The Wave Chapter 15: All There Is Is Lessons, or He Hideth My Soul in the Cleft of the Rock

He Hideth My Soul
in the Cleft of the Rock

He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock

that shadows a dry thirsty land…

He hideth my life in the depths of His love,

and covers me there with His hand.¹

Writing this segment as background for the events that follow has been extremely difficult; but it is necessary. In my other writings, when I have talked about my personal experiences, I have generally avoided some of these details for obvious reasons — it is painful to remember.

Additionally, I am always concerned that the reader will be either bored or turned off by personal data, and I have tried to cover only the salient points that will come up again later in a general discussion, while also making them as brief as possible. However, my experience has shown me that many of the things that are recounted herein are not unique to me.

As we left me in the last episode, I had decided that maybe having a brain was not such a bad thing even if the “faith trip” frowns on using it to any great extent, other than offering it up as a sacrifice to be hypnotized so it can be twisted like a pretzel and used to justify theological nonsense by acts of cerebral derring-do.

I remember visiting a friend of mine at her office one day, and there was a sign posted on her desk saying: God doesn’t create junk. That really struck me in a funny way since I was right at the point of struggling to be free of the hypnosis that says the human being is incapable of using his brain to discover or understand God, and must therefore use only faith and, of course, the Scriptures — whatever they may be in the varying faith trips.

How many times had I heard sermons on the subject of the brain — the mind — being solely the instrument of Satan? Of course, when talking about the “Predator’s Mind”, we see how this is one side of the coin. But, nevertheless, it was pretty clear to me that whatever existed, existed within the mind of God — whoever or whatever he/she/it might be — and therefore the human mind, as a ray of the Divine Mind, certainly must have a function in finding him/her/it.

Reading that little sign brought me face to face with the realization that I had bought so completely into the faith trip that I had actually become afraid to think. I had become embarrassed by my own tendency to ask questions, and had been made to feel extraordinary guilt for my capacity to use logical analysis.

One of the standard hypnotic suggestions of the Way of the Monk is that no thinking is allowed. Thinking leads to questions, and the unwritten 11th commandment is “Thou Shalt Not Question!”

With sudden clarity it dawned on me that obviously part of our creation exists in the fact that we do have brains — amazing instruments — for a reason. (I know that the reader must be pretty sure by now that I am the slowest learner of all time!) But, anyway, this self-evident fact that God had given us brains for a reason gave birth to the next thought: shouldn’t we be using them to discover God, rather than to justify obvious nonsense about God that has been passed down as tradition by folks who clearly didn’t do much to improve the state of the world and could, in fact, be cited as the creators of the system that has gotten us into the mess we are in today by not using their brains?

About this same time, something very strange happened. I didn’t think of it as abduction at the time. It is only in retrospect that I see the clues for what they might be. On the other hand, there could be other explanations.

As I said, we lived in a cabin. A very tiny cabin. Most of it was taken up with our beds, storage and a tiny galley type kitchen. (If I learned anything from this experience, it was how to design the perfect kitchen!)

My bed was a standard double size pushed into a corner with one side flush against a wall. There was a very narrow space at the foot of the bed between it and the baby’s crib. I slept on the inside, against the wall. The only way to get in and out of bed was either to scoot out backwards, or get my ex-husband up so I could get out on the side. In the condition of physical disability I was in at the time, the “scooting” option was difficult, if not impossible. Once I was in the bed, I was pretty much stuck there for the night without waking up my ex-husband and asking him to help me get up.

One night, something woke me up, though I don’t know exactly what. It was like a low roar, if you could call it that. I was very sleepy — feeling almost drugged, so it was difficult to open my eyes. But, I thought that I ought to check out this disturbance, and I forced my eyes open and lifted my head up off the pillow to just look around. I noticed the strangest effect I had ever seen up to that point in my life, and I still cannot explain it precisely.

What I saw was light, but it wasn’t an ordinary kind of light. It was more like a solid thing. It was actually penetrating the walls of the house through what seemed to be cracks and pinpoint openings all over the walls. Of course it came in the windows, but the needle like beams that came through the walls really were strange. They were almost solid, like icicles or even crystalline shards.

When I saw this, I was, of course, a bit puzzled. I couldn’t think of what would be so powerful a light that it would shoot through cracks in the walls from all directions at once, considering that the cracks were, for all intents and purposes, almost microscopic. The sunlight didn’t even do that, though I knew that the cabin structure surely had such fine cracks. The whole room seemed to be crisscrossed with these beams of light.²

Seeing this very strange light, what did I tell myself? I rationalized that it must be a group of my ex-husband’s friends playing a joke on him by driving up to the house in a whole convoy of mud bogging trucks with the hunting lights mounted on the cabs all turned on and pointed at the house! Of course, that meant that there must be trucks on all sides of the house, facing the house, as well as one above, with lights shining down. At that moment of true delusion, it seemed like a reasonable explanation for something totally inexplicable to me.

The only problem was: my ex-husband didn’t have any friends with mud boggers equipped with hunting lights! But, not to let that little detail bother me, I decided that it was his friends playing a joke and I was too tired to laugh, so let him get up and chase them off! How dare they come in the middle of the night, playing games, when he had to get up early and go to work! What’s more, I needed my sleep! I was a sick person after all!

And that is what I did. I just pulled the covers over my head and went back to sleep!

The next thing I knew I was in pain. Not any specific place, but I was still so fragile from the many months of convalescence from having the baby (in which, as I have written in Amazing Grace, I was bedridden for most of six months due to pelvic injuries sustained in delivery); any sort of activity could make me hurt and ache all over. The pain seemed to have a central point in the abdominal area that penetrated to my back, almost like the early signs of labor.

So, it was pain that woke me up. But, what is so bizarre is that when I woke up I found my face pressed against my ex-husband’s feet! I was completely reversed in the bed. In addition, my nightgown was wet from the knees down. It was a very painful operation to get myself into a sitting position against the wall, and pick my legs up one at a time, and swing them around to the foot of the bed so I could pull myself to my feet to find out what was the problem, but I managed.

I just stood there with the wet nightgown clinging coldly to my legs and tried to think how my gown got wet. I remember feeling almost hysterical in the very act of thinking about it, so I had to quickly stop thinking about it! I struck a match and lit a lamp so I could find something dry to put on. As I took off the wet gown, I noticed that it was covered with little black specks — the seeds and pollen from the Bahia grass outside that was about knee-high at the back of the property.

How did I explain this to myself? My immediate reaction to it was a rising feeling of hysteria, and so, again, I suppressed it. I told myself that I must have gotten up during the night and gone to the bathroom and dipped my gown in the buckets of water kept on hand to flush the toilet in the night. (I had insisted on the installation of fixtures, even if we had to operate them by hand.) But somehow, I had forgotten that I had done this. I didn’t even try to explain how I had gotten into bed backwards.

That was my explanation to myself. It made absolutely no sense because I have never in my life, before or since, gotten up in the night and not remembered it or been unaware of what I was doing. I remember putting the gown in the hamper in a ball so I wouldn’t have to look at it, and when I finally came to wash it, I did it hurriedly as if to cover something up; to hide it from myself.

Now, of course, that explanation, considering my physical condition and the logistics of getting myself out of bed at all, just didn’t fly. But, that didn’t matter to me. I created it and accepted it. The part of it that I couldn’t explain, I shoved “under the rug” and avoided thinking about it at all. I had to. What else could I do? If I even approached the problem with any rational thinking, there was no rational explanation that was part of my world view and it only produced a sensation of inner panic and something akin to what a deer must feel when it is frozen in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

I wonder how many other people have similar experiences that they explain in such ways?

At this point in time, the heart condition began to worsen, and I began to suffer from more than the back flush, or fibrillation. I began to have angina attacks every week or so with involvement of both arms, though it was mostly concentrated on the left side. I also began to have a recurrence of a former problem, endometriosis, which caused almost constant pain. (I ended up having a D&C and laparoscopy done which revealed that I had a severe case of adenomyosis.)

And then there were the headaches: pain so monstrous that the very act of breathing was agony. Nothing touched this pain — no drug, no therapy, no solution. The pain began in a strange way with a swelling of my head right at the occipital ridge where the back of the skull sits on the neck. It would sometimes swell as big as a golf ball and it was from there the pain radiated in ever increasing waves of pulsating torment, until it gripped me like a steel helmet squeezing my head, until I felt it must shatter, for how else could such a convulsion of agony end? The only way to cope — forgetting entirely about getting relief — was to lie perfectly still in darkness and to breathe as shallowly as possible so as to minimize movement. This would continue for up to a week at a time with only snatches of sleep, until finally I would fall into a deep sleep of utter exhaustion from holding my sanity in the face of this wracking torment, from which I would awaken free of pain at last, though living in terror of the next, inevitable attack.

As if all of that were not enough, there was also the constant struggle with ear infections that were so massive that the affected side of my head would swell until the ear itself closed completely, obstructing the draining of fluids that poured when the eardrum would finally rupture in a blinding burst of pain that, had I been able to stand, would have dropped me to my knees to beg for mercy!

The curious thing about these chronic, regular “blowups” in my ear was that I had no warning. There was no slow building of a sensation of something being wrong — I would simply wake up with the side of my head swollen, in pain, and it would develop, in the course of a single day, to a critical situation that required a trip to the emergency room.

I have to laugh in retrospect (though it is not a funny subject for those who have experienced it!) when I think about one doctor who proposed to obtain a specimen of the fluid leaking from my swollen ear. She just came up beside me with a cotton swab and was going to insert it into the tumescent ear canal for a gentle swipe. The instant she touched it, the explosion of pain immediately transmitted itself to my arm and the reflexive blow nearly knocked her across the room! She understood immediately that when I said it was very painful, I wasn’t joking in the least! And just for those who think I am a whiner here, let me point out that I had four children by this time, and one of them required the separation of my pelvis to deliver — utter agony — and I never once raised my voice, uttered a single cry, or did anything more than groan discreetly. In my family, pain was endured with dignity, not complaint. One certainly didn’t physically assault a doctor tending to the problem!

My solution to this was to meditate even more in conjunction with my reading and endless note taking. I had not entirely given up my quest for subsuming all emotion into the Love of God; so meditating on this was a daily activity — sometimes more than once a day. Meditation, taken in proper doses, along with “tuning the reading instrument”, can certainly accelerate one’s progress.

For me, meditation is a dual process. I later learned that some paths refer to my method as “meditation with seed”. The process really begins as an exercise in contemplation, or a focus upon an idea or image. It’s pretty standard, I believe.

My meditation practice rapidly progressed, as I later learned when I read some advanced texts on the subject. Of course, at the time, I really had no guide and had never actually studied it in method except to read books about meditation pathways per se.

There are two basic ways to meditate: with seed and without seed. That is, to have something to focus on, or to attempt to completely empty the mind. It is generally more productive to meditate with seed in the beginning. Depending on your type the seed will be different. If you are a visual person, holding a visual image in the mind works. If you are an auditory person, holding a phrase and “hearing” it in your mind works. If you are kinesthetic, holding a feeling or trying to achieve that feeling, works best.

Also, at the point when you begin to have some success in stilling the chatter, you can experiment with changing the seed or combining. You might have a visual and auditory, or feeling and visual, or auditory and feeling, or all of them at once.

My personal preference is a phrase that I can also “see” as letters forming words that appear and dissolve. With this, I have both thought content as well as visual image and can easily add feeling and sound at will. I can also discard visual, auditory and feeling elements and simply concentrate on the content.

Breathing is very important for a number of reasons. Very slow, controlled breathing with counting to start the process works very effectively. Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Once the breathing (that your are counting in order to regulate) becomes deep, slow and regular, then introduce either your phrase, visual image, or whatever you have selected as seed. The breathing ought to continue as you have set it.

The object, in the beginning, is to set several tasks for your mind to focus on intently and to hold that focus for as long as you can. If your mind wanders and other thoughts come along, as soon as you realize that you have lost focus, just bring your mind back to the focus and don’t get irritated that you have lost your concentration. Most people can’t focus on a single thing for longer than two or three minutes. That is why it is useful to begin with concentrating on the breathing and counting the breaths with the intention of setting up a specific depth and frequency. If you breath in for a count of 6, hold for a count of 3, breath out for a count of 9, and do this for at least 25 breaths in a row, you have achieved a respectable first step.

Another very useful technique is to find a poem or more lengthy quote to use as your breathing template and content. For example, the so-called “Lord’s Prayer” is very useful in this way.

Recite in your mind, “Our Father Who art in Heaven,” on the in-breath while holding in mind that the “kingdom of heaven, the “heavenly father” is the higher intellect. “Hallowed be thy Name,” on the out-breath while holding in mind that this is the part of you that is holy and which you desire to manifest through your self. “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done,” on the in-breath while considering the fact that you wish to establish a link with your higher self — the real you. “On Earth as it is in heaven,” on the out-breath, contemplating the fact that once the lower self is balanced and integrated, that the will of the spirit, the “heavenly kingdom” can be brought into your life.

You don’t have to do the whole prayer; the above is sufficient seed, but if you want to do the whole thing, I think you have the idea. You can visualize the words, consider the content, feel them, all the while the words themselves are acting as the counter for your breathing.

Some people can achieve very good results with very simple seed, other people require more complexity. Again, the point is to have something that you can focus on and to hold that focus intently. It is more or less an exercising of the Will and Intent, building a sort of “psychic muscle.” You may be surprised at the tenacity of the chatter and its resistance to this one-pointed focus.

Nevertheless, the result of this activity was that, after only a few months of practice, I found myself “zoning out” for up to three hours at a time, coming to myself feeling as though no time at all had passed. The only problem was: I never seemed to bring anything back with me. I had no idea what had been going on, where my mind had been, what my consciousness had been doing or anything. I did note that I was far more peaceful and able to cope with the difficulties of my life, but it was still frustrating to not be able to obtain something a bit more concrete from this entire endeavor. The C’s recently commented on this “zoning”:

August 5, 2009

Q: (L) What is this [zoning] phenomenon?

A: See previous answer [“Humans should remember the hermetic maxim can go both ways in some respects. Those who are destined to “meet” themselves in the future can now do so with greater facility due to these efforts. We once said that “you in the future” could “rewrite” cosmic programs… that goes for others too. They are now learning the programming language.”] and think of it as spending “time” with the higher self/teacher instead of wasting the ability to dissociate on futile illusions. Also remember that “time” spent in this process utilizes this “soul ability” as it was originally intended. It taxes the soul greatly to be embodied.

This recalls something from Gurdjieff:

[T]he only right way to objective consciousness is through the development of self-consciousness. If an ordinary man is artificially brought into a state of objective consciousness and afterwards brought back to his usual state he will remember nothing and he will think that for a time he had lost consciousness. But in the state of self-consciousness a man can have flashes of objective consciousness and remember them. […]

If we could connect the centers of our ordinary consciousness with the higher thinking center deliberately and at will, it would be of no use to us whatever in our present general state. In most cases where accidental contact with the higher thinking center takes place a man becomes unconscious. The mind refuses to take in the flood of thoughts, emotions, images, and ideas which suddenly burst into it. And instead of a vivid thought, or a vivid emotion, there results, on the contrary, a complete blank, a state of unconsciousness. The memory retains only the first moment when the flood rushed in on the mind and the last moment when the flood was receding and consciousness returned. But even these moments are so full of unusual shades and colors that there is nothing with which to compare them among the ordinary sensations of life. This is usually all that remains from so-called ‘mystical’ and ‘ecstatic’ experiences, which represent a temporary connection with a higher center. Only very seldom does it happen that a mind which has been better prepared succeeds in grasping and remembering something of what was felt and understood at the moment of ecstasy. But even in these cases the thinking, the moving, and the emotional centers remember and transmit everything in their own way, translate absolutely new and never previously experienced sensations into the language of usual everyday sensations, transmit in worldly three-dimensional forms things which pass completely beyond the limits of worldly measurements; in this way, of course, they entirely distort every trace of what remains in the memory of these unusual experiences. Our ordinary centers, in transmitting the impressions of the higher centers, may be compared to a blind man speaking of colors, or to a deaf man speaking of music. […]

The existence of these higher centers in us is a greater riddle than the hidden treasure which men who believe in the existence of the mysterious and the miraculous have sought since the remotest times.

All mystical and occult systems recognize the existence of higher forces and capacities in man although, in many cases, they admit the existence of these forces and capacities only in the form of possibilities, and speak of the necessity for developing the hidden forces in man. This present teaching differs from many others by the fact that it affirms that the higher centers exist in man and are fully developed.

It is the lower centers that are undeveloped. And it is precisely this lack of development, or the incomplete functioning, of the lower centers that prevents us from making use of the work of the higher centers.³ (Emphasis added)

As a matter of practicality, I generally meditated lying on the bed. Some people cannot do this because they tend to fall asleep, but that was never a problem for me. I could “zone out” in meditation, “come to” some time later, and then go to sleep if I was doing it at night. I was generally so uncomfortable in any position that getting to sleep was problematical if I didn’t meditate first.

One night, after a particularly trying day of struggle with the situation (I don’t really remember why I felt so extremely unhappy at that moment in time; probably just a combination of the constant pain, the struggles to make ends meet, anxieties for the children, and feeling completely alone in my marriage), it was standard practice for me to use any unpleasantness or unhappiness as the fuel for the meditative fires. Being able to achieve the sensation of love and peace in the face of some great difficulty was part of the challenge — and the purpose.

So, I went to bed and waited for my ex-husband to go to sleep. His attitude about the direction I was going was, on the surface, tolerant, but he always managed to say or do something to put some monkey wrench in the works if he was aware of what I was doing. If he thought I wanted things to be quiet for meditation, he would manage to just “have to” make some sort of noise or disruption, for which he would apologize profusely, and then go on to do it again and again.

After he was asleep, I began my breathing exercises. This part of the process I had borrowed from my hypnotherapy training. It was extremely useful. Of course, I later learned that it had been “borrowed” for hypnotherapy from certain meditation systems.⁴

At this point, I don’t know what happened. All I remember is starting the breathing phase, which came before going into the contemplative phase of the exercise. But, what happened seems to be that I sort of made some kind of big “skip” or something.

The next thing I knew, I was jerked back into consciousness by a sensation that can only be described as a roiling turbulence in my abdominal area. It was so powerful that, at first, it felt actually physical — like there was a boiling agitation in my organs that was going to erupt upward in some way. I could distinctly sense that it was building and was going to travel upward, and I was frightened that something crazy and strange was happening with my body with which I was completely unfamiliar. I knew I had to get out of that bed and get outside before “it” happened, though I had no idea what it was.

I was frantically holding my throat, because I could feel a tightening of the muscles in the throat area, as wave after wave of energy blew upward like the precursors of steam blasts from a volcano before it erupts. I struggled out of the bed, holding the wall with one hand and my throat with the other, all the while clenching my teeth so whatever it was would not come gushing out of me and disturb either my ex-husband or the children. For all I knew, I was just going to be violently sick! There certainly was a certain similarity between that feeling and the feeling that you are going to throw up!

I rushed outside to the porch where there was a lawn sofa and collapsed onto it just as the outpouring began.

I wish I could describe this in better words, but there are simply none that apply other than to use ordinary descriptions that don’t come close to the essence and intensity of the event. What erupted from me was a shattering series of sobs and cries that were utterly primeval and coming from some soul-deep place that defies explanation.

Accompanying these cries, or actually, embedded in them, were images — visions — complete scenes with all attendant emotional content and implied context conveyed in an instant. Again, it was like the idea of your life “passing before your eyes”. But, in this case, it was not scenes from this life. It was lifetime after lifetime. I knew that I was there in every scene, that the scenes I was seeing were vignettes of other lives, and I was experiencing myself as all these people.

And the tears! My god! The tears that flowed. I had no idea that the human physiology was capable of producing such copious amounts of liquid so rapidly! Where was all that liquid coming from?

Now, if this had been just an hour-long crying jag or something like that, it would have to pass into history as “just one of those things,” maybe like PMS. But, this activity had a life of its own! It went on, without slowing or stopping, for over five hours!

I had absolutely no control over any of it at all. If I attempted to slow it down, stop it, or switch my mind in another direction, the inner sensation of explosive eruption rapidly took over, all the muscles in my body would begin to clench up and I was no longer in control. I could only sit there as a sort of instrument of grief and lamentation, and literally sob my heart out for every horror of history in which I had seemingly participated or to which I had possibly been a witness. I think that there were even some that I was simply aware of and in which there had been no participation. And some of them were truly horrible scenes.

Plague and pestilence and death and destruction. Scene after scene. Loved ones standing one moment, crushed or laying in bloody heaps the next. Rapaciousness, pillaging, plundering; rivers of blood and gore; slaughter, carnage and butchery in all its many manifestations passed before my eyes; holocaust and hell. Rage and hot anger, bloodlust and fury, murder and mayhem, all around me, everywhere I looked. Evil heaped on evil like twisted, dismembered bodies. And the grief of centuries, the unshed tears of millennia, the guilt, remorse and penitence, flooded through me; melting, thawing and dissolving the burdensome shell of stone that encased my petrified heart; washing away the pain with my tears — an ocean of tears.

At the same time as this release of the worlds of accumulated guilt and grief of many lifetimes was going on, there was the voice in the background, ever soothing, ever calming, intoning over and over again: “It’s not your fault. There is no blame. It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.” And I came to understand something very deep.

I understood that there is no “original sin”. I understood that the terrors and suffering mankind experiences here in life on earth are not the result of some sort of mistake or error or aberration. They are not punishments. They are not something that one can be saved from, for I understood that every scene of terrible suffering and heart-rending cruelty was the result of ignorance.

It is easier to see this idea when you think about something such as the Crusades or the Inquisition. You can trace the path of twisted reason that led from the idea of the Love of God, to the idea of imposing that view of the Love of God on others “for their own good”. And, taken to an extreme, it even can result in ideas of torture and murder in the mind of a person who truly loves! Forget for a moment about those psychopaths who just viciously used such philosophies for their own gain and political maneuvers.⁵ Think for a moment about the sincerity of the followers of such philosophies. This following of evil disguised as good was based on ignorance. Even beyond that, those who were seemingly out for gain and self-aggrandizement were operating out of ignorance — fear and hunger of the soul that cannot be satisfied. It is only a matter of degrees, but in the end, it is only ignorance.

When the flow of energy, images and tears finally began to subside, there appeared the sensation of warm, balmy liquid that was almost airy in its lightness, and so sweet that to this day, I can still remember the piercing quickening of the fire of love for all of creation. It was ecstatic, rapturous and exultant all at the same time. I was lost in wonder, amazed and at the same time bewildered at this vision of the world.

The C’s also recently commented on this meditation:

June 20, 2009

Q: (L) Alright then. Is there anything that we could do?

A: Perhaps if you could share the technique that you used to achieve emotional cleansing, a lot of people would benefit including the two individuals in question.

Q: (L) What technique is that?

A: Remember an entire night of cleansing tears?!

Q: (L) Yeah. Well, that was just a meditation technique I developed. I would breathe a certain way and repeat certain things in my mind as I breathed, and I did it every night. Strange things started happening.

A: Strange indeed! You stumbled instinctively on an ancient method that is unsurpassed in its efficacy. So why not share?

Q: (Joe) Spill the beans, Laura! (L) Well I just never thought it was anything particularly special – it just worked for me! I mean how does something like that compare to this Art of Living Kriya thing [a popular Indian breathing program]?

A: AoL is for beginners and robots!

Q: (laughter) (L) Well then why were you so enthusiastic when C*** proposed teaching us? I mean, he asked if he should teach us, and you said yes with seven exclamation points!

A: Got you to do it and jump started your thinking didn’t we?!

Q: (L) So the point wasn’t that this method was “the best” or the only one or so great. It was to draw our attention to the idea of breathing, or control of breath, as a means of effecting emotional healing. Is that it?

A: Absolutely!X7

Q: (laughter) (L) Shorthand. Um…

A: Remember that your method employed a powerful “seed”.

Q: (DD) Seed? (L) Yeah, that’s a reference to meditating with or without seed. (Joe) What was the seed? (L) Phrases that I used in my mind. (Allen) Were those phrases particular to you though, like something that someone has to come up with for themselves? (L) Well, I dunno, were those phrases particular for me?

A: They were super powerful!

Q: (C) Where they like prayers? (L) Yeah, and it’s really funny because I started out using the Lord’s Prayer. Then I decided that I wasn’t happy with it because it wasn’t open enough. It had associations with specific religious things, and so I rewrote it. I’ll have to… It was something like… (DD) Did you use those words as a template? (L) Yeah. (Joe) I used to say a Lord’s Prayer that was modified. At night, like a mantra, I used to just go over and over… (L) Did you do it in concert with breathing? (Joe) Not consciously. (L) Yeah, well you see, I did. It was very deliberate controlled breathing. I did this every night for months. (DD) How were you breathing? (L) Very similar to what C*** teaches, what they call this Victory Breath. (Joe) Was it both in and out through the nose? (L) In through the nose, out through the mouth. (Joe) Because I thought Victory Breath was weird when we did the course since it was all through the nose. (A**) Yeah, that’s what was missing. (L) Yeah, I did it in through the nose, out through the mouth. It was in and count, hold and count, out and count. And it was very controlled… it was very similar to what they call this Ujjai breath, or Victory Breath. That was kind of familiar to me, because I’d done that for years. (C) And while you were doing it, you were saying… (L) I was repeating these phrases, and each phrase was created so that the in or out breath fit the phrase exactly. So for the first phrase, I would breathe in, and then out for the second phrase, etc. And my objective was to do it twenty times. I don’t think I ever did it twenty times, because I would get to about ten or twelve, and then I would just leave the body or something, just zone. And after a certain number of times of doing that, then I had this… I dunno, I came back to myself with this… I dunno whether I want to call it a kundalini experience or not, but I felt there was this tremendous cleansing event that went on for hours and hours and hours. I’ve described it before. Something happened. But anyway, that was the story. So I found that to be very effective. I dunno what to ask now. (Joe) Is what you just described the idea?

A: Yes and another excellent technique though for other purposes is what you call “power breathing”.

Q: (L) Oh, my Power Breathing. (C) What is that? (L) For me, that’s just energizing. The fast pace on the treadmill accompanied by a very particular kind and pace of breathing. This is the one that it’s not the head, it’s matched to the body. The one is like intellect and heart, and Power Breathing is like moving center and heart… You let the movement of your body take you where you need to go.

A: Remember what that technique did?

Q: (L) Oh yeah! (Joe) What did it do? Did you fly? Superpowers? (A**) That was the past life thing, wasn’t it? (L) Yeah, I went into a past life memory in the gym. (Joe) Where, here? (L) No, in Florida. Geez… But I guess if people do that, they need to have somebody there. So, there are a couple of ways to tap into these emotional issues that you’re talking about that are actually somewhat different from this Art of Living thing?

A: Yes and probably more effective if utilized faithfully. AoL is like the “Diet Coke” of breathing techniques… Just one calorie.

The prayer I used is called the “Prayer of the Soul”, which goes as follows:

Oh Divine Cosmic Mind

Holy Awareness in All Creation

Carried in the heart

Ruler of the mind

Savior of the Soul

Live in me today

Be my Daily Bread

As I give bread to others

Help me grow in knowledge

Of All Creation

Clear my eyes

That I may See

Clear my ears

That I may hear

Cleanse my heart

That I may know and love

The Holiness of True Existence

Divine Cosmic Mind

Well, the result of this event was a state of prolonged elevation, or loving peace that persisted for a very long time. You could even say that the effects reverberate to the present time because never again was I ever able to pass judgment on another no matter how wicked their deeds. I could see that all so-called evil and wickedness was a manifestation of ignorance and that there is no person, no matter how holy and elevated they may think they are in this life, who has not reveled in the shedding of another’s blood in some other time and place. The original denial of responsibility by Cain when he cried out “Am I my brother’s keeper?!” belongs to all.

But there was another significant point. Ignorance is a choice, and it is a choice that is made for a reason — to learn and grow.

And that realization led to another — to learn how to truly choose — to be able to learn, at this level of reality, what is and isn’t of ignorance — what is of truth and beauty and love and cleanliness. Of course I understood that it was like the saying of Jesus that some things are bright and shining on the outside, but inside they are filthy and full of decay. And I don’t mean that I was seeing this negativity as something to be judged — I clearly understood its reason and place as modes of learning — but I was deeply inspired to seek out all I could learn about this world so as to best manifest what was of light.

I was so excited by this revelation that I wanted to go straight back to the church and tell everybody. At that point, the only people with whom we had any contact were members of the church we had attended. They were coming by occasionally to find out why we had sort of dropped out, and these visits gave me the opportunity to talk about some of my branching out in terms of my spiritual experiences. In every single case, I was literally rebuked as having been duped by Satan. Boy, was I ever naive!

I thought about that a lot. I wondered if it could be so, if the whole drama of the visions, the actions of the minister who had been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, could have been set up and dramatized just to deceive me. I was truly on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, if they were right and I had been deceived, then perhaps my soul was in peril. But, if they were wrong and I was right then what did that make of the whole basis of Christianity? If they were wrong, if they could be wrong in such a fundamental thing, how could anything about what they had built on this basic error be right?

This distressed me because, while I was ready to “adjust” my Christian position, I was not quite prepared to toss the whole thing out the window. I mean, after all, through all the years of study and investigation, it had been there in the background. When I took the position that I was questioning the existence of a god at all, that was altogether different. There I was asking a question. But, in deciding that Christianity was just simply wrong, foundationally wrong because if there was no original sin from which to be saved, there was no necessity for a savior, then that was an altogether different thing. It amounted to making a choice.

It was a matter that took a number of years to resolve. So, we will leave it there. What is important is that, from this experience forward, I was never again able to see sin in quite the same light. When I read about murderers and deeds of mayhem, I knew that these were things in which I had participated in times past, in my ignorance.

When anyone did something that hurt me, I knew that I had done such things as well. I could no longer feel any judgment or criticism of anything or anybody because I knew that, at some place and time, it was myself I was judging. It had been a learning process, and I grew from each experience. I learned what not to do by doing it. And, in a very real sense, this is the reason for pain and suffering. It is like an automatic guidance system that keeps a person on the path of learning. But the trick is to be able to discern the difference between choosing a path that gives immediate physical comfort, and then leads to great psychic or soul pain, and a path that may be physically uncomfortable temporarily, that then leads to peace of the heart.

I suppose that you could say, in a sense, that I had accomplished a good part of the objective of the “love path”, but it was not that simple. I was still a very ordinary human being trying to function in the real world with real children and real events to contend with and some sort of balance had to be achieved between knowing that everyone is at some stage of learning and avoiding being part of their lesson. That was something that took some time. Had I not had children, I might have simply withdrawn from the world to spend the rest of my life in studious contemplation and repetition of ecstatic exercises. But I couldn’t. I had responsibilities. I was in the world, and it was my classroom.

What actually happened in the real world of practical affairs at this point, was a series of events that could be considered more or less ordinary, but in light of the previous trend of events in conjunction with my inner state and activities, can be looked at in a more miraculous light. We might even say that they were a direct reflection of the shift in my perspective.

Suddenly, my ex-husband was offered a congenial job. This actually happened because the man who offered it found himself needing help operating his business because he had suddenly decided to expand and found it to be too much to handle. He actually thought of my ex-husband specifically, asked around to find where we had moved to, and drove out in the boondocks to make this offer. At the time, I didn’t relate these external events directly to the shift in my state, but I was certainly grateful. So, the main worries about being able to live from one day to the next were solved.

Then, a friend who owned a business that included a fleet of trucks decided that it was time to get new ones, perhaps to be able to write it off on his income tax, and offered to sell us one (with very low mileage) for less than a fifth of its market value.

We added onto the cabin, doubling our living space, installed electricity and plumbing, and basically returned to the real world. Of course, by this time I had already had to sell my piano and all the jewelry that had been given to me over the years by friends and family before my marriage. If I hadn’t, there might have been no food to eat or no Christmas for the children.

I resumed doing hypnotherapy, which had been abandoned during the faith trip, and began to learn Spirit Release techniques.

It was at this point, also, that my mother woke up from her spell and realized how horribly she had behaved. It was too late to salvage the business or the real estate that had been sold to keep her friend happy, but she did sign back over to me the house I had inherited from my grandparents, from which she had evicted us several years earlier when my grandmother died. In the meantime, she had mortgaged it heavily, so I don’t think her motives were entirely selfless because the only thing I could do was sell it. I was able to utilize what funds were left after the mortgage was satisfied to buy a house that was big enough for our growing family.

But even before the move, something else happened. About three years after the birth of my fourth child, a longtime friend of mine who had observed the events of my life from the sidelines without judgment or comment, decided that I needed to get away from it all for a little break. I had never been away from my children for more than a few days — generally in the hospital — and I was not very comfortable with the idea of it, but the particular vacation being proposed was one that was hard to resist.

My friend and her husband owned a vacation home in North Carolina, and we had long followed the work of Al Miner who channels an entity calling itself “Lama Sing”. There was to be a meeting of the many people interested in this work in Maggie Valley, organized by a physician and his wife who were close friends of Al. There were going to be lectures, group meditations, dinners and so on. It sounded like not only a lot of fun, but also a path to something, though I was not sure what. I agreed to go.

At the symposium, everything was going along as might be expected at such an affair. People were claiming to see auras; folks were wandering around with ecstatic expressions on their faces pronouncing sagely on the “wonderful energy present”, and the talks were both lively and interesting.

Then, the doctor’s wife — the couple who had sponsored and organized the event — who was, I believe, a psychotherapist or counselor in some capacity — gave a talk about the many people who were coming forward at the time with “reincarnational memories” of the holocaust. This had the most unusual effect on me of producing an uncontrollable spell of crying. I had to leave the room and hide in a stall in the ladies lavatory until this particular talk was finished. I really thought I was losing my grip because nothing had ever affected me that way in public! Heck, not only do I not wear my heart on my sleeve in the presence of others, I don’t even dance in public because I have always felt that, for me, it was undignified!

But then, on the last day of the symposium the headache came. When my friend left to go to a group meditation, I stayed behind in the darkened motel room with cold towels and ice on my head trying to reduce the swelling. Fortunately this time, by the next morning when we were to all meet for a farewell breakfast, the pain had subsided sufficiently for me to be able to pack and otherwise function normally.

At breakfast, one of the ladies at our table remarked to me that the dress I had been wearing at the meditation the previous day was very lovely. I looked at her in surprise and said that I hadn’t gone because I had been ill. She looked back at me and said, “But I saw you clearly and I am not mistaken!”

My friend assured her that I had been in bed, so we all looked at one another and, after an awkward silence, the chatter began again. But I was pretty puzzled by this.

At the symposium, we had met two ladies who were elderly, but very spry and hugely entertaining and funny to talk with. One of them had had some training in hypnosis and advanced meditative techniques, and my friend and I discussed inviting them back to her vacation home where we planned to go for a few days before setting out for home. They agreed that we would have some fun, go digging for rocks at one of the local public mines, and just generally have a “hen party”.

After driving all day into the mountains, we arrived at the house, which was quite isolated and located at the end of an old logging road on the edge of a National Forest. It was completely peaceful and delightful and perfect for our experimental meditations.

Our new friend (let’s call her June) was going to direct a guided meditation accompanied by musical tones on tape. We all found comfortable places, and the instructions began. I remember following the breathing part, and tuning in to the musical tones, but from that point, it seems my inner consciousness had plans of its own.

I felt myself lift out of my body and “shoooop!” I was suddenly sort of hovering before a rock face on the side of a tall mountain. There was a sort of crack, or cleft in the rock. I knew that only very few people could pass through this narrow opening, and attempting it without being “one of those who can”, would result in a sort of shock, but I decided to try. I sort of aimed for it with volitional intent, and the next thing I knew I was emerging on the other side at the edge of a beautiful valley.

There were meadows of green grass and wildflowers of incredible luminescence and liveliness. The grasses were waving back and forth in the breeze, so it would seem, though this breeze was a sort of conscious caressing of the grass and the waving of the grass was a sort of conscious response to the caress much like a cat purrs when stroked.

I found myself in a sort of body, and began to walk through this grass, which received my steps, caressing my feet and legs as I merged with it at every step. It sort of passed me along, rather than me walking through it. There was a striped tent a short distance before me with banners flying from the posts in the consciously caressing breeze, but it was on the other side of a medium river. I knew that this tent was where I was going, though there was no sensation of “supposed to go”. I was curious as to how it was going to feel when I stepped into the water of the river.

I looked at the water that was crystal clear and sparkling in the bright sunlight, though there did not seem to be a sun in the sky, exactly. You could say that the jumping and dancing light on the water was a sort of conscious interplay between this ambient, intense light and the water itself.

I stepped into the water, noticing that my feet were bare and that I seemed to be wearing some sort of white under-robe with a striped over-robe, which I hoisted out of the water with my hands. I was surprised to feel the current moving so swiftly, yet giving the sensation of a merging with my feet. The sensation can only be described as “delicious” to my feet!

The glittering, jewel-like stones at the bottom of the river fascinated me. They were smooth, yet constantly flashing with the movement of the water across them. I walked across the river aware that this was an intense experience that had some deep significance. When I reached the other side, I was both glad that I had passed some sort of test, as well as regretful that the experience was over.

I approached the tent and there were two men sitting under an outer tent that was open-sided like a porch, on a carpet spread on the grass in front of the tent. They were also dressed as I was. The tent was striped in the same pattern as the stripes of the over robes, and the colors of the stripes were red, white and black with a constantly repeating thin border to each stripe of lapis blue.

One of the men spoke to me saying: “We have been waiting for a long time. There is joy in seeing you again.”

For some reason, this didn’t strike me as unusual. I had the feeling that this meeting had been arranged a very long “time” ago. I bowed and acknowledged the greeting. Then, the other one said, “He is inside.” That, too, was not unexpected. I ducked my head to enter the tent and there was a man, an old man with young skin like iridescent porcelain, standing inside. His expression upon seeing me was absolute happiness and satisfaction. He embraced me strongly and kissed me on both cheeks, tears coming to his eyes. “We will break bread first.” He said. Again, this was not a surprise and there was no question in my mind as to what “first” might mean, though I didn’t know!

We sat down on the carpeted ground inside the tent around a medium table. The two men outside came in with bowls of bread and milk. There was a golden goblet on the table already filled with something like wine. A large loaf of bread was broken into equal pieces by the old man and each of us was handed a piece. We dipped it in the milk and ate. Then the goblet was taken up by the old man, who passed his hands over it, blew on it, drank from it, and passed it to me. At that moment, I became aware that they were all watching me and I knew that drinking was another test. I drank and expressions of happiness were evident on all their faces.

Then the old man stood up and went through a door into an inner room in the tent, and I knew that I was also supposed to follow. I did. In this room was a golden chest about the size of a large breadbox. He went to it and opened it taking out a large necklace. Now, this necklace was about the strangest thing I have ever seen. It was made up of a series of balls of gold that were graduated like a strand of pearls would be, only the mediumest was about the size of a playing marble and the largest, in the center, was about the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Suspended at the center was a figured gold object set with a large stone. The figure of the piece consisted of two spiraling horns similar to Ram’s horns mounted to the side of the flat surface on which the stone was fixed. The flat surface was strange in that it was both circular yet triangular. How it could be both, I cannot say, but it was. The circular part of it seemed to be a function of the stone that was rounded like a Ping-Pong ball cut in half. But it was the characteristics of the stone that fascinated me. Imagine a combination between a diamond and an opal and you have some idea of what it was like. It was milky yet crystalline, flashing fire and colors like an opal, yet brilliant and transparent like a diamond. The living nature of this stone was apparent, and I was in awe of it.

The old man turned to me and looked at me long and carefully — searching my eyes for something. He held the necklace in both hands, suspended in air as he did so, and finally said, “You understand?” I replied, “Yes.” And the understanding that was instantly opened to my mind was that, if I accepted the stone, there were consequences. The consequences were that any manifestations of falseness in me would turn on me and destroy the instrument in which I was operating, i.e., the physical body of my present incarnation. It didn’t matter if they were unintended. I was being charged to seek out and speak only truth with no latitude for subjective wishful thinking.

With this understanding passed to me the enormous responsibility and risk I was accepting. It was sobering, awe inspiring and even a little frightening. But the fear passed quickly. “You accept?” the old man asked. “I do.” I replied and bent my head to receive the stone. He placed it carefully around my neck, adjusting the fit at the shoulders so that the stone should rest exactly at the base of my breastbone.

I was embraced again, and passed out of the inner room to the outer where the two other men were waiting. When they saw the stone, their faces lit up with joy and they clasped their hands together and bowed as I passed. I signaled them with my eyes as I did so, knowing that I could no longer speak in that realm.

The next thing I knew, I could hear June’s voice calling my name over and over again at a great distance. Like a rocket, I shot through the cleft in the rock and found myself over the mountain where the house was that held my mortal body, and then I was in the body, coming back as though emerging from a dark tunnel into the light of this world. I opened my eyes and my friends were looking at me and laughing that I had “gone to sleep”!

I tried to say that something very extraordinary had happened, but words failed me. I found that I could not really describe this experience in anything but the most prosaic terms and they were making great fun of it, so I decided that I shouldn’t talk about it and kept most of it to myself. They did ask what the stone was when I tried to describe it, and the only thing that came to my mind was that it was called The Speaking Stone.

I should mention that, shortly after beginning meditation practice, I had begun to experience a strange anomaly. Things would break in my presence with no apparent cause, things like drinking glasses, lamp chimneys (remember, we were living for some time with no electricity), and so forth. I had attempted to try to explain this as rapid shifts in temperature such as occurs when you pour boiling water into a glass, but that didn’t really work in the summer time, when there was nothing in the glass, and the lamp chimney had been sitting unused all day. Another thing to shove under the rug.

But, on the trip down from the mountains on the way home, I was thinking about the stone and how I was going to cope with this condition on my existence in my relations with my ex-husband, and at that very instant, the back window in my friend’s new car exploded with a loud noise like the shot from a cannon. We were both so startled that she slammed on the brakes and we quickly looked around. She looked in the mirror and I turned my head and we both saw the window this way at the same time. It was all milky with the fractures of tempered glass that breaks into little “balls”. And just at that moment, it began to rain. We looked in directions and there wasn’t another car in sight and no apparent place that a missile could have come from. And, in fact, there didn’t seem to be any impact point. The whole window was still in one piece, but completely covered with those lines of fracture. It was thus impossible to see through.

Swell! There we are, driving along with about 400 miles to go, with a shattered rear window and a pile of luggage and souvenirs in the back seat! But, the window seemed to be holding, and we kept moving, though slowly. At some point we wanted to check the situation out, so when we came to a place to pull off, a closed gas station, we turned in. The instant we hit the bump of the end of the pavement, the whole window fell in on the seat in a pile of thousands of little glass balls!

Well, there wasn’t much to do except find a place to stay, cover the car until morning, and then go from there. We found a motel where the owner very kindly allowed us to put the car in his own garage and the next day we drove to the nearest city with a car dealer affiliated with the maker of the car.

The car was repaired, but the mechanics were completely baffled. They could come up with absolutely no explanation as to why the window would suddenly shatter.

A related incident occurred not long after I was back home. By this time, we had a new bedroom built onto our cabin, which had now become a house, and the room was lined on two sides with large plate glass windows that measured four feet by six. The house was in the middle of a grove of trees and it was like having the outdoors “inside”. The head of the bed was against one of the walls of glass and I really enjoyed this room, especially when it rained.

I was meditating on the bed, and my ex-husband came into the house forgetting to catch the screen door to prevent it from slamming shut with the spring attached to it. When it slammed, I felt an internal “jerk” and the next thing I knew, the window at the head of the bed exploded exactly as the window at the back of the car had done some months before. Again, it was tempered glass, and it was a moment before the balls began to start falling, slowly at first, then all at once, collapsing in a pile on top of me.

Needless to say, at that point, my ex-husband became just a bit more cautious in his actions designed to “jerk my chain”. He was already wary of the dozen or so shattered glasses and lamp chimneys that had gone before, but this was taking the thing to a new level. Heck, who knows? Maybe he was thinking I was some kind of witch! But it was creating a great distance between us because it frightened him.

I have to admit that I was sometimes a bit frightened also. I didn’t know what was happening to me and around me. I only knew that I was on some sort of path and I could only do as I did because to do otherwise was in a strange way, impossible. I thought of it as a sort of “walking on water”. In my mind, I was out in the middle of a vast ocean and there was a certain path for me, but each step was an act of both faith as well as judicious consideration of probabilities. I had a pretty good idea of where the supports that were hidden just under the surface of the water were, but I was not allowed to see them before I put my foot forward for the next step. I knew that, at any moment, I might find that my step was not met by the support structure, and I would plunge into the waves.

So much for strange experiences while meditating. Now let’s jump over a few years to the time of the Flying Black Boomerangs chronicled in High Strangeness — another great inner shift. The reader will notice that no single experience was the last word. Things happened in stages and by degrees over years of time. And that, of course, implies that the process is ongoing. As I noted in Amazing Grace, it was at this point that my physical system broke down completely. My state of functionality had been precarious for years, and now it became a primary issue.

I continued to force myself to function by sheer will (the way of the fakir?) but I could see that the trend was definitely downhill and I knew that if something didn’t change I was going to die. I knew I would die because the will in me was gradually being eroded away by constant pain. I couldn’t stand on my feet for more than a few minutes at a time because the pelvic and lower back pain would make all my muscles go into a spasm that would end in spastic release because the muscles refused to support me at all. The muscles that are used to erect the body, assist in transitioning from sitting to standing, and lifting the legs to walk, were involved; and all of those activities — ordinary as they are — were greatly hindered. I needed assistance in and out of chairs, in and out of bed, in the bathroom, in and out of the tub and so on.

However, as long as I was sitting still and didn’t try to move, I was fine. And my brain hadn’t died, so I continued to read and study to divert my mind, and schedule hypnosis sessions. My ex-husband saw this as malingering. He complained that I could do what I liked to do, i.e., read or do hypnosis sessions for other people, but I wasn’t doing anything for him, i.e., attend to his physical needs. I was stung and deeply hurt by this because if it hadn’t been for reading and my work, I would have felt completely useless; I would have been a vegetable.

There were times when I wished that I had no family who would be damaged or hurt if I just ended it all. The angina was so constant a condition that I actually had fantasies of a madman with an ax breaking into the house and chopping my arm off thereby giving me relief. The doctor was baffled by it, and finally suggested that it might just be nerve damage and that doing carpal tunnel surgery was an option that might clear it up. Naturally, he didn’t really explain why the pain was in the upper arm and chest area, but go figure. I was desperate and went to have it done.

When I woke up after surgery that was supposed to have been on my left wrist, both wrists were bandaged up like boxing gloves. I was completely horrified! How was I going to do anything with both hands like that?

The pain was close to the worst I have ever experienced. It was worse than having a baby. It was in the same category as the headaches and ear infections. I was not prepared for that. And it didn’t go away as the doctor said it would.

The surgery also hadn’t done anything to relieve the arm pain. So I was worse than before, and now I was almost completely helpless. I didn’t even have the strength in my hands to turn a doorknob or take the lid off a jar or hold a potato to peel it. I couldn’t lift a pot from the stove; I couldn’t even hold a pen or pencil for longer than a minute without being gripped by an agonizing spasm, which resulted in my hand turning into a quivering, spastic claw right out of a horror movie. Forget playing the piano; wasn’t ever going to happen again!

That was pretty depressing. And, for some reason, my ex-husband took some sort of perverse pleasure in torturing me with the situation. I was constantly reminded that if I wanted anything done that I wanted, I would just have to figure out how to do it myself.

So we find that the situation had improved in many ways, reflective of a change in the inner state, but obviously, there was more that needed to be done. I had no idea what, and was not even able to articulate in my mind that this was what was happening. I was aware of the fact that our bodies reflect some state of the soul, the condition of the Speaking Stone, but try as I would, I could not find the door to heal my own soul so that my body would begin to heal as well. The only thing I could figure was that there must be something more, something deeper, something I wasn’t seeing. I knew that somehow my ignorance was playing a part, but of what was I ignorant? What, in the name of God, was I doing wrong?

I had seemingly achieved a state of love and acceptance for all people, for all paths, for all who struggled in ignorance. I was working as hard as I could (and even in my state of physical deterioration, which was considerable) to fix things for those who asked. I never turned down a request for help from anyone whether they could pay anything or not. I was not in it for the money. I was, in a certain sense, in as bad a situation as I had been when the voice had told me that I must “learn” about evil.

Well, I was trying. I was trying to learn how to identify it. What I didn’t know and was about to learn was that very often, that which manifests as light and truth is not; it is a deception to folly. This was the still unlearned part of the “love lesson”. I had already had the lesson that large religious organizations could be a pathway to destruction. For millennia, different sources, different teachers, have provided versions of a blueprint of the underlying forces of the reality in which we live — generally with very little, if any success. My observations over many years — compared with the observations of many other people — have led me to think that most of the expositions on the underlying forces of our reality have been, to put it bluntly, bogus. That is not to say that they have not had good intentions, and maybe even some “keys.” But, it seems to be a fact of our reality that we are “in the soup” and some forces really wish to keep us there. Thus there has been a concerted effort to promulgate versions of the deeper reality that are not only misleading, but obviously designed to keep people asleep. However, what I didn’t know at the time was just how subtle and torturous this deception could be and how it manifested on an individual, personal basis.

In early 1994, I had a conversation with Frank in which he enumerated for me the string of strange, synchronistic and even quite miraculous events that had brought me to the place where I now was. He cited point after point down through my entire life story, with which he was familiar, right up to the past few years when the bizarreness and synchronicities had increased to the point that I felt like I was living in a madhouse where normal reality no longer held sway, and the formerly solid earth of my reference system was crumbling beneath my feet. With each point he made, I felt like another wave was washing over my foundation of sand, and I was sinking into the mire of complete lunacy.

How can you deal with a life that has gone completely over the edge in terms of strangeness that you neither wish to experience, nor do you wish to perpetuate?

After going over most of my life, Frank came to the more recent times and pointed out how the UFOs had come with the first abduction session I had done, and that clearly this was an unusual phenomenon. Not everyone who might be an abductee under hypnosis attracts a whole flap of UFOs. The question was: was it the abductee, or the therapist in whom the denizens of UFO land were interested?

Then he pointed out the obvious (to him) connection between my deteriorating physical state and my own UFO encounter. When I protested that there might be no relation at all, he pointed out how my dog had suffered and died within a very short time after this exposure and how my symptoms always seemed to peak at exactly the time of night that the UFO had come along. What was my explanation for that little item?

I had none.

Frank’s theory was that the whole drama of recent times that was spread across several counties and included dozens of people, most of whom I didn’t even know, was staged to get my attention — to wake me up.

I did not like the direction the conversation was taking. Like the wet nightgown and the strange lights, I was really struggling to shove this one under the rug.

“Why meeee?” I wailed. I felt a huge pressure on my chest (the “Speaking Stone?”) at the very thought. “What am I supposed to DO?!”

At that point, Frank had run out of theories. “I have no idea,” he said. “I am just pointing out the obvious. I guess you have to figure the rest out on your own.”

I clearly remember sitting on my bed that night, thinking about these strange hints that there was something deeper to our reality than I might have supposed in my years of research and work. The only problem was, as I pointed out smugly to God, I was too sick to do anything. “You blew it, Buckwheat!” I told the Universe. “If there was ever anything you wanted me to do, you let me suffer too much for too long! So there!” I mentally stuck out my tongue in defiance and resentment.

There I was, as nonfunctioning as a human being can be and still appear to be functional. But an overwhelming sensation of purposefulness behind it all swept over me and I immediately regretted my childish resistance. So I resigned to it, accepted it, and declared to the Universe that if all of these things were being orchestrated to get my attention, it had surely worked, but I was too far-gone to pick up the ball and run with it. “If I am supposed to do anything about it, you gotta fix me up here,” I said. “As I am, I can do nothing.”

Within two weeks — actually more like ten days — I found Reiki. Or Reiki found me. And so did Dr. Greenbaum.