Stray Thoughts

My brother sends me this five-minute URL of a singer (Peter Mayer) playing guitar and expressing a lovely true song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua0PE1zulD4

When we’re really awake, we remember.

Made some final corrections to the sixth draft of Dark Fire, and I’m pretty happy with it. After seven intense months of writing, melding at least five previous versions, writing a logical sequel to not one but two novels – it was a lot! I re-read it in my last round of corrections and found that I’m happy with how it reads.

It’s not so easy, visualizing a world and making it come real, but there isn’t anything more satisfying, at least for me. And to be doing it as a form of homage to TMI and to Bob Monroe (even though my C.T. Merriman is very different from Bob), was immensely gratifying. I again took the opportunity to include what we might call distorted cameos of various friends – not portraits, but portraits of various traits, as they might play out if mixed and matched, put it that way. And as always I have used some names of people I am fond of, even though the characters bearing their names may have no resemblance to their personalities.

So far only one person has read it entirely, and she liked it well enough. Another is in the middle of it, and he likes it will enough. And I like it well enough. So I guess it’s time to get about the depressing business of finding a publisher or putting it out myself.

Later. Two TMI programs coming up this month, beginning the 22^nd. Meanwhile, I’m going to take a breather, maybe gloat a little.

For the past several months, I have been invited to write an article for The Echo, a free-distribution paper that circulates in central Virginia. It occurred to me, perhaps others would be interested as well.

It’s simple when you think of it in a certain context

By Frank DeMarco

Years ago when I was still a book publisher, I met Hank Wesselman at an INATS (International New Age Trade Show) in Denver, and he and I traded copies of our books. I read his first book, Spiritwalker, with interest, as I did with the two succeeding volumes of trilogy – Medicinemaker and Visionseeker – when they came out in later years. In 2009, I did one of his weeklong workshops in Oregon, along with Dirk Dunning, a friend with whom I have done several programs at The Monroe Institute. So, I came to know his material pretty well.

I don’t know about you, but I judge a book’s information by its effect on me. Ernest Hemingway said every writer needs an internal crap detector, and in my view that goes for readers, as well. When I read Spiritwalker for the first time, not only did my crap detector not go off, it strongly indicated that these books were telling important truths. I am far more skeptical of “science” than Hank is (he is an anthropologist by training), but I found his volumes fascinating, particularly in that they are first-hand experiences of communication via non-physical methods. Of course, in those days, I had no independent way to judge the material.

But now I do. In the years since I first read those books, I have been exposed to a lot of first- and second-hand information from the non-physical world. First came the information that Rita Warren and I received in 201-2002, and then, in the past two years, the material Rita fed me, several years after her transition from the 3D to the non-3D world. That material changed the mental world I live in, as it has done for many others.

Last month, in response to a prompting out of nowhere I can identify, I reread Hank’s trilogy, and found that what I have learned from Rita have made Hank’s books read very differently. First-hand experience will do that! Some things that I puzzled over at first reading, or took on faith, now seem obviously, inevitably true. Take this sentence, for instance, from Spiritwalker:

“Kahunas believed that everything in the everyday world has an ordinary aspect `here’ and a nonordinary aspect in the spirit realms.”

When I first read that sentence, years ago, I didn’t know what to make of it. All it said to me was that certain men believed a certain thing for reasons of their own which they did not divulge, and which the author did not explain. I don’t think this came from any desire on their part – or Hank’s – to deliberately mystify the subject. I think they just took it for granted and didn’t think to try to explain. I didn’t have the key.

But now I do. In the light of my long dialogues with Rita and others, I saw that this is just simple truth. In light of Rita’s explanation of the essential unbreakable oneness that is the 3D and non-3D world, the statement is not only sensible, but obvious, almost too simple to need stating.

It really is simple. Even the great god Science knows that reality consists of more than three dimensions plus time. Scientists are arguing about whether reality consists of six dimensions, or 12, or perhaps more, but for our purposes, how many there are doesn’t matter. However many there are, we are in all of them, even though we commonly perceive only height, breadth and length, and time.

We are in all of them, whether we know it or not, because there is no way we can not be. If you are in any, you are in all, in the same way you cannot be in height and depth, say, but not length. Rita explained that those dimensions we do not experience directly, we experience as aspects of time. As our ability to experience additional dimensions improves, they are, in effect, subtracted from our experience of time, so that time itself seems to change for us.

And if we are in all dimensions, so is everything else. Thus we live in the ordinary world (what Rita calls the 3D) and the non-ordinary world (the non-3D). So of course everything has one aspect here and one there. “Here” and “there,” in context, are parts of the same indivisible oneness.

In the second book of the trilogy, Medicinemaker, Hank quotes mythologist Joseph Campbell:

“The great key to understanding myth and symbol is that the two realities, ordinary and nonordinary, are actually one. The deed of the hero is to explore both dimensions and then return, to teach again what has been correctly taught and incorrectly learned a thousand times throughout human history.”

Plain, simple truth, but as usual, truth is more easily understood in its proper context.

 

 

I always read a lot, mostly books (rarely magazines, rarely newspapers) but since I finished my latest draft of Dark Fire I have been on an absolute binge. Between my proximity to UVA’s Alderman and Clemons libraries, and my own collection, and new and used books continually available for purchase, I live happily in a wilderness of temptation, with very little inclination to resist.

This morning I finished Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Times to Remember and it occurred to me how fortunate we are to have books. Here is a book published in 1974, which I am led to read more than 40 years later, and the author’s message is still there to be read. I re-read Profiles in Courage (the same paperback book I bought as a teenager) and it is a message from John F. Kennedy written more than 60 years ago, and more relevant today than ever, because the mainstream culture has moved so far away from what were the norms of the post-World War II world that his idealism comes as a fresh breeze from far away.

I read Emerson, and am reminded that things were every bit as bad in 1854 as in 2017: “The lesson of these days is the vulgarity of wealth. We know that wealth will vote for the same thing which the worst and meanest of the people vote for. Wealth will vote for rum, will vote for tyranny, will vote for slavery, will vote against the ballot, will vote against international copyright, will vote against schools, colleges, or any high direction of public money.”

How many years has Emerson been dead? (The answer, he died in 1882, but that’s not the point) Yet his words still speak to us. It is as he said in another place:

“What a great treasure can be hidden in a small, selected library! A company of the wisest and the most deserving people from all the civilized countries of the world, for thousands of years, can make the results of their studies and their wisdom available to us. The thought which they might not even reveal to their best friends is written here in clear words for us, people from another century.”

 

How fortunate we are to have books. If today they are electronic as much as paper, that has its advantages too: An electronic book that may be searched for a given word or phrase is a miracle of convenience, freeing us from the limitations of index or table of contents. Remove these time capsules, and what is left of our civilization will not be worth saving, nor will it endure very long.

Not the kind of thing I usually post here, but well worth reading.
http://www.salon.com/2017/03/26/dutch-kids-arent-stressed-out-what-americans-can-learn-from-how-the-netherlands-raises-children/

This article is titled “New Research Shocks Scientists: Human Emotion Physically Shapes Reality!”

Maybe they wouldn’t be so shocked if they didn’t cling to their old materialist paradigm. Nothing in these three experiments contradicts anything we have heard from Rita through me, or from the guys upstairs, before that.

http://i-uv.com/new-research-shocks-scientists-human-emotion-physically-shapes-reality/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IUv+%28I+UV%29

All this proves is that if you disregard the interconnection of everything through the non-3D, you aren’t going to be able to make sense of things, because in strictly 3D terms, there “must” be some lag, however small, between a stimulus in one place and a response in another.

 

Spoke to a Guidelines group at The Monroe Institute last night. Great group. I always enjoy talking to my fellow explorers, but for some reason, last night went particularly well. I was there until after 11 p.m. As always, I approached it not as a performer and his audience, but as collaborators investigating our experiences for our joint enlightenment, and, as always, I found the results stimulating.

I feel so fortunate to have had TMI as part of my life, these past 25 years!