musical canon of Liszt and his group of famous friends from beyond this earthly veil.  As a musician myself, a violinist who spent most of his career leading a string quartet, you could say that I too am a medium, but when I aim to express some long-dead composer’s intentions and emotions, I believe I’m working from a musical score.  Yet, I’m fascinated by the mysterious connection between music and our spiritual lives, not least the question of where seemingly transcendent musical inspiration comes from.

In 1969, BBC Radio 3 broadcast “Music From the Dead Composers,” an hour-long program which took a close look at Rosemary Brown’s claims.  During the program, Rosemary described how she received new compositions from beyond the grave.

Mrs. Brown:  Liszt, who was the first one to give music to me, has a way of controlling my hands.  I think quite a few people will have heard of something called automatic writing, where a spirit controls the hand of a person here, and writes through them.  Well, in this case, Liszt somehow contrives to control both my hands, so that he can make them play the music, and he plays the same phrases over several times, while I watch and try to memorize the notes, and then I’ll write it out afterwards to the best of my ability.

Robertson:  In May 1969, during the making of “Music From the Dead Composers,” presenter Geoffrey Skelton and his producer Daniel Snowman visited Rosemary’s home, a small end-of-terrace house in Lakewood Road, Balham, to record with her as she received her music.  Forty years later, Daniel Snowman can still remember how Rosemary sat at the piano waiting for inspiration to strike.

Snowman:  It was a very emotionally low-beat occasion; there was no sense of a séance or of magic or tables moving or all those things.  We simply turned the machine on and sat there, with her obvious agreement– she gave us a cup of tea and all that– and we sat.  And she would, every now and then, mumble various things– not sure whether they were to us or for us, or to somebody [chuckles] from the dead.

Mrs. Brown:  I’m becoming aware of their… they’re present.  At least they’re here, see.  They’re going to transmit.  I can see Liszt quite clearly.

Snowman:  And then she said, “Oh, yes, Liszt, Liszt is here now.”  And Liszt apparently dictated to her a difficult piece called “Grübelei.”  And she was mumbling back and forth with him, in English, “What? Five-four in the right… and a different… and the key signature, how many sharps?  And three-two in the left?”  You know, kind of, “If you say so, Maestro.”

Mrs. Brown:  [slowly picking out notes, scratching on paper]  I don’t know what I’ve left out.  What have I left out… left out… left out?  Oh, yes, you said repeat that, that goes there, yeah.  No….

Snowman:  And then gradually the thing seemed to come together.  She tried to play it, couldn’t, Geoffrey had a go, and it came together as an interesting piece.

The most extraordinary thing to me about that piece she produced in our presence, “Grübelei” by Liszt (supposedly), was that somebody of the ability and authority of Humphrey Searle, a great Liszt expert at the time, you know, looked at this piece and said, “Yeah, it’s very much like the kind of piece he was experimenting with towards the end of his life.”  It’s an extraordinary piece for somebody to simply do a pastiche of Liszt, to come up with something like that.

Willin:  Well, I had quite a lot of correspondence with Rosemary when she was alive, um, and I’ve looked at a lot of her music and I’ve done a lot of tests on it, and I’ve discussed it with possibly thousands and certainly hundreds of people.

Robertson:  Dr. Melvyn Willin describes himself as being a paramusicologist.  As well as being a music teacher and performer, he researches cases where music apparently meets the paranormal.

Willin:  And what do I have to say?  Um, I think that she was genuine, I think she was tapping into something.

Robertson:  So when you say genuine….

Willin:  She wasn’t fraudulent.

Robertson:  She was sincere.

Willin:  Sincere, yes.

Robertson:  OK.  But do you think she was, in your terms, a genuine medium for something she couldn’t otherwise have achieved?

Willin:  I think she believed that she was genuinely in touch with the composers that she said she was in touch with.  Um, and hey, perhaps she was.  I would be happier to think that she was in touch perhaps with something that was within her, that she was perhaps getting some help from externally.  But I don’t believe that Beethoven or Liszt was telling her the price of bananas in the supermarket, etc.

As to her music, it’s always come across to me, and to others, as a rather good pastiche of the actual composers.  But having said that, I wouldn’t say always, and that’s the frustrating thing, because I can’t say that no, I think all her pieces were pastiche.  I have to say that I think an awful lot were, but there was the odd one or two, that I just think, I don’t know how she did that.

Robertson:  So where does that leave us with the intriguing case of Rosemary Brown?  Not even her most ardent critics accused her of being fraudulent, or of somehow deceiving the public, and she was clearly sincere in her belief about where her talents came from.  It’s interesting, though, to hear her in an interview of 1967, describing her composer friends from the other side as themselves intermediaries for something greater.

Mrs. Brown:  Well, it seems to me to come from a central source of inspiration, as if there were spheres of music, and I think it is channeled down to me, as perhaps it is channeled down to other composers, by various intermediary beings, spirits, whatever you like to call them.  And in this instance, I think there are people who have been composers upon the earth, trying to channel the music to me.

[Background music: a tenor singing “O Sole Mio.”]

Robertson:  I’ll leave the last word to Leo May, who is as certain in his conviction as Rosemary Brown was in hers that he’s channeling the spirits of dead musicians, in his case, those of Enrico Caruso and Mario Lanza.

[An interview begins]  So in a way, it’s not a million miles different to having a talent and then having a duty to serve that talent.

May:  I’m a servant, yes.

Robertson:  And is that quite important, to feel that?

May:  It is indeed important, yes.  Indeed it is, to serve it.  I want to serve the spirit world, which I know, if anybody says to me, “do you believe in the spirit world?” I say, “No.  I know it.”  And there’s the difference between knowing it and surmising that it might be there.  I know it.  Without a doubt.

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http://www.arends-musikverlag.de/rosemary-brown/
Where you can buy Rosemary Brown sheet music and recordings.

https://app.box.com/s/isl0e5ybqgm84ljdusvi
My own recording of Liszt’s “Grubelei,” with some engineering help from Guilherme Tavares.

http://www.youtube.com/user/xavnet2
Ademir Xavier’s YouTube Channel, where you will find Érico Bomfim playing some Brown works, as well as a couple of interviews with Mrs. Brown.  Xavier has a blog, Era do Espírito, at http://eradoespirito.blogspot.com.

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/the-music-of-rosemary-brown-from-a-pianists-perspective/

My earlier post, “The Music of Rosemary Brown from a Pianist’s Perspective.”