[I am currently immersed in old journal notes and accounts of various stops on the road from where I started to where I am at the moment. I’m learning a lot, putting it together. This account of an interesting retrieval was published Sept. 1, 2005]
Friends,
This is long, but I did a couple of retrievals tonight that raised some interesting points, and I got an explanation, after the fact, that may be of use to you.
Tonight Rita Warren and I set out to do retrievals primarily focused on New Orleans and the tri-state area that was hit by the hurricane. Before we began, I set my intent to do something that would help lots of people rather than doing retrievals retail, so to speak.
1) Immediately I found myself on a major street in New Orleans, under this unbelievably bright, glaring light perhaps 12 feet above street level. It was so bright! As it was nighttime, the light was a huge attractor. Whatever else happened, I know I didn’t make up the light: it was there practically before I faded into the scene, if you know what I mean.
I was “dressed” so to speak as a smallish, thin black man, not young , in fact past his prime, with a scruffy white beard. Later I realized I was basically imitating Fred Sanford!
I started yelling at the three or four guys around me. Rough paraphrase, from memory:
“They’re not going to help us. They’re not going to do nothing! They don’t care if they leave us hear to rot. I tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to march down to the river [or it might have been, to the canal]. They got a big barge down there, and if enough of us go down there, they GOT to take us somewhere! They GOT to do something with us. But it’s got to be a whole lot of us go down there. One guy by himself, that’s nothing.”
Well, a few of the people – there were a lot more now, between the brilliant light and the shouting – a few of them said they’d go too. I said, more or less: “But we don’t go down there looking like a mob, or they liable to shoot us! We go down there marching four wide, like we was soldiers, and we bring our dead, and we bring the kids, and somebody needs help getting down there, we help ‘em.”
So we formed up, and by the time we were ready to go there were maybe 70 or 80 people in ranks of four, and I think at one point I told them to hold hands four across, for some reason or other that I made up. (Like the rest of you, I’m a great liar in these states.)
So then I started revving them up. “Where we goin’?” Mumble, mumble.
“We’re goin’ to the barge!” I shouted. “Where we goin’?”
“To the barge.”
“Where we going?” “TO THE BARGE.”
“All right, now there’s people hiding in all these buildings. We’re goin’ to shout loud enough to raise the dead, `Come on Out!’”. And we did, shouting “Come on Out! We’re goin’ to the barge!” etc. [I privately liked that touch, loud enough to raise the dead.]
After some indeterminate time, not very long, we got to the barge which of course our friends upstairs had there, as specified. They had a neat touch, army or national guard or something (uniformed) and Red Cross too, flanking the entry to the barge, giving out paper cups (I think) of water to people as they went by.
Of course, once they were in the barge, it was duck soup to get them to 27. When they came out on the other side (basically they walked into the barge at the stern and came out another hatch on the bow) they were mostly or maybe were all met by people they knew – but, odd thing – they didn’t all stay in 27. Immediately some sort of sank a couple of layers (that’s what it looked like to me) and wound up in this or that belief-system territory somewhere in 24-25-26. I saw at least one guy go to what looked like a black church.
I got, later, that they knew by then that they were dead, but they sort of readjusted their afterlife to what they wanted it to be / thought it ought to be.
Now, the next thing that happened was weird and was unprecedented at least in my experience. I went back to that light and thought I’d try it again. Worked pretty well the first time, why not mobilize some more people the same way? If it didn’t work, nothing would be lost, and maybe it would. But instead, somebody else – a helper, not someone in a body, though I couldn’t tell you how I knew that at the time – went and did the same thing I’d done. Did the rabble-rousing, formed them up, told them not to leave anybody behind, etc. I was pleased, of course, because it was happening without my even needing to do it, but perplexed isn’t the word for it.
Well, Rita and I got back to the present, swapped stories (hers was very straightforward; she’s had A LOT of practice!), and she suggested we try another.
2) Back to 27, this time winding up not at my place but on a hill overlooking the ocean, a place I’d never been. Expressed intent, and went on down to the hurricane disaster area.
At first I thought I was back in New Orleans, at one of the places where the levee broke. I knew there was a body in the water, so I went diving into the water (quite deep; ten feet, maybe?) and brought the body back to this (small!) barge that had helpers acting as assistants, like we were national guard or some other organized rescue force. First time I’ve ever handled a dead body in a retrieval, but the kid (it was a young black girl I think, but might have been white) thought she was dead and didn’t have any concept that you leave the body after you die, so she stayed with it. I wound up doing five retrievals in a row, all told, two on the lawn right in front of a detached house – I thought that was an odd place even as I was hauling them back – and two from the upper story of a two-story detached house. Went right through the wall with them, as anything that would break the spell would be worthwhile. The four after the girl were all young men, in their 20s maybe, or 30s, hard to say. White I think but am not quite sure. This is relevant for reasons that will appear shortly.
With each one, we went through the same routine. I told my “men” that the dead person “was in shock, probably thought they were going to die, maybe thought they had died. You’ve got to get them sitting up and breathing, and get them dry, or they’re going to die.” Etc. The usual bare-faced lies that ought to qualify me for a high government post.
Now the interesting thing here is that at about this time I realized we weren’t in New Orleans at all, we were on the Gulf Coast. (I thought Mississippi, but it could have been what they used to call the Florida Parishes – the parishes east of the city to the state line. More likely, it was all over the place on the shore. I’m not positive the upstairs crew cares much about state lines.) And at that time, the helpers who were playing enlisted men to my officer—they called me lieutenant (I was white this time, by the way) – started telling the men we’d rescued that we needed their help. Roughly: “You men know these folks; they’re your neighbors. We’ve got to get them out of here or they’re going to die. We know you’re exhausted and hungry, and we’re going to get you taken care of, but we need you to help us first.”
And so the helpers organized the retrievees – if that’s a word – to go retrieve others. And I’m thinking, “what the hell?” I mean, I’m used to being the last to get the word, but this is ridiculous.
So when I see I’m not needed, I go back to 27 and sit on my metal lawn chair looking out at the sea, waiting for someone to explain as promised. A helper appears, dressed in a General’s uniform. I look at the uniform and smile, and he smiles back, because of course he’s a general like I’m a lieutenant. He’s just quietly spoofing me.
Turns out he isn’t someone I know; isn’t one of my “other lives” I’m connected with; he’s just the guy in charge of that particular operation, I suppose. Or maybe, more likely, there’s some tie between us that he couldn’t be bothered to explain at the time.
Anyway, what had happened? Very interesting! He says that as usual they took advantage of my presence to get the attention of the dead people. But (perhaps because I had specified that I wanted to do more than just retrieve people one or two at a time?) they had then leveraged that. My presence allowed the dead people to recognize the helpers. That in itself stopped the tape-looping process (as I call it), freeing them from being hypnotized by their preconceptions. And the neat thing is, since they could now relate to the helpers, they could respond to a request to assist them to waken others. And since they were as dead as the ones they wanted to awaken, and had died in the same circumstances (that seemed to be important for some reason I don’t quite get) they could be heard by the dead in a way that the helpers could not – UNTIL the first set of dead helpers brought them to the attention of the newly dead, so to speak. (Sorry if that’s an involved sentence; best I can do at the moment.)
This all suggests that we can vastly leverage our efforts in common-disaster situations, so I thought I’d better make the effort to write it out so as to give you ideas. Sorry this is so long, I didn’t have time or energy enough to make it shorter.