Out of the Closet …
The raw ironies of karma are jokes we play on our many selves.
For example: Around 2004 just after retiring on social security at age 63, I, Joel, started a fast to loose weight. The fast lasted 45 days (lately I’ve seen that event as a not uncommon echo of Christ’s visit to the Desert, although in my case the desert was scientific materialism). From about day 12 on, I had visions every morning, on the cusp between sleeping and awakening. I took about thirty pages of notes, and in the next year wrote my first book: “The Way of the Fool”. http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twotf
The purpose of the book was to build a bridge between Faith based exoteric Christianity, and Gnosis based esoteric Christianity.
Please realize these were mystical visions, whose Nature inspired thought – construction. In the contents pages, this Other-generated musical organism is laid out in a logical (Logos) fashion. This is not “spiritual research”, as Steiner has it. Something more on the order of whimsical visionary interventions. [WV’s] Not my will, but thine …
The WV’s included me not being born in the astral, ethereal and physical body I now ride, until at the age of 31 of Joey [who was born in Montana on December 23rd, 1940], the previous driver and chooser – my (Joel’s) body brother … he surrendered and graced me one night during sleep, although it was over seven years before I understood the meaning of the level of changes I went through, beginning in 1971, because I wasn’t him. I have all his memories, and his soul was that of an innocent empath. Steiner folk hate that story. Yet, there exists extensive ‘de”-tales, all of which are recorded in my biographical writings.
As the change evolved, a co-worker stopped in front of my desk and said: “There once was a man named Wendt, whose mind became boggled and bent. One fine sunny day, Wendt went away, and no one knew where Wendt went”
Three years into the change, our ex-wife Tina, mother of our first three children, and someone who Joey first knew when he was a cadet at the Air Force Academy, said to me: “You know, you’ve become a completely different person. You don’t stand the same, walk the same, sit the same, or talk the same.”
[about 1982] When our (Joel and joey) eldest daughter was in her middle teens, I shared my understanding of the change. She told me a story she had never told anyone else. There was a night, when she was five, when she “awoke” to a great wind passing by the door to her room, going in the direction of her parents’ bedroom. It was followed by a large shadow. She began then to have lucid dreams, and started being able to talk to her guardian angel, … who politely silenced their connection, just before her period started.
I remarked that that shadow had to be the new double.
A few years later [1984], at an Emerson Study group in Fair Oaks, CA, Carl Stegmann remarked “offhandedly”, that certain kinds of incarnations required a Moon Archi, who has held his own development back to serve as their double.
[1979 or 80] Another fun WV, … I was working as a grill cook in Oakland CA, and closed the store after smoking a thin joint of Northern California seedless. Walking to the bus, I turned a corner where there were no tall buildings, to discover a powerful image written in the only clouds. On the right was a Zeus like figure, poised not unlike the painting on a famous ceiling. Down further, from deep within the clouds out of which His torso appears, a great crystal spear emerges from this cloud mass, pointing left. It has a large five pointed star at its tip.
The spear pointed to a row of smaller clouds. The words Matthew and Washington were spelled out by these clouds. I consciously blinked my eyes, and the image in the clouds was gone, but the general nature of the cloud form remained. What I felt is: “oh great! … Another message from the Gods.”
Fortunately, during the early years of “change” I had begun to believe I was enlightened. Shortly thereafter, the social environment mirrored back to me what a jackass I was being. Helped me rediscover my ordinary mind, and its natural social virtues and obligations.
Giving me these names had two purposes. One was to give explanatory concepts for certain life experiences, and deep feelings in my soul, such as a deep affection for America, and a love of the Gospels.
Another was to alert me to the dangers of thinking Their gifts mean I’m in anyway cool, like Them. Cursed works better for me. God shows you something and you have to act, right?
Later WVs suggested Clara Barton [1999, or thereabout] , and a perhaps a rascal version of Socrates [recently].
In 1986, while I was living at the foot of Mt. Shasta, and reading for the first time Tomberg’s “Meditations on the Tarot”, … on the cusp between sleeping and waking He touched me. This was an Intuitive Visionary experience (for Steiner friends). He took me into Himself, as He enacted a Ritual such that at each Mass, He takes the Heavenly Perfect Church and marries that to the Earthly Fallen Church, whatever the spiritual status of the presiding priest.
This vision was accompanied – simultaneously – by a dream. In the dream I am walking in a garden with a priest. On one side is my current home, and on the other a church. I am in the process of joining the Church, and telling him the story of the dream and the vision. At the end of this WV, I lay on my back, on my bed, in perfect inner and outer peace for at least a half hour.
Three years [1989] later I joined the Church, and had such a discussion with a priest. During the nine month process – the Rite of Catholic Initiation of Adults – I was praying one day before we “students” had to leave before the Eucharist, and He touched me as Love, sort of like: “See, I’m here, just like I said I would be.” Of course there exist no words to describe how that feels.
[2004] My first Inspirational (it is all conversational in nature) encounter with the Mother went like this: It occurred about the time of writing the Way of the Fool. I was engaged in prayer & meditation – when I started reflecting on all my personal bad-things done to other people. I was also of the view that the Divine Mystery knows us completely, intimately. I next thought about how it was that They must experience all of what both the perpetrator and the victim felt. In anguish, something usually quiet inside me cried out: “What do You do with all our horrible and terrible stuff”.
Almost before I was done speaking, She was there, Her aura of comfort lifting some of my own woes, and spoke these words: “We turn it into Love” [took a decade and a half of social phenomenological observations to see how They did It: Event & Aftermath.] https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2022/12/26/event-and-aftermath-the-creation-of-love-through-crisis/
[2018 or so] The last time with Her, in intimate conversation , I was near death. I was in a hospital for V-tac issues, but the staff was ignoring me trying to tell them I had accidentally poisoned myself with wheat. I was in great distress from the accompanying diarrhea and bloating. In addition, the doctors were loading me up with very strong meds, with – of course – serious side effects, in preparation for giving me a peacemaker defibrillator.
In what some in Russian culture call the Hour of the Wolf (around three a.m.), the day before my surgery, I wanted to die. She was immediately there. I asked if She would take me if I wanted, and She said yes. Ball in my court. I decided I was not done loving my Lady, so deferred.
The middle, and most intimate visit, was magical … In early Autumn 2007, I had two heart attacks in one day, while in the ER. That’s some serious “luck”. At some level my body was requiring much better ways of living. The problem is one of the soul, and the psychic forces required … events in life come with “struggle”. Shortly before the ER adventures, I had left (been lovingly kicked out by) my lady of five years. We both had other karma to live.
Simultaneously I was being rejected by some leaders of the Anthroposophical Society, in Fair Oaks, CA, where I was living. They were doing a study of a work by Paul Emberson, and I had the temerity to contribute to the meeting that this whole encounter was attracting darkness, and I could feel it. I gave a bit of an explanatory speaking and was interrupted by two male – leading personalities? – telling me that I didn’t know anything about Anthroposophy.
In December, Via Divine Providence (in retrospect), I was asked to leave the room I had been living in, since moving out. A native spirit woman that I know, called out of nowhere (?) to offer me a room in half of her garage. So I ended by driving a rental (with four nearly bald tires it turns out) from California to New Hampshire, where I finished writing my “American Anthroposophy”. http://iipwebdev.com/hermit/AmericanAnthroposopy.html
She too kicked me out after nine months (there can only be one powerful soul around a choleric, … her). Fortunately, my current Lady is a serious sanguine, and a perfect match for my phlegmatic temperament.
When I left California on Jan 2, 2008, I tried to time my driving to be in between the individual storms normal to that time, which move from West to East. I also made a list of cheap motels, for every fifty miles, not knowing where I would be when I wanted a rest. Thus began an adventure in the sense of horrible weather and breakdowns (remember the bald tires). I got to one of planned motels, after driving through a serious thunderstorm. It was Epiphany. I lay down on the bed physically, psychologically, and spiritually empty. I was spent.
I was 67. Recent heart surgery. Providence seem to have plans, yet there I was, … empty. Not only did I not want to live, I felt like I didn’t even want to be … to exist even as an immortal spirit.
Yet, there I was, alive, as it were. I had been following a twelve holy nights routine of: the Lord’s Prayer, followed by a self-made prayer of gratitude to all else in the Creation. After which I recited the first fourteen verses of the Prologue to the Gospel of John (a practice suggested by Steiner).
When I softly spoke the “Our” aloud, I discovered I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. She was there and helped me to feel the living gratitude of all Beings of spirit, from the rocks, through the waters, to the very stars themselves, praying in spirit this prayer.
In subjective time it took about three hours. The primary lasting impression, besides Her Favor, was of realizing what stood behind, within, and beyond the realms of Ideas and Ideals. As before, this was a kind of conversation, except that each word I spoke, including articles and such, involved a by grace Intuitional meeting. WVs remember, not true spiritual research in the Steiner sense.
A year or so later, over the Winter of 2009-2010, I was initiated in what Steiner calls a meeting with the Lesser and Greater Guardians of the Threshold. A year or so after that, I had a Pentecost experience. This led to a whole new level of writing, as well as video output (270+ on YouTube). Three dozen books, four hundred essays, some of which are also mixed in with over three hundred blog entries, short stories, a novel, poetry, and a screen treatment.
For the Christ Initiation, I had to master what Steiner taught in his books on Epistemology. Only a few years ago did I realize that the 2008 Epiphany meeting was a Mother Initiation, which in the Americas produces shamans, or earth religion priests.
[1978] About seven years after the change, I was working in a movie theater as a manager. I had been studying Franz Bardon’s works on Hermetic Science (magic), for about five years. My practice was at the level of learning to breath in and out, through pore breathing, the element of fire (will). This is an expanding power and can make one feel like the soul is going to explode, yet as we moderate it the will learns.
In my ongoing self-studies of social political life, I had forged this question: Since I know now from personal experience that spirit is real, what does that mean for the way we human beings live, in terms of political and social understanding?
Threes weeks later I met Rudolf Steiner through his books. Over the years I have since taught myself a spiritual social science modeled on Goethe’s phenomenological disciplines.
[In 2010, after these Mother and Son initiations, I wrote: “The Art of God – an actual theory of Everything.” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html
In it I retold the religious story as a theory, which I attempted to argue better explained human lives than did the present day theories of the materialists (all is matter, there is no spirit).]
[1978, again] Three weeks after starting to read Steiner, a God came to visit me, in the flesh, at my work as a movie theater manager. I had gone down from the office, to the ticket and candy counter, to count the cash in the till, and make number notations on a form. I was in the way of the clerk, when a figure walked up to me. I chatted with him, such as did he need a senior discount? (to which he said no, I always take care of myself). As it goes, not much small talk, … except the voice resonated from the whole body, something like music in a cathedral. Then he looked up at me for the first time.
He wore a workman’s clothes, and carried an odd box under his arm, that looked like a musical instrument case – size of a small flute. The wonder was His Eyes. No whites. Crystal clear, with bright and deep blue irises. Made me feel naked to my deeps.
He healed me of the despair of the Nixon years. I had had no hope. He reminded me I cared about the world. And, at the same time he was blessing my transition-inclusion, joining Bardon’s Moon Wisdom to Steiner’s new Sun Wisdom. My conclusion – later – was that one of this God’s names was: the Burning Bush (long story)
That’s the man with clear eyes, which links me with the Moody Blues. In their 1978 album: Octave, the first song speaks of the man with clear eyes, the second is Under Moonshine, making their relationship with the Mother more visible. The last is their beautiful masterpiece, “One Step into the Light”, which is about the Second Coming (“the river of living breath is flowing through the Sun, He was there before the Earth began”); and, hint at the Mother with these parts of the song’s refrain: “All the old things are returning”.
I don’t have what Europeans call: clairvoyance. Carl Stegmann called it clair-thinking. There are musical arrangements of the fundamental ideas of the creation. To think in pure ideas is to feel their relationship. The use of the idea “pure” can be confusing. The pure aspect is that in which thinking strives not to be of the sense world at all. The objects of thought are ideas, which RS defined as a complex of concepts. Love is the main way to see, or know, any person, or idea. Of special importance is that the thinking be selfless. We are seeking to know and understand that which is not for our benefit, but for the benefit of others.
As a consequence of having been “asked” to join the Catholic Church, I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating religious riddles. After two initiations you get kind of rewired – astrally and ethereally, and Hers and His produce physical effects, as well as more “gifts” & curses. On the day of the Pentecost experience [2012], it involved an image appearing in front of my inner eyes, whenever I closed my outer eyes. I felt it most strongly on the right-side of my face. It was about the size of an open hand, fingers extending just above my eyebrow, and then nesting the palm at the joint of the jaw … which were experienced by me inwardly, as zones of consciousness made possible by my Bardon self-studies.
The whole organism was built of more than a hundred smaller forms, with tips at each end. Seeing stacked and cuddled two pointed flames seems a workable image. The shape, as a whole, was kind of like a two dimensional peanut shell – two connected bulbs. The stacked and cuddled flames were then in a large loop, with one tip pointed out, and the other pointed in. The only forms were the flames, which were white at the tips, and in the connecting center blue. They moved, or perhaps: shimmered.
The condition lasted about 12 hours. I did note later changes in my speaking and writing. I tried more to just form questions, that ask the listener and reader, other questions. The questions help to see the inwardness of the other – a kind of not-knowing being necessary to a new knowing based on love. http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/SacramentalThinking33x.html
Divine Providence and the role of individual folly.
Joey had never sowed wild oats. So I spent the 70’s enjoying sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. There was a whole lot Joey had not known, and mistakes were made. I’m still learning how to be civilized, and child-like, around a woman. I emotionally hurt a few during the time of the oats.
Drugs. Joey’s brother gave him a Christmas present of a capsule of LSD in 1967. He didn’t take it until finals were over, and he was waiting a couple of weeks for the ceremony connected to earning a JD in Law, and to be sworn into the Montana Bar.
When I came in Joey had been living with Tina in the SF Bay area. Summer of love had just happened. Subsequently, I used various psychological medicinals until 1987, when I stopped completely.
Thirty years later [2017] I went on medical marijuana, because my knees were without tissue, destroyed by decades of arthritis (Our body was born under the Sign of Capricorn). During that interval of “sobriety”, I did most of my inner work on thinking, and writing.
I had developed, over those years, a kind of relationship with the world of thoughts and ideas. Early on my practice had been to “Listen to the World Song” – being awake to social and political drama as phenomena that Spoke. Somewhat like Goethe learning to read the Book of Nature.
Over time the experience can be hinted at by these words: the presence of Fullness, and the fullness of Presence, the Wind in the Soul. I drive, the Wind aids the flight, up or down.
As the change unfolded in the ’70’s, I acquired a kind of spiritual mistress. By this I mean I paid more attention to those pursuits, than to wives, girl friends, or children. For the latter, I kept food on the table and a roof over their heads (a task shared with Tina – they moved back and forth between us). At one point I was stoned everyday, and could fall sleep after starting to cook some noodles and hot dogs (these last may have come from me dumpster diving behind the nearby grocery store).
I did try to make amends in the ‘90’s, but we are all presently highly individualized. Some of the relationships are … sad, in the sense of a loss of that which never happened.
I have five children now, … from three marriages, the first two marriages were both with Tina. We all seemed to have survived each other. If you don’t think I had stuff to survive, you have never tried to raise an adolescent girl becoming woman. I have three daughters.
About three years into the change, I was reading Sufi stories, and came upon a tale called: “The Increasing of Necessity”. I followed those instructions, and instead of forcing my life along a path strewn with planning or direction of any sort, I lived deeply into the flow of providence – the lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
Life was also a school, and the most crucial lessons are in our lives. One of the providential streams goes with my love of books, and that led eventually to becoming a writer. At one point I had over 3,000, because I couldn’t leave them at a recycling center, even if I was never going to read them. Several moves required letting go. Fortunately, media mail makes it possible to move a small library to a new location, via the Post Office.
Fourteen years ago I met my Lady. I was living in Concord, MA, just after leaving New Hampshire in 2008. I went to a meeting of healers in the Trustee Room of the Concord Library, full of locked bookcases. Large table, comfortable chairs. I was early, and sat facing the doorway from the library proper. A woman surrounded by a golden halo walked in the door, and we’ve been together since.
Both of us love books. The house is kind of library. My office … crowded, stacked, semi-organized, … objects of beauty, sweet to the touch, each one a doorway into another universe.
~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~
a ?curiosity?: “The book of Joel written around 800BC and begins by describing a disastrous attack of locusts in the country of Judah. This attack causes significant damage to the economy and agriculture as this disaster of locusts is accompanied by a severe famine throughout the land. Prophet Joel calls the people to repent and interpreted the attack of locusts as the Day of the Lord when God would act directly to punish His people for their sins. Joel actually points out that these types of calamities are signs of God’s displeasure that if goes ignored the future consequences would be much devastating. The overall theme of the book is the day of the Lord. This phrase is used 19 times in the OT and five times in this small brief book of Joel. The first chapter begins with the locusts attack which already happened. The second chapter gives predictions of another attack but looks like Joel depicting an army of humans this time attacking and a sort of future prediction of Babylonian attack. Joel invites the people and the priests to fast and humble themselves and seek God’s forgiveness. If they respond, there will be resumed physical and spiritual blessings for the community.” thelastdialogue.org
From science fiction writer Frank Herbert’s novel Dune: “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until its too late.” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Rebellion.html
I have four new books. The first three are Prime, so two day delivery if you have it. The fourth is Lulu, and likewise has a link
Wandering Midst Wonders in the Caves of the Moon $33.00 390 pages – paper back … includes the next three books. Think of this book as a magic coffee table book, absent pictures. Just ideas, dangerous ideas. https://www.amazon.com/Wandering-Midst-Wonders-Caves-Moon/dp/1435776402/ref=sr_1_20?crid=2M843HS67JU0X&keywords=Joel+A.+Wendt&qid=1663635251&s=books&sprefix=joel+a.+wendt%2Cstripbooks%2C243&sr=1-20
“Flying High – a Stoners Guide to Enlightenment, Living Thinking and Shamanistic self-initiation” … paper back $9.47 48 pages
“the meditating scholar – and the Second Becoming of Christ in the Realm of Living Thought” $13.13 68 pages paperback
“The Father at Rest – magical and mystical dark-matter physics in the Age of Technological Chaos” At Lulu: $9.98, 47 pages
“Earth Mother ~!~ Holy Mother, and the Mystery Rite of the plandemic-Pandemonium Reboot” E-book $.99 cents.
Your friendly neighborhood stoned librarian,
joel
Fake Ancient Alien Theorist Foolishly Visits the Collective Imagination 