And the Truth Shall Set You Free

Why did Jesus have to die? That was the headline on an Easter edition of Time magazine some years ago. Intrigued, I bought the issue. I remember read the story, and that it said that there were three competing versions for the answer to that question. I'm not sure if I remember any of them, but I do remember that I didn't buy any of them. "He died so we don't have to?" What is that? So we don't have to...what? Die? Well, we do, so what's that all about. Oh, and then there's the classic: "He died for our sins." Lovely, so it's all our fault! Way to go God! God, the creator of all, perfect and infallible in every way creates a being so imperfect that she has to kill a part of herself, in a nasty way, to make the creation worth anything? What kind of God creates a flawed being, drops it in a world designed for it to fail, then punishes it forever if it doesn't measure up. Free will?! Where's the free will if the options are choose right or be dammed?! This is the God of love? Who are we kidding?

Sorry, to me that's just a steaming pile of you-know-what. It sound too much like a clumsy human invention.

Hey, just for laughs, lets consider another option. What if Jesus wasn't saying "Believe in me and you will live," but "Believe in me, you will live." He was trying to tell us all that the temple rules and casts mean nothing, we are all going to heaven, we all will rise again, no matter what. To prove it, he died and came back. His plan was to show that anyone can come back from the dead and for that he needed a demonstration. So he chose to die in public, in the most indisputable way possible, so that no one could say afterward that it was a trick, he wasn't really dead, and then rise again.

So far so good, that part went off without a hitch, he died and came back and no one could deny it. But we humans were trickier than he gave us credit for and we stopped his plan dead in it's tracks, so to speak. Since we couldn't deny that he came back from the dead, we did the next best thing: we denied he was human. Sort of.

I can see the temple leaders working this one out: "He could do that because he was God. No, wait, if he was God then he actually couldn't die... Um, wait a minute...let's see, if he is human, then he can't come back from the dead, but, if he's God he can do anything and the whole dying on a cross thing was just a pointless show. Oh dear! Wait! I got it! He was both God and Human, that way the human part can suffer and die and the God part then resurrects!"

The people: "Oh, I see... Wait a minute, come again? What is partially God? How can you be partially omnipotent, partially the creator of all there is?"

Leaders: "You poor ignorant slobs, don't ask such stupid questions. It's all a Devine Mystery, of course. We are important teachers and we know what the Truth is, so you don't need to worry your little heads about it. You live once and then you die and you look to us to make sure you are right with God when you do, so take care!"

For me, the simplest, straightforward answer is the one most likely to be true. Jesus was trying to tell us that we are all children of God, that we never really die, and you can give up the fear of death and the paranoia about "getting right with God." Live a good life. Treat people as you wish to be treated. Even criminals will get to paradise, so arbitrary rules are not what it's all about. Treat the homeless and whores with compassion and respect, you are no better or worse than they are. Anything you can't take with you is of no value in the end. What does follow you is how you value others, especially those who your society, social class, nationally and religion tell you to hate, to fear or just be uncomfortable around. Following silly rules is easy. Giving money to your church is easy. Having compassion for the blacks on your street, the muslim in the store, the homeless outside the store is hard. And the struggle to do so will leave marks upon your soul that will go with you, and will demonstrate the value you place on all God's creations. That is what matters in the end.

Jesus was/is an powerful, enlightened being. We all have the ability to do and be what he did, the difference between him and us is that we don't believe it. "Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free."

A World With a View

I stumbled into alternative healing through the back door, I suppose. My childhood had no particular religious or philosophic bent at all, that I can remember. Now that I think of it, it seems a little strange that nothing of the sort ever seemed to come up. Maybe I was too young to notice, but I don't think so. I was left with a vague idea that all priests, monks, witch doctors, etc. were all cut from the same mold: vaguely ridiculous, overdressed, self-importantly shaking their fingers about sin and quick to yell about the devil and evil spirits whenever there was something they did out understand or didn't like. And I ignored them.

By the ninth grade I had developed an interest in psychic phenomena and parapsychology, perhaps from reading lots of science fiction. I had somehow managed to find a book about the parapsychology experiments at Duke University, probably J. B. Rhine's book, New Frontiers of the Mind (1937), and saw that there was science behind the fiction. I found it all a bit exciting but perfectly sensible and reasonable, but my upbringing caused me to doubt everything: Don't believe anything (they're trying to trick you), and, above all, keep your head down and your mouth shut. So for many years I avoided having anything to do with anything religious, psychic, ghosts, UFOs, you name it. Basically a closet believer who toed the materialist, "ain't no such thing" party line in public. I was actually afraid of being associated with any of that stuff in any way. Even afraid to read about it in private, like somebody might "catch" me.

All that started to shift only a handful of years ago when my wife and I went to a marriage counselor. After working with the therapist for a while, I discovered that she was a spiritual teacher and a psychic, and, suddenly, it was like I had permission to believe again. It was like a great weigh was lifted off my shoulders and I was free!

In truth, I must have been slowly progressing for years. But that was the time when the locks of self doubt and fear, slowly eroded by increasing self-confidence and self-awareness finally flew open.

It would be nice to say "And they lived happily ever after," but no, not so fast. That was just the beginning of the confusing and sometimes painful process of re-jiggering my reality. That process is still ongoing, for there is still a huge amount of information that I need to sift through, digest, and integrate into my constantly evolving world view.

A Non-Human Reality?

Yesterday I got to experience a QHHT session first hand, to see what it was like to be the client. It was really wild, and puzzling.

A session starts with an interview. The practitioner and I didn't know each other, so we needed time for him to understand me enough to know what to look for and be able to understand and interpret what he hears. That took an hour. Then we got to the hypnosis, which starts with a past life regression using a light trance, then goes to a deeper trance where we can accessed the subconscious. That is where the healing and the power is. Where we get past the BS of the everyday conscious mind and find out what's really going on.

In my regression I saw three "scenes," but calling them past lives is...well, you judge. There just sort of...are.

Scene #1: I'm a man with a beard wearing dark brown skins, with hairy legs, and sandals, and I'm carrying a stone-tipped spear in both hands. I'm standing on the top of a hill in what looks like high country pine forest. A tree-filled valley lies in front me and there are stone-topped mountains in the distance. Pretty standard "cave man" right? Well the twist is that "I" am a silverly sphere, about the size of a softball, that is floating behind the man and controlling him like he was in a video game. I saw things sometimes through his eyes and sometimes from the outside as I maneuvered around to get a better look at what was going on,

Scene #2: Very hard to describe. Picture a featureless dark gray void. Floating in the center of the void is a rectangular, light grey slab that feels massive, and is about the size of an airplane hanger door. In the center of the slab, about one quarter of it's size, is a textured circle that kind of looks like a chrome-plated sphere filled with reflections. Got it? Now, a short distance from the upper right corner of the slab is a man, seated at a console, dressed in a silvery, reflective suit. There is nothing around him and he is seated on nothing, but he looks exactly like he's seated on a chair. A chair that isn't there.

I am a light-colored lumpy ball with arm and legs sticking out in various directions, and I am floating some distance away, watching. My feeling is that the circle is a portal of some kind, and the man is working to open it to a particular destination. Then the circle starts to change colors. I think that means is was opening. End of scene.

Scene #3: I'm a plant. I'm a big, ball-shaped collection of limbs and branches and leaves, dangling some distance above a clearing in a jungle. I seem to be attached to a huge plant high above. The jungle around me is very green and lush, there are rainbow colored birds flashing by. On the ground, there are centipede-like animals with brown fur and eight or ten legs, crawling over the leaves.

I am like a sun, I radiate the of energy or life force that keeps everything around me alive and thriving. I am very happy and content.

Jump forward: A darkness in coming. It's sucking all the energy away and everything is dying and turning black. I see it approaching like a wave and there's nothing I can do. I am extremely sad and struggle, but I know there's nothing I can do. I no longer have the energy to prevent it.

Next, I'm in space moving away from that planet. The entire planet is black ash, except for one white circle, which is the remains of the plant that I was. For some reason it turned to white ash instead of black. As I move away I feel great despair and sadness for what was.

The lesson I got from this is: cycles. Everything has a start, a middle, and an end. That is the way of all things, and is required for balance. I need to understand and accept growth cannot come without change and change requires something to end so that something else can begin. Don't cling, accept and move on.

That's enough for now. Next time I'll talk about what my subconscious had to say.

Falling Apples

I've started rereading Many Lives, Many Masters, rereading Dr. Brian Weiss's first book. I wanted to revisit how he dealt with discovering the past lives and reconciled their existence with his materialist scientific background. He had never heard of reincarnation, when one of his patients, under hypnosis, started reporting events from past lives. Ever the academic, he turned to libraries and, looking for any information on the subject, he turned up a large body of work. Carefully research and documented and published in mainstream journals, this work varied, comes from people with impressive credentials, is unassailable on rational scientific grounds, and is almost completely ignored by the scientific community. Look for yourself. With the internet, now it's easier than every to look this stuff up. And it's all there, and more, and still "Does not exist" according to any science course, text book or mainstream compendium on the state of scientific knowledge in the 21st century.

What's going on here? I justification I've heard goes something like this: "This looks really great! But wait, if this was for real, everybody would be talking about it. But nobody's talking about it, therefore there must be something wrong with it and I won't talk about it either." Circular logic that creates and unacknowledged code of silence about anything that might upset the materialist applecart. (Research funding, don't you know, old boy. It's all about the money.) Apparently, Issac Newton was the last scientist capable of looking at a falling apple and willing to acknowledge the implications of that simple act.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake addresses this issue in this TED talk Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED ... Once removed from the TED web site and now published on alternate locations. TED's decision to censor scientists that spoke against the status quo created quite a brouhaha, see TEDs Controversy – 3 Threatening Talks They Tried to Censor for that story.

There is a saying academic circles "Physics advances not discovery by discovery but funeral by funeral." Meaning that new controversial ideas cannot get any traction as long as there are famous and respected "mature" scientists who's position, reputation and ego threatened by them. Since in this case, pretty much every conservative group, including religions, are on the side of suppressing the information.

In a way, I guess that's kind of cool because it leaves room for the citizen scientist. Amateurs can do research and make discoveries without be blindsided by some big corporate or university research budget. So, for now, we amateurs rule the roost! 

Read for yourself. Foremost research on reincarnation: Dr. Ian Stevension.
Psychic research in general: Dr Dean Radin.

Much to Learn

I had another QHHT session with my daughter today and it was good. She was able to find a past life with some powerful memories. Some so powerful that she would not share them. One of the pitfalls of working with family, they aren't always as open as they might be with a professional stranger. At any rate, we had a long talk afterwards and I hope I as able to help her to integrate that life and it's lessons into her life today.

I tried, gently, to draw parallels between the events of the past and today. And the way she saw it was also interesting. For instance, when someone arrives in a scene, you ask them to look around  to get some idea where and when they are. My daughter couldn't looked around, and she made the comment that everything that wasn't directly in front of her was like a memory. That is a really cool detail, because that's what an actual memory of a real event is like. I've never heard anyone mention that before, and I'm sure my daughter hasn't either.

That's one thing I love about this work. Not everything is knows, there are new discoveries to be made at any time and I can make them. Yes!

First Success!

I had more success! Well, partial success anyway. My client, C, was able to access an interesting life as a young girl with a group of nomads in Egypt. I have no idea when it was, and it doesn't really matter, for it was a good first step for both of us. It took some work to get C that far down, so yay for that, but I when I tried to move her forward to the next step in the process, C seemed to pop right out of her trance. Perhaps the her subconscious was just not ready yet. It took me a while to develop my meditations skills, and I'm still learning, so I should not be surprised that it may take awhile for C, and me, to reach a level of proficiency.

This is really a bonus for me. To actually have some measurable success is something that means a lot to me. Success in this area has always been elusive to me, results have always been vague, subjective and impossible to reproduce. All the best results have been so hard to verify that I'm always left wondering whether there's anything to it at all. It really helps that my daughter is eager to try again. This time I am very hopeful that the what I learned from her last time will help us tremendously.

Meditate, Schmeditate? Lighten Up Already!

Have you heard of Dr Eric Pearl (www.thereconnection.com/eric-pearl)? You can read his book or go to his web site, but I think it's much better to see him in action, in person or a video. Why? Because all us new age, cosmic connection, Reikii invoking, energy healing, channeling, aura seeing types tend to take ourselves and our practices way too seriously. Eric Pearl's introduction to his process comes across much more like a stand-up routine skewering the alternative spiritual movement than journey of spiritual discovery. I love it. He has stripped energy healing down to it's essence and discarded all the frills that practitioners tend to use to decorate their practice. All too often, the people I talk to are so intently focused on discovering and following all the "proper rules," that they lose site of the point of it all.

I, for one, have distanced myself from organized religions largely because of all the arbitrary and, to my mind, just plain silly, rules and dogma, the outlandish decorations that have become so encrusted around the original message that you can't find that message with a pickaxe and blasting powder. I am one of those people who figure "If I just study and learn more, it will all make sense." Big mistake. Digging into the historical and philosophical underpinning of western religions sealed the deal for me, causing me to file pretty much all their "rules" on a dusty shelf under "Maybe It Seemed a Good Idea at the Time." For instance, it took the catholic church 350 years to admit they were wrong about the patently obvious fact the Man (not Women, or course) is not the center of the universe. I am flabbergasted at the outrageous hubris of the church leaders who could make such a statement in the first place. And Limbo, an entire cosmic state, apparently whisked into existence and then out again, by what, Papel decree? If they were wrong about those things, what else are they currently, solemnly, insistently, fervently, and even fatally, wrong about? Preaching that condom use is a sin, in a part of Africa overrun with AIDS? In short, my studies have shown me that the vast majority of all the teaching of western religions seem to stem much more from a mixture of political expediency and existing traditions than the Word of God.

So think, and celebrate the lighter side of things. Enjoy the fact that we are all different. Poke fun at spiritual pretension, and open up to other points of view. If you can't stand to laugh at yourself and you spiritual practice, then I submit that perhaps you are more focused on the Practice than the Spirit.

It is my view that the structure of any faith is there to guide you, not rule you. If there is any overriding message of the "New Age" spiritual movement, it is that you must find your own path, you must take responsibility for your own growth. For anything constructed by woman or man will have flaws and it is up to us to discover where to put our feet. Accept that there is no one absolute answer, for anything, and that the best you can every say is that some set of beliefs and practices work best for you. Question beliefs and traditions but do not judge, for no practice is absolutely wrong either. Keep what works for you, and set aside the rest, for they may be useful later. None of us can still wear those skinny, teenybopper jeans we once had, so don't expect any spiritual practices to fit you any better, decades down the road.