https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6OASdiqH1o
Indiegogo.com allows anyone, anywhere, to raise money for a project – video, art, movie, TV show, book, any venue. This evening, Daz sent me a couple of links to one particular project by Rae Dawn Chong who is attempting to raise money for a TV show called Celebrant. That clip above is about death and dying, love and life and synchronicity.
I’d love to see a show like this on TV.
And here’s Rae talking about the show:
When we moved from blogger to wordpress three years ago, we lost some readers. So I was delighted when I ran across a link to Jama Genie’s blog while I was going through some of my old notes. I went to her blog and left a comment about how great it was to find her again. Today, she dropped by for a visit and left this fascinating story about a trickster ghost.
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I’ve never understood the meaning of “trickster” either until I read this post. Thanks! That said, my perception of the Trickster has always been similar to the one you describe in connection with your father’s death. A few weeks ago, though, I had an encounter with the version of Trickster that isn’t so comforting… I had to go to an out-of-state funeral on a Saturday which required renting a car with unlimited mileage. What the heck, I said. I have to keep the car all weekend, might as well take advantage of those unlimited miles and make a road trip out of it.
My first stop was a 2-day visit with an 87-yr-old legally-blind friend I only knew online and through phone calls. I was to drive her to church Sunday morning, and she wanted to be there early, so I set my trusty travel alarm for the crack of dawn. As soon as I got out of bed, I turned it off and clearly remember placing it in a side pocket of my soft-side vanity case, which I then zippered shut. I don’t wear a watch and the legally-blind have no reason to keep regular clocks on the bedside table, so I opened the vanity case to look at the travel alarm, but it wasn’t there! Or anywhere else in the room! My friend’s response: “Mizz Fisher”, whom I would later learn was the previous tenant who’d lived in the apartment for 17 years before she died, but apparently had never left.
Weird things had happened while her son had been packing up her things. My friend felt cold spots in the kitchen. She’d find a cabinet door, that she couldn’t possibly reach without standing on a chair, wide open of a morning. Being blind, she naturally put certain things in certain places, but a special rosary went missing for several days until a sighted friend found it in a dish at the other end of the occasional table where my friend kept it. All Mizz Fisher’s doing, they decided. I suspect she was attracted to my travel alarm because it had a colorful dragon sticker on a silver background on the cover.
After church and brunch, I turned the room upside down again and emptied my luggage on the bed, and the clock was still missing. Then my friend and I left to visit a couple of area cemeteries and were gone several hours. On our return, I sat on the side of the bed farthest from my friend’s treadmill machine. Something shiny on the treadmill caught my eye. Yep, it was the travel clock, but sitting topside up, perfectly aligned with the edge of the rubber tread! Definitely placed there, not even close to where it would’ve landed had it slipped out of the vanity case or I’d dropped it without noticing.
I’m usually quite comfortable in residences with a “leftover” occupant, but the idea that an invisible entity was present that could remove an object from the inside pocket of a closed piece of luggage totally freaked me out, and that night I barely slept! At one point I heard a kitchen faucet handle turn and water hit the stainless steel sink. An hour or so later, it was the squeak of a cabinet door opening. Both times my friend was snoring away in a room across the hall. Trickster? Oh, yes! A playful trickster? Not MY definition of “playful”!
John Mack, right, with the Dalai Lama
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It’s rare that a mainstream magazine or newspaper tackles the subject of alien abductions without ridiculing the entire field of ufology and the people involved or, at the very least, without dripping sarcasm. But Ralph Blumenthal has accomplished this in a piece for Vanity Fair.
The piece begins in Rhode Island, where a group of abductees have gathered to share their experiences free of stigma and ridicule, and it ends with new information (at least to us) about Harvard psychiatrist John Mack.
In the article, we learned that John Mack had two unpublished manuscripts – one that he considered his “cri de Coeur against scientific materialism and ontological fascism,” and another about life after death. We also learned that after four years of negotiation, the film and TV rights to Mack’s story are going to MakeMagic Productions, which has partnered with Robert Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises. A major film is in development.
One the abductees Mack worked with, a man referred to as ‘Scott,’ recalled his last conversation with Mack in 2004. He was afraid about dying and this is what Mack told him in a reassuring manner. “You never know when it will be your time. We could all go at any time. I could walk out on the street and get hit by a car.”
A few weeks later, while in London, Mack was crossing a street in London when he was struck by a drunken driver and killed.
The article is here. The video link is courtesy of Daz.
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And Happy Mother’s Day to all moms out there!
Do yourself a favor. If you haven’t seen The Impossible, by all means do so! This film, starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, may be one of the most emotionally powerful films I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s based on a true story.
The premise is simple: a family – husband, wife, three sons – travel to Khao Lak, Thailand for a family vacation. Maria Bennet (Watts) is an English physician who no longer practices because she’s raising three sons. She and her Scottish husband, Henry (McGregor) and their sons – Lucas, Tomas and Simon- stay at a resort in Khao Lak, Thailand over the Christmas holidays in 2004.
They arrive on Christmas Eve day and we get a sense of them as a family. Lucas is the rebellious older son who bullies Tomas, nearly 8, the middle brother. He’s interested in astronomy. Simon, the youngest, is a cutie, an innocent. Maria and Henry appear to have a good marriage, beset by uncertainties – he may be losing his job.
On the morning of December 26, a tsunami slams into the coast, decimating the resort, and sweeping away Maria and Lucas, the oldest son. At the moment the tsunami hits, Henry and the other two sons are in the resort swimming pool.
Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter begins with a 2004 tsunami scene. But compared to The Impossible, Hereafter’s opening is like afternoon tea. As our daughter remarked while we were watching the movie, the opening of Hereafter is just for effect; in The Impossible, the tsunami and its aftermath are the story.
Without giving away too much, this story is about how human beings react and persevere in the midst of a natural catastrophe so devastating that nearly a quarter of a million people were killed. By focusing on one family, the emotional resonance is powerful, utterly genuine. Maria is severely injured, and she and Lucas end up in a makeshift Thai hospital, where the conditions are so gross, so unsanitary, that at certain points I writhed.
Maria keeps asking Lucas about the color of her severely injured leg.
“Red, “ he says. “Red. Why?”
“Red is good. Black is not good.”
Henry, meanwhile, has found his two youngest sons and sends them into the mountains with other refugees, so that he can stay behind on the coast and search for his wife and Lucas. This decision seemed like a plot flaw to me, but as Rob pointed out, maybe it actually happened, Henry only wanted his sons somewhere safe. In a situation like this, where a natural catastrophe has ripped apart normal, it’s difficult to know what decisions you might make. What’s immediately obvious about all the survivors are shell shocked, profoundly traumatized.
There are moments in this film that show humanity at its worst – like when Henry asks a fellow survivor if he can use his cell phone to call his father-in-law and the man says the battery is low and he’s waiting for a call, so no.
And there are moments when we see humanity at its best and most heroic. Henry and other survivors are sitting around a campfire somewhere, sharing their experiences about the loss of spouses, children, the sudden, unpredictable horror that slammed into their lives. Henry starts telling what he experienced and breaks down, sobbing, and one of the fellow survivors hands him his nearly depleted cell phone. “Make the call,” he says.
Naomi Watts was nominated for best actress for this film, and with good reason. In her scenes, I never had the sense that I was watching a movie. She’s totally genuine, a character in whom you vest your emotions as a mother, parent, wife, physician, human being. Through her and Lucas, we witness the chaos in the aftermath, how the injured flooded rural hospitals unequipped for such massive devastation. Through her, a physician, you feel the horror of her situation, how the deck is stacked against her.
I was surprised at some of the comments about this movie. But the one that really struck me was how this movie showed an insensitivity to the massive loss of loss of native people. I disagree. By focusing on the emotional chaos and horror that a family of tourists experienced, we are led into the heart of the disaster itself and its wrenching, emotional aftermath. In the end, the message of this film is clear: love pushes us into the unexplored, the unimagined, and can bring about miracles.
Moldavite is not a common stone. But it certainly has a colorful history. Nearly 15 million years ago, a meteor crashed in what is now the Bohemian plateau of the Czech Republic. It’s believed that moldavite is a result of that meteor’s impact, but there are several theories about its origin. One theory is that it’s earthly rock melted by the heat of the meteor’s crash. Another theory contends that its origin is extraterrestrial.
According to author Robert Simmons, moldavite has been used as a spiritual talisman for at least 25,000 years, More recently it has been connected to the grail in the legend of the holy grail. Whatever its origins, it is now widely used for metaphysical purposes. Simmons says that working consciously with this stone causes chakras to open, your dream life becomes more vivid and meaningful, healings occur, it’s easier to communicate with spirit guides, and that synchronicities increase.
I own a couple of pieces of moldavite – in a ring, a pendant, and a couple of raw unpolished pieces. I‘m always on the lookout.
So this afternoon (April 28) Rob and I are waiting at the Jamal Enlightement Center for his healing session with Peruvian shaman Don Pascual. The gift shop has an extensive collection of stones. I’m looking through them and wondering if there’s any moldavite. The other woman who is waiting for a healing with Carey Stokes suddenly says to the clerk, Do you have any moldavite?
Synchronicity. Maybe two seconds passed between my thought and her question. It’s as if we read each other’s minds.
The clerk comes out from behind the counter. “We have one piece. Moldavite is hard to find.”
She brings out a polished piece of moldavite, fitted for a pendant, selling for $70. The woman and I pass.
“You ever been to Cassadaga?” Rob asks her.
The woman laughs. “Never, but I’m going soon.”
Me: “You can usually find some nice moldavite pieces there.”
She asks a few more questions about Cassadaga, we talk about the silence and darkness after a hurricane. She confides that she has made the rounds of healers (and psychics) in the area and has found them wanting. “But I feel that Carey is genuine.”
And so do I.
Carey is one of these strapping, good-looking Cary Grant kind of guys. You sense that he’s totally immersed in what he’s doing. He learned his healing methods from Don Pascual.
When she was called in for her healing with Carey, Rob was on the far side of the room with Don Pascual. “Puedo quedar?” I asked Don Pascual. May I stay?
“She can translate,” Rob said.
“No, no,” Pascual said.
“It’s about the spirits who come in,” Stokes added.
So I shut the door, bought a pair of dream catcher earrings that had captured me earlier, and went on outside to walk Noah, who had been waiting patiently in the car.
I also bought two pieces of vegetarian pizza, consumed one of them, enjoyed the vast blue Florida sky, and marveled at the small but magical synchro with a stranger.
Noah and his new girlfriend,Brandy
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Last year, our golden retriever, who was just three then, started acting like a much older dog. He was winded after a few Frisbee runs, had trouble leaping onto the back seat of one of our cars, slept a lot, and then started losing hair from his tail and neck.
We changed his diet, gave him cod liver oil, olive oil, and concocted exotic drinks suitable for human consumption that we shared with him. Nothing worked. Then he developed an ear infection and we took him to our vet, a genius whose diagnoses are rarely wrong. He looked at Noah’s ears, then at his balding tail.
“Thyroid,” he said, and conducted a blood test.
Sure enough, the blood test revealed a low thyroid. Noah is now on the canine version of synthroid. A pill twice a day. In just three weeks, the difference in his energy is astounding. He runs faster, is more competitive at the dog park, chases away doggy thieves who sneak in to grab his ball. He also seems to have developed a crush on Brandy, a female mixed breed who jumps higher than he does to catch a ball. That’s her in the photo above, looking up and watching a high ball that Rob threw her.
Noah, who was fixed when we got him, now humps Brandy at every opportunity. When she runs to chase a ball, he races alongside side her, trying to reach the ball first. People at the dog park who know him have commented about it.
Wow, what has gotten into Noah?
This is how he was two years ago with Cody!
Does he ever get worn out?
The thyroid gland controls how quickly the body uses energy, makes proteins, and controls how sensitive the body is to other hormones. Energetically, it’s centered in the fifth chakra – the throat area – communication. I’ve noticed that since Noah has been on the thyroid meds, his barks tend to be louder, like explosive booms. Sometimes, he sounds like a hound at the hunt.
Golden retrievers are generally known as people friendly dogs who seek human company, seek out human touch and companionship, another form of communication. Noah has never been that kind of golden, probably because he was crated for the first nine months of his life. His previous owners intended to use him as a stud and gave him up when they ran into financial problems.
Yet, since he has been on the thyroid med, he is much less timid about approaching people. Just this afternoon, he went over to Jen, Brandy’s owner, and nudged her, asking for a pat on the head. Of course, maybe he figures if he can get on her good side, Brandy will be more amenable to chasing him instead of that ball!
We took him back to the vet for a checkup and is thyroid level has gone from .5 to 7 in just four weeks. Normal, the vet says, falls around 4. His fur is growing back, lustrous and thick.
There’s no synchro in this story, no aliens, nothing conspiratorial. Noah has simply reminded me that our animal companions aren’t just ornaments that decorate our lives. They are beings whose inner, emotional lives are as rich – or richer than- our own. They have desires, needs, and longings we can’t fathom.
Most people I know, for instance, think squirrels are cute or annoying or mischievous little devils. But if you stand in the middle of a dog park and shout, SQUIRREL, nearly every dog will stampede to where you’re standing, looking for that squirrel. They not only understand that word, they react to it.
For a dog, squirrel may represent what for us would be an adrenaline rush – skydiving, that first innocent kiss, winning a marathon, a tennis match, a game of chess. Or, squirrel to a dog may just be synonymous with the thrill of the chase, of running free beneath a vast blue sky.
Since we share our lives with Noah, we are energetically linked to him and vice versa. So, symbolically, I’m wondering about the thyroid message. Perhaps it’s saying that we should do more of what we enjoy, what thrills us, what makes us feel as if we are perpetually running free beneath that vast blue sky.
If Rob and I start howling at the moon, you’ll know we got the message.
art by deb komitor
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I’ve been reading a book called The Trickster and the Paranormal by George Hansen, published in 2001. The book is dense, often academically dry, packed with mythological references, theories about what the paranormal is – or isn’t. There’s even stuff about UFOs and encounters. But all of it relates back to the trickster, the vehicle Hanses uses to explore psychic phenomena.
Hansen regards the trickster as deception, a perpetrator of hoaxes, a liar and a cheat – in other words, the person you hope your son or daughter won’t marry! Hansen talks about Jung’s archetypes, but defines it, for the purpose of his book, as “a pattern that can manifest at multiple levels.” He believes the trickster is an archetype, as Jung said, but defined it as an “abstract constellation of characteristics” that includes:
Hansen isn’t a debunker. He isn’t exactly a skeptic, either. He worked in lab-based parapsychology for eight years, three at the Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina, and five years at Psychophysical Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. By his own admission, he has been personally involved with a number of psychic, UFO, and occult subcultures, and also helped start a skeptic group. “Friends of mine practice ritual magic; others are professional mediums; a number tell me that aliens have abducted them; and still others admit to me privately that they are phony psychics.”
Obviously, this guy isn’t your ordinary researcher. His central thesis is that psychic phenomena are “associated with processes of destructuring.” From what I can gather from what I’ve read so far, “destructuring” seems to be the point where monumental shifts occur in society’s mass beliefs, where we reach a tipping point. Hansen cites the sixties rise of the hippie subculture, for instance, as a period of destructuring. Well, yeah, it was. And the Vietnam war was the pivot on which that destructuring spun. I would venture to say that Occupy Wall Street belonged in this “destructuring” category.
He takes on debunker James Randi, Israeli psychic Uri Geller, UFOs, abductions, shamanism, Houdini, hypnosis, CSICOPS, reincarnation, near-death experiences. In Hansen’s cosmology, all these areas are subject to and often subsumed by the trickster. The biggest problem I have with Hansen’s book, other than the fact that the book is twelve years old and much has surfaced since then, is his definition of the trickster.
The trickster isn’t just about deception. It’s often an in-your-face sort of thing, where we are confronted with our shadow selves. It can manifest itself globally, politically, within organized religion. A politician ior pundit who is against gay marriage, for instance, suddenly changes his stance because his son or daughter comes out as gay. Or he himself turns out to be gay. Hours after Pope Benedict announced his resignation, lightning struck the Vatican. Very Biblical, right? It’s the Cosmic Clown in action.
Yes, the trickster archetype – that clown – can be – and often is – everything in Hansen’s handy list. But it’s also much more. The trickster is sometimes playfully mischievous, as it was when Rob experienced two successive Zen license plates. It can also goof on you, poke fun at you, as it did during this word game. It can hint at a creative path. It can relate to extreme weather phenomenon that seems to be tailored to seize our attention about climate change. And yes, the trickster can be dark, as it was for Heath Ledger and David Carradine. Or global.
The trickster archetype, the clown synchro, has many masks, many manifestations, and they don’t all have negative connotations. The trickster can be an alchemist that teaches us how to mix different elements in our lives to create what we desire. It can be the object or animal (coyote in Native American mythology) that relays a message or brings a communication from the dead (owl, raven). It can be a poltergeist, an ally, a Smeagol in disguise that teaches us something vital about ourselves. It can be wrapped up in something as exotic as an alien encounter and in something as prosaic as a marriage, a friendship, or in something as significant as death.
When my father was dying, he was in an assisted living facility in Georgia where my sister was the head nurse. We had spent all day in his room, organizing his stuff, making sure his favorite classical music played. We talked about him and our mom, about what great parents they were, what wonderful childhoods we had. In short, we verbalized our tribute to them. Around 10:30 that night, Mary and I headed back to her townhouse. We were exhausted, but too wired to sleep. She suggested we split an Ambien, which she normally used to go to sleep.
I was hesitant. Although I’d experimented with my share of drugs in the Sixties, I’ve stayed away from prescription drugs. But I knew I desperately needed to sleep. “I’ll take a quarter.”
Half an hour later, the night nurse at the facility called and said we’d better get there, fast. Dad was failing. At this point, the Ambien had kicked in. When I walked into the dimly building, I felt as though I were walking into a Neptunian world, where nothing is what it seems, where it’s all illusion, a Matrix sort of world, where the veil between the living and the dead is nearly non-existent. He lay there, my dad did, bathed in a surreal light, unmoving, and I felt my mother around, caught the scent of her favorite perfume. In my mind, I saw them dancing.
It’s the Ambien, I thought. But I knew it was the trickster, the Cosmic Clown, enabling me to see his transition, to feel my mother’s presence, enabling me to push through the resistance I had to his death. In astrology, Neptune symbolizes the netherword, the afterworld, so it seemed appropriate that two people from the Neptune Society arrived to take his body away. He wanted to be cremated, his ashes scattered at sea, and that’s what the Neptune Society does.
After they took his body away, I sat outside in the dark courtyard, and talked to him in my head. I thanked him for being the father he was. I called a friend and told her what I was feeling. And off to my right, I saw the Cosmic Clown – not a Stephen King horror, but a kinder version who opened his arms, and whispered, “He’s here, always here, as close as your focus and need.”
And ever since, that has been my experience. The Cosmic Clown may laugh at us, but he/she always laughs with us as well, delighting in our discoveries.
This is the trickster I know, the Cosmic Clown I acknowledge. Teacher, muse, buddy, ally.
Dean Radin himself must be considered supernormal. As a scientist working in the tiny field of parapsychology, he is surrounded by academics and intellectuals who not only dismiss all psi phenomena, but think parapsychology is not a valid field of study. As a result, there is very little money available for such result and only a handful of full-time parapsychologists. Yet, Radin plods on tirelessly, turning out the studies and the book. He has the evidence, the undeniable proof that telepathy and other psychic phenomena are real.
from Radin:
Critics are fond of saying that’s there is no scientific evidence for psi. They wave their fist in the air and shout, “Show me the evidence!” Then they turn red and have a coughing fit. In less dramatic cases a student might be genuinely curious and open-minded, but unsure where to begin to find reliable evidence about psi. Google knows all and sees all, but it doesn’t know how to interpret or evaluate what it knows (at least not yet).
In the past, my response to the “show me” challenge has been to give the titles of a few books to read, point to the bibliographies in those books, and advise the person to do their homework. I still think that this is the best approach for a beginner tackling a complex topic. But given the growing expectation that information on virtually any topic ought to be available online within 60 seconds, traditional methods of scholarship are disappearing fast.
So I’ve created a SHOW ME page with downloadable articles on psi and psi-related topics, all published in peer-reviewed journals. Most of these papers were published after the year 2000. Most report experimental studies or meta-analyses of classes of experiments. I will continue to add to this page and flesh it out, including links to recent or to especially useful ebooks. This page may eventually become annotated, then multithreaded and hyperlinked, and then morph into a Wiki.
This You Tube video is one of the things that came out of the Disclosure events in Washington, D.C. this past week. This man was apparently a CIA agent during the Eisenhower years. He strikes me as sincere, but I always ask myself if it might be more disinformation. The video was shot in early March.
Tonight, we’ll be live with Mark Johnson and KGRADIO, 9-10:30 PM eastern.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=3eQx_5U4WV4
A note: we’ll be here tonight live, from 11 PM to 1 AM Eastern time.
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I have been fortunate in my life to connect with people who make a difference in the world. Author and past-life researcher Carol Bowman is one of them.
In the 1980s, when her son and daughter were very young, her son, Chase, developed a horrible fear of firecrackers. When questioned about his fear, he recounted a life as a Civil War soldier in which he was wounded. He, a five-year old boy, accurately described a bayonet, the “firecracker-like noises” around him on a Civil War battlefield, and Carol suddenly knew his phobia pointed at a deeper reality. After he remembered his death on the battlefield, his fear of loud noises went away.
She ended up on Oprah before she’d even written her book, Children’s Past Lives, and went on to write a second book, Return from Heaven. In the years since, Carol has established a practice as a past-life therapist. She has been on innumerable TV and radio shows, was the first person to be contacted about the James Leininger case, which she discussed on ABC “Primetime” before that case even registered in popular culture, and has been approached by numerous producers and consultants who are looking for cases that prove reincarnation.
Through her research, Carol was not trying to prove whether these memories can be validated. Her focus is on healing, an aspect her mentor – Ian Stevenson, and his protégé, Jim Tucker – summarily dismissed. Carol knows otherwise. And the universe seems to be cooperating. Just today, she was going through her cases for her next book, and ran across a regression she did in 1994, of a woman who had been plagued by the same nightmare for forty years.
In the nightmare, this women saw herself as a young boy, about 15, in tattered, dirty clothing. She/he was with a group of children and was telling them to be quiet. The boy sensed a dark shadow following them. Then, she would wake up in a panic.
In the regression, this woman saw herself as a teenage boy, about 15, who is trying to usher a group of Italian children to safety during WWII. Everything goes wrong. The boy is found – and tortured – and he and the children are all killed. As he was dying, the boy felt terrible guilt about what happened, and blamed himself for not saving the children. He felt it was his responsibility, and he failed.
As he was “dying” in that life, he saw that he really had died a noble death by sacrificing himself to try to save the children. He was able to release the guilt he carried from that experience into this life, which came up through his dreams. Today, almost 20 years after that regression, Carol heard from the woman, who gave her permission to use the story in her new book.
Since the woman’s regression, she has never had the nightmares again. The regression provided closure when she saw that as that boy she had done all that he could do to save the children in that situation. This insight, or shift in perspective, healed her.
That’s what Carol’s work is about. She is already convinced of the validity of past lives. Her focus now is simpler: past-life therapy heals.
