The world’s invisible Internet (1)

So here I am, more than 60 years old, and I am talking to people who are not in bodies. Some have been dead a few years, some for decades, or centuries. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how long they have been gone or how famous they were or weren’t. Apparently I may talk to nearly anyone I wish to, provided that I have a reason to do so. I seem to have tapped into the invisible world’s Internet.

If this were merely my own experience or my own delusion, it wouldn’t be very important to anyone but me. But since it appears to be a skill that anyone can develop, I propose to tell you how to do the same thing I’m doing. To do so, I need to sketch out how I got to this point, but you don’t need to follow my path. In fact, you couldn’t if you wished to. You have your own path, whatever it is, and it’s the only one for you.

The family and the religious tradition I was born into had nothing to do with talking to spirits. I was born, less than a year after the end of World War II, into an Italian Catholic family. My father’s side of the family were easy-going, skeptical farmers. My mother’s side were devout townsmen. My spiritually formative years were spent in the remnants of the mystical medieval Catholic Church as it existed in postwar America. I left the church in my teens, unable and unwilling to live within its rules and restrictions. But I had been shaped more than I knew by growing up in a tradition that took for granted that this physical world was underpinned by an invisible reality that was primary, not secondary. I grew up with one foot  in bustling, confident postwar America and the other in almost a medieval worldview.

In my college years I read of Edgar Cayce in Jess Stearn’s The Sleeping Prophet, Thomas Sugrue’s There is a River, and other books. They told of Cayce’s trance channeling sessions from the 1920s through the mid-1940s, which had been captured in shorthand, typed up, and filed in the archives of his Association for Research and Enlightenment. Those sessions contained remarkable and well attested prescriptions that led to the healing of many whom conventional medicine could not help. They talked of past-life connections, paths to spiritual development, and dire prophecies of our future if we did not change our ways.

Cayce had died only a year and a half before I was born, but his life story seemed a long way from anything I knew. I believed what I read, but it didn’t occur to me that others could learn to do what he did, and perhaps easier. It would be a good long time before it occurred to me that Jesus had said that others would do what he had done, and would in fact do even greater things. As a boy I assumed that this referred to “special” people like his disciples. It didn’t occur to me that he might mean me, and you.

Cayce served as an entry point into the strange world of the occult, as it was then called.

But what a labyrinth that proved to be! I spent years searching through books filled with assertions, and hints, and (I suspected) lies. I was looking for something clear and authoritative, and instead I found chaos – often pretentious chaos. (Gurdjieff, I later learned, once said that the worst form of lying was pretending to know when you did not.) One writer would refer to a secret school, another would refer to a different secret society, a third would hint at secret sources of knowledge, or would just flatly state that x-and-such was true, leaving you to take it or leave it. I left it.

I was never tempted to follow gurus, and was unable to join any of the societies I learned of, even the Rosicrucians, who seemed to me to know something. So many sects, each proclaiming that it, and only it, had the truth. Where was the key? Where were the undisputed facts? If you set out to learn a hard science, you learned a body of agreed-upon facts. True, some of those “facts” may turn out to be appearance rather than fact, but in time (theoretically) revision after revision leads practitioners of that science ever closer to a true understanding of how things are in that field. Soft sciences such as psychology have a much smaller body of agreed-upon facts, with much more interpretation and argument. But the difficulty of getting your bearings in psychology are just nothing to those facing a newcomer to psychic investigation.

People who are able to work from within a spiritual tradition can refer to it for their values and their judgments on whatever problems life throws up for them. Every tradition on earth contains enough truth to orient one’s life, or it wouldn’t have become a tradition. But what of those who are not comfortable in the tradition they were born into, or who are born into a lack of tradition, or a hostility to tradition? How do you find a home? It seemed to me that the only tool I had to work with was my intuition. This put me in the position of having to decide, before examination, whether something was worth examining. This is absurd. Nonetheless, this is the fix I was in. I don’t know any other way but to keep discarding what you cannot use, and keep looking for what is food and drink to you. You can’t necessarily depend on the judgment and experience of others, for “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Your soul, like your body, will react to poison when it experiences it, and it is up to you to recognize the reaction and reject the poison. Just pray that you recognize it as poison before you’ve eaten too much of it!

Whatever it may be for others, the Catholic church was not food and drink for me. Years after I left it, I began to get first hand experience of what I call “the other side.” The more experience I got, the more it agreed with a certain way of looking at Catholic doctrine – but the less it agreed with Catholic conclusions, and the rules drawn from those conclusions. So I was left relying on the inborn sniffer that (I am convinced) we are all given as our birthright, an intuitive sense that “this is the way for me, regardless whether it is the way for others. In short, I was still on my own.

At first, in exploring reincarnation and past lives, I was thinking of those subjects as most people seem to do. But with time and experience it became clear that our explorations are hampered by careless assumptions and bad definitions. We assume that if people reincarnate, it is one person moving from one life to another. We assume that we in this life are separate from those other lives. We assume that even if they influence us, we do not influence them. My experience argues that none of these assumptions are correct.

“But – you ought to be objecting — reincarnation is an old, old subject. What makes you an expert on the basis of a few years’ experience?” Well, if I were relying on my own personal resources, I wouldn’t have much worthwhile to say. But much of the information and most of the concepts contained here came via automatic writing, or from altered-state experiences alone or with others. That gives access to a tremendous amount of knowledge, wisdom and experience. Unlike Jane Roberts’ Seth, who dictated sentences and paragraphs and specified titles and chapter headings, my contacts were not that obliging. It was my job to find a way to make these things accessible to others, and it took a long, long time to figure out how to do so.