Egyptiam visions

Egyptian Visions
Charlie

The vision described in this short story happened in the summer of 2002 (or possibly 2003).  It was the middle of the afternoon and I was taking a bit of a reading break in my living room at home.  I was sitting in my favorite reading chair, reading a book that my friend Ron had lent me concerning some of the things that Edgar Casey said concerning Atlantis.  According to the book, Mr. Casey “saw” the country of Atlantis before it had sunk into the ocean milleniums ago.  Because of his visions, he claimed to have some kind of direct knowledge of the place, the peoples, and its history.  This all seemed, and still seems, pretty outlandish – not something I am likely to invest my beliefs in.  However, I was reading the book so that I could talk to Ron about it.

I stopped reading for a moment to ponder the question of what was it that Mr. Casey was reporting on.  Assuming that he wasn’t outright lying, it seems that he is describing some kind of experience.  I formed the question in my mind, “what was he experiencing that gave him the background to make the claims that are in his writings?”

Almost immediately I found that I was in very new, and unknown, place.  Instead of sitting in my chair, in my living room with a book on my lap, I was standing on a long pier jutting out into a body of water, looking back toward the land.  The sky was very blue and bright, the dock was in good shape, approximately ten feet wide, with wooden deck boards running perpendicular to the direction of travel.  There were no railings or any other things along the side except for large fluted, white columns spaced about every twenty feet apart along both sides of the pier.  The columns looked to be of an ancient design (from my point of view), with some sort of curly things around the top, but without a roof.  The pier was about 4 or 5 feet above the water.  I suppose I was a hundred or so feet from the shore.

The water was a beautiful deep blue color, and very calm.  It was making tiny ripples as it splashed up against a smooth, perfect beach leading out of my vision to both sides.  The beach was the color of California beaches; it wasn’t white, but more of a golden brown shade.  The beach was about fifty feet deep, gently sloping up to meet rolling hills leading inland.  The hills were green with grass and a few small bushes, but there were no trees nearby.   There was what appeared to be a stand of trees off in the distance to my left.  I could see the hills up to a height of about 100 feet or so, and then they disappeared from view and the cloudless blue sky started.

Directly ashore from the pier was the front of a building that appeared to be dug into the hills.  It appeared that the hills had been dug back making room for the front wall of the building.  The large, marble looking building was dug into the hillside so that all that was visible was the front which consisted of a wall made from what appeared to be marble blocks, with a covered area in front supported on more columns.  There was a large opening near the center that led to the interior of the building.  It was quite dark in the opening, so I could not see anything inside of the building, just a black opening.

I looked around the landscape for a bit, turning my head to look up and down the beach – noticing that my “vision” was in three dimensions, I was in the middle of it, it was “projected” out in front of me.  As I scanned the view I noticed that there were no trees nearby, and no animals of any kind.  There were no tracks that I could see in the sand.  It didn’t really feel barren; it just happened that there were no animals immediately visible at this time.  It didn’t feel out of place, I was just noticing.  It was completely calm, and completely silent – although I am not sure if I could hear in this vision, maybe it was just visual experience.

As I stood watching the scene, a lady came walking out of the building on the beach.  She was tall (5’ 9” or so), had black hair, and brown skin.  She had “Caucasian” features, and a nice comfortable figure.   The first thing that I noticed was that she was wearing a golden crown that consisted of a golden band about a half inch in diameter going around her head, with a cobra’s spread out head raising up in the front.  I recognized this as the headgear that I had seen pictures of Egyptian queens wearing.  Kind of a Cleopatera look from the movies.  She was wearing a wrap-around gown that had a plunging neck line, wide upward sweeping shoulders. It was in a  pattern that looked a bit like a fan starting near her belly and fanning out upward toward her shoulders.  The fan was formed from alternating stripes of beautiful blue and gold color.  The fan was edged at the top (neckline) with a broad golden colored border.  I was pretty sure that the gold was actual gold threads.  I don’t know what the blue was from.  The gown appeared to be very light and airy, and form fitting above her hips.  Her robe appeared to be worn like a robe rather than like a dress.  Below her knees the gown gently folded, with a slit in front formed by the folds.  The best way to describe it is that it looked just like popular pictures of an Egyptian queen.  She had open toed, strap-on sandals.

She walked across the sand leading to the pier and come toward me until she was standing about ten feet in front of me, stopping to look into my eyes.  Not a word was said, and it was all of her movements were very soft but formal.  At that moment my mind answered myself, “so, this is what Casey was seeing.” 

Poof!  The vision was gone and there I was sitting in my living room, holding my book, slightly stunned by the instantaneous transformation between my two visions (the Egyptian vision and the home in my living room vision).  It left me pretty disoriented for a few minutes. I had to consciously accept the idea that I was going to stick with the living room vision.

A year or so later I was attending the Burningman festival in Nevada.  One day I walked into the big center camp tent to see what was happening and there she was!  There was the lady in my vision, standing a few feet in front of me.  Not wanting a re-experience of missing important moments in time, I walked right up to her, introduced myself to her, and told her about seeing her in my Egyptian vision.  Neither she, nor her male friend, seemed to cotton to the idea of my telling them this.  They sort of polity thanked me for the story and quickly backed away to get away from this wild-man telling them about visions of her in a former time of splendor.  Oh well, at least I didn’t walk past what might have been an opportunity.

I don’t think that my vision was anything more than that.  I doubt that it was rooted in any sort of past, present or future reality.  My impression when it happened was that some part of my mind was answering my question about Mr. Casey’s world view.  Rather than giving me an answer in words, it did it by creating an experience.  It was a visual answer, not a verbal one.  I don’t think I learned anything about Egypt or the lady, but I certainly learned about how vivid and spontaneous these things can be.  It explained to me why some people say they see things that others do not.  It would be pretty easy to confuse an experience like this with “reality” because it didn’t require the experience of falling asleep and waking up.  It just popped in and out again.  I suppose I actually fell asleep and was experiencing a dream, but if so it was a lucid dream that didn’t fade in and out like most dreams do.  While it was a lucid dream, I had no view of any part of myself which is normal in my lucid dreams.  I can usually see parts of myself such as my hands, arms and legs – but not this time.  However, from the position that I was standing in I don’t think I would have been able to see myself so that doesn’t really mean much.

City Dream

This dream was the first that I am aware of where a Toltec teacher was helping and guiding me in a lucid dream. 

The dream started with me walking though the countryside toward a large city.  The road that I was walking on went through agricultural fields, over gently rolling hills.  It was a clear day, with blue skies and a slight chill to the air.  I could see the city off in the distance, but had a long walk ahead of me.  A car pulled up next to me and the driver, a man in his 40’s, asked if I would like a ride.   I accepted, and we continued on toward the city.  As we drove along he told me that he was going to be my teacher, and that he had something to show me.

We entered the city, which I assume was New York, or equivalent.  In any case, it was a large bustling city.  We found a place to park, and he said we had to walk through the city. 

When we got out of the car, I looked around and the city was almost empty.  There were no cars or any other vehicles on the streets.  There were a few people on the sidewalks, but they appeared to be in some sort of suspended animation.  We were walking through a deserted and stilled city.  We walked down empty streets, looking at the skyscrapers and other buildings.  It was an eerie feeling, reading the street signs, looking into empty stores, walking across empty streets.  It was a little like what I imagine it would be to walk through the town of Chernobyl after it was evacuated after the nuclear power plant accident – except that there were motionless people in this city.

I then noticed that the people had starting moving, but not with any direction, they were just milling around.  They saw us and were commenting among themselves about us. It was clear that they found us to be out of the norm, and to be frightening.  They pointed to us, and told each other that we were not the same as they were – to be careful of us.

I asked my teacher what this was about, why was he showing me such an odd place?  He said that he wanted to point out that this is the normal situation, there are a few people who are “awake,” but mostly everyone is asleep and there really isn’t anything going on of importance – most people are just milling around using up their days.  There was really almost nothing in the cities, even though we think of them as being full of things.  He said that he brought me here because he wanted to be sure that I understood that in many ways the path I have chosen to follow is lonely and disassociated from most of the people around me. He said that I would find that most things that I previously thought were important don’t even exist.  Even those few people who do take notice do so from a distance.  They will be fearful because I would be unknown to them.  He said that it wasn’t all like that, but much of what I had come to view as full of important things was really empty.  He then told me that he would continue to visit me in my dreams to help me along the path to enlightenment.

I don’t know if this dream was some sort of warning, or just a statement of fact.  I have thought of it often over the years because it seems so true.  I just finished a cruise in the Mediterranean that had a lot of the feeling of that dream.  The ship and other passengers were basically not there.  They were busy, and seemed to be engaged, but were actually so far into their internal worlds that they missed most of what was happening around them.  Those few that I did talk to were hesitant to get any closer than just passing acquaintances.   When we went ashore, it was to visit old ruins – we saw and interacted very little with the peoples or places that we were traveling through.  It was a lot like that empty city to me

Solar Eclipse

At about 7:00 am, on February 26, 1979 there was a total eclipse of the sun near the town of The Dalles in Oregon.  Being a life long crazy guy about the stars, astronomy, and physics I really wanted to see this event.  At the time my wife Mary Jo, my year and a half old son Kevin and I lived in McKinleyville, on the far north coast of California.  A little 500 mile jaunt to the The Dalles on the northern border of Oregon seemed like a reasonable weekend trip (even though the 26^th was on a Monday).  The physics department at Humboldt State University was making the trip and would watch the eclipse from an observatory on the north bank of the Columbia River.  However, since I had graduated from the department five years previously, I was not invited to join their adventure.  That meant that I would have to make the trip on my own.  Mary Jo decided to accompany me, which I found to be a great blessing and would really enhance the adventure.

The three of us headed north on Sunday the 25^th, hoping to be in a good location by first light Monday morning.  Since we were poor at the time, in order to save expenses we decided to camp on Sunday night, get up early to see the eclipse, and then drive home that same day.  We would miss only two days from work this way, so it was really just a weekend adventure.

The drive over highway 99 to Redding, and then north up highway 5 to the region was uneventful.  Since it was the middle of winter, the camp grounds were not full – in fact they were empty.  Luckily they weren’t all closed.  We found a beautiful campsite next to a crystal clear river.  The campsite was set in a grove of aspen trees, many of which had been recently fallen by beavers.  It was cloudy and cold, but at least there was no snow. 

We spent a cold night sleeping in the back of my work van.  The van was just a shell that I used as a truck when building houses.  It had no insulation or other fancy things (like carpet or seats or anything else).  Moisture kept forming in the ceiling and raining down upon us.  Our son had a fever, and didn’t feel good.  We tried to stay warm as we settled into our sleeping bags – but it was not a very restful night.

At first light we woke up and headed east, looking for a good place to observe the eclipse.  The weather was not promising, the last thing you need for an eclipse is cloud cover.  However, as we traveled east, the clouds started to break up, becoming patchy in the dark sky (the moon is always dark when an eclipse of the sun offers because it gets between the earth and the sun, hence no sunlight falls on the side that we observe). 

We finally came over a rise and found ourselves on the ridge of a hill that sloped down to the east.  The Columbia River was to our left (north) and in front of us was a great rolling wheat field, disappearing over the eastern horizon in front of us.  It made me think of looking across the fields of wheat in the Midwest.  It was almost time for the eclipse to begin, so we had to stop if we were going to catch the show.  We pulled off the road with a couple of other cars, and got out to wait.  By this time it was about 8:00 am and the sun was up.  We could see the observatory with the other folks from Humboldt to the north, just across the river. They were in the shadows of the clouds, we were standing in the sunshine.

We got out to watch the show, but unfortunately our 1-1/2 year old son decided it was time to scream for attention.  Not a gentle cry, or something that could be remedied with a little food, but rather a full blown tantrum that required some attention.  It was one of those terrible distressing moments in my life.  My son demanded attention, but the eclipse was starting.  We had just driven ten hours getting here, and it would probably be the last time in any of our lives that we would see such a thing.  We were going into a 15 minute event, my opinion was that we just let him scream for 15 minutes and deal with him later.  He was a very colicky child and did this often.  Mary Jo couldn’t bring herself to just let him be for a few minutes, the mothering instinct was just too strong.  I wanted to watch the event, so I did – but with a huge amount of anger being directed at me for ignoring my son.  She was extremely forceful about making sure that she was going to deal with him, and ignore the eclipse.  I finally decided that even though I was clearly getting into lifelong trouble, I wanted to watch the eclipse – she would only take glances now and then, so I think she missed most of it.  It was really too bad, because we were in for such an amazing experience.  For the next 15 minutes I kept trying to point out what was happening, but by then she was so upset that I don’t think she could really see the magnitude of the beauty that was all about us.

The day was breathtakingly beautiful.  Large clouds were swirling through the sky, dark ominous rain clouds with large breaks edged with bright white borders.  The sun was low in the eastern sky, lighting the wheat fields in a way that made them like golden waves reaching toward the horizon.  The fields dipped off to the river on the left which cut along the base of a bluff, where the observatory was located – still in deep shadows and rain.

Then it started.  The first thing that I noticed was that the fields felt like they were pulsating with light.  At first it was a gentle pulsation about a second apart.  They gradually become more evident and I could see that they were bands of shadows racing across the fields from the east toward us.  The shadow bands were perpendicular to their movement.  They looked like waves in a pond where someone had splashed a rock on the far side from where we stood.  They were very distinct, dark shadows and bright sunlight alternated between the lines of shadows marching toward us.  As they crossed our location, the light level went from almost dark, to full sunlight, which accounted for the pulsing.  The pulsing got to be so strong that it felt like my entire body and the earth were pulsing in a giant coordinated unity.  It jarred me and made my whole body react with each pulse, which got faster and faster with time.

I looked down to the ground and saw that the shadows of things (my body, arms, hands, the car, trees, etc) had somehow grown long feathery hairs.  The hairs looked to be about a foot long and were wavy, they edged everything.  I am not sure, but I think they began to grow on things themselves, not just there shadows.  For some reason this is difficult to recall, I am not sure if they were just on the shadows, or on things too.

So there I was, pulsing with the light, seeing hair-like projections on everything, watching the moon slip across the front of the sun though my welding goggle lenses, as the day got darker and darker.  I was totally amazed and transfixed by the experience.

Then the moon finally lined up completely over the sun for the beginning of totality.  Everything went totally silent.  The pulses stopped, the shadows vanished, it felt like the breeze stopped blowing, and all noises stopped – we were suspended in complete stillness and solitude while in the sky the sun blossomed into a huge shinning Mandela of golden light encircling the black circle of the moon.  The sun became the size of a basketball held at arm’s length in front of your face. It was no longer a solid object with a defined surface, but rather it was a wispy, glowing, beautiful thing.  We all stood in awe at the majesty and beauty of the sight and feeling.  The cold air settled in on my bones as I watched for the eight minutes or so of totality.

Then the pulses started up again, slowly at first but quickly returning to their rapid pace. It all repeated, playing backwards in time.  I could see that across the river the observatory never got a glimpse of the magic that was playing out on our side of the river.  Too bad, their luck failed them on that trip.

After the event was completed I felt like I had been carried into a dream, I was just standing there feeling like I had been blessed with some sort of universal magic.  It was a totally awe inspiring and huge experience.  Nothing at all like I had expected.  I had expected to see the day get dark, had seen photos of totality so expected to see the corona beyond the moon, had heard that it got quiet as the birds went to sleep.  However, I didn’t know about the shadow bands, hand hairs, or the feeling that it all forced upon me.  It was truly an overwhelming experience.  I can understand why it was such a big deal by the ancient ones, it IS a big deal.

We left to travel home, taking a short cut over the mountains near Crater Lake.  The road past Crater Lake was open, but the snow was 15 feet or so deep, so we traveled over the mountains through a valley of snow, vertical walls fifteen to twenty feet on either side of the two lane road.  It was beautiful, but a bit scary, to be in such wilderness in the dead of winter, with almost no other traffic on the road.

A few years later we happened to be traveling in the desert near Needles, California.  We had heard of an ancient native America rock art work next to the Colorado River.  It was called the Topoc Maze.  It is located on a gentle rolling desert hillside.  Rocks have been moved into long parallel rows, some with the dark desert varnish showing, and some with the white side showing.  The results in waves of light and dark lines going across the hillside.  It is hundreds of feet across, with the lines staying parallel to each other as the wrap across the hills and valleys of the area.  My first and current reaction is that they had recreated the appearance of the shadow bands in rock.  It looks just the same to me as what I saw in Oregon on that cold and beautiful morning.  I think that the maze could be dated by finding out the date of the last full eclipse of the sun to go across that region.  I wrote to a noted expert in the field and told him my theory.  He shot back that it was impossible, that the Indians never did anything that didn’t have immediate practical use and they would never make art that somehow reproduced experiences.  I thought it was a pretty odd response, but it didn’t do much to change my mind. I can understand how they might have found an eclipse a moving enough event to want to copy in on the ground for whatever purpose.

Shaman and modern equipment

During a trip to China in the year of 2006 or so, we were visiting some “indigenous” villages in the southern part of the country.  I am not sure which peoples these were, but they were probably Miao people, or possibly a Dong village in the province of Guizhou.  It is my understanding that the Miao, and possible the Dong, people came to China from southeast Asia, and are related to the Hmong people in Vietnam and Laos.  These are a couple of the 55 or so recognized minority groups in China. 

The village where we were staying was ancient looking, with the roads through town being winding trails just wide enough to let a water buffalo though on the way from its stall in the farmers’ homes to the fields.  The houses in town were all hand hewn, hand made, two-story buildings that tend to lean in various directions – sometimes in several directions within one building.  There were no automobiles, stores or other attributes of a modern town.  These are deeply religious peoples, but mostly believing in “shaman” style religions, based upon ancient knowledge’s and practices.

One morning we were taking a walk through town with our wonderful guide, Xiao (pronounced like the first four letters in “shower”).  We turned a corner and came upon an ancient shaman standing in the front of the doorway to a house, performing a healing ceremony for the lady of the house who was apparently quite sick.  Since there is no access to modern medical attention in these remote villages, the shaman is the doctor of choice.  My guess is that even if modern doctors are available, the shaman is still the doctor of choice.

He had some items in his hands that he was waving in prayer, and was chanting/singing a long prayer song.  When he saw us, especially me with my video camera, he made it clear that we were welcome to watch, and to take videos of his service – so of course I did take footage of that interesting event.  He stood in the doorway for a few minutes longer, until he apparently finished his work – and then rather abruptly packed up his things and left.  It seemed a little odd to me that there was really no tapering off of the ceremony, one minute he was deep in prayer and the next he just stopped and walked away.  Obviously he was finished with that work.

This was interesting at the time, but I discovered that something rather odd had occurred when I was finally at home and editing my “travel video.”  I had taken about 30 hours of video while on this trip.  My practice is to take more video than I think I need and then edit it down to a manageable length video, in this case an hour “feature” of our trip through Asia.  I copied all of that footage into my computer and began to work my way through it, selecting scenes that I felt were important, and adjusting their duration so that they create a better pace for the viewer. 

I was anxious to include the shaman footage because it was so unusual and striking.  I easily found the footage, but discovered to my dismay that while the visual part was perfect, it had no audio!  Out of the 30 hours or so of raw footage, there was one two minute piece that had no audio – this segment.  Not just no sound, but no sound track at all – just blank tape that hadn’t been recorded on, not even with a silent signal. 

All the rest of the tape was perfect, just as I had expected.   I was so perplexed that I got my camera out to see if there was a chance that I had accidentally turned off the audio recording feature.  However, that camera is a "point and shot" model which doesn’t have a way to turn off the audio – you get sound no matter what you want.  You can’t adjust the volume, and can’t turn it off.  So, as far as I am concerned it remains a mystery. Could it be possible that the shaman had some "mysterious" power to prevent the recording? Who knows? It is just another little event to wonder about.

Spacemen in the desert

This story of alien spacemen in the desert takes place approximately in 1961 when I was about 14 or 15 years old.  It would have been during the cooler months, so it was probably either a Christmas or Easter break.  My mother, father and I had decided to spend another week at the Turtle Mountains looking for gold, Indian artifaces, and just nosing around in the desert.  As was normally the case, we got up at about 2:00 am to get a nice early start on the trip, which would get us into the camping spot in plenty of time to set up camp before dark.  On these trips I usually slept in the car until we were about in Bakersfield, in time for breakfast.

The trip was uneventful, but beautiful as always.  I especially liked the part of the desert from Mojave to Needles, passing through old railroad stops in alphabetical order – Amboy, Bagdad, Cadiz, Dagget, Essecs, etc.  At about 3:00 pm we pulled off the highway onto the desert track (it wasn’t really a road, it was just a track where you could tell vehicles used from time to time) toward Mopa Peaks and “our” campsite. 

When we got to the beginning of the wash up the canyon to Two Palm Springs, we were stopped by a cable strung across the road.  There was a white painted sign hanging in the middle cable.  The sign said, “Keep out, Government Project in Progress.”   The first thing that struck us was that the lettering was stenciled in black, but the paint had run down the sign so that it was really amateurish, not at all like a real government project.  If the government does anything right, it is that they make good looking signs.  Because of that, we decided that whatever was going on it was related to any government project.  In some ways that made it even more perplexing – after all this is government owned, BLM land and nobody has the right to post keep out signs. 

My dad decided that the best thing to do was to wait for a bit before going past the blocked off road, and set up camp for the night at the “rock wall.”  (When we first started going to the Turtles it was just a campfire with a couple of short rock walls set up to provide a wind break.  Over the years we added a few rocks on each trip, and the wall started to get much bigger.  Apparently others did the same, and it eventually began to look like the remains of an old cabin.  The BLM still claims that it is a cabin, but it really just a wind break.)

We set up camp and in a short time heard a vehicle slowly making its way down the sandy wash to the sign.  My father and I walked over to the sign to intercept them and find out what was going on, and to find out if we could gain access to the places that we had come to explore. Once at the gate we only had to wait a few minutes until a jeep with three men in it drove to our location.  The driver got out to open the cable gate and stopped to talk to us.  The two others stayed in the covered jeep.  I don’t recall exactly what they were wearing, but they were all dressed appropriately for being in the desert. 

After exchanging hellos with the driver, we told him that we had arrived a couple of hours ago and were camping over by the rock wall.  The driver said that he knew that because they had seen us when they flew over earlier in the day.   This was a surprise since we had seen no aircraft, and there was really no place that seemed likely to afford a landing place for an aircraft.  We asked what they were doing flying around in that area, and he said that they had been working on their spacecraft and were test flying it following some repairs.  I asked why they were there and they said that they were scientists and had been performing a survey of the planet when they developed trouble with their vehicle and were forced to land it to fix the problem. I asked why they had picked this location to work on their spacecraft, and the answer was that “they had flown over much of the area and this spot appeared to be the least contaminated with humans that they could find.”    This was a most unusual conversation to say the least. 

Once it was clear that this conversation was headed in rather unusual directions, I started to pay a bit more attention to these guys. One of the odd features of the guy sitting in the back seat of the jeep was that he had quite large (very large) ears.  I think this was before the time of Dr. Spock, but there had been movies with spacemen having large ears.  I thought it was kind of comical that these guys who claimed to be spacemen should have such big ears.  I then noticed a much more intriguing thing, which was that while I was talking – they weren’t.  I could “hear” and understand what they were saying, but it was as thoughts, not as sounds!  This was most unsettling to say the least. 

The conversation continued for some time.  One of our concerns was to be able to get to the spring to get water because we didn’t bring enough to last the week that we hoped to be there.   They showed great revulsion at this idea, saying that there were lots of little wiggly things in the water and that the water was therefore not fit to drink.  We tried to explain that since there were things living in the water, that meant that it WAS fit to drink, otherwise the water would not have any life in it.  They weren’t convinced at the logic of this.   We asked if we could go to the spring to get water, but they said that we were not allowed to enter the valley, and agreed to bring us water when they came back from town. 

The conversation when back and forth in this odd mode for awhile until they finally said good bye and drove away.   As they were driving away, my father (who is normally a most level headed guy), turned to me and asked if I noticed that they weren’t talking, but rather were just exchanging thoughts with us.  Now THAT really freaked me out.  I had kind of decided that I was just making the thought communication thing up because it was such an odd conversation.  However, to have my father bring up the topic meant that if nothing else it wasn’t just my imagination running wild, if so his was running wild in the same way.  We went back to camp and by the time we got there we talked a million words a minute telling my mother about what had just happened.

We spent the night there, but they never came back so we didn’t get our extra water. The next morning my curiosity got the better of me and I hiked up the back of a hill which I hoped would give me a view of their space vehicle.  However, I couldn’t see anything of interest from that vantage point because of the twists and turns in the valley.

We decided to go to town (Videl Junction) to get breakfast and some water.  The town has a California Agriculture inspection station, a small motel, a restaurant,   a tiny service station and a few houses.  I suppose the total population of town is about 50 people.  We went to the restaurant for breakfast.  We ordered out meals and when they were served, my father told the waitress that we were camping near Mopa Peaks and did she have any idea about what was going on out there (about 30 miles from town).  She didn’t answer, but rather finished serving us and then left.  In fact, everyone left the restaurant.  The other customers got up and left, the waitress left and so did the cook and helper.  We were left by ourselves in the restaurant.  When we finished there was nobody there to take our money, so my dad just left what seemed about right on the table.  We went outside to get water and some gasoline, but there was nobody in town to help us.  The service station was open, but empty.  We went across the street to the inspection station and it was empty.  We thought that maybe someone might be at the motel, but that was empty also.  Everyone had abandoned the place after we asked that question.  We finally got some water from a tap at the service station and went back to our camp spot.

We didn’t hear anything more from these self proclaimed spacemen, but didn’t go to our favorite spots because the cable and sign were still across the road.  The whole thing was weird enough that we didn’t want to push our luck.

We returned the following year to see if they left any signs of their activities, but could find nothing. That was the end of the story for about forty years until last year when my father and I got to talking about that day.  He said that the most unusual part of the whole thing was that they were there in a big, fancy, black car that couldn’t possibly drive in the part of the desert that we were in.  He just couldn’t figure out how they got there.  Not only that, but he couldn’t figure out why there were in the desert wearing suits and ties!

This was really weird because I saw folks in a jeep and cloths that made good sense in the area.  My father saw something entirely different.  Over the years I have often wondered if they were really spacemen, how did they get the cloths and jeep.  Now I realize that they didn’t get anything, they merely had us put them into cloths and a vehicle that we knew about.  They didn’t have to be able to speak English, or have these vehicles, they only had to get us to think about these things and they happened.

I guess I will never know what really happened that day, but I will not soon forget it either.  The whole thing stands out as a very strange close encounter of a weird kind.

Waking up at Burningman

During the 2002 Burning Man event I decided to be alone, rather than camp with a group of friends.  It wasn’t that I wanted to shun my friends; rather it was a desire to see what would happen if I didn’t have schedules or people to talk to.  Basically, I was exploring what would happen if I just let things happen on their own, without outside influences from friends.

I took my Jeep Cherokee and a small utility trailer that our family uses for camping.  The trailer made it easy to bring food, water, a stove and camping furniture.  I don’t like to sleep in tents, partly because I don’t like the process of setting them up and partly because I don’t like being hidden inside where I can’t see and feel what is going on around me. I like to watch the stars and like to see the morning light as dawn approaches.  For this reason I ended up sleeping in the back of the Jeep with the tailgate open (in order to let my long legs stick out of the back).  This kept most of the rain off, allowed me to close my stuff inside of the vehicle when the dust blew, and gave me a reasonable place to sleep.  Every morning I would heat a bucket of water to be used for a “shower,” dipping warm water over my head while standing next to my trailer.  This didn’t give much privacy, but privacy is not a big concern at the Burning Man.

I found my camping place to be just about perfect.  I had an open area within a circle of strangers.  However, it wasn’t very long before all of us knew each other because “my” open area was the common ground between the four or five encircling camps.  Everyone was very nice, and I very much enjoyed the freedom to come and go on my own schedule, while being able to stroll over to a neighboring camp for a visit at any time.  It was very relaxing.

One day early in the week I decided to take an extended bicycle tour around the camp, through the “residential” district.  It was one of those perfect days in the desert; no wind, a bit of chill in the air, and crystal clear blue skies.  My leisurely bicycle ride took me on a long dirt “road” between the tens of thousands of campsites set up by the attendees.  I was just sort of mindlessly riding along looking at the people and their ideas for the “perfect” camping experience, in awe of the creativity shown by the various campers. 

All of a sudden I felt like my attention shifted into a place that I had never experienced before.  It felt like I had woken up out of a dream.  It felt like I was directly seeing and experiencing what was there at that moment, rather than seeing it all through my filtering mind.  I don’t know how to describe this feeling, except to say that it felt good and clean and pure.  It was so strong that I stopped riding in order to just stand there and observe what was before me, taking it all in as an experience of the moment.

After a couple of minutes of this I realized that I was in a place of a disconnected observer, rather than as a participant. It was like I had dropped in from another planet and was observing the activities and characteristics of an alien community with little prior knowledge or expectations of who they were or what they were doing.  Having no filters meant that I had no expectations, which meant that it was all new and unknown.

What I saw made me laugh out loud, right there in the middle of the street.  I saw that everyone was preening to attract a partner.  The men were setting up their camps with lots of colored bobbles and interesting things to attract a partner. It struck me that it was very much like the mating activities of Bower birds. Bower bird males build a nest for their future, unknown, mate and then gather lots of colorful and interesting things that they place on the ground in front of the nest.  They like to get colored string, pieces of glittery things, colored fruit or flowers, seeds, or anything else that they can find that would catch the eye of the female.  If they are successful in creating an attractive nest, and have the right objects of attraction for the lady bird, she might stop in for a chat.  Of course this just gets the lady within speaking distance, what happens next is up to the two of them to figure out.  The actions at Burning Man are very much like that.  Each person is putting out (or on) interesting things to attract a potential mate (or maybe just a friend).  It was comical because I could see clearly that everyone thought they were acting as creative individuals, when in fact they were acting from an instinctual drive. 

This is just a small part of what saw that day.  As I spent the next couple of hours slowly riding through the camps among all of the people doing their various wonderful and wacky things, I just stayed in the position of an awakened observer not really interpreting what I saw and felt, just noticing.  That experience turned the entire week into a magical time for me because I stayed close to that point of view the entire time.  Not only that, but in many ways it has stayed with me.  I now find it much easier to just step back in my mind’s eye and observe, feel, and experience without always filtering everything through my past experiences and knowledge. I have learned to find a place of peace and calm in the midst of almost any amount of chaos.   I don’t mean that I am somehow reserved or distant, but rather it is the opposite – I am more often present in the moment, rather than dreaming of the past or the future.  This makes me more present and connected with the people I am with, rather than more distant.  That moment on the bicycle was a shift in perception that continues to resonate through my view of the world four years later. I suspect it will stay with me for the rest of my life (at least, I hope that it does because it is like a shroud has been lifted for me).

Birthday

The day was the day that my grandson, Hayden, was born in 2003.  I had been working in Santa Clara, so ended up at the hospital an hour or so after his birth.  I expected to find a bunch of giddy, happy people – but instead found quiet, concerned people because Hayden wasn’t doing so good.  He had a problem with his heart beat and respiration.  The biggest concern was a very uneven, and rapid, pulse plus whatever it was that was causing this.

 My family wanted me to see him, but that was kind of a scary thing because he was in a room by himself, in an incubator, hooked up to all sorts of monitors, tubes and wires.  Because he was “wired” it was easy to see and hear the problems with his heart on the monitor above his bed.

I watched him for a few minutes and then had an urge to hold him – holding him flat in my hands on his back, not like you normally hold a newborn baby snuggled in your arms.  For some reason it seemed right to me to hold him in my hands like an offering, rather than as a baby.  Once I held him, I could feel an odd sort of warmth that felt like love, moving through my arms and hands, into his body.  It was a very nice, warm, comfortable feeling of contentment and good will.  I really don’t know how to describe it other than to say that it felt warm, good, and as if  I was sending  energy and love though my hands to him.

As I did that I noticed his monitor changing.  His heart beat got more stable, slowed down and within a couple of minutes became “normal.”  After a short time (not more than three or four minutes), it felt like the energy flow was done and I could put him down.  I knew then that he was now ok, and that he would be fine.  This turned out to be the case.  They held him in intensive care for a couple more hours just to observe, but from that point on he was just a normal little kid doing everything just right.

My wife was in the room at the time that this happened. Afterward she said that it felt like the entire room had been filled with a powerful, loving energy.  She said it kind of pulsed or vibrated, and she knew that everything was going to be okay because of the power of that energy.

I had nothing to do with this event in the sense of intending it, or trying to make it happen.  I just felt an urge to do what I did, and then it just felt like it did.  Whatever was happening was happening through me, but not by me.  My wife and I were the only ones that seemed to know what was happening.  I didn’t feel that anyone else had to be in on it unless they already were.

Recapitulation

I first heard about the practice of recapitulation in Carlos Castanada’s books.  He briefly talks about the importance of using a practice of going back and re-experiencing life events as an important way to get access to our personal energy.  However, while he mentions it and alludes to its power, he doesn’t give enough details to really be able to do it.  Then a few of his fellow warriors (women) wrote books about don Juan and the path of the warrior.  They are much more specific about the importance of this practice, and give descriptions that are clear enough to actually do the practice.   When I met my leader/guide/teacher/mentor Ramin, he stressed the importance of this practice, and suggested a book by Victor Sanchez  (The Teachings of don Carlos) that describes how to do this practice.  Ramin highly recommended it as a necessary step toward getting access to our personal power.

Sometime around 1996 it became clear that if I was serious about learning what the Toltec path to wisdom I would have to do this practice of recapitulating my life, so I dedicated at least a year to it.  My original agreement with myself when I started talking classes from Ramin was to do what he suggested for a year to see if it was worthwhile.  I had completed this year and found it to be exactly what I was hoping for.  An additional year dedicated to taking the next step seemed reasonable to me.

Ramin was teaching the recapitulation practices to his students, and was leading us in the basics.  I followed him as best I could, but since he got the information from Mr. Sanchez’s book, and Sanchez got the information from Carlos’ books I decided to go directly to Carlos and Carlos’ fellow warrior’s books for direction.  This means that while I generally followed Ramin’s and Mr. Sanchez’s suggestions, I deviated in a few places to be closer to the source material instructions.  I believe the differences are not critically important.

The idea behind the practice is to re-experience (recapitulate) all of the important experiences in our lives in such a way as to be able to release the energy that we have invested in them.  The point is that a lot of our personal energy is bound up in these past experiences, and that through this practice it is possible to free up that energy for use.  We have a limited amount of total energy, the goal is not to make new energy, but merely to gain better access to the energy that we already have. The energy is almost always bound up with people that we have known, and the connections go both ways.  Sometimes we are holding them with our energy, and sometimes they are holding us with theirs.  In both cases, we are not free.  My goal is to be free.

The idea behind this process is pretty bizarre, it involves something that I can talk about, and know a little about, but mostly it is just weird.  Carlos talks about our “egg” of energy.  He says that people consist of a large egg shaped ball of energy fibers surrounding our body.  These fibers are our connection to the universe and allow us to perceive the world around us.  We interact using these fibers. Where the fibers come together they form what he calls the “assemblage point.”  (This point is located at about an arms length behind our right shoulder.  The exact location of the assemblage point on this ball of luminous fibers determines how we perceive the world.  Move it and our view of the world changes – actually, the world changes; it is more than just our view of it.  These fibers get “hooked” with other people’s fibers during our life, which means that we loose our ability to use those hooked fibers.  Recapitulation is a method for unhooking those bound up fibers and getting our egg back into shape, patching any holes and smoothing out any snarls that might have occurred during the tossing and tumbling of life. 

The first step in the process of recapitulation is to identify all of the important events/people in your life.  This would be a lot easier for a younger person.  For a fifty-year-old like me, it includes a LOT of important events.  Partly based upon directions from Ramin, but mostly from directions from Carlos and his cohorts, I made a chronological list of all of the people that I could recall in my life.  I did this by breaking my life into phases (houses where I lived, jobs that I had) and then working my way through the memories of these phases.  This part of the process took me about three months working a hour or two every day.  At first I tried to sort out the important people from the unimportant ones, but finally settled on the idea that if I could still remember them, they were important for some reason.  The ones that I couldn’t remember might not be so important.  I tried to identify them by name, but in some instances I couldn’t recall names, so instead I made short descriptions to remind me of them. The names weren’t important, but the memory of them and our experiences together were.  This list ended up including about 3,000 people.  I did it using the computer so I could sort them and print the list for future use.

The experience of doing this first step was amazing!  It connected my life into a single whole experience rather than a long series of experiences. I had tended to forget, or not pay attention to, past experiences and was just moving along in the bubble of the present.  This is not a bad thing, this focus on the present is what I am trying to achieve.  However, the experience of remembering all of this somehow broke the bounds of the present and made me realize that the past and the present are all here in the moment, we do not really leave the past behind.  It is hard to explain, but I ended up feeling like the past, present and future were illusions – the reality is that it is all one.  Just this part of the process turned out to be an amazing experience.

Then came the recapitulation part. I made a wooden box to sit in while recapitulating.  The box was just big enough so that I could sit cross-legged within it without touching the walls or top.  It was tied together with cotton string; I used no metal in its construction.  It was made from 1x6 boards, leaving cracks between the boards for ventilation.  The front came off to make a door and there were no windows or other openings.  I put the box in a shed out in our backyard within our forest of eucalyptus trees to protect it from the elements.  Every day for about a year I would take my list of names, and sit in the box going person by person down the list until I had revisited everyone on the list.

I had a candle in the box with me so I had enough light to read the list.  I would tear off the name of the next person on the list and recapitulate them.  In reality, I wasn’t exactly recapitulating them, I was recapitulating the events associated with them – but these two are so closely connected that I gave up trying to figure out the distinction.  When I finished with a person, I burned their name and added it to a can of ashes. 

I soon realized that there was a problem with dealing with the events associated with a person because people that I know well, and for a long time, have hundreds or thousands of events associated with them – many of them very important indeed.  I started to wonder if I should recapitulate each event or each person.  I had to decide how to deal with this.  Going back to don Juan’s instructions, it seemed like the idea was that we make connections to people in our lives. These connections are more or less permanent, and continue to influence our lives long after they were created.  In the process of recapitulation, we are trying to disconnect these connections.  Therefore, it is only necessary to go back to the last time that we encountered them – at that time all of the connections would exist and be available to us.  I followed his guidance and just concentrated on the last event that I had with each person.

I decided that the process is a purely magical one, meaning that it has little or no meaning to my logical mind – it just works.  I had to give up on making any sense out of it and do it with the assumption that something was happening.  The process is pretty simple.  (1) I imagined the person and the event surrounding the last time that I could recall seeing them. (2) I then watched that event from the prospective of being outside, kind of like watching a movie.  (3) Then I “jumped” into the event, recalling what it was like from the inside when it was happening.  At this step I tried to remember it as clearly as possible, including sights, smells, sounds, temperature, etc.  The more complete this was the better.  This step involved the realignment of the assemblage point with where it was at that previous time.  The realignment brings those connections that existed at that moment back in a way that allows them to be changed again. (4) I then jumped back out to see the view as in a movie, but this time including the smells and other things, and then finally (5) I breathed to release the energy. 

The breathing was done in a special way.  I turned my head toward the right shoulder and breathed in through my nose while slowly turning my head toward the left shoulder, retrieving energy that I used to connect and hold the other.  I then breathed out while turning my head from left to right, releasing energy that the other was holding me with.  I would focus on breathing in for awhile, then on breathing out for awhile.  I would breathe like this, imagining the energy being released from both directions, until it felt like there were no more connections.   At that point I was finished with that person, and would light the paper with their name and burn it up, placing the ashes in a can with ashes of all of the others.

Once in awhile I would come across an event that contained a special jewel for me.  These were times when I found the source of agreements that I had made about myself and who I am.  It turns out that our self image and our understanding of who we are come from a long series of agreements that we have made with ourselves, usually based upon things that others have told us while we were growing up, or just during life.  Things like, “you are not handsome.”  Oh, really?  Ok, I agree with that, I am not handsome.  “You are good at science.” Oh really?  I agree, I am science oriented and good at it.  “You are too stupid to do that.”  Sorry, I can’t do that, I am too stupid.  It goes on and on and on.  We slowly build up the story of who we are, what we can do, what we cannot do, what we like, etc. based on all of these little agreements.  This is not a bad thing; it is just the way it is. The problem is that we make the agreements without thinking about them, based upon assumptions of what was meant that are usually wrong, and we make a whole set of conflicting and confusing agreements because we get input from many people and experiences all jumbled together.  This helps to explain the mess that we are when we try to untangle who we “really are.”  We sometimes have a chance to revisit these agreements, and change them.

While recapitulating, now and then I came across events and people that seemed to be at the root of some agreement that I had about myself.  I then had the chance to re-visit that agreement and make a conscious decision about whether or not I wanted to keep it.  I could decide right then and there to discard it.  However, I couldn’t just throw it away; I had to replace it with something.  At about this same time I had read don Miguel’s little book “The Four Agreements”.  It turned out that in almost all cases I could replace my unwanted agreement with one or more of the four agreements.  I didn’t have to change from “I am stupid” to “I am smart,” all I had to do was change from “I am stupid” to “I will do the best that I can”.  With this simple change I dropped the judgments and baggage that came with the initial agreement.

This process was hugely liberating!  Day after day I found that I kept feeling more and more free.  I stopped worrying about problems with others, stopped trying to hold others with my energy, stopped letting them hold on to me.  I started being solid and strong by myself.  At first I was afraid that this process would ruin my feelings of love for my family and friends because I was confused about the difference of being attached, and being in love.  It is true, I lost my attachments – but that was a good thing.  I could finally just feel my love and allow myself to enjoy them and our relationship, no attachments and no controlling the other is needed. Love and friendship are not based upon holding onto and controlling the other.  In fact, it is just the opposite.  It is involved in allowing the other to be free, and enjoying them just as they are without trying to change or control that.  Instead of making me become isolated from my friends and loved ones, it brought me much closer but in a much warmer and comfortable way. 

Not only did this process help me to get closer to others, it helped me to let go of damaging agreements that were not useful to me.  It also allowed me to feel much more empowered to be able to use (or withhold) my energy to suite my needs.  I no longer feel compelled to use up all of my energy on things that don’t matter.  I feel like I am now much freer to be me, and much less compelled to be what I think others what me to be.

By the time I had spent a year sitting in my box, burned the last name from my list, and burned the box - I was floating in the clouds.  I feel peace and joy with life most of the time, even when it was not “fun” or peaceful.  I stand up tall and look life straight on with fearlessness and excitement to see what is coming next.  I find that I am much more relaxed and patient with my friends and loved ones because I just enjoy the time that I am having with them at the moment, there is nothing more important to do than what I am doing.  I find that what people do and say has not nearly the impact on me.  I can see clearly that what they say and do tells me a lot about them, but very little about me – so if they say something bad, or say something good, about me it is not about me – it is about them.  I don’t a need to let them “hook” me, and I don’t have to try to “hook” them. (In fact, when I do then I go back and unhook later in a mini-recapitulation exercise.  It just isn’t worth the extra work later on, so I avoid that in the first place.)  This doesn’t mean that I don’t let myself like or love them, or accept their good feelings; it just means that I don’t accept the controlling aspects of the relationship.

My year of sitting in my box was a true turning point in my life.  I no longer am able to return to be the person that I was before I met Ramin and started on the path of the warrior.  I am now on a path full of love, hope, joy, excitement and mystery.  I will never be able to go back, nor would I want to.

Bicycle Ride

The summers in Sonoma were times of high adventure for me as I was growing up.  I spent my time hiking in the hills (we called them “mountains”) between Sonoma and Boyes Hot Springs, swimming in one of the six public swimming pools within my “territory,” hanging out with friends, or riding my bicycle. 

One of my bicycle haunts was down by Sonoma Creek where there was a grove of oak trees in what must have been part of a park at one time.  The grove consisted of a couple of acres of flat land with trees that were either planted, or thinned out, to make nice shady picnic areas next to the creek.  The creek was normally almost dry during the summer months.  There were small ponds with warm water, green scum and giant bullfrog polliwogs in between the large, rounded boulders lining the bed of the creek. 

At the end of the grove of trees there was a dirt road leading down to the creek bed.  The road angled steeply down for thirty feet or so, and then bent to the right, going around an “island” of land that rose steeply on all sides – creating a peaked hill about 15 feet tall.  At the top of the hill was a single oak tree spreading its shady limbs over the hill and part of the creek below.  The side of the hill facing the creek had been eroded into a vertical cliff falling away from the tree to the boulder filled creek more than twenty feet below the peak of the hill.

I liked to visit this part of the creek because there were fish, frogs, pollywogs, crawdads and other creatures in the pools.  It was also a great access point for hikes up or down the creek.  During that summer, each time I visited on my bicycle I would ride down the first part of the dirt road and up the side of the island at the curve, hoping to ride all the way to the top.  I would get part way up, run out of speed and fall over – tumbling back down the hill.  I knew that if I went fast enough I could make it to the top, but since there was just barely enough room on the top to park the bike before going over the cliff I had to be careful to judge my speed to avoid that possibility. Every time I tried it I would go a little faster and get a little higher up the hill before falling over and tumbling back down the hill.

One day I decided that it was time to get to the top. I started way back in the grove of trees and pedaled as fast I could.  I was really going by the time I got to the road, bouncing around on the rough road.  I flew down the road, turned up the hill and didn’t slow down at all!  In a flash I was at the top of the hill, into the air, and still climbing.  As I flew up into the air,   I felt that time almost stopped.  It was like I was suspended in time and space. I had all the time in the world to check out my new predicament. I looked down and saw that I was well past the edge of the cliff, headed upward in a nice gentle curve that had a trajectory leading me to the middle of the creek below – right into the place with the biggest and nastiest looking boulders.  I thought about stopping, but since I had long since left the ground it was obvious that wasn’t an option.  I let go of my bike, feeling like I was hanging almost motionless, and bike-less, in the air. 

On my right side I noticed a big limb of the tree reaching out over the creek, the limb was right next to me, parallel to my flight path.  I reached over and grabbed onto that limb. The next thing I knew I was swinging from the branch, watching my bicycle continue through its arch and then falling front wheel first onto the rocks in the very place that I had predicted.  It bounced and crashed with a resounding smashing sound, ending up in a scum covered pond with broken spokes and a bent frame.  I swung there from the limb for a little bit imagining what it would have been like if that tree hadn’t reached out and caught me.  I think that might well have been the end of my adventures for that summer.

I finally reached up with my legs, encircling the limb - holding on upside down.  I inched my way back to the trunk of the tree onto firm ground and went to rescue my bicycle.  It was a little bent, but still usable.  It was covered in long, green, pond scum.  After cleaning it up a bit I was back on the saddle, no harm done – thankful to that grand old tree that was just waiting there to catch a stupid boy in its arms.

Cyclical Lives

This story isn’t really a “story” at all.  Rather it is about an epiphany that I had concerning some of the Buddhist teachings that I have been studying lately. 

Over the years that I have read about Buddhism I have been puzzled about the issue of cyclical life, and karma.  One of the reasons that I find Buddhism to be attractive is that is not a religion in the usual sense of the word.  It is based upon observations, rather than a belief in a divine creator.  I am attracted to the Toltec style of spirituality for the same reason.  Because they are both basically experiential in nature, they both have a lot of common themes, questions and answers.  However, Buddhism has the strange belief in cyclical lives that leaves me puzzled. 

I see no reason to believe in something that is totally unknowable (and not available to be experienced), such as a divine creator, or multiple lives.  These types of beliefs in myths don’t add anything to my spirituality, and in fact just seem to detract in many subtle, and not so subtle, ways.

I realize that at the same time as I say this I am willing to entertain beliefs in many other unknown things such as energy connecting living beings that can be used for communication and healing.  I am also more than willing to “call” for support from the “great spirit” or the “spirits of the four directions.”  Admittedly, this seems to require a belief in some unknowable things.  The difference is that I don’t think they are unknowable, only unknown.  I can test them and maybe even experience them.  I seem to be able to experience energy flowing, but not the spirits.  However, I am currently of the opinion that the idea behind things like that sprites of the directions isn’t that they are beings of some sort, but rather that they represent these invisible energies which may, or may not, exist.  I have come to the conclusion that everything that we experience is in our mind (it is all a kind of dream).  If I experience something, that has a lot of value to me – even if I know that it is “only in my head” – after all, that is all that we get, what is in our heads.  I’ll suppose that I will keep playing with these ideas until such time as I either know that they really do exist, that they don’t exist, or I finally die.

Then it hit me, it really doesn’t matter whether or not the myth of a cyclical series of lives is true in the strict sense, it is true in an even more fundamental sense that impacts all of us all of the time.  The idea is connected to the concepts of impermanence, karma and who we are (or more importantly, are not)

It has become clear to me that we are not who we think we are, we keep changing.  The “I” that was me twenty years ago is certainly not the “I” of today. I feel like there is a connection or continuity since childhood, but when I think back to those times it is as if I am looking back not only to a different time, but to a different person.  Some days seem to go from day to day and I stay the same (it seems like I stay the same because the changes are small, but I keep changing nevertheless).  Then something might happen to make a large change, all at once.  Perhaps meeting a new person, or losing an old friend.  The outcome is that we feel different, and ARE different – we are a new person.  The “I” is no longer the “I” of just a short time ago.  We have been reborn in a real way.  So that is the trick, we are reborn again and again, in a cyclical nature.  The idea of a cyclical rebirth makes sense, even if you don’t want to buy into the concept of a cycling beyond death.  It does indeed seem that we are in a recurring cycle of birth and death of “I”, which can be changed on any of the cycles.  This can be thought of as on the smaller time frame of our current lives, or on the time from of infinity.  From my point of view, the span of my life is effectively infinity.

I had already worked out in my mind the idea of karma can be thought of as within this life, or within the unknowable multiple lives beyond death and before birth.  It seems to me that karma clearly works within a lifetime.  Everything we do changes the world that we will experience next.  Not only that, but it moves out from us like the waves from a stone dropped into a pool, effecting others further and further away from us and that instant.  These then change others, which then send waves back toward us, impacting us once again.  The point is that we all impact each other, which impacts and changes our future lives (or future “I’s”).

We can indeed stop being caught in a life pattern that is just a continual cycle of pain and suffering, we can change who the next “I” is going to be if we truly desire to do so.  Not only that, but karma has something to do with how we can do that.  For example, if we decide to lead a “moral” life, it will change the karma that spreads from us, which will change the karma that comes back to us from others, which will change the things around us and interactions with others, which will change who we are.  We will then have been reborn into a new incarnation of “I” which is closer to what we desire – living in happiness and full of love.

Once it dawned on me that the messages of Buddhism can be applied to this life (the one between my birth and my impending death), I found that I didn’t have to worry about whether or not the myth of multiple lives is true or not.  It is clearly true from my vantage point, I can see and experience that it is true within this life.  That is good enough for me.

Angel Lady

I encountered my first “angel” sometime in the summer of 1995 or 1996 in the town of Zamora. I had recently joined the local volunteer fire department and was still quite nervous about going to automobile accidents for fear that I would do something wrong and hurt someone. Actually, “nervous” is an understatement, “terrified” is closer to the truth.

One day I got a call on my fire department pager in the middle of the day notifying me that there had been an accident on one of the main county roads just outside of town.  I quickly put on my “turnouts” and rushed off to the call, but came upon the accident before I managed to get to the fire department.  I parked my car and went to see what I could do.  The accident was a very serious one where a small car had been hit in the driver’s side door by the pickup end of a harrow bed.  A harrow bed is basically a large trucks based machine that is used to pickup and stack bales of hay from the fields.  It has a long “scoop” device that sticks out the front of the vehicle.  The scoop moves up and down so that it can slide under a bail, picking it up off of the ground.  The bail is then placed onto a conveyor belt that moves it toward the rear of the vehicle where it is automatically stacked.  Since harrow beds are built on truck chassis, they travel on normal roads at highway speeds when going from field to field during the haying season.  One of these machines had hit the driver’s door of a small, hatch-backed car, sticking the scoop part into the driver’s space.

The driver of the car had pulled out in front of the harrow bed at an intersection, and the scoop device crashed through the door, crushing the driver to the right side, pressing her down into the lap of the passenger.  The mangled door and intruding scoop device held her down in a bent over, sideways position. Our problem was to safely and quickly get the driver and the passenger out of the car.  The car was so crushed that both of the ladies in the car were trapped, and the driver was obviously very seriously injured with massive head and torso injuries.  The scoop end of the harrow bed was intertwined with the wreckage, and had lifted the front portion of the car off of the ground.  This event happened before the department owned a “jaws of life” device, so extrication had to be done with hammers, axes, saws, bars or whatever was available.  My job was to get inside of the car next to the women, calming them as much as possible, hold a tarp over them to protect them from broken glass, and do whatever I could to help them medically. 

The three of us ended up in a very tight position in the front seats.  We were covered up so we couldn’t see what was happening outside, but we could hear and feel the banging and twisting of metal as the firemen worked at opening enough space to pull the women free from the wreckage.  It was pretty disorienting and rather frightening being unable to see out, while being so close to the victims.  The passenger did not seem to have a medical emergency, but was very hysterical.  She was screaming, crying and calling for her friend.  Her friend’s head was smashed into her lap so she couldn’t move.  Her friend was clearly in extremely serious danger, she was unconscious, bent in ways that are impossible for a normal person, and was bleeding out of her head, mouth and ears.  Blood was pooling in the passenger’s lap.  While it was clear that this was an emergency situation, there was nothing that I, nor anyone else, could do to help the driver because of the position of her body, the passenger, and the tangled mess of metal surrounding her.  All that I could do was try to calm the passenger and hold my hands on the driver’s head in a futile gesture of compassion. 

I quickly found myself enveloped in a very strange feeling of love and compassion.  It felt like the three of us had been somehow transported into a new dimension where we were in a bubble, separate from the rest of the world.  The passenger calmed down and it just felt like we were somehow outside of time with the three of us joined together in a single energy field. 

After some time passed (I have no idea how long it was), the passenger asked me about her daughter.  This took me by surprise because as far as I knew, there were only two people in the accident.  I asked her what she was talking about and she told me that her young daughter was in the back seat of the car.  I looked back there and found there was no back seat!  It had been ripped loose.  The car was crushed and mangled, but there was nobody else in the car.  I had the thought that the daughter must have been thrown out of the car and was lying injured in a ditch somewhere, unattended because we didn’t know of her presence.

I decided to get out of the car and go find the little girl.  As I started to do so, I came face to face with a very nice looking lady in her late twenties or early thirties.  She put up her hand to stop me and very forcefully said that I needed to stay where I was, that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, and that the little girl was uninjured.  She said that she was the girl’s guardian angel and had taken the girl out of the car following the accident.   She told me that she had taken the girl to a nearby parking lot and was helping her. She also said that my job was to stay with the mother and the driver, her job was to look after the little girl.  For some odd reason, I was convinced at that moment that she was just what she claimed to be (an angel), and that her directions were to be followed.  I returned to my job of holding the energy and light within the vehicle.

The other firemen finally got enough of the vehicle untangled and torn apart to be able to slide the driver out from under the steering wheel.  I helped pull the passenger out of the car and place her on a gurney.  I then returned to help extricate the driver.  The first task I had to do was to reach through the passenger side door, lying over the driver in order to get her feet to move them out from under the pedals.  The EMT person who was helping told me to help pull and lift her out, but warned me that when we pulled on the girl (the driver) we would probably pull her in half and she would die immediately!  My mind’s eye raced to the vision of seeing the girl’s guts and blood spill out as we tried to pull her free.  This image just about did me in, but somehow I stayed steady and calm.   Happily, the girl stayed in one piece and we were able to get her onto another gurney, perform some emergency procedures on her, and place her into a waiting ambulance. 

The passenger was once again screaming and crying in hysteria.  She wanted to see her daughter and wanted her friend to not die.  I told her that I would get her daughter for her, but that she had to become strong for her daughter, she couldn’t be screaming and hysterical or it would hurt her daughter.  I held her hands and she finally calmed herself, and I went to get the daughter.  I found her easily, but the lady that I had talked to was nowhere to be found.  A few neighbors were taking care of the little girl, but no angels were visible.

Once they were taken away by the ambulances, we heard nothing more about the two young women.  I wanted feedback from the hospital concerning their condition, but that was not available.

For the next few days I kept having very uneasy feelings about the driver.  My mind kept going back to her, drawn somehow not so much by the image of that day, but by her in the hospital.  I assumed that it was just that I was still in the drama/trauma of the event.  About a week later I was sitting in meditation in the early morning as the sun came up in the east.  I felt strongly drawn to the image of the driver, who was in the hospital 30 or so miles away.  It was as if I was being pulled that way, more than just my attention being pulled – it felt like a physical force.  I was noticing that when all of a sudden my body started to shake and shiver as if something was physically shaking me about.  I felt hot, and then cold, and was shivering all over.  This didn’t last long, just a few seconds, and then I felt calm and peaceful.  It was like a wave that came over me and then passed, leaving a great calmness behind.  It felt like I was finally finished with my job, I was released and at ease.

That day we heard more about the women.  The passenger was not serious injured, as I had expected.  The driver was very seriously injured with many internal injuries, broken bones, and a serious head injury.  She had been in a coma up until that morning, when she finally woke up.  As far as I was able to determine, she woke up about the same time that I felt the shivering.  I later heard that the driver survived, but was confined to a wheelchair.  I don’t know what the final outcome has been for the driver, and have not seen either of the ladies since that day.

As a final note, there was a lawsuit concerning the design of the intersection and the county put up a new flashing light to control the intersection.  As a result of this accident, the fire department purchased a “jaws of life,” which has aided us to more quickly rescue several people.

Walking the path

I have been fasting in alignment with the Muslim time of Ramadan.  It is a one month period of time each year where they (I say “they” because I am not a Muslim) do a number of spiritual activities, including fasting between the hours of sun up and sun down.  No food, no drinks (including water), no “eating” other people’s energy, no sex, and no alcohol for the month.  I am a week into it and am finding it to be a much more meaningful, and powerful, activity than I had anticipated.  The hunger and thirst during the day is a small part of it.  They just provide a reminder of what I am trying to accomplish, which is to become more clear about who I am and what I am doing.

A very dear friend of mine wrote the following poem about this task of remembering, seeing and understanding. Enjoy.

WALKING THE PATH
I walk along the path,
I stop here and there.
I see light, I see reflection of light.
I stop and look here and there.
I walk along the path,
I see my reflection here and there.

I walk and watch along the path,
I see familiar faces and hear clear voices.
And when I get to the end of the path,
I wonder, What was my intention to walk this path?
and I ponder, where have I been and where have I gone?
So I wonder as I walk along the path.
What are the seeds of my desire?
I walk alone the path to the end of my time and
wonder,
where have I gone with the seeds of my desire?
I walk along the path to the end of my time and
wonder,
where have I gone?
Ramin Yazdani October 2005

Feeling energy

Feeling energy

Charlie

It was sometime around 2001.  I was attending a spiritual gathering with some Toltec acquaintances of mine.  It was a group that I didn't really know very well - although I did know a couple of the folks from previous meetings.  The meeting was in the evening and we had "warmed" up by meditating a bit, saying some prayers, playing drums and other instruments, and generally enjoying ourselves.  The leader had us do some energy exercises.  We paired off in twos.  I was pared with a lady that I slightly knew.  We were asked to sit cross legged on the floor facing each other.  Then both persons were to close their eyes and one would "feel" the energy, or aura, of the other by feeling the space between them and around the other person with their hands.  I was the first to be the "feeler," she was to be the person who I felt. 

I found this to be a very unsettling exercise being basically a non-believer in this kind of weird thing.  I consider myself to be an engineer/physicist and was (and am at some level) convinced that there is no energy that can be felt in this way.  However, since I had made an agreement with myself to do as asked as long as it isn't too dangerous, I played along with the game.  I allowed myself to be blindfolded, and reached out with my hands to explore the space between us.  We were positioned so I wouldn't be able to get closer than about a foot, maybe a bit more,  from her with my hands.  For quite some time this went as expected, I waved my hands around and felt nothing.  I didn't expect anything more and wasn't disappointed. 

I started to notice a warm sensation in the palms of my outstretched hands.  As I moved my hands around I could feel it getting warmer and cooler, depending upon where they were placed.  There was a certain place that they felt very warm.  The feeling was very much like moving my hands toward and away from a hot cloths iron.  In fact, I finally stopped because I was a little worried that it would actually burn me if I got too close. So I just kind of played with the sensation, moving my hands closer and further away from her, and up and down - feeling the boundaries of the heat.

After we were done, we took off our blindfolds and talked to each other about the experience.  She told me that I was hurting her by pressing too hard on her left shoulder/breast area.  She said that I was pushing in and out too hard, and that it felt almost painful, but not quite painful.  Then she said that she had a serious medical problem in that area (she didn't say what it was and since she didn't offer that information, I didn't ask).  She just said that she had a problem, and that I was pressing the energy in that location and causing significant pressure and warmth to the injured area.

The experience stuck in my mind because it was the first time that I had an independent agreement with the experience of feeling the "energy" of an illness or disease.  I was very sorry that I made her feel uncomfortable; if I had known that I was actually impacting her I would have been much more careful and gentle.  As it was, I had no idea that she would be able to feel what I was doing, more or less that I might make her feel pain or be ill at ease.

I have never seen that lady again since that time.  I have often wondered if by some weird magic that experience might have helped her to heal.  I have had no feedback since then, so as far as I am aware it was just an experience of the two of us feeling some kind of hot, powerful energy.