We’re going to take a few days off from the blog so that we can straighten out everything that got messed up when we were hacked. We hope to resume on Saturday! See you then.
Trish and Rob
This story comes from Lauren at Threads of the Spiderwoman. We read it on her blog and loved it. You’ll see!
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I ran across this story in my files, and felt like sharing it.
In 2005 I was driving across Nebraska from an east coast residency, and stopped in tiny Cozad to visit the Robert Henri Museum, and the 100th Meridian Museum, which I just couldn’t resist. The founder of the “Ash Can” school of American realism, Robert Henri was born there, and apparently never went back, preferring New York City and Paris to Nebraska. Cozad forgives him.
I remember, afterwards, sitting in a diner and fretting as usual about what to do with my life. I know I was doing this, because I have it on paper in my journal. I also remember looking up at a flashing sign on the bank across the street.
That got my attention.
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Pretty cool, huh?? Talk about direct, literal messages from the universe.
Picasso
When we lived in Venezuela, most of the people in the American community who were Catholic attended one particular church. It was a Venezuelan Catholic church, but the bulk of its congregation consisted of Americans who worked for the oil companies. The kids were remanded to catechism classes, which pretty much amounted to brainwashing sessions about the nature of god, the universe, and all that. God is everywhere, God is good, God’s word is gospel.And when you die, you’re going to be judged as hopeless, maybe salvageable, or yes, you made the grade.
I remember siting there in this class and thinking that it was all wrong, that what happened when we died was what we believed would happen. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to go to church anymore and confess sins that I made up and do penances for things I hadn’t done, and I mean, please, Eve tempted Adam with a silly apple? Are you kidding me?
In all fairness to the Catholic church, I agreed with the previous pope about the immorality of the Iraq war. But that’s about the only area where I agree with the church. Most religions seems to have a vested interest in encouraging us to believe we’ve got one life to get it right, that some archangel or god will be sitting in judgment of what we have have done – or not done; what we have achieved – or not achieved; that some angry god may decide to sideline us somewhere till we tow the line.
Sounds like politicians, right? But if you look at the literature about near death experiences, you find something quite different from what most Christian religions preach.Tonight, rewriting the ultimate journey section in our book, here’s what I found – and mined:
The irony of dismissing anecdotes as valid, as proof, is that anecdotes are the only things we have at this point in scientific explorations of NDEs. Ask Raymond Moody, whose 1975 book Life After Life is a compilation of more than 100 stories from people who were declared clinically dead and were subsequently resuscitated. Moody’s book stamped the word near-death experience on the collective consciousness.
Two of the personal experiences that follow were left as comments on our blog. The last story was told to us by a friend. Each experiences is different, but there are certainly common factors.
Yet, she felt no awareness of her physical distress. “It was pure bliss. I stopped looking at what was happening below me and felt myself gliding away from that room, farther and farther. I didn’t pass through a tunnel, exactly. It was more as if I stepped through a door or a gate onto a kind of brightly-lit path or beam that seemed to be tugging me towards the most brilliant spectrum of colors, indescribable. I was so eager to reach those colors. But a voice, coming from someone I didn’t see, very clearly said to me, Connie, you can’t stay here. You have a new little boy to raise, and two more little boys coming. You have to go back.”
But Connie had no desire to go back.She was infused with such comfort and peace and joy that she felt angry that something seemed to be relentlessly pulling her back. She looked down and was in the room again, then very suddenly, with a severe jolt that seemed like an electrical shock, she was back in that ravaged body.
“The code team was ecstatic, but I wasn’t. I spent thirty-one days in what was then an ICU unit. It was written in my chart that for six minutes I had flatlined, with no cerebral activity and no pulse. I was dead, not “nearly dead”, as the so-called experts call it. There are no words in any language that can adequately describe the experience of being dead.“
Vicki D drowned at the age of sixteen. “I drifted up and saw myself lying on the beach as they administered CPR. Someone was behind me and kept asking me different questions. I remember feeling so peaceful and warm until the voice behind me told me to look closer at the girl on the beach and I slowly realized she looked like me, and then BAM!
During the birth of her first child, Renie Wiley died. She remembers drifting up toward the ceiling and watching the doctors as they tried to resuscitate her. Certain information was available to her in that state and she realized that her primary doctor was going to be shipped off to Vietnam and that he wouldn’t return.
When he brought her back into the world of the living, she described what she had experienced. She told him what she’d seen for him and begged him not to volunteer. He was shocked. No one knew that he had applied as a medic in Vietnam. And she was also right. He was killed in Vietnam.
Several years back, at the tail end of the Bush era, before the economy collapsed, we suspected things were screwed up because of what was happening in our neighborhood.
The house directly across the street from us had been turned over to the previous owners’ so the place became a revolving door for – well, we weren’t sure who these people were. One week, a family would be living in the house, kids and dogs and volleyball nets. The next week, the family would be gone and two guys would be sitting in the open garage with their computers, and new tenants would show up.
We had them all, every skin color, every type of family unit, every family pet. We discovered the guys in the garage were using the neighbors’ internet, that the house was being rented out to the homeless, the disenfranchised, that it was sold in a deal where no one could prove ownership, not even the bank. Then, of course, came the big collapse, 2008 and the foreclosure mess. We all know how that shook out.
So the other day we found this wonderful trickster story that turns the tables on banks:
Patrick Rodgers bought his home for $186,000. But when he started receiving notices that he owed a home insurance premium for a $1 million dollar house, he wrote his bank three times about it. The bank didn’t answers. A Philadelphia homeowner started foreclosure proceedings on a Wells Fargo mortgage office after winning a rather strange legal judgement against the bank. So he decided to force his mortgage company to pay attention, ABC News reported.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rodgers discovered the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, which requires mortgage companies to acknowledge written requests within 20 business days or face penalties. He took Wells Fargo to court and won a default judgment of $1,173 because the bank didn’t show up in court. When the bank still failed to reply to his letters, he started foreclosure proceedings.
The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, passed in 1974 to protect borrowers, stipulates a standard complaint letter that can be sent to lenders. (For more information on RESPA, check out the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website here.)
The contents of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage’s offices at 1341 North Delaware Avenue were scheduled for a March 4 sheriff’s sale. We’ll have to check for an update!
We’ve posted quite a few synchros about animals as messengers and a number of stories about how our pets often stick around after they have passed on. The spirits of animals used a variety of methods to communicate with us. We might hear the tap of claws against a floor, feel the weight of the pet at the foot of our bed, catch a certain scent in the air that we identify with that animal. They also come to us in dreams.
But the experience Jennifer L had with her dog is the first we’ve heard of with animal spirit communication.
“My Malamute, Dakota, was very wolfish but also very human and intuitive in amazing ways. I always felt she bridged the gap between the human world and the world of nature for me. She was my best friend for so many years and after she passed, I could feel her presence for a long time. Then I stopped feeling her around. That made me sad.
“About nine months after her death, I came home one day, and saw her paw print on the window! It was exactly what she loved to do: jump on the window to look out. Now whenever I miss her, I think of that and feel comforted.”
We’ve heard of initials on frosted or steamed windows, names and hand prints on mirrors and windows, but never a paw print!
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| Andrew Jackson Davis |
If you know much about American history, you’ve no doubt heard about Andrew Jackson, the fourteenth president. But you’ve probably never heard about American mystic named Andrew Jackson Davis. So here’s a history lesson from the mystical underground.
In 1844, at the age of 18, a shoemaker named Andrew Jackson Davis went into a state of semi-trance and wandered from his home in Poughkeepsie, New York. The next morning he found himself forty miles away in the mountains where he claimed he encountered the spirits of Swedish philosopher and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg and the second-century Greek physician Claudius Gale. He came away from the experience claiming he was mentally illuminated. Even though he never attended school, he began teaching and writing about supernatural powers, which he called human magnetism and electricity.
Davis, who became known as the Poughkeepsie Seer, also exhibited these powers. In 1845, he began to dictate, while in trance, a book entitled The Principles of Nature. In the book, Davis made the following prediction regarding a new era of communication with the other side.
“It is a truth that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher spheres—and this, too, when the person in the body is unconscious of the influx, and hence cannot be convinced of the fact; and this truth will ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration. And the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communion will be established…”
In Davis’ notes, dated March 31, 1848, are the following words: “About daylight this morning a warm breathing passed over my face and I heard a voice, tender and strong, saying: ‘Brother, the good work has begun—behold a living demonstration is born.’ I was left wondering what could be meant by such a message.”
It wasn’t long before he realized the meaning of the message. March 31, 1848 was the day that Maggie Fox and her two sisters established a means of communicating with the others side, which gave birth to Spiritualism, a movement that flourished in the waning decades of the Victorian Era. Davis had experienced a synchronicity through his contact with the other side.
While synchronicity doesn’t always involve spirit contact, it can serve as connective tissue between the everyday world and the other side, the world of spirit. The more contact we make, the more the so-called ‘dead’ appear to be quite alive and willing to communicate.
OK, for a change of pace here – from owls to self-published e-book millionaire at the ripe old age of 26! She was rejected by major NY book publishers, but that didn’t stop her.
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In doing so recently, we stumbled across one very strange and specific search question: “What does it mean spiritually if an owl dies in front of your yoga studio?”
On Christmas Eve, we were sitting around our fire pit, warming our feet, and started talking about UFOs. I suddenly remembered two instances when I had a sighting.
The first must have been around 1963. I was in boarding school in Massachusetts, there because the high schools in Venezuela weren’t that great and the company my dad worked for paid for it. Six or seven of us were in a room on the ground floor of an old Victorian house that comprised one of the dorms. The room belonged to Holly Smith, who had inherited a ton of money when her parents had passed away a few years before. Holly was a trust fund kid – there seemed to a be a lot of them at this boarding school – and had a prime room with fantastic floor to ceiling windows that offered a panoramic view of the campus, the sky, the world. She paid extra for that room, where she lived alone.
Many nights, some of us would sneak down to Holly’s room after lights out – yes, 10 PM was the magic hour for the dorm to go dark, arcane, I know – and sit around talking and gossiping and smoking cigarettes.So one night six or seven of us were sitting around in Holly’s room, doing our usual forbidden things, and I happened to look out one of her fabulous windows and saw a very strange light. It hovered, it was soundless, it pulsed red, yellow, blue.
“Hey, look,” I whispered to one of the other girls. “What the hell is that?”
“A plane,” she said.
“It’s not making any noise,” I said.
“We’re just not hearing any noise because it’s too far away.”
Except that it wasn’t far away. The light was close and now it was moving strangely, swiftly, zigzagging across the sky, growing larger, brighter, and changing colors. “That’s a UFO,” I said.
“No way,” said Holly.
The light zoomed in closer – not flush to the window or anything like that – but close enough for all of us to see that it wasn’t a plane, wasn’t a chopper, wasn’t like anything any of us had ever seen before. It performed – racing from right to left, moving diagonally, spinning, slowing, hovering again.
By then, I was practically hanging outside the window. I knew what I was seeing, I knew what this was, and so did everyone else in that room.Then the light shot off into the stratosphere at the speed of light.
The second sighting occurred on November 9, 1965, during a blackout to the Northeast coast of the U.S. The Life Magazine cover story depicts it well. The lights went out. I was a freshman in college, in Utica, New York, wedged between Schenectady and Syracuse. I was in my double room on the ground floor, had just come in from a class or dinner or something, and hit the button on my desk lamp – which didn’t come on. No electricity. It was already dark outside, and I made my way over to my bed and sat down and tried to remember where I had put my flashlight.
My room had long windows that slid open and looked out over the back campus where everything was totally black. But suddenly, the sky lit up and dozens of bright, orange objects cascaded through my vision. At first, I thought it was a meteor shower that was visible because of the blackout. But after a few moments of watching these objects, I knew they were the same thing I had seen two years earlier in Holly’s room. These were UFOs.
When I Googled blackout 1965, a wikipedia entry was one of the first URLs that came up. Here’s what it says:
On the same night, many UFO sightings were made in the same area. One occurred at 4:30 PM over Tidioute, Pennsylvania, and another at 5:22 PM between Syracuse Airport and Rochester, New York. They were described as fast, bright objects. During the blackout, a private pilot and a flight instructor both witnessed a bright fireball 50–100 ft in diameter, which quickly vanished. The fireball was observed over the Clay Power Station, which was originally said to be the source of the blackout before authorities reported the source of the surge to be at Beck. In New York City, UFOs with a strange glow were reported, and one of the pictures of the object taken was printed in Time Magazine. Before the Federal Power Commission‘s explanation, the Indianapolis Star, the Syracuse Herald-Journal, and the Associated Press all picked up the UFO reports.
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So now, all these many years later, I’m left to marvel that I twice witnessed something inexplicable, that I intuitively know were UFOs, and that I got as close to them as I can personally accept. Years ago when Rob and I met, I defined my boundaries with UFO experiences. I didn’t want little grays running around in my bedroom, I didn’t want implants, I didn’t want terror.Forget pain and malaise. Give me magic, give me mystery, give me proof. Back then, as now, I’d like to meet a friendly ET, you know, the funny looking guy in the Spielberg movie who will take me on a wild bike ride through the light of the full moon.
