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Chapter Thirty-one: The Cleft in the Rock

In 1988 I decided that a garden would help me to exercise and strengthen my muscles, ease pain and assist a gradual return to full mobility.  It was still difficult to walk.  I had to put pants on sitting down because I couldn’t lift my feet high enough;  I couldn’t exert enough control to insert them into the “right leg”.

Little by little, my garden became one of the few truly enjoyable aspects of my life.  Of course, Larry very subtly demeaned it as useless and a waste of time.  Growing flowers didn’t produce “food” for the table.  Well, that was true, but when I’d helped him start a vegetable garden, there was so much conflict and criticism about everything I did  that I left him alone with his beans and squash.  What’s more, if we were going to sell the place, making sure it looked attractive was productive work to my way of thinking.

So I ignored his rants about the time I was wasting on grass and flowers.  I took three Tylenol three to four times a day and worked away in the garden.  Pain was easier to bear in summer air with the plants, seeing them grow and respond to my care in ways that clearly didn’t work with my family.  Eventually, even Larry appreciated my efforts after other people complimented me on my glorious roses and beds of giant marigolds.  It was there that I prayed and “talked to God”.

One day, crawling around on all fours pulling weeds, covered with dirt, I realized suddenly exactly where I was and what I was doing.  With startling clarity, I saw that nothing I had ever thought about my future had come to pass.

We were in no position to send our children to college, they had never been to a summer camp, had very few friends and even fewer material comforts..  I sat back against a tree and looked up at the sky and asked “Why?”

I wanted God to tell me: Why create a mind with the spirit of a mystic and the will of a bulldog, only to confine me to the prison of poverty and total obscurity?

By this time, I’d learned how to “hear the voice of God” in the world around me.  I saw all my glorious flowers, I saw my beautiful children playing across the yard.  I realized the only thing that would matter in a hundred or a thousand or a million years was the satisfaction I’d experienced in growing my roses and loving my children.  Maybe the only thing that existed eternally was the love we give away.  Imperfect as I was, God only knows, I loved deeply and fully, with all my being.  Those I loved, I would gladly give up my life for.

And perhaps I had.  “Okay, God,” I sighed.  “I get it.  I’ll grow where you’ve planted me.  Just show me what to do next.”

Not very long after this, in a rather comical way, I had an out-of-body experience for the first time.

Meditating before going to sleep on a very warm night, I’d pulled my nightgown up above my knees and was lying on the bed without even a sheet to cover me so I’d be cool as possible.  I began my breathing exercises and suddenly heard a sort of crackling or buzzing sound in my head.  Then there was a sort of “whooshing” sound like an internal Cosmic Whisper effect, and a word reverberated through me: “Shekina!”

Well, I quickly ran through the memory banks and pulled up the notion that this was a word that meant “Forerunner of the Presence of God”.

Wow!    That was heavy!

My reaction to this was a sort of panicked feeling that I was “indecent” and that I ought to pull the sheet up to be more modestly arranged for whatever was going to happen now.

I reached down and tugged my nightgown down decorously, pulled the sheet up, and folded my hands prayerfully.

Next thing I knew, I had to go to the bathroom really, really bad!    So, I rolled to my side and reached out to brace myself as to stand up.

My hand went right through the wall!

Well, that was startling, but I really had to go, so I leaned forward to sort of lunge out of bed, and the upper half of my body went right through the wall into the bathroom!

Whoa!    I stopped moving and looked around me.  I realized with a start that I now had 360 degree vision!    Not only that, I could see through everything!    It wasn’t that things were transparent, but rather that they were like living colored light.

Everything was alive!    And so colorful!    I thought quickly about the children, and instantly I was “there,” hovering over them – all of them at once! – seeing them in their beds as they slept.

That was cool!    So, I decided to try thinking about something a few miles away.  I thought of the Farm.  Whoosh!    There it was!    A thought of anything brought me in direct contact.  At the same time, focusing on any single thing did not eliminate the view of everything else around me in all directions at once.

Then I suddenly wondered: “What if I’m dead!?” I panicked at the thought of leaving the children unprotected.

The instant I felt this panic, I snapped back like a rubber band.  It was almost painful!    Like a sharp sting I realized I was in my body, the sheet was still down, and I had never arranged my nightgown as I was sure I had.

Whatever had happened to me, wherever I had been, it had begun with the Cosmic Whisper.  Everything after that had been in another “realm”.

***

In August of that year, Eva decided that I needed to “get away from it all” for a little break.  I had never been away from my children more than a few days, generally in the hospital, and I felt uncomfortable with the idea.

But the vacation Eva had in mind was hard to resist.

Eva and her husband had a cabin in North Carolina.  A Lama Sing symposium was planned near there.  At this point, Eva had just completed treatment for her colon cancer and she hoped going up to the mountains would be restful and healing.  She planned for us to spend a few days in Maggie Valley at the symposium, and then drive to their cabin for another seven days to hang out, meditate, poke around the mountains a bit, and rest and read.

The symposium was organized by a physician and his wife, close friends of Lama Sing’s channel, Al Miner.  Lectures, group meditations, dinners and so on sounded like a lot of fun, and possibly a path to something new.  Putting aside my fears about being away from the children, I agreed to go.

The talks proved lively and interesting.  During the breaks, people walked around claiming to be seeing auras, ecstatic expressions on their faces pronouncing sagely on the “wonderful energy present”.  Everybody told about their psychic experiences in much the same way Fundamentalists speak in tongues and dance in the spirit.  I wasn’t saying much, just observing and feeling a bit put off by the lack of evidence to back up these stories.  It seemed little different from the “testifying” in churches around the world.

I guess, in a sense, I had become a true skeptic!    I wasn’t going to believe anything or anybody without some corroborating evidence of at least the circumstantial kind if nothing else was available.  I was even a little worried about Eva because she seemed to be completely “taken in” by all the claims and was turning into a “true believer” in the New Age religion.

On the next to last day of the symposium, the doctor’s wife who’d helped sponsor the event gave a talk about the many people who were coming forward at that time with “reincarnational memories” of the Holocaust.

When she began to read from personal accounts of “recovered” memories, this produced in me an uncontrollable spell of crying.  Again, it started as the “boiling” sensation in the pit of my stomach, and I had to leave the room and hide in a stall in the ladies lavatory until I was able to gain control of myself.  I really thought I was losing my grip.  Nothing had ever affected me that way in public!    It was one thing to have such an event occur as a result of prolonged meditation exercises, but something else altogether to have this reaction stimulated by words read from a podium.

What was wrong with me that I felt so raw and vulnerable?

The next day, group meditation was scheduled as a closing ceremony.  When Eva left to go, I stayed behind in the darkened motel room with cold towels and ice on my head.

At breakfast the next morning, a lady at our table remarked 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, “I saw you clearly.  No, I am not mistaken!” Eva laughed and assured her that I had been in bed.  After an awkward silence, the chatter began again.  But I was puzzled by this.

At the symposium, we had met two elderly ladies, very spry and hugely entertaining and interesting in a Dickensian sort of way.  One of them claimed to have had some training in hypnosis and advanced meditative techniques which she had taught at various times.  Eva and I were interested in this, so we quickly discussed whether she ought to invite them back to the cabin with us for some experimentation.  Eva approached them with the proposal and they quickly agreed.  We decided that our stay at the cabin could be a lot of fun.  In addition to meditation experiments, we could go digging for rocks at one of the local public “crystal mines,” and just generally have a “hen party”.

After driving half a day through the mountains, we arrived at the cabin, isolated at the end of an old logging road on the edge of the Nantahela National Forest.  It was completely peaceful and delightful, perfect for our “experimental” meditations.

Our new friend June agreed 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.

The next thing I knew, I felt myself lift out of my body and “shoooop!” I was suddenly “hovering” before a rock face on the side of a tall mountain.  There was a “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 “shock” that might be physically destructive.  I decided to try.  I “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 deep luminescence and “liveliness”.  The grasses were waving back and forth in the breeze, so it would seem, though this breeze was a  “conscious” caressing of the grass and the waving of the grass was a “conscious” response to the caress, the way 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 “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 small river.  I knew this tent was where I was going, though there was no sensation of “supposed to go”.  I was curious how it was going to feel when I stepped into the water of the river.

I looked at the water, 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 “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 a white under-robe with a striped over-robe that 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 feeling can only be described as “delicious” to my feet!  I was fascinated by the glittering, jewel-like stones at the bottom of the river.  They were smooth, yet constantly flashing with the movement of the water across them.  I walked across the river.  This was an intense experience of deep significance.  When I reached the other side, I was glad that I had “passed” a test, but regretful that the experience was over.

I approached the tent.  Two men sat under an “outer” tent flap, open sided like a porch, on a carpet spread on the grass.  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: “We have been waiting for a long time.  There is joy in seeing you again.”  Curiously, though I had the impression he was “speaking,” I was also aware this was an intentional whole thought transfer.

For some reason, this didn’t strike me as unusual.  I had the feeling this “meeting” had been arranged a very long “time” ago.  I bowed and acknowledged the greeting.  Then, the other man said: “He is inside.”

I felt overwhelming love and happiness that I would see “him” again after so long and weary an absence.

I ducked my head to enter the tent.  An old man with “young” skin like iridescent porcelain stood inside.  His expression on 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.  We sat down on the carpeted ground inside the tent around a small table.  The two men came in with bowls of milk.  There was a golden goblet on the table already filled with something like wine.  A large loaf of bread on the table was broken into equal pieces by the old man.  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.  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.  I knew that I was also supposed to follow.  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.  The smallest was about the size of a playing marble and the largest, in the center, was about the size of a golf ball.  Suspended at the center was a figured gold object set with a large stone.  The figure of the piece consisted of two curved horns similar to Ram’s horns, mounted to the side of the flat surface on which the stone was fixed.  The flat surface was both “circular” yet “triangular”.  How it could be both, I cannot say, but it was.  The “circular” part seemed to be a function of the stone which was rounded like a golf ball cut in half.  The stone 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?” And the understanding that was instantly “opened” to my mind was that, if I accepted the stone, there were “responsibilities and consequences”.  Any manifestation of falseness in me would turn on me and destroy the instrument in which I was operating: the physical body of my present incarnation.  It didn’t matter if falsehood was unintended.  I was being charged to seek out and speak only truth with no latitude for subjective “wishful thinking”.  It could even be said that the necklace itself represented a sort of “new circuit” through which energies might be transmitted.  By accepting the necklace, I was undertaking a process of “seating” something in my current physical body that had rarely, if ever, been manifested in the world of physical existence.  I replied, “Yes”.

With the acceptance of these conditions in full comprehension, I felt the “mantle” of enormous responsibility and risk I was accepting settle down upon my being.  It was sobering, awe inspiring and even a little frightening.  But the fear passed quickly.  “You accept?” the old man asked, as if to fully confirm my acceptance of the conditions.  “I do,” I replied and bent my head to receive the stone.  He placed the necklace 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.  The old man held onto me tightly for a moment as if in fear for my safety, kissed me again on both cheeks, and we turned 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 at a great distance.  Like a rocket, I shot through the cleft in the rock and found myself over the mountain where the cabin stood 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.

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.  They were making great fun of me, so I decided that I shouldn’t talk and kept it to myself.  They did ask what the stone was when I tried to describe it.

“It’s called The Speaking Stone,” I said.

***

There was another curious thing about my meditation practice.  Not too long after I had begun, strange anomalies began to occur around me.  “Things” would break in my presence with no apparent cause.  Fragile things, like drinking glasses or kerosene lamp chimneys.  Objects disappeared and reappeared mysteriously, often in the exact places I had searched.  To make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks, I even had Larry or one of the children search with me.  When the object would reappear where we all knew it had not been, none of us could explain what was going on.

The breaking of objects was, naturally, more disturbing.  I had attempted to try to explain this as “rapid shifts in temperature” that occur 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.  In the end, it became just another anomaly to shove under the rug.

Now, however, 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 Larry.  At that very instant, the back window in my friend’s new car exploded with a loud noise like a shot from a cannon.  Eva was so startled that she slammed on the brakes.  She looked in the rearview mirror with a startled expression.  The back window was all milky looking with the thousands of tiny fractures that appear in tempered glass as it breaks into little “balls”.  Obviously, something had struck the window hard enough to make the noise and shatter it, but not hard enough to penetrate the glass.

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 impossible to see through.

Swell!  There we are, driving along with about five or six hundred miles to go, with a shattered rear window and a pile of luggage and souvenirs in the back seat!    Not only that, it started raining.  The window seemed to be holding, so Eva started off again and we kept moving slowly.  At some point Eva came to a closed gas station, so we turned in.  The instant we hit the bump on the end of the pavement, the whole window fell in on the seat in a pile of thousands of little glass balls!

The damage was eventually replaced, but the mechanics were completely baffled.  They could come up with absolutely no explanation why the window would suddenly shatter.

***

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, like having the outdoors “inside”.  The head of the bed was against one of the walls of glass.  I really enjoyed this room, especially when it rained.

I was meditating on the bed when Larry came into the house, forgetting to catch the screen door to prevent it from slamming shut with the force of 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 Eva’s back window had done 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.

I spent days after this event walking around the property trying to figure out if some sort of missile could have been directed at the house.  Maybe a hunter out in the woods had fired in the wrong direction?  Of course, a new house had been built across the road on top of the hill there, and it was actually impossible for an errant bullet to have arrived from that trajectory.  In fact, there really was no angle from which a bullet could have come, unless it was from someone standing directly at the front of our property at the bottom of the hill.  There were too many trees, barriers, and hills to prevented it.

Nevertheless, I was not ready to believe that it was really “me” doing this.  Of course everyone around me was becoming convinced that, in every instance, the “event” occurred in relation to some distress inside me.  If this was psychokinesis, I had absolutely no awareness of how it operated, and definitely no control over it.

Needless to say, at that point, Larry became just a bit more cautious in 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 this frightened him.  I was moving into territory where he could not or would not follow.

I have to admit I was sometimes a bit frightened myself.  Well, to be completely honest, sometimes I was utterly terrified.  I didn’t know what was happening to me.

I was on some sort of “path”.

I could only do as I did, because to do otherwise was, in a strange way, impossible.  I thought of it as “walking on water”.  In my mind, I was out in the middle of a vast ocean.  There was a certain path for me, but each step was an act of faith as well as judicious consideration of probabilities.

I had a pretty good idea where the “supports” were hidden just under the surface of the water, but I was not allowed to see before I put my foot forward for the next step.  I knew at any moment I might find that my step was not met by the support structure, and I would plunge into the waves.

And nobody was telling me what to do.  I was having to figure it out myself based on the clues around me.

Continue to Chapter 32: Moving To Montana