Iona (2)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Robert Clarke

Thursday, June 5,2003.

Manchester airport has a rail spur to the train station. Very convenient. I get the train to Crewe, and a cab from Crewe to Burslam, in Stoke-on-Trent, where Robert Clarke lives. The itinerary I’d printed up for myself includes the phone numbers of the friends I’m going to visit, so I borrow the cabby’s cell phone and call Robert to tell him I am on my way. I say “Robert…” and he bursts out laughing; says he knows from the accent who’s speaking. Accent? Me? I heard his clipped North of England accent, of course, but it’s funny to hear how broadly we come across to them.

Robert and I have not met before. My friend Colin Wilson had sent me an account of Robert’s work and manuscript on dreams and the meaning of our lives, and Robert and I spent some months exchanging emails, and I sent him my book Muddy Tracks, which he understood. Hampton Roads published his manuscript as The Four Gold Keys.

Sometimes people just click. It had became clear in our email correspondence that Robert and I saw things much the same way. But as soon as we sat down to talk in his front room, it was as if we’d been friends for many years. Dreams have told him that his last two lifetimes were in America, and David’s, of course, was British. We find a natural harmony between us, very nice.

I had penciled in this side-trip to England specifically because I knew that Robert was having health problems and I non-rationally knew that I could help him. And in fact, as soon as we sit down in the front room and his elder brother Ken fixes me an excellent cup of coffee, this is the first thing Robert and I set out to do. Because it could help each of you who are reading this, I will spell out the technique a bit. It is something The Guys Upstairs gave Rita and me in a series of meditations, and it is very powerful and cannot do harm. Of how many techniques may that be fairly said?

Get into a comfortable sitting position and close your eyes. Take a few slow deep breaths, briefly holding your breath after you breathe in, and again after you breathe out. Relax. Envision yourself in a waterfall, with the river of life and health flowing through you as well as around you. Those waters – our invisible support from the other side – flow through us day and night, or we could not live, but mostly we live unaware of this silent unfailing support. As the waters flow through you, from your head to your toes, become aware of obstructions in the flow. Pains, chronic or transient. Illnesses, serious or trivial. Anything that obstructs the free flow of the waters: See the waters quietly but effectively dissolving the obstructions. Do this whenever you happen to think of it. You’ll be surprised how many things come up and then go away. I have taken to using it for emotional reactions to situations, as well, visualizing the waters dissolving the quirk within me that causes unwanted emotions such as envy, nervousness, etc.

How does it work? Who knows? Who cares? One theory is that by concentrating our attention on the waters, and the obstructions, we focus our subconscious mind that does the moment-to-moment work of maintaining the body. My theory is that our physical body is laid down on an energy-body template, and once we adjust the energy body, the physical body readjusts itself to match that corrected template. But this is only theory, and as I said, who cares? What matters is that it works. Certainly it works for Robert this day.

Robert and I walk around his town, and have fish and chips together with Ken, who is a talented painter whose work (which seems Persian somehow, though neither of the brothers had seen this influence) makes a deep impression on me. And all the while, for four hours, Robert and I talk, not about trivialities, but about Carl Jung, and the spirit, and religion, and the plight of modern man. Then Robert walks me a couple of miles to the Sneyd Hotel Inn, where he’d made reservations for me at my request. I go to bed at about 4:30 p.m. their time, about 26 hours after I’d started my day in America. I awaken at 11 or so, make a couple of journal notes, and go back to sleep. A good start to the trip. A good day.

 

Friday, June 6,2003.

D-Day, 59 years later.

I awaken feeling intimidated, a bit. Is it being a stranger? Having no place of my own? Take heed, peregrine! I eat but little breakfast: scrambled eggs, served with underdone white bread, and coffee nothing like Ken’s. Besides, I don’t want to eat a lot. I eat too much and I am looking forward to losing weight if possible this fortnight, walking and moving about.

After breakfast, Robert walks up ot meet me and we walk around a little lake, and here and there, talking. After a bit he takes me into town and I meet his friend Jim. Then back to Robert’s house and we talk yet more, and do some more energy work. I see clearly Robert’s belief system about health. I work to convince him that illness follows obstructions in the energy system, and, the obstructions removed, the physical system repairs itself.

At one point I take a little nap, and nod off in the chair in his sitting room. I wake up, less than an hour later, remembering the last part of a dream. I had a bow and arrow and was aiming it at the sky, quite pleased, because things would be all right. When Robert rejoined me he came out of a brief sleep to remember dreaming of a rainbow, which, he said when I told him about the bow and arrow, was more or less the same symbolism.

In the evening we go to a pub, a real pub, not a tourist pub, and I enjoy it. (I find myself unable to order a “haff” pint of Guinness, and instead ask for a “hof” pint. It sounds a little phony to my ears, but to say it the American way would have sounded jarringly different.) At one point Robert gets a funny look on his face. I ask if he is in pain, and he says he is. I point to him across the table and send energy, but more important, I think, is the fact that I am talking to him, telling him what I am doing. To his surprise the pain goes away and stays away. We were expecting to be met by Robert’s friend Jim, but I suspect that he will not show up, and he does not. Instead, Robert’s godson Steve comes in and joins us, and I know why Jim was not meant to show up. Had Jim been there, the conversation would have been vastly different. But Steve is used to talking to “Uncle Robert” about dreams and spiritual things. He instinctively understands them. This 26-year-old with great alive eyes does not belong in this depressed midlands town.

After a while I demonstrate to Steve, and then to Robert, that they have an energy body, using the nearness of my own hand to help them feel their own aura. Steve, as soon as he feels it, jerks his hand away, startled. He is astonished – and now he knows, he doesn’t have to believe. I tell Steve that he ought to get out of the area, as the pressure of the environment holds him down. He and Robert agree. And I say – out of what knowing, I know not – that he might study to become an energy healer.

Robert says my book changed his thinking. He is quite complimentary about it, and embarrassed about it. I take a couple of pictures of Ken and him, my first photos of the trip. By then it’s nearly midnight. We say goodbye, feeling great affection for each other.

Iona (1)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

One day in April, 2003, I realize that I want to go to Iona, the “holy isle” off the Scottish coast famous as St. Columba’s residence in the sixth century. Within a few days, I plan the trip. I borrow a backpack and fill it and a small suitcase with sweater and sweatshirt, warm woolen jacket, flannel shirt, two dress shirts, a pair of blue jeans, and a pair of good pants. This in addition to the short coat I would wear en route. For reading material, I choose, after some hesitation, The Lives of the Saints (Brendan, Cuthbert and Wilfred), and The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling. Both books are small, lightweight, and likely to match my mood.

Wednesday, June 4, a friend takes me to the Charlottesville bus station for the long bus ride to Dulles airport. I begin snoozing as soon as the bus starts at 9 a.m., figuring it will be long hours before I get to sleep in a bed again..

At Dulles, the woman at the check-in desk advises me to take their 1 p.m. to Newark, as they are experiencing weather delays all up and down the east coast, and it would be better for me to be in Newark waiting than in Dulles. Good thinking. As it is, the 1 p.m. doesn’t get off the runway until 2 p.m.. Then up out of the grey clouds into the bright blue sky, and 35 minutes later back down into the same grey overcast we’d left,  Departure for Scotland is scheduled 8:35 p.m.

Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport, although it does give one time to memorize the “security” announcements threatening to seize and destroy one’s unguarded luggage at the first opportunity. Also the no smoking announcements come every fifteen minutes. Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport.

The night before, Rita Warren had asked if she was picking up a bit of depression on my part. I said she was, and compared it to the apprehension I had had before I did my Gateway at The Monroe Institute in 1992, which my friend Kelly Neff had said was normal before a transformative experience.

Well, there I was with nothing pressing to do. Why not ask someone’s take on things? I wrote:

“For some years now, and increasingly in recent months, I have been in contact with what most would call past lives of mine. I don’t think of things quite that way anymore, but suffice it to say I have become aware of other lifetimes that are closely connected to mine. Being located outside time and space, these other lives are as “present tense” as mine. (We are all living in the eternal present, after all.) Of these other lives, the one who has shaped me most actively is a Welsh-born journalist, traveler, psychic investigator named David Poynter who lived from the 1870s to the 1930s. I am in contact with his spirit and he with mine, let’s put it that way. Since I learned the knack, I can contact him at will. In fact, in a TMI program in March, he came through on a tape recorder for the first time, which added a new dimension to our interaction.”

So here, sitting in Newark Airport (which, if you didn’t know it, is a smoke-free facility which promises to seize, damage or destroy your unattended luggage) I haul out my journal and ask him why the tension/depression/anxiety connected with the trip. “Why can’t I just do the trip as best I can and see what happens?”

“You are doing just that. Don’t be hard on yourself in an overbalancing way. But the other elements are there, too, we recognize

“Anxiety – lest plans not come through due to circumstances beyond your control.

“Depression – because you ask yourself `why am I doing this? I am not prepared, I am not even sure what I am doing, let alone why.’ You worry that you will go, return, and in between miss all your opportunities.

“Tension – because a good part of you knows better, a large part disagrees and both parts are waiting to see.”

Pretty good analysis, I’d say. Sitting unobtrusively on a bench against the wall in the waiting room, I play a TMI CD called “Catnapper” that lets you get a full sleep cycle in 30 minutes. It’s one of my favorites, and it works this time as always. I awaken refreshed. The terminal building is cold, and I am glad to be able to pull out a sweater from my backpack. Time passes, and the lounge very gradually fills. I spend some hours reading about the voyages of St. Brendan in The Lives of The Saints.

At nearly 7 p.m., I pull out my journal to ponder.

“Well, what am I to make of the voyages of St. Brendan? An otter who not only brings a fish, but firewood to cook it with! So much of it seems just Irish tall tales – and yet there is something at the root of it. That “something” is the character of St. Brendan himself. The tall tales mixed with the true tales – around him. So who was he really? His utter reliance on God shines through everything. But all their beliefs, their rituals, their world, really – it’s incomprehensible what it once must have meant. It doesn’t mean to us what it did to them. It can’t. And I was raised Catholic! I’m one of the few people left – or rather, my generation is – who can still remember even that shadow of the theology. But it wasn’t to us what it must have been to the people who wrote and read things like the life of St. Brendan. It’s almost inconceivable, now, that people could read that as non-fiction. I suspect there must have been a different sound to them – perhaps the difference between thinking humorous exaggeration straight fact. Yet there was more. They lived in a magical world, a world not shaped – cursed, I am tempted to say – by science as arbiter.”

My good friend Robert Clarke will explain to me how such tales are written, in effect, in code. Thus the otter carrying firewood is not meant to be a statement of fact but a  metaphor. It makes a lot more sense when he explains it.

Finally we board, we taxi, we fly. New England, Nova Scotia, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, and then the British mainland pass beneath us while we eat, we snooze, and we eat again, working our way eastward through five time zones. Through much of the flight, as previously through much of the waiting time in the terminal, I am in a no-thought space, not sleeping, not waking. A weird feeling, to be moved from this quiet near-sleep state to a waking state by the small jolt of the wheels touching down. We land at 8:30 a.m. local time, and by 9:30 I am through passport control, have retrieved my luggage and gone through customs (no one there) and am waiting in a British Midlands line to get my boarding pass for the 9:45 to Manchester, England. The temperature is about 50, so I figure my packing was about right.

 

Jung on our work that can only be done by us

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Thursday, September 10, 2015

5 a.m. Dr. Jung, I remembered, last night, a dream I had on my visit to the island of Iona, back in 2003. But when I went looking in my computer journals for an account of the dream, I found that I had remembered it wrongly. It wasn’t one dream but two, and they didn’t say quite what I thought I remembered them saying. At the moment, though, I am a little surprised that I could have forgotten them at all, or that they should come to mind now.

Fill in the dreams and we can discuss them. Tomorrow, if you don’t care to do so at the moment.

I could find them and print them out now, if you think dealing with the computer won’t put me in too exterior a mood.

“It” won’t put anybody into any kind of mood. “It” may lure you if you are conflicted, or may surprise you if you are unconscious. But if you are aware and intent, why should doing anything for any reason change your orientation?

But we aren’t very conscious usually, nor very intent.

Being aware of lack of awareness is the antidote.

We’ll see. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Let’s see how many: it is 5:08 now.

5:18. Well, that was interesting, to say the least. I go up to my office and I find the computer left on, the Iona file already on screen, where apparently I had left it last night. I never leave the computer on when I’m finished with it, but put it in sleep mode. Yet there it was. And, although the long narrative is shot through with accounts of dreams, I find what I want easily enough – and find more that would be worth looking at. But I managed to restrain myself and print out just the excerpts I intended to ask about. So I guess I was able to preserve my continuity for ten minutes, anyway.

So how do we proceed?

Copy, and re-read, the first dream. Omit the correlations with conscious life and we will look only at the dream.

 [Sunday, June 8

“I am in the church that [My Scottish friend] Michael Ross and I were in yesterday. There is a service going on, I think.

“Two women go up to the priest – he is in the aisle. They want his help, but I from behind one of them say, “I know what you need, my dear, and I can help you. But it can’t be right now. This is not to do with you, just I don’t have the time right now.” This is accepted by all concerned. From within the dream, I am concerned lest it be 8 a.m. when I’m going to awaken (alarm set) but am glad to realize that it is not yet that, but about 3:30 real time.

“As we were coming out of the church – but still inside, in the aisle, toward the door – there was something. The woman to my left didn’t figure directly in the dream – I’m not sure she said anything – but the dream concerned the four of us, among so many strangers I did not know.

“I note that the priest and the women accepted that I had the knowledge and ability to help the woman. It was not presumption, nor a vying with the priest. I could help her as he (the church, I think) could not, and all concerned knew it. But not just yet – I had something else to do first. I stressed, it wasn’t her fault that I couldn’t help right away, it was that I wasn’t yet free to get to it. But I would be.”

The church you had visited had been destroyed during the reformation, and had lain waste for centuries, and had been slowly and laboriously rebuilt in the 20th century. You approved of the rebuilding, but were repelled by the present-day church’s leaflets on the walls and by the sight of a flesh-and-blood priest walking by.

Yes, I remember that well. I approved, but I was not a part of it and didn’t want to be, or couldn’t. I couldn’t even bring myself to pick up one of the leaflets. That was at Pluscarden, the day before I traveled on alone to Iona.

You were one of four in the dream, of course. The two women, the priest, and you. Three laity and a priest as the fourth. You were with the other two, and yet not with them. They were together, you were behind them, but the three of you were facing the priest, though he too was in the aisle. He was not on the altar, you see, but in the aisle.

Not quite him as only another member of the laity, though.

No, but not performing his priestly function, either. He embodied that function but he was not in the act of intermediating between humans and the divine.

And although I knew I could help one of them, I wasn’t ready yet.

Let us say the time wasn’t ready yet. You had something else to do first and so couldn’t help at the moment, but all concerned knew that it was only a matter of time. And your consciousness was aware that in “real life” it wasn’t time either; you didn’t have to leave your dream for external obligations – which fitted smoothly into the dream. Note that you, and the two women – only one of whom needed the help you could give – and the priest were four “among so many strangers” you did not know.

I am very much aware that what I don’t know about the dream, you or any analyst would know, or should know.

But maybe it isn’t everybody’s business. We don’t analyze in public.

All right, but then the second dream?

“Again at 6:15 a.m. I am up to record a dream:

“An experience that was almost suffocating in its intensity. I went into a church and proceeded down, down, down stairs to lower and lower – older and older – levels. I could see I was below the level of our civilization, where the steel foundations for it, the support of the structure, were. Construction was going on and I was concerned that I not interfere or get hurt. At a passageway, a ladder in front of me, a wooden ladder, very tall, of the A-shaped kind. A worker was sitting high up on the wall to the left. The ladder was tilted away from him [tilted onto one set of legs, on the right, its left-hand side in the air] though it was not falling. I gently pulled it down to sit firmly, and walked under it. I came to a level still far above the depths, I thought, though far below our time. But they had a press operating there, though it was not printing, but before printing. They asked if I would lend a hand for a few minutes – and hours later I was happily still there.

“They were not signatures but single sheets 8 ½ by 11 or larger, and were first individually written and colored – in many colors, not just red on black – and the sheets were collated and bound. It was full color printing, before printing, each sheet being individually prepared. [Here I sketched a sheet with the left third of the page being design and the right two-thirds being lines of text.]

“The dream ended there for the moment.”

You related it in your mind to my dream of going farther and farther beneath the basement of my house and discovering archaic levels of my psyche. That is a valid association in so far as it concerns the descent into historical realms. Your dream was leading you to the foundations of the church. Steel, thus rigid, modern and strong, and then below the upper levels, construction was going on.

Yes, I noticed that vaguely, although naturally I allowed for the vagaries of a dream’s logic. In real life, you don’t construct from the bottom up, nor from the bottom down by further excavation. I mean, you don’t construct from under an existing construction.

You persist in contrasting dream reality to “real life” although a part of you knows better.

The dream was “almost suffocating in its intensity.” It was meaningful and you knew it was meaningful. This closely concerned your life. You had no doubt of that. You were not part of the construction work going on – you didn’t want to interfere but you didn’t want to get hurt either. In short, you knew to keep your distance.

But then there was the ladder.

Ahead of you, in the direction you wanted to go, was a man on a very tall wooden (not steel) ladder. [But – I notice upon typing this up – the dream said he was on the wall, and the ladder was tipping away from him. Yet “Jung” proceeded as though my inaccurate recall was correct.] Although a man was sitting on it (that is, although he was not falling), one half of the A-shaped ladder was in the air, an unstable position. You pulled it – gently – until it sat firmly on both sets of legs – and then walked under the ladder and there you found what at first seemed a moment’s useful amusement but which turned out to occupy quite a bit of your time, happily but unconsciously.

Do you customarily walk under ladders? Is that not supposed to be bad luck, as well as perhaps slightly dangerous?

I had no sense of danger, and I had no sense of incurring bad luck. I can’t remember if I even thought about walking under the ladder as a sign of bad luck, either in the dream or later, writing it up.

You remembered the sensation of working happily with the press and the printers, but you did not pay attention to the fact that you had walked under the ladder you had stabilized, to get there.

Does this imply that in fact working further with the printers was a bit of bad luck?

It implies that you lost consciousness.

And if I hadn’t walked under the ladder?

You would have been left with a very different feeling –  “suffocating in its intensity.”

Hmm. So I let myself get diverted.

You were told earlier, you couldn’t help the woman yet, that you were not yet free to do so. No one and nothing implied that you were not free because of external circumstances (as if that could really happen, but we are holding to the conscious understanding here).

I had things to live, first.

That’s one way to look at it. Now continue to the third dream, three days later.

Only that one, or the others of which it was part?

We cannot do everything at once. Your hour is already over, even allowing for the time spend retrieving the file.

“There was some kind of building work being done in the church. And there was a man working who was somewhat skillful. I was involved with it at a less skilled level. The man had to quit. He couldn’t do it any more, there was something wrong. The posture hurt his feet, or something. I offered to do the work, or was asked, I forget which. The woman in charge of the thing said I had great [force?] The idea was that I could do the job, and otherwise it couldn’t be done.”

And the point, as you well knew and know yet, is that otherwise, it couldn’t be done. It doesn’t matter how much more skillful others may be – if only you can do the job, only you can do the job. Do you imagine that I felt up to the task life set for me?

I am well aware that this does not refer only to me but to those who read this. I’m merely noting that I know it.

Yes – but don’t forget that for you as well as for others there is something only you can do, well or badly, so you do not have the luxury of assuming that it doesn’t matter if you do it, it will be done by somebody else, and perhaps better. Your work can never be done by any but you yourself. Your inner work, your outer work. If you do not do it, your un-done outer work may perhaps be compensated for by the work of another, but it will remain un-done. And who is going to compensate for the work that you, as leader of your particular soul, are responsible to do?

Now, a word or two more, and we will dismiss class for the day. What do you understand the point to be, of today’s exploration?

I get that it may be time for me to consider that Iona manuscript again.

Not in the form you left it, but in the form you will have to find for it. Yes, and?

I always knew that the church was essential but that I couldn’t really be a part of it. I guess this showed me that I could help it get more grounded on the psychic side.

They won’t necessarily recognize the assistance, or appreciate it, but yes, demonstrating the everyday-ness of the nonphysical world in its interaction with the physical is a potential reconnection of a social institution with the basis of belief for people. It is an old, old wooden ladder, and a tall one, and the human at the top is not in danger of falling off, nor was the ladder in danger of falling over, but it is better when firmly placed on either side.

And one more thing.

It isn’t primarily about me and a manuscript, or printing, or helping others or placing the church on firmer footing. It is about me orienting myself correctly.

I will be very glad to continue our conversation whenever you find it convenient.

My thanks, and I think those of others whose interest you arouse now, let alone so many you have helped out of the wilderness in life and in your books. Till next time, then. (6:28 a.m.)

In preparing this entry, I realize that my friend Robert Clarke had commented on this dream after my visit in 2003,  saying:

“Doing construction work in the church, where the woman of authority (of the unconscious) says you have great force. You must do it, or it can’t be done. Now we are coming to it. This says it all. Building the church is building the Higher Self. Solomon building God’s temple means exactly the same. This may mean a divine incarnation, though it all takes place in the unconscious. Remember me saying that David begins the temple but Solomon completes it? Moses begins the Promised Land task and Joshua completes it. John the Baptist begins, Christ completes. Earlier, Osiris begins and Horus completes. The man in your dream begins and you have the chance to complete.

“St Francis was told by God to build the church, which he first took to mean the ruin he was in at the time. Then he took it to mean the Church itself. But it really meant building the structure of the Higher Self and this, as said, can indeed lead to a respiritualisation in the outer world. I have little doubt that you could build the structure of the Self yourself, maybe even go all the way. You have the right temperament, the thirst for spirituality, the basic goodness of heart, and the intelligence. I constructed the Self myself for some time, but couldn’t sustain it. It takes superhuman powers, not to rise above and inflate, as Nietzsche mistakenly took it, but rather to deflate in humility and self-sacrifice, to empty oneself of the world. It depends how far one wants to go. But, as said above, it is a very heavy burden that few would take on if they knew the suffering it entails.”

 

Communication (from 2007)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[Not all my conversations were with non-3D individuals! And of course not all of them were published. I can’t recall if I ever published this short session with Rita (who at the time was still in 3D), but it seems to be of interest today.]

&&&

This is the 31st of March 2007.

Rita: Well, we haven’t done one of these sessions for awhile. But you have this communication channel always available, don’t you?

Frank: Well it’s a different quality when someone else is asking the question, because you inject different — you come out of left field rather than where I already am internally.

R: Although sometimes I notice when we are just talking, the energy’s picked up as a response to you.

F: No, you’d have to believe in telepathy for that. I want to see a double-blind survey. [😊]

R: Let’s just ask a question about that while we’re at it. When this activity is going on, how different is it from what we’re doing here?

F: Well in a way, it’s the difference between talking to yourself and talking to someone else, because if you’re talking to yourself, the answer comes out of the same stream that the question came out, but if you’re talking to someone else, sometimes it comes out of the same stream but sometimes the other person has had different rabbits start out of the bush from the same question and therefore intersect again with the other person from a different angle. It’s really the same process.

You have to bear in mind that both in spoken communication and in unspoken communication, all kinds of levels are involved in both persons, and between them at an upstairs level, so an interaction between individuals seems much more straightforward to you than it actually is. It seems like this and then that, but what it is, is this and then that on a downstairs level, both of you connected to the upstairs level and maybe the upstairs level the same thing, maybe it’s coordinating the two of you by feeding you lines and feeding you emotional reactions. It would be the equivalent of the difference between two actors talking onstage and the writer or writers having written their lines ahead of time to set up certain interactions.

R: And so this in itself means that there will be different responses depending on who Frank’s having a conversation with.

F:Tthat’s right. And they will evoke different parts of himself, as he is doing to them. An interaction between two people is always unique because either of those two people interacting with somebody else is different. It doesn’t look like it, usually, too much. Often you can’t see it.

R: So when you think about lecturing to a room full of people, all these multitude of interactions –

F: Yes but if you are only lecturing and they are not responding verbally, it’s sort of like you have a screen in front of you that is speaking to them, it’s your public persona. We don’t mean by that anything artificial or insincere. We don’t imply a lack of integrity. We’re saying necessarily when you’re speaking to more than one person, it’s a persona speaking rather than the intimate conversation you might have with one person at the right time in the right way. Now for the audience, they are communicating in an individual way, but with that persona rather than with the speaker. They may know the difference, but not necessarily.

R: Depending on whether they’ve had a history with this person or not.

F: Yes, exactly. Exactly. If they know the person as an individual, and then are in the audience while that individual is speaking, they will definitely see the difference. They may not however correctly attribute what the difference is. They may think it is — actually it’s the same thing — tailoring to the audience.

R: Both ways there’s an assumption of who the speaker is.

F: And in fact you’re all mysteries to each other.

R: I want to ask about what seems like to me this new burst of creativity — I don’t know if we’re talking about a burst of creativity or way for talking about an operational relation of a lot of material that now is getting put forth.

F: We would think of it more as a burst of expression. It’s in there, it’s been tailored, it’s been thought of. The creativity was in the living of it and the thinking about, and it has been built up, and now that conduit is available, the expression is bursting forth. We can see that it looks like creativity happening now, and to a degree it is, but really it’s the expression of what has already been created but has been dammed up.

&&&

The transcript ends here, somewhat abruptly, it seems to me. Because it was a spoken rather than a written interchange, I have no way to know if this was the end of the exchange, or merely the end of my transcription.

 

Melynn’s legacy

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Never underestimate the power of a helpful suggestion, or encouragement. My friend Melynn Allen had an idea, and passed it along, and the result – so far – has been nearly 17 years’ worth of blog entries. Here, lightly edited, is what I find in my computer journal:

&&&

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Melynn calls, all excited with an idea. She has put together a blog and she wants to help me do the same. Using WordPress, which is what the HRPC blog is using, so I’m already familiar with it.

This really does sound like what I need. And she is enthusiastic about helping me, paying a karmic debt, she calls it. And that is precisely what I need – someone younger, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, energetic, who believes in me.

This could do what I had thought to do with my webpage (which, she points out, is static rather than dynamic.)

Photos, poems, transcripts – and it’s just what I do already – as she says.

Plus the potential to sell e-books, via a shopping cart. The shopping cart would cost money but everything else would be free, at least until we hit the limit of what they offer (20 GB she thought, which is a lot!), and then you upgrade.

This is perfect!

This really is what I want to do. As she says, I’m already doing it!

If I could sell e-books at $10 a pop (or whatever) it wouldn’t take all that many sales to provide as much money as the royalties on many more sales. $15 book – 10% royalty (net) – maybe eighty cents per book. So I need to sell a dozen books conventionally to match what I would make on one e-book more or less.

Everything would depend on my being able to get the blog out there and noticed – and she could help me do that.

Okay friends, thoughts on the subject? A theme for the blog? General commentary on the pattern of my life?

Well, choose.

Theme.

Intuition is your theme, how to live life connected more deeply. Religion and psychic affairs are two aspects of it, but intuition is the key. Misleading as a word, though, as “connection” would be, too. What you want is to lead people to realize that they don’t need to fear. Fearlessness, Fearless Frank. How about Fearless Living?

Interesting idea, not one I would have thought of. I’ll google it when I get on the machine.

What was your search for magical powers if it was not a reaching for a way to live without fear?

Fearless Living. I do like that. Or maybe Living Fearless, or Living Without Fear. No, the first sounds best. Well, that didn’t take long!

&&&

In the event, I didn’t call it Fearless Living or anything like it, and neither did I make any great amount of money out of book sales. But for years it provided me with  daily incentive to put something out there. It certainly encouraged me to post my conversations with the guys, and in a reciprocating process encouraged even more conversations.

From the habit of conversing came so much more: Chasing Smallwood, for instance, and The Cosmic Internet, and other books.

A few years after Rita Warren died, she and I began a long series of explorations, all of them posted piece by piece. Bob Friedman, following those conversations, suggested that he put them out as a book, and published them as Rita’s World  in two volumes, then Awakening from the 3D World and It’s All One World.

And besides the records of my conversations, I posted other things that drew my attention, striving to produce a source of hope and encouragement for fellow explorers. Seventeen years and counting, and all flowing out of a friend’s helpful suggestion. We influence so much more than we sometimes realize!

Remote Viewing Conference, 2003 (4)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday morning at 8 a.m., Stephan pre-empted Peter van Daam’s usual exercise period  to show the presentation he had intended to show on Friday night: Remote Viewing, the History of an Idea and Why It Matters. I was particularly interested to see him trace his work with psychic George McMullen, whose abilities he had documented in two classic books, The Secret Vaults of Time and The Alexandria Project. (Years ago, having read and been fascinated by the latter book, I had been glad to snap up George as a Hampton Roads author telling his own stories.) Stephan showed the intrinsic differences between lab research (concentration on variance from chance; concentration on a statistical outcome; statistical analysis as an end product, and involving only a single discipline) and applied research (statistics only a part of the analysis; use of psychics; no baseline for chance, and invariably multidisciplinary). He showed how in his projects he set out to create a “meta-mind” in which the psychics functioned as the intuitive side and the scientists as the analytical side. And he gave us insight into his four-team approach (teams of parapsychologists, archaeologists, specialists, and record keepers) in the pre-fieldwork, fieldwork and post fieldwork phases, and showed, in short, how he has gotten such interesting and important results. I was glad, after all, that we did get to see the presentation.

After another RV session (in which I did not participate, and which I therefore cannot describe) we came to Ingo Swan, who said he was tired of force-feeding audiences, and therefore had not prepared a talk but would answer whatever was asked, as this would tell him what people wanted him to talk about. Some ingots from the fire:

– In the 1980s he had thought RV doomed to disappear without a trace

– RVers and institutions like A.R.E. “fly in the face of the social commitment to keeping humans uninformed.”

– In order to have a controlled society, it would be important to get rid of telepathy.

– At 71, he said this appearance was perhaps his “swan song.” He is tired of  being here, wants a new body and is already planning his next life.

– If society were 60% telepathic, there would be no need to make decisions.

– We are trapped in our past, and trapped in our language. (The very word ESP for instance, sounds like it makes sense, but doesn’t.)

– We are born with ESP but the self gets collapsed down until we fit in. And we must fit in, because the others are aware when we don’t – even though they don’t know how they are aware.

– We are not taught Awareness 101. We should be taught, for example, Sensing Danger 101 (direct instinctual perception).

– Most of our switches (our abilities) are turned off. How do we turn them on? Simply find the switch and imagine it’s turned on. To turn it on, “Ask. Maybe you’ll get a dream.”

– “Don’t concentrate on blocks. Look for the good and wonderful in you.”

– “Compassion is the philosopher’s stone, the answer to everything. From compassion comes all the things that strengthen compassion.”

And for me, that was it. A three-day seminar followed, but I didn’t attend it. I’m sure that if it was as interesting as the conference that preceded it, the attendees went away happy.

[Footnote, 2024: Depending upon the depth of your interest in learning to practice remote viewing, you may be interested in Stephan Schwartz’ course. I have no vested interest in this; I get no kickbacks from it, but it’s hard to think of a better resource for those interested.: https://www.nemoseen.com/remote-viewing-course/ ]

 

Remote Viewing Conference, 2003 (3)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday’s first speaker was Edgar Evans Cayce. Hearing his quiet Virginian accent and his gentle and effective humor, I could imagine that his father must have sounded much the same. He described his father, and the process of giving readings, from first-hand memory, one of few people left alive who could do so. As the author, with his brother Hugh Lynn Cayce, of The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce’s Power, he was able to speak with some knowledge and authority of where his father seemed to get information, and what variables affected it. The former included unconscious memory, telepathy with people living or dead, clairvoyance –Edgar Evans said his father was always right when exercising clairvoyance – and either the akashic records or the mind throughout time and space. The latter included the state of his health, and the emotions and ideals of those around him.

After Mr. Cayce, we did our second RV experiment. This time, three people, one of them a cameraman, went out to an unknown destination somewhere within 20 minutes of the A.R.E. When the 20 minutes was up, Stephan called them, ascertained that they were there, and led us through 15 minutes of RV’ing. When the team returned, they showed the film of where they had been, and it was not at all hard to tell whether or not you had hit the target, for the four possibilities were the Cape Henry lighthouse, a water park, an exhibition center with an RV exhibit (Winnebagos, not psychics!) and a road construction zone. Here, for the first time I actually was able to overcome my tendency toward analytical overlay and self-imposed consistency, and got many elements of the target, which was the lighthouse. A very funny feeling, to suddenly “get it.” By show of hands, it seemed much of the audience did, as well.

After lunch, Dale Graff talked about remote viewing and dreams, telling how an early experience while canoeing on a remote Canadian river led him into the field. In desperate need of a replacement pair of boots, he dreamed where he would find them (though he didn’t know at the time the meaning of the dream) and indeed found them – in the middle of nowhere, apparently abandoned by someone – the next morning. It’s the kind of thing that tends to get one’s attention, I suppose. He differentiates between what he calls CSP (Conscious State Psi) and DSP (Dream State Psi). He’s onto something important here; I wish I had better notes!

Then Henry Reed of the A.R.E. spoke of RV as a tool of self-realization, and I was particularly pleased to hear him single out Skip’s book as being explicitly about spirit. Henry gave a striking example of what he called “value added.” One could give an RVer a set of coordinates and ask “what’s there?” That’s standard practice. But one could then ask, for instance, “how can it be made a more peaceful place?” And this is not standard practice. Should it be? Henry mentioned the difference between Doing Trust and Being Trustworthy. Of course, they are not the same thing. The point is, if Remote Viewing is to become more than a parlor stunt or a scientific demonstration of possibility, all sort of ethical and developmental questions arise.

And after supper, Russell Targ spoke entertainingly and well about just this same kind of thing. He began by noting that Hal Puthoff had been put in front with the scientists while he himself was back with the mystics. Riding that laugh, he pointed out that a mystic never asks you to believe anything, but invites you to find out for yourself. (I found this particularly simpatico, of course. It was Bob Monroe’s approach, all the way.) .Harking back to the Vedic traditions, and ranging freely through modern quantum physics, Russell then talked about the use of psychic abilities for self-inquiry. As he put it, 100 years of data demonstrates that “materialism doesn’t make any sense.” He quoted the Buddha as saying that we give meaning to what happens to us, and paint ourselves into a corner, and we suffer. That is, suffering is the creation of our prejudgment; separation is illusion. To become free, we must trade our conditioned awareness for naked awareness.