Looking over 2009

I've been meaning to write on here again for some time, but it never seemed to materialize despite many opportunities. When last I wrote I was reclining for several weeks at Stacey's in Springfield, Mass. A month later I find myself still reclining, but this time at my Aunt Holly's in southern California snowed in atop the San Bernadino Mountains. Between that 3,000 plus mile gap was an equally extended drop in to Denver for the New Year. All in all, at least for the moment, I've slowed down considerably from my blitz back in October and November.

This time has been a good time to sit back and look over what happened in these past nine months. The most valuable thing that comes to mind at the moment has been the onset of calming down from my fanaticism earlier in the year. Its time now to look over what really happened and share it.

When I posted my last post, which was really just sharing an allegory I liked, Todd, ever my foil, criticized me with a response post challenging that I was being told what to think since I had added no insights of my own. At the time there was some significantly unspoken tension between us that, in my view, had continued building steadily since our time in Michigan & Ohio back in June. I was, however, confused by the criticism as it seemed contrived.

A few days, perhaps even the next day, we ran into each other online after several weeks of only sporadic communications. We cleared the air quite a bit between us that night, and my confusion over his criticism was cleared up by a surprising realization. I had added no insight to the allegory because to me that seemed redundant to do. My thinking and my writing over those previous months had been dramatically separate from one another.

What Todd was pointing out last month was that I never really delved into what I was coming to believe in these posts, where I had thought I was going on about nothing but. While in Port Townsend, with plenty of time to write, I remember feeling like the writing I was putting up on this site were inadequately describing where my thoughts were going. Things were happening and I felt completely unable to describe them aloud.

To go back to June, I had given my sister a book called Many Lives, Many Masters on Stacey's recommendation. She enjoyed the book and concepts in it so much she highly recommended I read myself, which I did along with two others by the same author, Brian Weiss, as soon as I got into Denver in July. The book, as the title suggests, is about reincarnation, karma to a lesser extent, but mainly talked about physical life as a sort of school for the soul. The allegory I found in December at Stacey's a thought did a good job of articulating how I had come to understand the concept.

Back in July I was so inspired by these books that I felt the need to get my own experience on these concepts. I ended up meeting Greg through a Craigslist post who had a near death experience 20 years ago. I met with him to hear his description of what happened with the idea of comparing it to the stories I'd always heard from my grandfather who had also talked of dying for a minute after a heart attack.

Ever since high school I've always wondered about the point of life and all of that. Everyone in those days dug up their own hip new religion to follow, be it Wicca, Satanism, Hindism, Islam, Buddhism, or simply proclaiming agnostic or atheist. I read through many of those but the all seemed essentially the same. The options seemed to be nothing happens at all, one evolves to a higher plane of existence based on personal behavior, or you simply came back again. None of these seemed to serve a point to me. Clearly the most scientific of nothing happening served no point, behavior based spiritual evolution left me figuring that once in that next plane then what, and coming back again seemed equally pointlessly cyclical.

I've talked before about my great grandmother, Mimi's, family famed ability to channel spirits. This, among other stories and experiences I've had, left me convinced that the idea that nothing happened after death was quite unlikely. Reincarnation has always seemed to me the most likely but it left me wondering who these people were that Mimi was channeling if everyone's coming back, especially since an old 17th Century bard was the main character of a famous story that link will tell you all about, and he showed up over a span of 80 years in the past century. Anyway, all of this has always fascinated me and looking into it was a main catalyst for this past year's adventure.

Other things I've read, much like this story in India, added to my curiosity and the Many Lives book finally gave me a concept to look into that made sense. The concept that came from channeling "higher spirits", who were done with coming back to bodies, was, in short, that being in a physical body was a "school" for the spirits education into an eventual God-like reassembly. This still doesn't cure my cyclical notions, but the concept, along with Greg's description of what it feels like to be in this "light" everyone talks about after death, definitely sounded intriguing.

The overall concept is as cliche as any hippie can spew out amid crystals and pyramids, but looking over all the spiritual gurus of the past, my own experiences with spiritual pursuit, and the various first hand tales I've heard of others it all fits together. My grasp of it has shifted very little with all this, but has more been reinforced, so I could be still hanging on to preconceived bias.

That said, my overall belief is possibly best described as The Force from Star Wars. An energy surrounds us and binds us together causing influence over each other, plants, animals, the whole lot included. That energy is what we describe often as God, Allah, The Universe, The Fates, even luck, but I believe it is one large soul to which we are "driplets" off of it. This gives an explanation for telepathy and other such ESP-ish things.

From what Greg and my grandfather, among other second hand sources I've read about, when you die there's some sort of light that envelops you which brings a sense of peace and you are reunited with some important people from your life. According to the channeling entities in Weiss' books and the Many Mansions book I discovered back on New Years Eve of '08 many people you know in life travel with you life to life, sometimes switching roles and otherwise playing karmically off each other to give these souls a full perspective.

As I understand it, once out of your body everything becomes peaceful and serene, as described by the near death experiences I've heard. Going to the peace of this "light" is what I understand is the essence of the peace gained from meditation. It seems this school of the body for souls is the best way to understand the sense of overcoming hardship since it appears everything is honky dory outside of it. Souls don't need to be fed or sheltered, but stick them in a body and the test is seeing if that sense of peace can be maintained. Again, from my understanding, if one can go through all the shit life can handle and still hang on to peace you graduate to not having to come back anymore. The next role seems to be turning around and helping along those that haven't graduated yet.

So this has been what my understanding of the world has been honing in on. For much of the year I was deeply fascinated with the idea of "who was I" in my previous lives. When visiting my mom and sister in Jersey we all saw a lady who gave us each a "life reading", which essentially was her telling us bits about what happened and who we were in previous lives. This was met with mixed results. My sister was deeply unconvinced, my mom and I were really impressed, and as my mom put it, "if she was making it all up she's a great story teller."

I resonated a lot with what I was told, but as Todd later pointed out, there a couple lives in there that could easily just have been ego pleasers. Either way, the resonation still held since many of these characters she described had quite a few of my more deeply anchored personality traits, both good and bad. I said nothing for most of the hour and a half she was spouting everything off and nor looked at her conscious of subconscious tells encouraging her one way or another if she were a con.

After that summer with the Weiss books I became interested in his method of uncovering these previous lives which was hypnotherapy, and as I said before, by then I was after first hand experiences of my own. Wendie was too, and it so happened that one of his first pupils, Ari Klein, lived the next town over from her. This link tells the more in depth story, but basically money showed up to go see him the day after I made the appointment.

While in Port Townsend I had a few weird experiences that lead up to deciding to make that appointment. Being in this space with my sister of focusing on these concepts I began to have these experiences I was looking for. The first being when I had a day in the house to myself, drew a bath, turned out all the lights and meditated to one of Weiss' CDs in the tub. I had a very strange vision of sloshing rough seas off the coast of Venice and the strong notion that I was tied up and being tossed overboard into those seas. The year 1606 popped into my head as well.

A few days later I was walking home from work by down a path by some cypress trees and had a waking dream of five Roman soldiers on horseback charging at me, the one in front impaling me in the chest and running the sword up across my face. Two weeks later I saw Ari and had my first experience with hypnotism and "regression". The thing I like about the concept of this method is that the suggestion is definitely that you're remembering memories from previous lives, but that even if you're not, it is something coming from you and therefore must mean something even if its simply a metaphor. When I left Port Townsend a week after that the ride I caught to Portland happened to be with a lady who had been a hypnotherapist with very interesting stories to tell as to why she quit.

Leaving Port Townsend set in motion an interesting series of events, all of which seemed to be telling me very blatantly not to rush and that everything would be fine despite leaving with only $50 and three weeks to hitch to San Fran then Massachusetts for my Dad's birthday on Halloween. Looking back, it seems I was slowed at every presumption that I'd easily move forward, and caught long rides every time I relaxed and stopped putting pressure on myself to rush forward. My Dad and sister picked me up the evening before his birthday in Albany, NY; an hour from home. I had $9.31 in my pocket.

A week later Stacey had driven me down to NYC and for most of that week I had no money. I mention all this talk of my finances because of that concept of manna, meaning I had been quite convinced, through a series of examples on this trip alone, that what ever I needed would show up as I needed it. Here I was now standing on the thresh hold of going to another continent with nothing but a credit card, and no money to back it up other than my various stores of gold and silver I invested in earlier in the year.

Sure enough money did come my way, but from friends and family and one day in Iceland took care of that. Over the course of Europe no money showed up for me, but the debt I ran up was the exact amount my metals were worth when I returned with those values at an all time high. I interpreted that as The Universe telling me to put my money where my mouth was and do away with my personal safety nets. I still had the clear support of my friends and family, but no longer would I have the safety of my own funds to back any credit card rescues.

Money isn't, by any stretch, the only form I've seen this idea of being provided for manifest, but it is the easiest to relate and observe. My favorite non-money example is from my walk across the country back in 2004 when a Port-a-potty showed up out of nowhere when I desperately needed one. I mention all this because it was a significant sense of change that came out of Europe. A sense that I was going to have to secure away a much more complete faith in the concept for the months ahead rather than the dandy observations of it.

Sitting here in Southern California I'm readying myself to head into Mexico and beyond for some time where I have a feeling the challenges will increase tremendously. I don't know why I'm going down there as opposed to say Haiti right now, but its just where I feel drawn to go. That same feeling that I followed to find myself reconnecting with just about everyone I've known in my life, so I've stopped questioning it. Looking at it through this lens of karma and the school of materialism I can't help but wonder what sorts of things, lessons, await me down there. Coming from a non-metaphysical approach, there is an obvious wealth of lessons awaiting an American suburban escapee in the lands of Latin America, especially ones that are potentially lethal in several different ways, but at this point all I can do is wonder.

With the year that I've just come out of I'm strained to believe that it is simply a lust for adventure. I admit, for my ego it is precisely that, but if that was all it was I'd be on a plane for Haiti right now where they could use spare hands. Back in Denver I even had a connection to go there, and was pushing it to go as much as I could, but it simply wasn't happening. It also didn't feel right, even though crossing the Mexican border where drug lords are regularly beheading and kidnapping people, Americans included, did seem right. That comparison is the only thing I can rely on as evidence that it isn't fear preventing me from going to Haiti this moment.

So in short, what is this jumble all about? I just needed to recount in my head all that I'd seen and experienced over 2009, and figured I'd share it. Looking at the year ahead I'm trying to strip away the drama of enthusiasm at these experiences and try to pare it down to more honest understandings. Todd and I chatted last night online and were breaking down our concepts.

Patience and faith that The Universe is working, or as we call it, Sit Down and Shut Up, seems a clear principle. The concept that if The Universe is working then its working for everyone, not just you. We call that one COTU, or the Center Of The Universe. You may find yourself in a position you have no idea why you're in it, and in fact it may have nothing to do with you, but that you may have something unknowingly to pass on to someone who needs it. For Todd and I it seems most often to be when we consider ourselves stuck somewhere. For others it could be going through financial ruin to come to understand more valuable concepts than temporary physical comfort. I believe my Dad's ailing health is an example of this concept.

The concept we call, The Side Car, has to do with letting go of trying to control everything. This is one Todd likes to laugh at me struggling with from time to time, but I've seen him struggle under the same yoke as well. We call it the Side Car from an analogy I made back in Albuquerque in April that I felt like I was flying along in a side car off a motorcycle and loving the wind in my hair, but occasionally would lose confidence in the driver and try to grab at the wheel when things got harry. This generally does nothing more than fuck up the flow of things, and its born out of a blind sense of fear from the unpredictable. Relaxing and realizing life has a good hold on what's going on, and yes it might scare the crap out of you at times, its important to keep rolling with it and try not to force control over forces that seem to know where they're going.

An example from my run back in October comes to mind to best articulate this. I'd caught a ride with a trucker, Don, in the middle of Nebraska through a very unusual sequence of events. The kind I like to notice and interpret to all get out. The day after picking me up we were just outside Kansas City at a truck stop and I got anxious when he said he was going to stay there for the day rather than head on to St. Louis as he'd previously told me. That link tells the story, but in short I decided to try to keep running when everything pointed toward sticking with him. I finally succumbed to "the signs", or stopped trying to control my fate, and stuck with him. Two days later he dropped me off well beyond St. Louis in Binghamton, NY; 3 hours from my Dad's front door. Let go, let the world do its thing.

Todd also has the concept of not treating Karma as your bitch. I definitely agree with this one, but don't feel as threatened by following or not following it as he claims I am. The concept has to do with the good Samaritanism for profit, be it physical or spiritual. The idea of helping an old lady across the street simply because it makes you feel good and hope to score points with The Fates on a whole. Often has Todd accused me of hedging my bets against the benevolence of The Universe (correct me if I'm wrong, Todd... what am I saying of course you will). Essentially the idea of doing good things to off set things you've knowingly wrongly committed is what this is all about. This, I think, is the basis of many of our disagreements in feeling that the other is doing this.

That being said, it fits nicely into something I've been struggling with recently of trying to dispose of judgment of others. That one is a bitch when you really wrap your head around it. I have recently decided to start trying to pull my head out of offhandedly condemning politicians as corrupt, corporations as havens for the greedy, etc. Mostly I've just stopped paying attention to most of the things that don't concern me, but that's also putting my head in the sand. When I run across those who natural assumptions creep on me with I'm doing my utmost to really clean my slate with each individual.

With every car I've gotten into this past year, and the homes I've been welcomed into throughout any of my travels this has been ever present. I've watched the judgment of me, and revisited my judgment of them. There's always been something to disagree with, between strangers, family and friends, but leaving the conversation open has always lead to some interesting insights, or if nothing else, perspectives. There are still a good collection I have a hard time standing, but I can't think of anyone yet I haven't heard out at least for a bit.

We'll see what happens next.