If I Should Die, Before You Wake … (long)

If I Should Die, Before you Wake

For reasons inexplicable, I have some words to write, a sort of last words, … although I could easily live into my ‘80’s – I am presently 77. Some stuff to say, and a need to be sure I say it rightly, in the nearest-now.

All any of us have is our story … this is mine.

I’m not an ordinary person. I wish I was, and others may have that wish as well. But factually, I have Ways of seeing/thinking that are quite different, and some of that I need to make sure I do not leave unspoken and/or unwritten.

How Different?

a) A different person lived in this body before I did. He was 31 years old when he left one night, unexpectedly to his own day-waking consciousness. When I came in I did not know (at the beginning) I was a different personality/spirit, until many life style [and life of the mind] alterations made the “change” obvious. Details are in my biographical materials [ Biographical Necessity – the confessions of a social philosopher and occasional fool ]
{ http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/anthro-bio.html }

Why the “change”?

Joey, my body-brother, was a true innocent. He received the world, but did not so much try to rule it, as to ride it safely, and in the most ordinary Ways. A natural empath he “saw” the heart of things&people, and only wanted to love and be loved. In his 31 years he received three deep wounds, which became riddles in his invisible soul-nature (astral-desire&ethereal-life bodies). His story is here: { http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Joey.html }, and my destiny was to try to solve those three riddles:

1) Why was there evil and cruelty in the world? Answered in: “The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/mysteryofevil.html

2) Why was American politics so absent of America’s spiritual reality? Answered in: “Uncommon Sense* – the Degeneration, and the Redemption, of Political Life in America (why play by the rules, when the game is already fixed)” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/degeneration.html

And, 3) Why did Christianity loose its magic? Answered in: “The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html , “the Way of the Fool” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twotf.html, and: Medicine Woman is Here.

b) I have visions, which is just a shorthand word for a variety of direct spiritual experiences. Many of these experiences were/are self-consciously willed, after their arts&crafts were discovered from practice and experiments. Some were related to the use of drugs, such as LSD. Details of my practices here: [ Sacramental Thinking ] { http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/SacramentalThinking33x.html } For a short precis of the basics, there is this: “pragmatic moral psychology” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/stgfr5.html , with a longer bit here: “Cowboy Bebop and the Physics of Thought as Moral Art (is the brain a computer? Is the mind the brain?)”  http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/CowboyBebop.html

c) The more profound spiritual experiences were not initiated by me, but required the Divine Mystery to choose to act upon me, in some fashion or another. In a sense, my human organism is/(was to them) a kind of musical instrument that I was learning to play in a new way, at the same time my/me-as-instrument is/was also being “Played” by Others.

d) When certain invisible folk play one’s soul&spirit, through their own initiative, that “playing” leaves a mark, as it were. They change me in the process. Not to say I am unwilling, but rather the rub is that all the same it is not my will that Plays me, but a different Will.

All of us have such experiences, we just are unlearned in the true arts of meditative/prayerful/thinking/introspection that is available to the souls in all of us. It is just that we are each unique, and in any individual life we know what we need to know to do the doing of that life, and no more. Faith is basically trust, including trust in your self.

e) Being played in this fashion is not always pleasant. On other occasions it is a kind of miracle., often of a healing nature. Still I followed – by choice – a trail being marked by the old gods and the new. Seeing/thinking is then often given new directions, and leads to what for me are/were unanticipated consequences.

f) Where I ended up was unexpected, and welcomed nonetheless, in spite of the drama. These paths were walked until it became obvious that the greatest mystery was the own-Dark. To go up, you have to also go down. Six Paths to the Spirit { http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/fivepaths.html }

g) The first major cord that was played in my essence involved – initially – (on my part) a prayer, for I had become – after the “change” at 31, morally gridlocked. Any direction seemed to involve harm to my family (wife and three children inherited from Joey’s biography), and as well was creating deep inner confusion&conflict. Still, …

… the prayer was met instantaneously. Prayer and gift simultaneous. Moral gridlock not only gone, but replaced by the sense that the hard choices – with risks unknown – are best met by choosing. The lesson? True moral art is essentially not fixed, but creative&personal to us. We are there in that place and moment to get to choose. The World-Direction is to a degree surrendering unto us, letting us figure out who we are, individually and collectively (in tribes and communities and families).

From the point of view of the gods&goddesses, what we call history&events is a secondary effect of the arts&crafts of karma&destiny as surround us in all the days of our individual biographies. The primary Art of Their Love is directed at enabling us to face the right trials of growth and challenge, … As Individuals.

We live in groups as part of that, but for each of us the development of the soul&spirit elements requires real time moments of crisis. All billions of us. All of us needing crisis in order to wake up, yet from unique and individual perspectives and needs.

h) No rules, just the choice, and the choice (acting) is the “thing” as it were. To stay on the fence – to not choose – that was the error. The same healing that lifted the horrible depression of the moral gridlock came with a present/as in gift – either Way to go at the forks in the road is alright. To not choose was the road to hell. It was a lesson many times repeated until I surrendered to the understanding that the Divine Mystery wanted “my” choice. Not their supposed traditional rules, but my willingness to take responsibility. Me relying on a rule was the defect unwanted. And, in choosing to make the hard choices, … that made me a co-worker in the Creation at a fundamental level. This invitation to do so is offered to all human beings in this Age.

i) There are many nuances to this mystery. [ Living Thinking in Action ] { http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/lifeT.html } The Hopi Prophecy calls our Time: The Day of Purification; and, from an esoteric-Christian point of view, this Third Millennium is “The Epoch of the Consciousness Soul” – the soul engaged in self-awakening. Billions needing such crisis&drama brings about the current level of global conflagration now being enacted.

It can’t be avoided, but it can be meet and mastered.

j) Most of the times after I was Played-by-Others, there then followed a gap in which to practice and learn the related skills, crafts, & arts. For example, seven years after the healing of the moral gridlock, where I was first Touched&Shown something to share, I was Touched again, … this time on the cusp of a choice which involved me moving beyond the skills being studied via the works of Franz Bardon (the Hermetic Science of the Ancient Egyptians – updated), and growing into/at that phase of my life from where Bardon-studies would then become integrated into the works of Rudolf Steiner & Company.

k) This Touch was delivered by a God who choose to appear to me, apparently physically. What legend calls The Burning Bush = Jehovah/Yahweh etc. showed up at my place of work and blew my mind, while giving me another “healing” – this time reminding me that in spite of the political horror show that was the Nixon years, in my depths of soul I still did want to help … to “try to save the world”, as is normal for all of us, although variations of ambitions and capacities exist.

All of us, of whatever circumstances, hunger to do life rightly, perhaps with “style” as Catherine MacCoun puts it – and, the measure of what is right is ours to choose. Still, there are consequences always to any action.

l) Hope for me – as a sense of our society mastering its self-delivered trials – had been lost, or at least buried, and then rediscovered, after”the man with clear eyes” visited.   He of the Voice like a cathedral of tones/not stones, and eyes that were iridescent blue set in crystal clarity. Nothing I was He did not know, and even fractured, weak, and troubled, I was still fully loved. Later I learned He had also visited my favorite rock group, the Moody Blues, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU37fSd_0KU Stepping in a Slide Zone.

At the time of His visit, I was 37, in 1978.

m) All of us are “touched&healed”, by the music we love, and the folks – visible and invisible – we get to love, and who love us as well.

n) Then there was the 45 day fast I wandered, when first fully set free of certain family ties, while living in Prescott, AZ. After a couple of weeks of the fast (for weight loss) I started receiving touches every morning, while in the land of the dream-time between sleeping and waking … I took notes after these visions (which often were of pure-idea/relationships), and later wrote a book: the Way of the Fool, laying the groundwork for a healing to occur in Christianity between the pastoral impulse (the Shepherds) and the pagan/magical/gnostic impulse (the Kings). I was 64.

An example vision during the fast involved seeing all the women in my life, as far back as visual memory allowed – and feelings allowed – unfolding like a deck of living tarot cards, each woman teaching me about what a woman is, and by implication what I was becoming.

As with other visions, the women/tarot was simply a sign of a place to look, which I then did – recalling, in many moments of reverie, the women/stories of my life, which then revealed a weaving remarkable when viewed as a whole. All of us need to attend to the “Mother” of/in organizing Life, which some called once Divine Providence, others of late: the Universe. Always in some sense, however far back we go in time, we come to the Source, of which the Mother is one of the six [Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Mother, Daughter, Holy Soul] necessary ways to see this miracle of the One.

What does it mean? That you are also free to choose that – to choose what life means to you. Just as we choose actions at each life junction, so we choose the maps we make of the world and its meaning. Our inwardness (soul&spirit) are a garden we care for, or not.

o) In between 38 and 64, when I was 45, and living at the base of Mt. Shasta, I was taken up/into-by Christ, shown a piece of my future (a future that actually came about in 1991, when I was 51), and shown/experienced as/within Him what it means that He is Always with Us, but most especially in the Mass – in  magical celebration, regardless of the soul weakness of the priest – , in the Mass where He unites the heavenly perfect Church with the fallen Earthly Church …

… all the same, in prayer in private we are always in direct contact with Him. As promised in Matthew 6:6. This experience also healed me of youthful prejudices against Mother Church = Catholics – see: “Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church” { http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/SavingCatholicReligion.html }

Just after I first posted the above essay to the Internet, I walked outside to the mailbox and Nature Became Joyous, for across my path for a couple of minutes there scampered, jumped and chittered dozens of dozens of squirrels. Back and forth, stopping me in my tracks. My Linda-Lady – personal impossible, on hearing this story – ordered some stuff off of the Internet with “Dances With Squirrels” written on them.

I was then 70 years old, and still being “played”, while loving all of it, having in retirement found my heart’s home with Linda.

For all of us more contact with Nature is essential in the future. The time of the Cities is over, for they will decay into mechanical hives if we are not careful – something, unfortunately, we have shown ourselves to be considerable skill/ed at: i.e. being-not-careful.

However, or Why, then does anyone ever fall in love? Being a fool is one of the six paths. The word silly used to mean: possessed by the sacred.  The heart has major secrets.

Meanwhile, I urge my readers to at every opportunity become acquainted with the most ancient local practices of the Earth-Religions where you currently live, mostly, – some will have more than one choice … the Old religions all recognizing the Mother; and, as pointed out by Owen Barfield in his “Speakers Meaning”, the oldest languages – in  their youth, were entirely literal.  Never figurative.  Just named what they experienced, and they experienced the original face of the World, in all its Pagan pantheistic Majesty.

p) In 1979, I was 39, working in a restaurant, when after work (and getting ganja/intoxicated) I was given a “sign in the clouds” vision that I had been St. Matthew previously, as well as George Washington. In 1996, while being the live-in-aide to Dr. Paul Longmore, whose book “The Invention of George Washington” was Paul’s big academic tome, I was told in the midnight conversations of thinking, that I had also been Clara Barton.

q) These stories are not brags, so much as explaining the trials and/or tortures that are given to all of us, = our lot in life. Trying to be sane, while invisibles are dropping this kind of stuff in my head is not fun. Keep in mind that these gifts fascinate on the one hand, and are equally disturbing on the other. Why am I shown these realities? Are they even realities? Is the Tempter at work here?

r) The Song of “Why me, oh Lord, why me?”: A sort of final stage in the shamanistic path, where you have to study the clearly inevitable, which if it happens, has then by Existing proved immutably that all the powers above and below have agreed and authorized “that to be”, for the What Is is refreshed&rebooted continuously.

For some fools, it is just them&US living through our mutual confusion. For example, the world has to swallow Trump&Friends – no getting around shit that happens when folks are still being given by the gods&goddesses just enough rope for their personal hanging/destiny. Remember the World is on Fire [ “Shapes in the Fire” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/index.html ]

s) What/Why and/or How does the Mystery find what the ancients called Prophets & Avatars & Harbingers & Drunk poets & Envoys in the Age of Science, without honoring Science itself as The Modern Way of Knowing? At certain stages of this dance of me getting “Played” by Others, there was the Initiation by the Holy Mother on Epiphany in 2008 (see paragraphs next for details), that event/being-touched was later followed by the meeting with the Lesser Guardian, and a bit later by the Greater Guardian (2009&2010), and then an experience of the New Pentecost (2011) – { http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/threshold.html }

Some will not like it.  I’m stuck with it.  Shit happens.

… word/names do not begin to describe these experiences, that while coming via Grace are real – in a way that sense experience is not – no separation, and often only possible when we are filled with deep pains of soul, for our suffering is Their suffering too.   I asked Her once (I was self-loathing, and deservedly so), what did they do, knowing so intimately all our misdeeds&flaws, and all the suffering we caused, and woes&such … how do They (Her and the Son) deal with our rain of crap … then, with the voice of a clear deep bell She sang to me: “We turn it into Love”.

The deepest Mother Embrace came only after a year of increasing woe (2007). In February that year my body dawned the illness: “a-fib”, requiring blood tests every month, as rat poison is used to thin my blood. An experimental medicine made me emotionally labile (unusual and unexpected emotional ups and downs), and my girl friend and I split up – I had to move out.

I was in those years writing my book American Anthroposophy { http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/AmericanAnthroposophy.html }, and been herded by Providence to take up the question of Ahriman’s Incarnation. To study such brings the soul into dangerous waters, such that on September 19th (in the Season of Michaelmas), I had two heart attacks – dying twice – the same day, and were it not for Providence I would not have survived them, being already in the ER not feeling well at all when felled by my heart stopping, getting rebooted, and then stopping again.

Two and a half days later I woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by three of my five adult children. No white lights or out of body stuff, yet clearly some force now lived in my will that had not been there before.

Then two more blows, … where I was living, after separating from my girlfriend, needed me to move again. As well, my relationship with the local Anthroposophical Society Branch (the Faust Branch) became strained, and I was told at a meeting by two male peers – that I greatly respected – that I did not know anything about Anthroposophy.

Another move was required, another choice. Go near to my kids in the SF Bay Area, or on an adventure – once again drawn from West to East by the songs of a part Mohawk part Scottish Highlander – very powerful shamaness met previously, who offered me a tiny apartment in one side of her two car garage. I was there 9 months, finishing American Anthroposophy, and otherwise working at being a visionary writer.

The driving trip from West to East began on Jan. 2, 2008, and involved riding in the gap between the winter storms that also move regularly West to East across America. Adventure hardly describes what occurred in that drive, yet by Epiphany January 6th, I was exhausted. I rode my rental into that stage’s motel, after driving over 800 miles that day, trying to catch up-to-plan after the disaster of the tires.

Imagine a 67 year old man, who had just suffered two heart attacks, finding his rental car with worn, now blowing, tires … in the middle of Nebraska, and the guy you call for road assistance wonders if you are up to changing the tire yourself.

As 2007 morphed into 2008 I was psychically exhausted. Spent. I laid in the bed, on my back and prayed to be relieved of life. In a single year the whole pattern of my life had altered, and I didn’t even want to exist. This was no suicidal want, this mood. I knew I would not do something like that, but still, as to the pursuit of meaning-in-action, I had nothing more to give. The past was over, the future not yet.

After a time, I noticed I was still alive, so I began that year’s Holy Nights’ practice, which involved out loud meditative/prayer beginning with the Lord’s Prayer, followed by a self-created prayer of gratitude to all my relations – visible and invisible, finally ending with the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John.

Yet, while somehow still breathing … I had died, – becoming caught/enveloped – in Her.

I had surrendered, and She choose to touch me, … me? I was not alone, but surrounded, and yet still the doer of the doing/being. I spoke aloud the word “Our”, and then met the Idea-Beings that gather around that expression of that word/concept, and its meaning opened like a smooth/lyrical song of itself&friends, for no Idea is not always in-community. In belongs to out. Our belongs to everything.

Everything that exists sings that song to the primal cause of their existence: “Our”, which All my relations share – all of us, whether we know it or not. I was with the We, all of us adoring “Our” Father. Yet, so carefully held by Them/Her, I was at peace – a child in vivid dreams of connections never before suspected. And, … full of questions, and so word by word, for about three hours, I was outside my body in the Realm of Pure Ideas, being bathed, and resurrected into the next phase of this life.

Restored. Played, but for what purpose? Well, that’s the rub isn’t it. I still have to choose to be what we made of me/us, by continuing to learn how to think on my knees (Tomberg),

… and just what did Rudolf Steiner mean by: a) It thinks in me” and, b) “there is only one concept of a triangle”.

t) The Future will know Rudolf Steiner as the John the Baptist figure of the Second Coming o f Christ in Clouds of Glory (the sacramental mind in prayer, which is a dance for two&more). Steiner, as the Voice Crying in the Wilderness of Scientific Materialism, saves that very science from the loss of the Divine Mystery.

u) It is now possible to prove to one’s self (the only valid proof there is) that the Earth (our Home) is the avatar body of a Divine Being known always as the “Mother”. We will call this spiritual/historic moment: “the counter-Copernican Revolution”, wherein spirit and matter are rediscovered in many new ways … anyone wishing to seriously participate in this conversation needs to become familiar with six books***, in order for the conversation to begin to create the necessary maps to old territories very much needing of being seen in new light.

v) With the help of Rudolf Steiner, and his real indications for the practice of sacramental thought, Religion now comes to have equal footing with Science, and a vast re-balancing and healing begins taking place throughout the social life of humanity.

w) With the help of Wendt (“there once was a man named Wendt, whose mind became boggled and bent, such that one fine sunny day Wendt went away, and no one knew where Wendt went”), everyone can yet come to understand that we are all shamans&prophets in training. All have minds, which contains the narrow gate, the one that goes down, into the hard trials of life. There, in the dark and of the dark, we discover/define our needed self-determined meaning.

y) To find the truth in a scholarly fashion, we have to begin by dreaming  backwards in history, toward the end of saving the past from the confusion of present day science. We are not accidental meat-heads in an uncaring cosmos. Rather we are that very Cosmos’s Children, already immortal, and also … like adolescents in terms of cultures, we are hopelessly led by our excessive appetites toward self-ruin, should that be the direction chosen freely.

The more I opened myself to the Mother these last years, the more odd, yet normal seeming my inner life became, … learning to talk/listen to trees and becoming open to the World of Faerie.

z) Zombies and Cylons are real – human seeming beings, without a conscience or empathy, often end up sitting on high, in corporate towers of steel – tools of lost in space corporate cultures – yet like the rest of us, never safe from Mother Nature bearing the Father’s Wrath.

Do people really think weather is accidental?

Also real are interstellar travelers.

And fairies.

Each child of the spirit gets to make up the names of their own reality – keeping in mind perhaps that Legends are always a Sign of Something So Real that it Marked Forever the Collective Psyche of Humanity, Scoring Us with Wonder.

Speech … “the gift of the word” [ best results if read aloud, with an occasional rush of words, or have someone else read, while we listen only ] The Gift of the Word, originally called Speech, was written on Epiphany, Jan. 6, 1997, in the evening, in about a third of an hour.

Speech, / Words, letters, sounds, / heard by both the inner ear and the outer.
Letters, sounds, words, / linked invisibly to ideas and thoughts.
Ideas, thoughts, letters, sounds, words, / a woven tapestry of meaning,
carried by Speech, / sometimes with grace, / but most often just carelessly.
Meaning, / a weaving of thoughts, sounds, words, letters and ideas,
spoken into the air and left there, / abandoned.
Words, spoken and heard. / Meaning intended. / But what is heard?
That which is heard is also intended. / Two intentions, two purposes, two meanings.
How difficult then communication, / suffering as it does the contrary pulls of multiple intentions, purposes and meanings.
I speak, you listen. / I mean, you grasp. / Somewhere in this delicate dance of words, sounds, letters, thoughts, ideas and purposes; / understanding is sought after.
Perhaps. / Sometimes.
Voice. / Speech reveals the unspoken. / Anger, fear, pride, arrogance, true humility.
The ear of the heart hears what is hidden in voice.
Posture, gesture. / Speech is more than sound. / The eye hears things the ear cannot, just as the ear sees things the eye cannot.
One mind. / Two minds. / Speech a bridge of woven light between two minds, and sometimes, although rarely, / between two hearts.
Speech, rich and full of flavor, / a light bridge, / joining two separate beings.
Speech denatured, / No sound, no gesture, no posture, no voice.
Speech reduced to lines of dark on light. / Written. / A treasure map in code spilled across a page
Words, letters, ideas, thoughts, sounds, / reduced to marks upon a parchment. / Speech dying.
Yet, / even in death, murdered by pen or pencil mark, / some essence of Speech still.
Meaning embalmed. Understanding buried. / Until read.
Reading. / Words, sounds, letters, thoughts, ideas, meaning, purposes, intentions,
Speech resurrected in the silence of another mind.
Speech. / Light bridge dying into print, / reborn when read in the inner quiet of another soul.
Speech, / The Spoken Word. / Writing, / The Word entombed. / Writing read, / The Word resurrected.
That this is so, / that human beings live in such an exalted state having Speech, this is Grace.
The spoken word, the written word. / Things so ordinary, so taken for granted, so pregnant with possibility.
The emptiness between two souls is always / chaste, virgin, pure, / waiting for Grace, for the bridge of light, / for Speech.

***”gospel” = good news … the “six” books from which create new mental maps

1) [a gospel of the word as speech] “Speaker’s Meaning”, by Owen Barfield;

2) [a gospel of the Second Coming] “The Art of God – an actual theory of Everything”, by Joel Wendt;

3) [a gospel of the soul] “On Becoming an Alchemist – a guide to the modern magician” by Catherine MacCoun;

4) [a gospel of seeing/thinking] “Man or Matter”, by Ernst Lehrs;

5) [a gospel of matter] “The Nature of Substance” by Rudolf Hauschka;

and 6) [a gospel of the heart] “Human Heart, Cosmic Heart”
by Thomas Cowan M.D.