Important Information

[poliphilo]

I've got this big, big book about Ghosts by Hans Holzer. Thank you jackiejj for the recommendation. It's teaching me new skills; like how to balance a book the size of a family Bible on one knee and a plate of food on the other.

Can't put it down, see.

Normally when you die someone comes over from the spirit world to talk you through it. But if you die suddenly or violently or all in a dither about unfinished business you can miss the connection. Then you get stuck.

Ghosts are people who are stuck.

Holzer talks to them. He uses a spirit medium which means he can have face to face chats. Most ghosts are muddled and fuddled. They've grasped that there's something wrong but they haven't quite figured out what. And they're too angry at their murderer or too mithered about the doubloons they've left buried under the fireplace to figure out how to work themselves free.

Holzer compares them to psychotics. We shouldn't be afraid of them he says. They're far too wrapped up in their own troubles to want to hurt us.

Often they don't know they're dead. There's no time where they live. When Holzer tells them its 1965 not 1776 they do a double-take. "I'm 56," one ghost protests, "Do I look 204 years older?"

Who wouldn't want to know about all this? It's important information. Knowing it could mean the difference between spending eternity in the summerlands with the ones you love or tripping up and down the stair-case wondering who all these strangers are and why nobody talks to you any more. Fore-warned is fore-armed.

I was lying in bed yesterday looking at the ceiling and I caught myself thinking, "I hope I'm not becoming too attached to this house. I wouldn't want to wind up haunting it."

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Watching this woman being interviewed, I thought again about the latest brain studies, which seem to offer a physical explanation for OBE.

I think, just like there are people who are savants with numbers, so are there people who can see other dimensions.

If Jesus's words were true, then he surely was very psychic--why not? I've met a very good psychic. He plucked things out of my life that he couldn't possibly have known about (he'd never met me, didn't know I was coming).

Jesus said (paraphrased) that there were other worlds around us, that the Kingdom of Heaven was all around us, but that we didn't see it.

He told people their secrets. He told the woman at the well about her many husbands.

I think our brains are just part of it. Like radios--they are transmitters.

Have you ever read Depak Choprah? He says the body is a mechanism that is inhabited by mind. He says, have you ever fallen asleep on your arm and felt it to be alien to you, like a cold fish?

He says our bodies are clothing for our minds.

And Carl Sagan, perhaps more cynically, said our bodies were festooning for DNA, so it could walk around and evolve...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I agree with Depak. I think our bodies and brains are machines for the use of our minds.

In the end there is only Mind. Matter is nothing but a solidification of energy, or- as mystics and poets in every tradition have been saying all along- nothing but an illusion, a dream.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I took Thomas Moore's The Soul's Religion along with me on my walk this morning, and he was talking about how religious institutions have become defensive and hidebound and are driving people away. And he talked about emptiness.

He says the Hopi pueblo people of the American Southwest have a legend about the first appearance of their people "in the time of dark purple light, the people had moisture on their foreheads and a soft spot at the top of their heads. Eventually this soft spot hardened, but occasionally they can open it like a door and make themselves available to the influence of the spirit world. As they were drifting on the water looking for a livable fourth world, 'not knowing what to do, the people stopped paddling, opened the doors on top of their heads, and let themselves be guided.'"

I don't know what to do. I think I will try opening a door.

It's wonderfully exciting to turn everything around and say, this isn't as real as the Mind.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The church certainly drove me away. It seemed like this dead-end enclave of conservative values. I was stifling.

I'd like a door to open in my life too. I don't feel I can force the issue, though. I have to wait- and wait- and see what the gods have in mind.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Waiting.

I know all about waiting.

The wind doesn't blow. As Annie Dillard says, "Nothing sounds."

I remember being pregnant, all those years ago, in Atlanta. Long walks alone, wondering if the baby would ever be born, if it would be a boy or a girl.

I felt like such a biological convenience for the gods.

Which I was! Amazing!

I was too young to realize what we were building, Mind and I.

I'd just take walks and feel awkward and tired.

Then, in the delivery room, wide awake and without drugs, I was pushing and I imagined myself as a Center of Life. I felt I was in a vortex that was all around me, that I was part of something much greater than what was taking place in that room. I felt--observed. And appreciated, and understood.

When they handed my daughter to me, she looked at me and her face lit up. We said hello to each other. Then she went back into the machinery that was surrounding her mind, and she began to be a baby human.

But for that one moment, we saw each other, soul to soul.

Waiting takes place here, and takes place There, until the fullness of time.

I'm waiting, too. I've felt pregnant for years now.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's extraordinary. I've never known childbirth spoken of in such terms before. What you've said is- literally- a revelation.

I'm just a man. This is a mystery I can never experience.

Not in this incarnation anyway :)

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

It only happened that strongly in my first pregnancy, perhaps because everything was new, or perhaps because I was so exhausted that "the door in my head" was open, as the Indians say.

My son's birth was precipitous, and, although it was also a natural childbirth, it was much easier--and more earthbound!

What I felt was just a glimpse, no matter what the mechanism, and very soon I was back to being my regular self again.

But that moment of greeting! I'll never forget it! Kate's eyes widened. She smiled at me and looked at me a very long time. I said hello! And then the moment was gone, and she was just a wobbly newborn.

I swear, Tony, that has to have been the moment when she came into this world, and I got to see it.

Maybe it all was an illusion. But I choose to believe that I participated in one of the "common miracles" and that I also glimpsed just an edge of the Kingdom of Heaven, "all around me."