Sunday, January 29, 2006
Today's Writer's Tip: Don't Be Afraid to be Influenced By, and have Influence Upon, your Reality
I realized something liberating, or may I say (without evidence but from the direction of more love) that someone dear whispered in my ear. I considered that if my stories have fearful present life connections, such as my awareness of mortality and fears and fantasies of death rising in a story about a man dying, then I might have choices for what this can mean. Fear says they are premonitions.
I recently had the creepy experience of working on a story about a world virus plague just months before the fears and possibilities of a bird flu pandemic ascended in the headlines. But my story may have been a contribution to the energy of humanity facing a long-standing problem. After all, the SARS virus scare, founded in some reality, did come and go, and a friend's husband was quarantined briefly after returning from the east at that time, and all is now well. He also avoided a flight used on 911. The river flows, flow with the river around the stones. So I'm happy to note that the world funding appeal for international support of bird flu research and containment exceeded its goals into the billions of dollars eagerly offered by many nations.
What is going on behind the scenes? It is an old and time-honered plot device that an author's stories start coming true, happening to them, and the boundary between reality and fiction, fact and fantasy, becomes not necessarily blurred (for that can be unhealthy) but scrutably interlaced. Something on the order of Swedenborg's concept of correspondances, in which different levels of reality have different meanings and uses for the same object or event. This kind of thinking is otherwise associated with figuring out the symbolism of dreams or myths or archetypes.
There are apparently sympathetic interlacings of pure energetic parallelism between strikingly different ways of being. For example, an attribute of the tribal shaman is that they are an ordinary person, chatting about getting the firewood and hunting for food, until it suits their topic to shift to otherworldly adventures, and back again, without batting an eyelash. Early anthropologists interpreted this as the feeble supernatural thinking of peoples without scientific explanations. Later anthropologists might apprentice in shamanic rituals and subsequently write books in the style of a shaman, claiming to be changed.
A leading example might be Hank Wesselman, who began revealing in 1995 in "Spirit Walker" his experiences of telepathically experiencing the life of a post-apocalyptic future tribal shaman self, in an America that was returned to forest and jungle over decayed and buried cities. Apparently people of the future had weather problems and/or wars, and forgot how to make metal, and all the metal used to make the cities rusted so everything fell apart. My conviction is that Wesselman tapped into a nonphysical representation of his current life needs, a kind of completely mirroring personal mythology and pedagogical alternate universe. Sorry if this sounds invalidating, but as I've been forced to consider more than once, we have to get over our biases that symbols are somehow less real than physical realities, because in fact they may be more real, especially if real is defined as impact upon change and evolution. Surely therein lies power.
I am skeptical of Wesselman's claim to a physical future due to its supportive so-called facts like this one about all metal being lost to rust. How poetic (something unused or disused or improperly maintained becomes rusty, returns to dust, etc.) But isn't metal extracted from natural rust to begin with, iron oxides like goethite and hematite? Can no one think to burn the rust piles and see what happens? Did Wesselman's unconscious think that iron comes from iron deposits? Terrestrial iron is almost non-existent, it's all in forms of rust. If you do find a chunk of iron in nature, you're advised to save it, not melt it into girders to begin your highway back to civilization. A natural iron chunk on Earth is most likely extraterrestrial, non-siliceous material that bounces out of the solar junk ring known as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Iron meteors are worth a lot of cash in modern science culture. Shamans may have used them to channel alternate identities for the purposes of inner archetypal journeying that doesn't have to jibe with physical reality. The symbolism is good for this, but I'm only guessing here.
My story about the world plague has a transcendent happy ending by the way, it just takes a while to get there so I tired and longed for something more cheerful to work on for a while. I have to juggle these reality interactive projects of mine, stories and essays and journals. Unfortunately or fortunately, most of my stories deal with major consciousness transitions, and what would those often imply if not describe but death. So my fears of mortality can rise while writing some stories, such as the one about the businessman dying from cigarette smoking and the priest who learns from him as they hatch a thought experiment to alter reality and it does. Again, it holds a happy transcendent ending, but all this talk of death makes me nervous. Perhaps I need the concept of shamanic or symbolic death. Death as ultimate healer, dying to the past, like in the tarot. Conscious manipulation of the unconscious through the subconscious, stuff like that.
In 1998 I changed so much after a period of composing music and writing spiritual essays that I had to think of myself as having died. I went through a period of feeling between worlds, and I was sloppy around the house. I became a more complex and interesting person after that time of a few months, which included most seriously feeling, though not entirely believing, that I was the reincarnation of the medieval philosopher Hildegard of Bingen and the 20th century New England inventor and occult dabbler John Hayes Hammond Jr. I had my reasons, what can I say. I was a consenting adult playing with, and seduced by, the mind. I had already read years ago of the so-called Holy Lands fever from which police in Jerusalem have learned to accept and deal with tourists who snap into thinking they are Jesus or John the Baptist or one of the Disciples. It passes, they just need to take care of the person. I suppose the closest I ever came to thinking I was in the Bible was as a teenager. I stumbled upon and loved to think about Ezekial, who saw a chariot of fire with these weird angels with four faces, man ox eagle lion. He also did weird things including eating rituals that I considered to be brilliant performance art, though not necessarily anything that I would want to do. I only went so far as to write a song about being Ezekial, singing to a cheap red electric guitar that I bought from a friend in High School and kept for many years. Yeah, that was cool.
Hey I know, what if I just end these ponderances here. I want to go work on a story that I'm more intrigued by than afraid of now. Thanks for visiting.
regards,
Carl
PS - Hey, I just realized, a dying process actually was completed yesterday. My grandmother passed away after a long decline. Now she's pretty cool in and of herself, but in my dreams her farmhouse lawn was more than once the setting for meeting shamans, isn't that interesting? One took me backward time-travelling, and I blacked out / woke up, but not before I felt time slicing through me similar to how it feels when you pass your hand through solid objects like glass or walls when you're out of body. Um, and if you haven't done this, well it feels like what you'd imagine the description would feel like.
I recently had the creepy experience of working on a story about a world virus plague just months before the fears and possibilities of a bird flu pandemic ascended in the headlines. But my story may have been a contribution to the energy of humanity facing a long-standing problem. After all, the SARS virus scare, founded in some reality, did come and go, and a friend's husband was quarantined briefly after returning from the east at that time, and all is now well. He also avoided a flight used on 911. The river flows, flow with the river around the stones. So I'm happy to note that the world funding appeal for international support of bird flu research and containment exceeded its goals into the billions of dollars eagerly offered by many nations.
What is going on behind the scenes? It is an old and time-honered plot device that an author's stories start coming true, happening to them, and the boundary between reality and fiction, fact and fantasy, becomes not necessarily blurred (for that can be unhealthy) but scrutably interlaced. Something on the order of Swedenborg's concept of correspondances, in which different levels of reality have different meanings and uses for the same object or event. This kind of thinking is otherwise associated with figuring out the symbolism of dreams or myths or archetypes.
There are apparently sympathetic interlacings of pure energetic parallelism between strikingly different ways of being. For example, an attribute of the tribal shaman is that they are an ordinary person, chatting about getting the firewood and hunting for food, until it suits their topic to shift to otherworldly adventures, and back again, without batting an eyelash. Early anthropologists interpreted this as the feeble supernatural thinking of peoples without scientific explanations. Later anthropologists might apprentice in shamanic rituals and subsequently write books in the style of a shaman, claiming to be changed.
A leading example might be Hank Wesselman, who began revealing in 1995 in "Spirit Walker" his experiences of telepathically experiencing the life of a post-apocalyptic future tribal shaman self, in an America that was returned to forest and jungle over decayed and buried cities. Apparently people of the future had weather problems and/or wars, and forgot how to make metal, and all the metal used to make the cities rusted so everything fell apart. My conviction is that Wesselman tapped into a nonphysical representation of his current life needs, a kind of completely mirroring personal mythology and pedagogical alternate universe. Sorry if this sounds invalidating, but as I've been forced to consider more than once, we have to get over our biases that symbols are somehow less real than physical realities, because in fact they may be more real, especially if real is defined as impact upon change and evolution. Surely therein lies power.
I am skeptical of Wesselman's claim to a physical future due to its supportive so-called facts like this one about all metal being lost to rust. How poetic (something unused or disused or improperly maintained becomes rusty, returns to dust, etc.) But isn't metal extracted from natural rust to begin with, iron oxides like goethite and hematite? Can no one think to burn the rust piles and see what happens? Did Wesselman's unconscious think that iron comes from iron deposits? Terrestrial iron is almost non-existent, it's all in forms of rust. If you do find a chunk of iron in nature, you're advised to save it, not melt it into girders to begin your highway back to civilization. A natural iron chunk on Earth is most likely extraterrestrial, non-siliceous material that bounces out of the solar junk ring known as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Iron meteors are worth a lot of cash in modern science culture. Shamans may have used them to channel alternate identities for the purposes of inner archetypal journeying that doesn't have to jibe with physical reality. The symbolism is good for this, but I'm only guessing here.
My story about the world plague has a transcendent happy ending by the way, it just takes a while to get there so I tired and longed for something more cheerful to work on for a while. I have to juggle these reality interactive projects of mine, stories and essays and journals. Unfortunately or fortunately, most of my stories deal with major consciousness transitions, and what would those often imply if not describe but death. So my fears of mortality can rise while writing some stories, such as the one about the businessman dying from cigarette smoking and the priest who learns from him as they hatch a thought experiment to alter reality and it does. Again, it holds a happy transcendent ending, but all this talk of death makes me nervous. Perhaps I need the concept of shamanic or symbolic death. Death as ultimate healer, dying to the past, like in the tarot. Conscious manipulation of the unconscious through the subconscious, stuff like that.
In 1998 I changed so much after a period of composing music and writing spiritual essays that I had to think of myself as having died. I went through a period of feeling between worlds, and I was sloppy around the house. I became a more complex and interesting person after that time of a few months, which included most seriously feeling, though not entirely believing, that I was the reincarnation of the medieval philosopher Hildegard of Bingen and the 20th century New England inventor and occult dabbler John Hayes Hammond Jr. I had my reasons, what can I say. I was a consenting adult playing with, and seduced by, the mind. I had already read years ago of the so-called Holy Lands fever from which police in Jerusalem have learned to accept and deal with tourists who snap into thinking they are Jesus or John the Baptist or one of the Disciples. It passes, they just need to take care of the person. I suppose the closest I ever came to thinking I was in the Bible was as a teenager. I stumbled upon and loved to think about Ezekial, who saw a chariot of fire with these weird angels with four faces, man ox eagle lion. He also did weird things including eating rituals that I considered to be brilliant performance art, though not necessarily anything that I would want to do. I only went so far as to write a song about being Ezekial, singing to a cheap red electric guitar that I bought from a friend in High School and kept for many years. Yeah, that was cool.
Hey I know, what if I just end these ponderances here. I want to go work on a story that I'm more intrigued by than afraid of now. Thanks for visiting.
regards,
Carl
PS - Hey, I just realized, a dying process actually was completed yesterday. My grandmother passed away after a long decline. Now she's pretty cool in and of herself, but in my dreams her farmhouse lawn was more than once the setting for meeting shamans, isn't that interesting? One took me backward time-travelling, and I blacked out / woke up, but not before I felt time slicing through me similar to how it feels when you pass your hand through solid objects like glass or walls when you're out of body. Um, and if you haven't done this, well it feels like what you'd imagine the description would feel like.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Today's Writer's Tip: The Deconstructed Altar
Two mugs of tea, one for the masculine, one for the feminine. Choose appropriate mugs and teas and coasters. Mine are: a brown cowboy mug I got when I visited Denver and Boulder far to the west of Boston to see my sister who was writing a report on greenway plantings for cities, and the other is a green on white Ann of Green Gables mug from when I went with my shy redhead librarian girlfriend to visit her hero the Ann of Green Gables house on Prince Edward Island to the north of Boston, and I have fond memories of her because she cried when she realized we had to break up because she was a lesbian, but I said that's fine honey you just be what you're meant to be, and I cried too, and life went on.
Denver Cowboy sits to the left of my computer on a forest green Mexican design coaster that my dear wonderful wife from Texas purchased when we were visiting her folks. My father was German and I grew up in a New York State with a sister and mother and father. Sometimes I got teased for being German. In college I listened to a lot of German rock and pop music as introduced to me by my German professor who became my best friend for a while until I got all metaphysical and weird on him years later, and I had a local girlfriend who was in German studies and took me to Germany twice and moved there and married a German after I broke up with her. I made experimental lyrical electronic music that I sang in German for years after that, which was on the way to metaphysical breakthroughs including feeling spiritual connections with some past Germanic composer/authors. I do a lot of writing in English (which is my wife's last name, and she is a language teacher), and I'm writing and you're reading in a language that is closely derived from some old German languages. So Germany means something to me, and surprisingly my wife's area of Texas actually was settled by a lot of Germans. Thus I will never forget a billboard I saw with her once driving between San Antonio and Austin (I don't think it's there anymore). A jolly boyish guy in Lederhosen was saying "You all kommen sie back now, ya hear?"
I felt right at home.
(Is he American? Is he post-modern self-engineered? Is he Terran? Yes. Yes. Yes.)
Mmmm, a sip of Honeybush tea. That's the green on white feminine mug on the right on top of a green and blue floral four-cornered design on white Mexican tile too, also purchased by my wife. Normally the right side would be the side of the masculine, the will, the action, the personal, things you can act upon and from. The left side holds the cowboy mug, normally the feminine side of receptivity to the universe, of accepting and working with the universe to enter harmony and see the ways to get what you want smoothly for all benefit. But since the left and right sides of the body cross to the right and left sides of the brain, respectively, then it's never really clear whether it matters if you flip the sides' gender. What works is what's right for you, including doing something entirely other than reading this obsessive essay, or "obsessay" as I will henceforth maybe say.
Cowboy holds ginger tea. Now there's a tea of action. Cowboy is accepting my action self, to work on my computer. Further to his left is snacks. Dragon Fruit, from a hip food store called Trader Joe's. Dragon Fruit is an exotic woody tasting fruit, named in the East, but otherwise known as cactus fruit in the West where I believe it originated. To the right of the house of Ann of Green Gables - that Shakespearian Pollyanna who grows to be a woman with her own strong mind - I lit a rich orange candle that I must remember to not let drip.
By the way, some spacey world dance music is playing in the background, from some Buddha Bathroom series or whatever the marketing department has developed for me. I'm okay with it because it's actually pretty nice.
If you follow these altar specifications exactly prior to any sincere writing session (remember, it is the heart that matters) then you may become licensed to channel me and write a blog like this one, that is your choice. I've given sense coordinates to a psychic position, possibly. However please be warned that this state of consciousness is copyrighted, so anything you may channel from me is copyright by me and even then by my estate after I have shuffled off this mortal coil as they say. I do this not from pride or jealously, after all I'm heaping the adjectives for rather mudane joys, but only that I and then my estate may retain the ownership rights of first refusal as well as control editorial and distribution processes.
I say this to be fair to my own glimpsed but heretofore unnamed muses. Sorry, dear friends, but until you manifest physically to be in the needs of sustenance like teas and Dragon Fruit, as am I, then I am obliged to point out that I'm the one living in the material world where copyrights can contribute to the making of a living. I will strive to reference you in some accrediting way. But also, in this direction of musing, I wish to generally lighten the monologue with the satirical benefits of perspicacious delineation. There are some really weird thought forms that people can channel these days, and I wouldn't want my material getting mixed in with some trickster discarnates in campaigns of weird projective mischeviousness ladled with abject ignorance. Been there, done that, know what I mean?
But if you don't (know what I mean) then if you make your own altar with your own materials and good personal self-appreciation (as opposed to impersonal self-appreciation, which may be a goal) -- and perhaps just be sure to engage as many dimensional senses as possible including taste and smell and touch and light and sound and memory and relationship and space and time -- then you may aspire to channel your truer self, future and or higher, if not spirit or soul. I certainly hope to do so in the writing I'll be doing as soon as I finish this silly blog, which is dedicated perhaps to that florid author Proust, of whom I have read only one sentence, but since it was one of his longer sentences I think that counts for quite a lot actually.
Honeybush, ginger, honeybush, ginger. Say, perhaps one might profit and benefit the world as well to sell a ginger honeybush tea. I will be just this once like Benjamin Franklin, who prospered well enough already to delight in giving away fabulous ideas upon which others built their fortunes. That is to say, should ginger honeybush become the cornerstone of your empire, I would not make legal claims so much as request that you do good with your wealth, such as give to homeless kittens and puppies, feed hungry children, and get better people in the White House.
Hey, if you like my blogs and can identify the personalities behind each entry which is different from the last as being of a certain psychoacoustic identity, ie. vibration that might be phonetically transcribed in the Western alphabet (the ISO-8859-1 character set is preferred) then you can email that to me and I'll try to pronounce it.
Or, if it be easier and applicable, just tell me what you like about my blogs using that little feedback comments link below here. See it down there, yeah that. If you don't say something then I won't know that you ever read this, and that may weigh upon your conscience and even incur karma, so someday you'll be like fixing my hovercraft, or I'll be fixing yours, whichever way the karma goes. I can't figure out these things, I don't run the place, I just incarnate here.
Over and out,
Carl
Denver Cowboy sits to the left of my computer on a forest green Mexican design coaster that my dear wonderful wife from Texas purchased when we were visiting her folks. My father was German and I grew up in a New York State with a sister and mother and father. Sometimes I got teased for being German. In college I listened to a lot of German rock and pop music as introduced to me by my German professor who became my best friend for a while until I got all metaphysical and weird on him years later, and I had a local girlfriend who was in German studies and took me to Germany twice and moved there and married a German after I broke up with her. I made experimental lyrical electronic music that I sang in German for years after that, which was on the way to metaphysical breakthroughs including feeling spiritual connections with some past Germanic composer/authors. I do a lot of writing in English (which is my wife's last name, and she is a language teacher), and I'm writing and you're reading in a language that is closely derived from some old German languages. So Germany means something to me, and surprisingly my wife's area of Texas actually was settled by a lot of Germans. Thus I will never forget a billboard I saw with her once driving between San Antonio and Austin (I don't think it's there anymore). A jolly boyish guy in Lederhosen was saying "You all kommen sie back now, ya hear?"
I felt right at home.
(Is he American? Is he post-modern self-engineered? Is he Terran? Yes. Yes. Yes.)
Mmmm, a sip of Honeybush tea. That's the green on white feminine mug on the right on top of a green and blue floral four-cornered design on white Mexican tile too, also purchased by my wife. Normally the right side would be the side of the masculine, the will, the action, the personal, things you can act upon and from. The left side holds the cowboy mug, normally the feminine side of receptivity to the universe, of accepting and working with the universe to enter harmony and see the ways to get what you want smoothly for all benefit. But since the left and right sides of the body cross to the right and left sides of the brain, respectively, then it's never really clear whether it matters if you flip the sides' gender. What works is what's right for you, including doing something entirely other than reading this obsessive essay, or "obsessay" as I will henceforth maybe say.
Cowboy holds ginger tea. Now there's a tea of action. Cowboy is accepting my action self, to work on my computer. Further to his left is snacks. Dragon Fruit, from a hip food store called Trader Joe's. Dragon Fruit is an exotic woody tasting fruit, named in the East, but otherwise known as cactus fruit in the West where I believe it originated. To the right of the house of Ann of Green Gables - that Shakespearian Pollyanna who grows to be a woman with her own strong mind - I lit a rich orange candle that I must remember to not let drip.
By the way, some spacey world dance music is playing in the background, from some Buddha Bathroom series or whatever the marketing department has developed for me. I'm okay with it because it's actually pretty nice.
If you follow these altar specifications exactly prior to any sincere writing session (remember, it is the heart that matters) then you may become licensed to channel me and write a blog like this one, that is your choice. I've given sense coordinates to a psychic position, possibly. However please be warned that this state of consciousness is copyrighted, so anything you may channel from me is copyright by me and even then by my estate after I have shuffled off this mortal coil as they say. I do this not from pride or jealously, after all I'm heaping the adjectives for rather mudane joys, but only that I and then my estate may retain the ownership rights of first refusal as well as control editorial and distribution processes.
I say this to be fair to my own glimpsed but heretofore unnamed muses. Sorry, dear friends, but until you manifest physically to be in the needs of sustenance like teas and Dragon Fruit, as am I, then I am obliged to point out that I'm the one living in the material world where copyrights can contribute to the making of a living. I will strive to reference you in some accrediting way. But also, in this direction of musing, I wish to generally lighten the monologue with the satirical benefits of perspicacious delineation. There are some really weird thought forms that people can channel these days, and I wouldn't want my material getting mixed in with some trickster discarnates in campaigns of weird projective mischeviousness ladled with abject ignorance. Been there, done that, know what I mean?
But if you don't (know what I mean) then if you make your own altar with your own materials and good personal self-appreciation (as opposed to impersonal self-appreciation, which may be a goal) -- and perhaps just be sure to engage as many dimensional senses as possible including taste and smell and touch and light and sound and memory and relationship and space and time -- then you may aspire to channel your truer self, future and or higher, if not spirit or soul. I certainly hope to do so in the writing I'll be doing as soon as I finish this silly blog, which is dedicated perhaps to that florid author Proust, of whom I have read only one sentence, but since it was one of his longer sentences I think that counts for quite a lot actually.
Honeybush, ginger, honeybush, ginger. Say, perhaps one might profit and benefit the world as well to sell a ginger honeybush tea. I will be just this once like Benjamin Franklin, who prospered well enough already to delight in giving away fabulous ideas upon which others built their fortunes. That is to say, should ginger honeybush become the cornerstone of your empire, I would not make legal claims so much as request that you do good with your wealth, such as give to homeless kittens and puppies, feed hungry children, and get better people in the White House.
Hey, if you like my blogs and can identify the personalities behind each entry which is different from the last as being of a certain psychoacoustic identity, ie. vibration that might be phonetically transcribed in the Western alphabet (the ISO-8859-1 character set is preferred) then you can email that to me and I'll try to pronounce it.
Or, if it be easier and applicable, just tell me what you like about my blogs using that little feedback comments link below here. See it down there, yeah that. If you don't say something then I won't know that you ever read this, and that may weigh upon your conscience and even incur karma, so someday you'll be like fixing my hovercraft, or I'll be fixing yours, whichever way the karma goes. I can't figure out these things, I don't run the place, I just incarnate here.
Over and out,
Carl
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Consciousness Fiction and the Maximum Esoteric Overdrive
(** = future link)
I'm overdue for a blog entry, and I already wrote several that were concerned with the mundane (perhaps to a scary degree, what with my project acronyms, political rants, and housecleaning philosophy). So let's try a further space-shot, shall we?
I'm writing a lot more these days, stories of what I call **Consciousness Fiction. Most of these what-if tales operate from a personal evolving cosmology, ie. how I think the universe is organized into individual (contactable!) beings. I used to think that I and my ideas were being called to write educational metaphysical non-fiction, but my friend **Kurt Leland is covering that area so well that I feel liberated to make up stuff more readily for the sheer joy of imagination, much as I did as a kid. Plus Kurt's excellent books have helped me sift for the best insights and truths. Thanks Kurt!
Kurt's specialty is in going back to original sources - including sacred texts, mystery school teachings, and psychological studies - and reconciling these with his own dreamtime and out-of-body adventures, producing sensible primers for the modern psychic explorer. Kurt is currently working on a book that will, among other topics, demystify levels of reality as taught by **Buddhists and **Theosophists. Check out his blog of research for ** Kurt's book in progress here. The reincarnation of the evolving human spirit through the physical kingdoms, from crystal to plant to animal to human, is just the beginning of such esoterica. The Theosophists diagrammed some wild stuff like the downward movement of incarnating souls through multiple planes simultaneous to and harmonious with the upward movement of evolving spirits, human and other. The former movement is called involution, the latter evolution, and following is an email to Kurt that I sent speculating how/where nature spirits, fairies, elementals, and more might fit in with such a scheme.
Nature spirits and consciousnesses of physical configurations will appear in a future story of mine, so I keep playing in this area of thought. I have curious recurring visitors and locations in my dreams, including spirit friends on other planets, the anima and animus, etc. I don't know which of my experiences I would call fairies and such exactly, but I feel a kind of cultural and historical respect for these mytho-poetic fauna. There are stories of strange beings recorded across societies, often reflected in encounters on a darker, or at best shaded or tinted, side of psychological experience. Perhaps life was harder then. ** More recently, Terence McKenna met techno-elves on **DMT, the so-called spirit molecule derived from Amazon shamans’ ** ayahuasca that is said to give otherworldly roundtrip tours in just under 10 minutes. World War time populations began seeing flying UFOs that they could not identify (what do you call it when an acronym sublimates into a word that again calls for adjectival clothing? linguistic evolution?) which sparked a wave of ET abductions as, shall we say, new perceptual discoveries. ** Carl Sagan wanted to connect abductions to the fairy realms in the British Isles with the ** UFO abduction experience and also, highlighting the, shall we say, second chakra issues of the phenomenon, with the **incubus and **succubus demonic seductions of medeival society, and possibly **Hindi visitations by Gods experiences, and so on.
Now I have seen, in ** out-of-body ** lucid dream states, visitors in space suits in my bedroom. One in particular was a nice lady with a green face in an orange helmet and vivid blue diving suit. I asked her why she wore that suit, and she said "I. R. Q. N. Y.". Right, well then I woke up and puzzled over possible meanings for this for weeks. Not too long after the visitation, I met Kurt Leland and asked him what he thought of it. He said that, in his experience, higher beings often wear protective garb that may look to us like space suits or armor or capes. The protection is ironically to protect us, not them; their light, or intensity of uneclipsed presence, could overwhelm our consciousness. So I have decided that her answer meant "irony" with a "q" for my question in the middle of it. Not that that is a particularly linear or human approach to answering a question, but it's not unintelligible. I also saw wise gentle alien spirits resurrecting Jesus, but that's another dream story.
Now my friend Alex, he's had some interesting adventures of waking up out of his body and walking around, or flying places, or simply thinking of places and appearing there. Sometimes he met strange beings right in his bedroom. One was a boucy blue cloud that was having a lot of fun. Another time, there were two little ET guys, much like ET's are depicted with the big eyes and head. Alex went over enthusiastically and said Hi! They were flustered that he could see them, and they zapped him with high-speed thoughts, like being blasted with a modem, and then disappeared. If you want to know more you should ask Alex, but right now he's playing proper businessman and doesn't want to talk with most people about such things. But I think that is a lot like someone encountering a peeved elf or pixie in mythology. A classic story like **Rip Van Winkle, that tale is powerful because it is actually depicting a whole folklore of true experience.
I recently reviewed a fine documentary about fairy lore, see **"The Fairy Faith". Over **Christmas vacation I met artist **Andrew Gonzalez who illustrates **Tibetan angelic beings called **Dakinis. I also like **shamanism with its angelic overworlds, earthly middleworld, and animal spirit underworld, and how this might correlate with classical western **Heaven/**Olympus, a **purgatory, and **Hell/**Hades. **Swedenborg's cosmologies were very detailed, and he describes visiting hells, other planets, and three major spiritual realms, the natural, spiritual, and celestial. Then there's modern psychological and human potential terminology which imply realms of being, and I like how the channeled entity **Lazaris describes the evolution of power downward from the higher conscious, through the unconscious (which connects lifetimes), through the subconscious (which connects everything in a lifetime), into the conscious mind (you and me!), which then must choose to travel back up again through the same levels to co-create with the higher conscious.
In the past I may have gone off the deep end with such cosmologies, numerologies, and other psychic theories. Now I just tinker for the purpose of writing a (metaphysically) plausible story, and I feel pretty grounded. I'm gradually learning about the history of Consciousness Fiction too, as it stands in my opinion, and I'm enjoying exploring my affinities for the metaphysical works, especially shorter stories, of such authors as: **E. M. Forster, **Nathaniel Hawthorne, **Washington Irving, **Edgar Allen Poe (bit dark that fellow), **Dion Fortune, **Theodore Sturgeon, ** Ray Bradbury, **Ursula K. Le Guin, **H. G. Wells (love the movie version **"The Man who could work miracles"), **Edward Bulwer-Lytton, **David Lindsay, **E.T.A. Hoffman, **Jorge Luis Borges, and more. I claim no expertise but I will be compiling a personal ** ConFi authors list on my astralresearch.org website as I read and write (it won't be nearly as extensive as my ** Mystical Movie Guide project).
So take it with a grain of salt, and enjoy below an excerpt of my own maximum esoteric overdrive in the thinking behind my fiction. I welcome **feedback or questions, and by the way, if you're an aspiring writer in need of guidance, a great book of writer's validations and tips I found is "**The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters". My favorite guidance so far is: whatever your blockage is, write through the blockage! That is to say, just write, write your way past the problems, just express, flow, and be a writer. That's why there so many more places to write these days, the internet has created mental plane real estate. That's what a *blog is, you see!
Best wishes,
Carl
Hi Kurt,
I guess what I like about the invo/evo cycle is that it is cyclical, rather than the linearity of lower chakra/plane to upper/chakra plane which always begs the question well what's lower than that and what's higher than that. Similarly with the origins of the universe, people ask well what happened before the big bang, the answer being there is no before, and maybe the beginning is also the end (and the end is a new beginning!).
So evolving consciousnesses are becoming god-like in their return to god, and involving consciousnesses are becoming constrained in rules in their return to individuation. I say constrained in rules to avoid a word like imprisoned, but one could also use the word ensconced. Etheric and physical incarnation. Involving consciousnesses become the matter to evolving consciousnesses.
I also like to think of everything as being "here now", there are no other places, just other ways of perceiving and connecting with everything that's already present. Whatever cycles exist are continually existing at all stages simulataneously. So a primitive human interacting with a god can be just showing the split within the consciousness, the amount of integration that soul still has to do, or is always doing, or is willing to do. Lazaris likes to call it the long division, implying to me a mathematical process (and Lazaris is big on process - not mechanical, but spiritual, like maturation stages). The primitive human can be the soul involving, the god is the same soul evolving, and the being is meeting itself. Today's New Age culture is showing more of the balanced integration between the individuated potential and all-aware potential, as people think of god as being within and that individuals create their own reality. Maybe a meta-evolution would involve the span across planes, diameter of consciousness cycle. But meta-evolution must be multimensional, because it can too simply imply a paradoxical hierarchy too. Can it be that Earth is an impressive and advanced school as some spirits say, even as it seems to us in the middle of it so messy and unadvanced (one could say ignorant and dangerous)?
But are there other consciousness which make the Earth their home? Maybe the so-called "different" evolutionary paths of nature spirits, devas, etc. are simply different stretches across the "planes", different cycles or tours (tours of duty?) through the worlds. Lazaris for example says he is of a group of consciousnesses that simply chose early in their growth to never grow physically. That suggests to me that a soul can know early on in it's growth, or at least challenge itself to the constraint, that its invo/evo cycle, or spin, stays within certain distances of self-recognition. (I read that the spin of electrons influences their availability for reactions). Beings who are never physical just don't go as far as the physical plane to be ready to turn around, but physical beings can communicate with them from their less integrated and less material invo/evo dualisms, ie. their intuitive inner senses, like intuitive thought and feeling. If that's what a deva is, a spin, then humans could have two ways of sensing them, from the involving self or downward spin (felt as a primal nature connection) and the evolving self or upward spin (felt as a psychic explorer connection). A gnome or troll could be a soul that goes lower/closer to the physical in its spin, thus their appearance to a human is symbolized as the animalish hairy underground beings of folklore who can be peevish, ie. more dualistic. A higher nonphysical being, one who orbits its soul to less unintegrated distances, remains more consistently angelic, perceived by humans as a spirit of the air and of higher morals, thus sylphs, fairies, etc. Humans, being willing to orbit even further from the soul, have more dualistically self-unintegrated aphelions than even the nature spirits, and when operating from aphelion in the other planes (remember, it is all here now, and we're in all the places that we're ever going to) would probably be the source of some of the most dangerous astral forms.
I like this idea of perihelion and aphelion in describing the integration degree of a being in a soul orbit. It always seemed odd to me that planetary orbits are elliptical, so there must be powerful metaphors and constructor idioms available here. Certainly the orbital shape of Earth leads to the seasonal cycles which so influence our mythologies and cultures, harvests and nature. The question is, as we change our environments, do the nature spirits change with us. Do they look like the ETs and ride about on UFOs? Or can we meet friendly brightly hued aliens in space suits who answer questions with multidimensional acronyms and good cheer?
I guess this is the kind of stuff Theosophists worked out, and Buddhist and Hindu monks before them.
That's enough for now, you can reply or just wait til our next conversation.
regards,
Carl
I'm overdue for a blog entry, and I already wrote several that were concerned with the mundane (perhaps to a scary degree, what with my project acronyms, political rants, and housecleaning philosophy). So let's try a further space-shot, shall we?
I'm writing a lot more these days, stories of what I call **Consciousness Fiction. Most of these what-if tales operate from a personal evolving cosmology, ie. how I think the universe is organized into individual (contactable!) beings. I used to think that I and my ideas were being called to write educational metaphysical non-fiction, but my friend **Kurt Leland is covering that area so well that I feel liberated to make up stuff more readily for the sheer joy of imagination, much as I did as a kid. Plus Kurt's excellent books have helped me sift for the best insights and truths. Thanks Kurt!
Kurt's specialty is in going back to original sources - including sacred texts, mystery school teachings, and psychological studies - and reconciling these with his own dreamtime and out-of-body adventures, producing sensible primers for the modern psychic explorer. Kurt is currently working on a book that will, among other topics, demystify levels of reality as taught by **Buddhists and **Theosophists. Check out his blog of research for ** Kurt's book in progress here. The reincarnation of the evolving human spirit through the physical kingdoms, from crystal to plant to animal to human, is just the beginning of such esoterica. The Theosophists diagrammed some wild stuff like the downward movement of incarnating souls through multiple planes simultaneous to and harmonious with the upward movement of evolving spirits, human and other. The former movement is called involution, the latter evolution, and following is an email to Kurt that I sent speculating how/where nature spirits, fairies, elementals, and more might fit in with such a scheme.
Nature spirits and consciousnesses of physical configurations will appear in a future story of mine, so I keep playing in this area of thought. I have curious recurring visitors and locations in my dreams, including spirit friends on other planets, the anima and animus, etc. I don't know which of my experiences I would call fairies and such exactly, but I feel a kind of cultural and historical respect for these mytho-poetic fauna. There are stories of strange beings recorded across societies, often reflected in encounters on a darker, or at best shaded or tinted, side of psychological experience. Perhaps life was harder then. ** More recently, Terence McKenna met techno-elves on **DMT, the so-called spirit molecule derived from Amazon shamans’ ** ayahuasca that is said to give otherworldly roundtrip tours in just under 10 minutes. World War time populations began seeing flying UFOs that they could not identify (what do you call it when an acronym sublimates into a word that again calls for adjectival clothing? linguistic evolution?) which sparked a wave of ET abductions as, shall we say, new perceptual discoveries. ** Carl Sagan wanted to connect abductions to the fairy realms in the British Isles with the ** UFO abduction experience and also, highlighting the, shall we say, second chakra issues of the phenomenon, with the **incubus and **succubus demonic seductions of medeival society, and possibly **Hindi visitations by Gods experiences, and so on.
Now I have seen, in ** out-of-body ** lucid dream states, visitors in space suits in my bedroom. One in particular was a nice lady with a green face in an orange helmet and vivid blue diving suit. I asked her why she wore that suit, and she said "I. R. Q. N. Y.". Right, well then I woke up and puzzled over possible meanings for this for weeks. Not too long after the visitation, I met Kurt Leland and asked him what he thought of it. He said that, in his experience, higher beings often wear protective garb that may look to us like space suits or armor or capes. The protection is ironically to protect us, not them; their light, or intensity of uneclipsed presence, could overwhelm our consciousness. So I have decided that her answer meant "irony" with a "q" for my question in the middle of it. Not that that is a particularly linear or human approach to answering a question, but it's not unintelligible. I also saw wise gentle alien spirits resurrecting Jesus, but that's another dream story.
Now my friend Alex, he's had some interesting adventures of waking up out of his body and walking around, or flying places, or simply thinking of places and appearing there. Sometimes he met strange beings right in his bedroom. One was a boucy blue cloud that was having a lot of fun. Another time, there were two little ET guys, much like ET's are depicted with the big eyes and head. Alex went over enthusiastically and said Hi! They were flustered that he could see them, and they zapped him with high-speed thoughts, like being blasted with a modem, and then disappeared. If you want to know more you should ask Alex, but right now he's playing proper businessman and doesn't want to talk with most people about such things. But I think that is a lot like someone encountering a peeved elf or pixie in mythology. A classic story like **Rip Van Winkle, that tale is powerful because it is actually depicting a whole folklore of true experience.
I recently reviewed a fine documentary about fairy lore, see **"The Fairy Faith". Over **Christmas vacation I met artist **Andrew Gonzalez who illustrates **Tibetan angelic beings called **Dakinis. I also like **shamanism with its angelic overworlds, earthly middleworld, and animal spirit underworld, and how this might correlate with classical western **Heaven/**Olympus, a **purgatory, and **Hell/**Hades. **Swedenborg's cosmologies were very detailed, and he describes visiting hells, other planets, and three major spiritual realms, the natural, spiritual, and celestial. Then there's modern psychological and human potential terminology which imply realms of being, and I like how the channeled entity **Lazaris describes the evolution of power downward from the higher conscious, through the unconscious (which connects lifetimes), through the subconscious (which connects everything in a lifetime), into the conscious mind (you and me!), which then must choose to travel back up again through the same levels to co-create with the higher conscious.
In the past I may have gone off the deep end with such cosmologies, numerologies, and other psychic theories. Now I just tinker for the purpose of writing a (metaphysically) plausible story, and I feel pretty grounded. I'm gradually learning about the history of Consciousness Fiction too, as it stands in my opinion, and I'm enjoying exploring my affinities for the metaphysical works, especially shorter stories, of such authors as: **E. M. Forster, **Nathaniel Hawthorne, **Washington Irving, **Edgar Allen Poe (bit dark that fellow), **Dion Fortune, **Theodore Sturgeon, ** Ray Bradbury, **Ursula K. Le Guin, **H. G. Wells (love the movie version **"The Man who could work miracles"), **Edward Bulwer-Lytton, **David Lindsay, **E.T.A. Hoffman, **Jorge Luis Borges, and more. I claim no expertise but I will be compiling a personal ** ConFi authors list on my astralresearch.org website as I read and write (it won't be nearly as extensive as my ** Mystical Movie Guide project).
So take it with a grain of salt, and enjoy below an excerpt of my own maximum esoteric overdrive in the thinking behind my fiction. I welcome **feedback or questions, and by the way, if you're an aspiring writer in need of guidance, a great book of writer's validations and tips I found is "**The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters". My favorite guidance so far is: whatever your blockage is, write through the blockage! That is to say, just write, write your way past the problems, just express, flow, and be a writer. That's why there so many more places to write these days, the internet has created mental plane real estate. That's what a *blog is, you see!
Best wishes,
Carl
Hi Kurt,
I guess what I like about the invo/evo cycle is that it is cyclical, rather than the linearity of lower chakra/plane to upper/chakra plane which always begs the question well what's lower than that and what's higher than that. Similarly with the origins of the universe, people ask well what happened before the big bang, the answer being there is no before, and maybe the beginning is also the end (and the end is a new beginning!).
So evolving consciousnesses are becoming god-like in their return to god, and involving consciousnesses are becoming constrained in rules in their return to individuation. I say constrained in rules to avoid a word like imprisoned, but one could also use the word ensconced. Etheric and physical incarnation. Involving consciousnesses become the matter to evolving consciousnesses.
I also like to think of everything as being "here now", there are no other places, just other ways of perceiving and connecting with everything that's already present. Whatever cycles exist are continually existing at all stages simulataneously. So a primitive human interacting with a god can be just showing the split within the consciousness, the amount of integration that soul still has to do, or is always doing, or is willing to do. Lazaris likes to call it the long division, implying to me a mathematical process (and Lazaris is big on process - not mechanical, but spiritual, like maturation stages). The primitive human can be the soul involving, the god is the same soul evolving, and the being is meeting itself. Today's New Age culture is showing more of the balanced integration between the individuated potential and all-aware potential, as people think of god as being within and that individuals create their own reality. Maybe a meta-evolution would involve the span across planes, diameter of consciousness cycle. But meta-evolution must be multimensional, because it can too simply imply a paradoxical hierarchy too. Can it be that Earth is an impressive and advanced school as some spirits say, even as it seems to us in the middle of it so messy and unadvanced (one could say ignorant and dangerous)?
But are there other consciousness which make the Earth their home? Maybe the so-called "different" evolutionary paths of nature spirits, devas, etc. are simply different stretches across the "planes", different cycles or tours (tours of duty?) through the worlds. Lazaris for example says he is of a group of consciousnesses that simply chose early in their growth to never grow physically. That suggests to me that a soul can know early on in it's growth, or at least challenge itself to the constraint, that its invo/evo cycle, or spin, stays within certain distances of self-recognition. (I read that the spin of electrons influences their availability for reactions). Beings who are never physical just don't go as far as the physical plane to be ready to turn around, but physical beings can communicate with them from their less integrated and less material invo/evo dualisms, ie. their intuitive inner senses, like intuitive thought and feeling. If that's what a deva is, a spin, then humans could have two ways of sensing them, from the involving self or downward spin (felt as a primal nature connection) and the evolving self or upward spin (felt as a psychic explorer connection). A gnome or troll could be a soul that goes lower/closer to the physical in its spin, thus their appearance to a human is symbolized as the animalish hairy underground beings of folklore who can be peevish, ie. more dualistic. A higher nonphysical being, one who orbits its soul to less unintegrated distances, remains more consistently angelic, perceived by humans as a spirit of the air and of higher morals, thus sylphs, fairies, etc. Humans, being willing to orbit even further from the soul, have more dualistically self-unintegrated aphelions than even the nature spirits, and when operating from aphelion in the other planes (remember, it is all here now, and we're in all the places that we're ever going to) would probably be the source of some of the most dangerous astral forms.
I like this idea of perihelion and aphelion in describing the integration degree of a being in a soul orbit. It always seemed odd to me that planetary orbits are elliptical, so there must be powerful metaphors and constructor idioms available here. Certainly the orbital shape of Earth leads to the seasonal cycles which so influence our mythologies and cultures, harvests and nature. The question is, as we change our environments, do the nature spirits change with us. Do they look like the ETs and ride about on UFOs? Or can we meet friendly brightly hued aliens in space suits who answer questions with multidimensional acronyms and good cheer?
I guess this is the kind of stuff Theosophists worked out, and Buddhist and Hindu monks before them.
That's enough for now, you can reply or just wait til our next conversation.
regards,
Carl
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Housecleaning for 2006
Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were good. Ours were quite nice, maybe better than ever, visiting many fine friends and family. It's refreshing to know and appreciate good people, or at least the good in people, depending on what you got to work with.
I just did some housecleaning. I suppose most people do some. It's quite confrontative, isn't it, to push that vacuum around, dust, move furniture. I either scream or make a party of it, there's no in-between. So I started with a little song, making it up as I go:
I love to clean the house
I love to vaccuum too
I hope I find a mouse
I'll add it to our zoo
Then I felt the frustration rise. Why do we have to keep cleaning things? I've done this before. Go over the same surface areas. Routines with no apparent benefit other than to maintain or degrade.
Then I remembered what I heard Lazaris (smart topical channeled entity) saying that housecleaning goes with sifting and sorting your attitudes and beliefs, thoughts and feelings, choice and decisions. Dirt gets tracked in, that late night TV program dumped some paranoia on you, that person you talked to blew a dust of bad outlook on the world, stuff like that. I agree. Our reality creations get flawed because of junk, we have to cleaning our minds, which are externalized in reality.
How do you do that kind of housecleaning? My friend Kurt and his entity Charles recommend, think of the things you want to do or want to have in life, from your deep desires and destiny. Then list the yes-buts, or the problem with that is, and the reasons why it won't work. That's where you can find assumptions of how life works, and you can cancel and change any assumptions you choose. Look for new examples of new assumptions, if you don't believe it. It's a big world, a lot of things can go in whatever direction you favor.
So I did some assumption finding and fixing in rhythm to the literal housecleaning, and this felt good. But then there was still more housecleaning to do, I wasn't done yet. So I appreciated my wife some more, she was doing some cleaning too. That felt good too.
But then house cleaning still wasn't done, not even the limited amount I set for myself to do today. So I started getting more annoyed and frustrated and tired. But I kept my temper in check, because I remember the times that I full-out lose it and yell a bit and bang things around, and those always give me a headache.
Finally I was done. Tonite we're having friends over for potluck and movie night, that's why we needed to do some cleaning. I took a shower, and I'm about to eat and watch a short film. I've been wanting to check in with a blog entry so I wrote this first.
Slice 'o life. First blog entry of 2006. Something mundane, something profound, kinda mixed together. That works for me. Happy New Year!
Oh and please comment if you liked anything I said. How do you relate to housecleaning and the chores of life?
I just did some housecleaning. I suppose most people do some. It's quite confrontative, isn't it, to push that vacuum around, dust, move furniture. I either scream or make a party of it, there's no in-between. So I started with a little song, making it up as I go:
I love to clean the house
I love to vaccuum too
I hope I find a mouse
I'll add it to our zoo
Then I felt the frustration rise. Why do we have to keep cleaning things? I've done this before. Go over the same surface areas. Routines with no apparent benefit other than to maintain or degrade.
Then I remembered what I heard Lazaris (smart topical channeled entity) saying that housecleaning goes with sifting and sorting your attitudes and beliefs, thoughts and feelings, choice and decisions. Dirt gets tracked in, that late night TV program dumped some paranoia on you, that person you talked to blew a dust of bad outlook on the world, stuff like that. I agree. Our reality creations get flawed because of junk, we have to cleaning our minds, which are externalized in reality.
How do you do that kind of housecleaning? My friend Kurt and his entity Charles recommend, think of the things you want to do or want to have in life, from your deep desires and destiny. Then list the yes-buts, or the problem with that is, and the reasons why it won't work. That's where you can find assumptions of how life works, and you can cancel and change any assumptions you choose. Look for new examples of new assumptions, if you don't believe it. It's a big world, a lot of things can go in whatever direction you favor.
So I did some assumption finding and fixing in rhythm to the literal housecleaning, and this felt good. But then there was still more housecleaning to do, I wasn't done yet. So I appreciated my wife some more, she was doing some cleaning too. That felt good too.
But then house cleaning still wasn't done, not even the limited amount I set for myself to do today. So I started getting more annoyed and frustrated and tired. But I kept my temper in check, because I remember the times that I full-out lose it and yell a bit and bang things around, and those always give me a headache.
Finally I was done. Tonite we're having friends over for potluck and movie night, that's why we needed to do some cleaning. I took a shower, and I'm about to eat and watch a short film. I've been wanting to check in with a blog entry so I wrote this first.
Slice 'o life. First blog entry of 2006. Something mundane, something profound, kinda mixed together. That works for me. Happy New Year!
Oh and please comment if you liked anything I said. How do you relate to housecleaning and the chores of life?
