Rational Spirituality
A guide to understanding spiritual phenomena
through rational explanations and personal psychic experience
Chapter One:
My Personal Metaphysical Experiences
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Like most people, I became interested in metaphysics when I was a teenager. That's
generally when we first encounter stories of "real magic" and feel a pressing need to know
just what is and isn't real. This was back in the early 1970's when the
hippie movement was promoting peace and drugs as a path to social enlightenment, and I was
first awakened by LSD. (The pros and cons of using drugs to assist metaphysical
development are discussed later.) My first "acid trip" didn't do much more than produce a few "special effects," such as the car I was riding in filling with smoke, and water pouring like liquid rainbows against the windows as we drove through a car wash. And I laughed so hard and so long my cheeks and abdomen hurt all the next day. The second experience had a much more profound effect on my world view. While listening to "acid rock" music with my eyes closed I saw complicated, 3-dimensional patterns of neon-bright light moving in sync with the music. These patterns were so intricate and real, so beyond my own ability to imagine, that I was convinced they had been �programmed� by the musicians so everyone on "acid" (LSD) would perceive them. (It took months for me to learn differently, but the experience lead me to develop a theoretical method for creating those effects: Audio Animation - see my web site for more info.) While under the influence of LSD I felt a connection with God, that I was part of this huge thing that contained the world, the universe, everything, and it was called God. The world was no longer solid and real to me, but some kind of "projection." I didn't understand how it worked, but it opened my mind to the idea that there is more to reality than meets the scientist. I started talking with people about different religions, looking for answers, and heard some very strange tales. There was one girl in the coffee shop where I hung out at the time, a strikingly beautiful 19-year-old with long brown hair, who told me about Eastern religious monks involved in astral projection (now often referred to as OOBE's, or Out Of Body Experience). Apparently these monks would have themselves locked up in a tiny room in some remote monastery for years at a time till they learned how to send their conscious awareness out to visit any place they wanted to, including the "astral planes" -- other levels of existence where different kinds of beings lived. Some sort of "silver thread" was supposed to trail out from their astral body to keep them connected to their physical body, and if this thread was ever broken the monks would supposedly die. That girl believed in a lot of crazy things, including mental telepathy; the idea that some people could read minds. Many of the ideas she talked about were totally new to me, and I would have laughed them off as pure fantasy if the experience of LSD hadn't shook me from the "waking sleep," the totally ignorant state most of us are in all the time where we take reality to be as solid and real as it appears to be. I wanted to know if such things as telepathy and astral projection were really possible. The only way to know for sure was to try myself. It wasn't long before a friend, Chuck, agreed to help me experiment with telepathy. We were parked in the driveway at my fathers house in Chuck�s old, white Plymouth (with the big rear "wings" common on cars of the early 1960's). My father�s two acre yard had lots of tall trees and bushes everywhere, so we would often sit in the car with the music playing quietly on the 8-track stereo without disturbing anyone. On this particular night, around midnight, we were smoking hashish (a concentrated form of marijuana) discussing the spiritual effects of LSD and the strange stories that girl had told me. We decided to attempt using telepathy to convey a letter of the alphabet, in spite of having no clue how to do it. I chose a letter and began concentrating with my eyes closed. Chuck closed his eyes and tried to discern which letter I had selected. He was very patient, waiting for some "clue" to indicate which letter it might be. He was extremely patient. Agonizingly patient. After a few minutes passed I looked up to see if he had "spaced out" and forgotten what he was doing, but there he was bobbing his head gently with a serious expression on his face, concentrating intently, so I went back to concentrating on the letter I was trying to send. I could visualize the letter very clearly due to the "assistance" of the hash. I was altering my visual image of the letter by changing it's color, making it appear 3-D, rotating it, adding ornate decorations to the edges, anything I could do to keep my attention focused only on that particular letter of the alphabet. I glanced at Chuck again and he was still concentrating so I kept at it. Perhaps five minutes passed before I became so frustrated I thought I would burst. I stopped just short of smacking the dashboard with my hand and screamed to myself mentally, "Get it through your head! The letter is -" "R!!!" he yelled. Wow. He got it. I slumped back down in the seat shaking my head in disbelief. Telepathy was a reality, not just some story people made up. Not only that, but I could do it -- at least I could send. And if telepathy was real, all those other things like astral projection might be real as well. I was dumbfounded. Thirty seconds went by before Chuck asked, "That was the letter, right?" It wasn't till then that I realized he had actually shouted the letter without knowing for sure it was correct. We tried to repeat the experience several times over the next hour, but failed every time. Still there was no doubt that we had actually performed mental telepathy that first time, something I have to attribute to my friend who concentrated with such dogged determination. Later that night I laid in bed pondering the experience of telepathy and what it meant to live in a world where such things were possible. Is reality truly the sort of illusion it appears to be while on psychedelic drugs? Do monks actually leave their bodies? Is there really a God? The question regarding the reality of God, or the lack of a real God, had been pressing on me for sometime. Before my psychedelic experiences I assumed that people had invented the idea of God in order to feel they had an answer to a question no one could answer -- "where did the universe come from?" I felt that no one had a clue about the source of existence, and "God" was a bandage used to hide from that truth. But for months had I wanted to know for sure if there was a God or not. The question had become an obsession. After the experience with telepathy earlier that night I felt I might be closer to discovering an answer I could trust. I had learned that telepathy was real simply by trying it. Perhaps I could know if there was a God or not simply by asking the question with the same level of determination. I laid on my bed and asked, "Does God exist?" I asked the question with all the determination I could gather. I was so focused on the question, so sincere, I believed I might actually get an answer. After a moment I noticed a feeling similar to becoming high on pot, only the feeling was centered around my head, a sense of "pressure" or "expansion" in a band around my temples. A faint while light began to gather near the foot of my bed and I felt a tremendous sense of exhilaration and suspense. The light grew continually brighter and brighter and I was certain God himself was about to appear before my eyes. But then the thought occurred to me that if someone really did appear before me, how would I know it was God and not some astral projecting monk pretending to be God? I realized that if someone appeared, claiming to be God, even if he explained every aspect of every detail of reality, I could not rationally be certain it was actually God, even if it truly was God. I became convinced there was no rational way to know if God exists, period. I finally had the answer to the question I had been obsessed about for months. "I don't know," turned out to be a legitimate answer.* Having the long sought answer made me feel so euphoric I nearly forgot about the glowing light at the foot of my bed, which was slowly beginning to fade. My next question was, "Is astral projection possible?" My immediate response was, "I don't know," and the obvious limitations of that answer became clear. I didn't know if telepathy was real until I tried it, and even though I didn't know how to go about doing telepathy, it worked. To find out if astral projection was possible I simply had to do the same thing, to try it. (*Note: The above is not the "real" answer to the question of the existence of God.) As I laid on the bed looking at the acoustic ceiling tiles above me, I could sense the light at the foot of the bed glowing brightly again. I was having a "transcendental" experience, the kind of stuff we read about but which doesn't seem possible for us regular people. I stared at the ceiling and thought to myself, "Up." My body started "vibrating." It felt as if a vibrating electrical current were passing through me in slow waves, up from my toes to the top of my head, then back down, over and over, faster and faster until I heard a distinct "ripping" sound inside my head. It was like the sound of cloth being torn at the base of my skull, but I felt the sensation as well as heard it. In that moment I experienced a "swooshing" sensation, like going up in and elevator when it stops suddenly and produces a momentary feeling of weightlessness. I hadn't closed my eyes, not that I could remember anyway, but I suddenly became aware that the ceiling tiles were only a few inches in front of my face! I was floating outside of my body! I don't think I have ever felt a more exhilarating sensation. In one night the world had become a truly magical place and I was able to do these incredible things. I was thrilled beyond description. I floated in the air letting my arms and legs dangle, enjoying the incredibly delightful freedom of weightlessness. I was looking at the joints in the acoustic ceiling tiles, and could clearly see the fuzzy little hairs of fibrous material on the corners where four tiles came together. My vision was crystal clear, in fact better than normal. I hung suspended near the ceiling for perhaps ten to twelve seconds before I thought about turning around to look at my body on the bed. I immediately decided that wouldn't be such a great idea because I didn't know how I would react to seeing my body when I wasn't in it. After a moment I realized I didn't know how to turn around anyway. Then I thought I should make a point of remembering how I got out of my body so I could do it again, and realized I didn't really know how I had gotten out. At that moment my pleasant adventure turned into a life threatening nightmare as I realized I didn't know how to get back in either. Panic overwhelmed me. "Back," I said to myself, but nothing happened. I started screaming mentally, "Back! Back! Back!" but still it was just me and the ceiling tiles. Finally I started telling myself this was all a dream and it was impossible to leave one's body. I went into a rage of sorts about how this couldn't be real and finally felt that "swooshing" sensation again, only this time it was sudden and hard. I actually felt myself drop from the ceiling and slam into my body with a sudden impact. The force of reentry was so violent I sat up straight seemingly from the momentum. I gasped for air and flung my arms about wildly, relieved to be back, but the relief soon turned to horror. My body was icy cold on the inside. It felt ghastly, unnatural, and at that moment I was convinced I had just entered my previously dead body. Needless to say, it took a while before I again thought so highly of the wonders of astral projection, about as long as it took for my body to regain it's normal temperature, which was roughly 20 minutes. But once I recovered from the shock I was indeed quite impressed with the whole thing. I had performed mental telepathy, left my body and "solved" the question of the existence of God all in one evening. My ego was glowing profusely. The next day, returning to the local coffee shop where all my young acquaintances hung out, I was quite excited to tell everyone what had happened. No one believed any of it. I sat there in embarrassed disbelief as my friends all made fun of me for coming up with such a tall tale and expecting them to fall for it. The more I insisted it was all true the more annoyed they became that I wouldn't give up my attempt to deceive them. I was young, felt insulted and vowed to get even with them. It was probably about two weeks later when the next significant event occurred. The coffee shop was a large, open building with high ceilings and three walls covered by tall glass windows. The orange booths had low seat backs and it was easy to see everyone in the place. All of us kids used to play a sort of game now and then, getting into "staring contests." If two of us happened to catch each other's glance we would sometimes stare each other in the eye till one or the other would "lose" by blinking or changing facial expression. I was a serious guy at the time and quite good at it, but everyone recognized one particular girl as the stare-down queen. She was a busty, attractive girl with a round face, black hair and large, dark eyes, probably about sixteen. I could hold out for five minutes at a time with her, but eventually, for no reason at all, I would suddenly find myself cracking a huge grin and lose, every time. So it was a couple of weeks after my night of "transcendental illumination" that I found myself in a staring contest with the stare-down queen. With nothing to do but stare and think, the idea came to me that maybe I could think of something funny, project it to her telepathically and cause her to laugh. I thought of a joke I had recently heard, concentrated on mentally delivering the punch line, and she immediately broke up laughing. I won! I beat the champ, someone no one could get to even crack a smile. She demanded a rematch and this time most of the kids at surrounding tables all watched to see what happened. I again thought of something funny and again she suddenly broke up laughing. Yes! Success! Later the girl asked me how I had beaten her, and when I told her, she said she had always used the same trick. That cinched it for me. Telepathy was real. I knew I was good at sending, so the next step was figuring out how to receive. Again I was faced with the fact that I didn't know how to proceed, and again I used the same old method -- just try. I don't know why I started looking into people's eyes when attempting to "read their minds" but it seemed natural to make eye contact when you want to communicate clearly with someone. I would simply look into the eye of one of my friends and say, "let me see if I can read your mind." Then I would say whatever popped into my head. It became obvious that saying, "let me see if I can read you mind," caused most people to think something like, "There's no way you can read my mind." I could easily see that from their facial expressions. So the first thing I often said was, "You're thinking there is no way I can read your mind." They'd snicker and say that proves nothing, but I would force them to admit that I had indeed guessed what they were thinking. Next they would try to think of something specific in order to make their thoughts a little less obvious, and I'd say, "Now you are trying to come up with something specific to think about," which was almost always the case. Then, "You are beginning to think I might actually be able to do this because I have been right all along so far." It was at this point that most people would actually get worried that I might know what they were thinking. The fear that I could dig deep into their secrets would focus their attention very strongly. "You are afraid that I might dig into your deep secrets," would often send people into a sort of panic and they would radiate their thoughts so loudly I could actually begin to pick up specific details. In great fear, and needing to prove that I wasn't reading their minds, they would finally focus on something very specific, and because my attention was so intently focused on them I almost always knew what it was. "You're thinking about the slippers your grandmother keeps under her bed," is one example I remember picking up on. If you can picture what it would be like to be in your late teens and be subject to this kind of intense psychological pressure, you can imagine how terrifying the experience was to these kids. From out of nowhere some guy is doing the impossible right before your eyes, digging deep into your mind as if it were an open book, exercising a power no one else had; a total invasion of one's entire identity. These feelings of fear and helplessness would be broadcast so loudly that I would feel them just as intently. "Please! What did I ever do to you to deserve being invaded like this! Please get out of my mind! Please don't do this to me!" I'm telling you these were hideous feelings and I was being overwhelmed with them. I'd smile and back off, saying, "See, I told you I could do it." My "victims" would acknowledge my achievement and run for the hills. I did this every day for about two weeks, getting better at it all the time. My friends would proudly introduce me to their friends as the "mind reader." I'd do my little trick for their unbelieving friends, drive them into helpless terror, and walk away thinking I was really superior to all these dull-witted people. My ego was totally out of control, and I certainly got even with all those people who had ridiculed me a few weeks before. But I was beginning to hate feeling the emotions of the people I was doing this to. Every time I did it I was left looking at someone begging for mercy, with me sharing the feeling of their intense suffering. It got to where I didn't want to do it so often, but worse, all my friends started avoiding me. Who wants to hang around someone who can pry into your mind at will, which is what they (inaccurately) believed I could do. Within two weeks I didn't have a single acquaintance left who would talk to me. When I walked into the coffee shop, everyone who used to greet me warmly would turn their backs and try to pretend they hadn't seen me. When I deliberately engaged someone in conversation they would find an excuse to leave as soon as possible -- being careful not to offend the guy that could read their mind and tell the whole world their dark secrets if he wanted to. I couldn't do that, but everyone believed I could. I felt like a leper. I had no choice but to stop doing the telepathy thing if I wanted to have any friends. I stopped doing it, and told everyone I had stopped, but it took about two months for people to stop fearing me and treat me like I was one of the crowd again. I haven't been able to "read minds" in the same way since then. Two years passed before I thought I would investigate telepathy again. I remembered that as I watched someone's eyes while doing this stuff I would often see their face blur and distort, and once a girl had told me that my face was also distorting. So when I started doing it again, this time with the intent to teach others how to do it so my ego wouldn't end up killing me, I asked about the distortions. Sure enough, everyone would see them at the same time and with the same degree of intensity as I did. My "telepathy exercise" became based upon looking for these visual changes as indications that thoughts or emotions might be duplicated at the same time. There are a few points about all this that are important. First, most of my problems came from an ego that was completely out of control. If you don't keep your ego from letting you think you are superhuman you will soon find out how much you miss humanity. Another thing has to do with being able to pick up specific information so clearly. The methods I used forced people to place intense emotional energy on their thoughts and focus on those thoughts with great clarity. That makes it much easier for anyone to pick up the information. When you attempt to use telepathy you should encourage people to focus on things that are both emotional and pleasant. Ask people to think about the most rewarding moment in their life, for example, and see what kind of impressions you can get from that. After I had sworn off "reading minds" so I wouldn't be without friends, my thoughts eventually went back to the question of the existence of God. While I was convinced there was no rational proof possible, one way or another, there must be a truth. God exists or God does not exist. "I don't know," ended up not being an answer after all. Again I found myself seeking a direct encounter with God, if there was a God, and that lead me to become a "Jesus freak" for about two months. Jesus freaks were groups of mostly young people who would get together to read from the bible and "freak out" in spontaneous sessions of "speaking in tongues." It was a popular, unstructured spiritual movement of the late sixties and early seventies. "Speaking in tongues" was the real goal of participating in these groups, a condition where everyone would excite each other into a spiritual frenzy of sorts where you would allow yourself to start babbling nonsense. Supposedly the constant stream of babble coming out of your mouth was some other language, from past lives or existence in heaven or whatever. It was reported that people in these groups actually spoke known languages which they were previously unfamiliar with. From my later research I discovered this is true on some occasions, but although I found myself "speaking in tongues" quite freely, I never understood a word of what I, or the others, were saying. But I did experience something valuable as a result of being with those people. For a time, on an intuitive level, I accepted as truth the existence of God and Jesus. Reason was not to be trusted to provide all the answers, so I allowed myself to simply believe. Faith was the key according to those people, and believe it or not, it worked. I accepted as fact that Jesus was always watching over me, and that I had a guardian angle who was with me all the time. For two months solid I silently chanted, "Thank you Jesus. Thank you Lord," day in and day out. It filled my mind at all times when I wasn't doing something that required my attention otherwise. I talked to my guardian angel out loud when I was alone, and "felt" like I was actually communicating with a real but silent being. My life improved in truly remarkable ways. Before I became involved with this stuff my girlfriend had left me, I was out of work and my old, '63 Chevrolet Nova was blowing huge clouds of blue smoke, ready for the automobile graveyard at any moment. I was constantly depressed and suicidal. Within two weeks of walking around with my robotic chant constantly echoing in my mind, my girlfriend was back and I found a job I really liked, working in a pool hall where all my friends hung out. One night after work, at about 2:00 AM, everyone left the pool hall to go home but my car wouldn't start. Before I could get anyone's attention the others had all driven off and left me alone in the parking lot. I tried push-starting my car, rolling it down the slight grade and popping the clutch, but the strip mall parking lot was under construction and the tires wouldn�t grip on the loose dirt. I ended up with a wheel in a pot hole, stuck permanently. The streets were empty. Home was a three mile walk. For a moment I doubted that Jesus was helping me, then I remembered one has to have faith under any circumstances. I asked my guardian angle to help me and chanted my "Thank you Jesus" thing all the more intently. Moments later a pick-up truck appeared far down the road and pulled into the parking lot perhaps 150 yards away. I thought Jesus had saved me. But suddenly I felt a pressing urge to run toward the truck as fast as I could, so I started running. The driver was drunk and had pulled over to relieve himself. He was already back in his truck and beginning to drive away when I ran up to him out of breath. If I hadn't ran he would have been long gone, so right then I knew Jesus was helping me. I thought the driver would be like an angel sent to help me, but instead he was a burly, grumpy, middle-aged man, drunk and impatient, perhaps fearful that I might have friends waiting in the dark to rob him. He didn't want to help and began to drive off, but at the last minute agreed to push-start my car with his truck. I knew beyond any doubt that my faith had saved me that night. It wasn't long before everything in my life was just wonderful. My getting a job and having found God encouraged my father to believe I had gained some responsibility, so he co-signed on a loan and I bought a two year-old, 1968 Pontiac GTO -- one of the fastest, nicest muscle cars of the day. I ended up getting more money from the loan than I needed to pay for the car, so my wallet was loaded with more cash than I ever had before. I was sitting on top of the world, all because I had faith in Jesus. Or was that really what happened? I was driving down the road in my very nice car, talking to my guardian angle about the whole situation, and it became clear to me that "help" had indeed intervened. That night when my car wouldn't start and I was "told" to run as fast as I could -- that was no ordinary event. My faith had made that possible. But there are hundreds of millions of people asking Jesus to help them everyday. No one, not even Jesus, has enough time to look out for all those people. What had helped me was my faith. It was faith that worked, not God or Jesus, and I could get the very same results even if my faith was in something as ordinary as an inanimate rock. I felt my guardian angel agreeing with me. What a relief. I could drop all this constant mental chanting and go back to having a normal life. It turned out that intuition couldn't prove the existence of God either, but I did learn that faith works, faith in anything. I had lots of money and a cool car, so I dumped my girlfriend in order to chase all the cute babes who would think I was hot stuff now. (I was eighteen and my ego was still out of control.) I had enough money to survive nicely for weeks, so I quit my job to have fun for a while. Within a month I was broke, out of work, had this huge car payment, no girlfriend, and I was perhaps even more depressed than ever before. I realized that it was a lot easier to have faith in some higher power, who could do absolutely anything, than to believe that some rock was going to solve all my problems. I could no longer believe in Jesus when I knew Jesus had nothing to do with it, and a rock is just a rock. I envied my religious friends for their happy lives because they could still believe Jesus was helping them out, but I also felt they were completely missing the truth about what was really happening. I was miserable, but I knew the truth, that the power came from faith, not the object one has faith in. Over the next two years, since I hadn't yet found a rock that could live up to my expectations, I became more and more depressed. I was suicidal, and one day in late November I was saved from killing myself by what can only be called divine intervention. My GTO had been repossessed and I was driving a '63 Volkswagen van at the time. I had turned twenty a couple of months earlier and some friends had given me a 12-string acoustic guitar for my birthday. I loved playing that guitar, though I could only strum a few chords. I had held and lost twenty-one different jobs in the previous three years, and the realization that we are all slaves to economic survival was completely unacceptable to me. I felt I would rather be dead than spend the rest of my life being told what to do with my time and energy by some employer who was simply exploiting my efforts for his own selfish gain. I went to a local park at about 11:00 PM and walked around trying to decide if I should really kill myself or not. It was the middle of November, dark and cold and I was bundled up, wearing the guitar on a strap, but I could only play for about two minutes at a time before my hands would become too stiff from the cold. I walked through the shadowy pathways among the leafless trees, strumming two sad chords very slowly, first one (Am) then a moment later another (FM). As I concluded that I was indeed going to kill myself that morning, I felt certain that anyone hearing the sound of those two chords would know, beyond any doubt, that I was about to die. As the sun began to rise I was sitting in the concrete bleachers of a small baseball stadium, my back up against the walls in a corner to stay out of the wind. I was waiting for my father to go to work so I could park my van in the garage, leave the motor running and be done with it thirty minutes later. The sunrise that morning was amazing. I remember the first, streaking rays of the sun coming over the mountains, the way they illuminated the clouds and suddenly flared on the chrome ladder of the new swimming pool, which had yet to be filled. The fluffy clouds blazed with color and I felt sad to be leaving such a beautiful world, though I hated the cold, hated living in a world where the environment would kill you if you didn�t protect yourself from it with heavy clothing. As I walked toward my van in the parking lot, watching the leaves swirl across the ground and feeling a sadness no one can imagine till you know you are about to take your own life, I saw another vehicle at the far side of the parking area. I had been walking through that park all night and it seemed impossible that I wouldn't have noticed if another car had been there. And someone was getting out of that car. I had no desire to speak with another living being at that moment, but a young man was walking toward me, carrying something. I hurried to my van, hoping to get in and leave before he reached me, but he quickened his pace and caught up with me just as I reached the van. He was carrying a guitar case and smiling warmly. I tried to avoid conversation but he was very insistent in a pleasant way. He pointed to my guitar and said he was also a musician, that he had been traveling around the country playing on sidewalks, in parks, restaurants and bars, and was making enough money to keep going, enjoying his life. He opened his guitar case and on the inside of the propped-up lid "spare change" had been written with letters cut from various colors of felt cloth. There was something unnatural about this guy. He had appeared out of nowhere, saying he had been in the park all night which I thought was impossible, and he just oozed happiness. His smile was friendly and warm and seemed to radiate a genuine, accepting love for life. And he kept emphasizing how happy he was playing guitar to make a living. Other than that he was just some average looking, dark haired guy who was interfering with my intense desire to be alone and go kill myself. I wasn't very friendly to him, just tried to be polite, let him bug me for about ten minutes then hurriedly got in my van, at which point he walked back to his car. But as I sat in the van waiting for the motor to warm up, wondering if I had enough gas in the tank to do the job before it ran out, a burst of inspiration suddenly came to me. I loved music, and that guy was truly happy playing his guitar and making a living at it. And he was totally free, definitely no one's slave. Bingo! A way to make a living, a way to be happy. I'd be a musician. I'd write songs that would truly move people, like the way I knew anyone would have been moved by hearing just those two sad chords I had been playing all night. I'd not only make money at it but I'd be so good I'd be rich and live the good life. A reason to live. I would stay alive! I practiced playing guitar ten hours a day for the next six months, then found part time work and continued playing five hours a day for the next few years. I was totally dedicated. It was a few days following that event before I really thought about how amazing it was for someone to come up to me at that precise moment and tell me the only thing on Earth that could have kept me alive. The incredible beauty of that sunrise, the realization about how well I could communicate my feelings through two simple chords, and then that guy appearing out of nowhere -- it all added up to an "impossible" coincidence. Was it a coincidence? Yes. But some coincidences are deliberate and have their source on another plane of reality. A very similar event happened about ten years later. Since my "magic rock" wasn't working and I still hated life, I had become suicidal again, had been thrown out of my father�s house (which I was always in and out of) and had driven to a deep gorge in the Utah desert to decide whether or not to end it. I drove to The Wedge overlook during the night. From the overlook, which I had searched for in the past but had previously been unable to find, one can stand atop a cliff jutting out into a very deep canyon. All around is barren sandstone with multiple hues of reds, whites, pinks and browns. The river comes in from the west, which was to my right. Curving side canyons open up across the way to the south. To the east the small river runs out of the main gorge and winds back and forth, zigzagging between side canyons, stretching out nearly to the horizon. This time I managed to find the place. I was carrying my guitar, playing those two sad chords again, and walked slowly onto the point of rock jutting out into the canyon. The Sun was just beginning to rise over the distant mountain range. In the long canyon to the east the early morning light reflected on the criss-crossing river like strips of a mirrored ribbon. The silver threads glimmered brightly under a thin shroud of mist floating above the distant water. The colors in the clouds were blazing with an intensity that defied the limitations of reality. All around me the ground was painted orange by the fire in the sky, and the orange tint combined with the colors of the rocks. As the sky changed color, so did the colors all around me. It was as if the canyon walls were animated, literally pulsating with life. Just as the Sun cleared the eastern horizon, the full Moon, seemingly twice it's normal size, touched the western horizon as it began to set. For a brief moment two large, glowing orbs where balanced perfectly on opposite horizons. It was just too much for me to take. I wanted to be dead. This same sort of thing had happened to me years earlier, convinced me to stay alive, and I had suffered ever since. I felt as if some "higher power" were trying to make it's message clear to me, and I desperately wanted to know what to do. Should I live, or should I die. What was the message in all this overwhelming splendor? I looked down with a sigh of desperation, and there, carved into the sandstone, exactly in the center of the space between my two feet, was the word, "LIVE." Of course, some real person must have carved those letters. There were a few names and dates scattered elsewhere on the rocks. But just imagine desperately asking a life and death question, with the world erupting all around you in spectacular surreal-ness, and the answer suddenly appears carved in stone between your feet. I gave in. I decided to live. The next two months were by far the worst of my life, literally starving to death on the streets of Los Angeles. What I want to point out here is that "divine intervention" does in fact occur, even to us "nonbelievers." If it didn't occur I could have saved myself decades of pretty much hating life. But considering my unbelievable ego, the powers that be must have wanted to make sure that ego was ground to a pulp before setting me lose on the world with some real power. My "magic rock" and I raise a toast to "the gods" for their sense of humor in the way they tricked me into torturing myself all these years. The Psychic Window Technique In the summer of 1984 I was living with a girlfriend, Annalisa, in Los Angeles -- Burbank actually. My article on Audio Animation had just been published in the largest recording industry trade magazine and I believed the world was about to beat a path to my door and make me fabulously rich. The girlfriend waited tables and paid the bills while I negotiated in meetings with entertainment industry top dogs and venture capital groups. I had plenty of time to concentrate on metaphysics, so I was reading constantly, meditating and trying new experiments. A friend of mine at the time, Gerald, was heavily involved in the Kabala, the occult magical teachings being promoted by many "heavy metal" bands that were popular then. He was well versed in ritual and could make a room shake with the sound of his voice, which was quite impressive. We were sitting in a two-person booth at a coffee shop in Burbank doing my telepathy exercise for the first time together. As I stared into his eyes the visual distortions were going through their regular fluctuations, but because my friend was so well practiced at concentration we were able to become deeply immersed in the experience. At one point I noticed the room around us growing darker and the sounds of the busy restaurant began to fade. The darkness became an inky blackness with only a pair of eyes still visible, then I noticed the blackness starting to "fizz" as if tiny bubbles were popping. As the bubbles burst they revealed a totally different scene behind them. I was looking directly at a very pretty blond girl about nineteen-years-old. She was perhaps six feet away, facing slightly toward my left as she sat in front of an old-fashion chest of drawers topped with a large, ornate mirror. Her dress was bright yellow, laced up the front and had a white, ruffled collar. She was brushing her long blond hair with very slow strokes, looking rather absent minded, as if she were daydreaming about some hoped-for future. To the left of the dresser was the closed bedroom door. Without knowing why, I was certain there was a hallway on the other side of the door. I knew that toward the right the hall lead to the back door and the barn area, while on the left the hall opened into the living room. On the other side of the hall from the bedroom was the kitchen. I knew where all the pots and pans and lanterns were hung, that the road came in from west in front of the house and most of the fields were in that direction. I knew everything about the place as quickly as my mind could scan the area, including the "fact" that I was in a farm house in Southern California in the late 1800s. Suddenly the image became unstable and an incredible state of confusion overwhelmed me. Blackness engulfed me and in an instant I was back in the restaurant with my friend, who was panic stricken, his hands and feet flying about as he literally tried to get a grip on reality. His eyes were rolling and he was gasping for air as he finally started to calm down, his hands gripping the side of the table. The entire experience hadn't lasted more than about six seconds, and to this day I wonder what we might have discovered if we had sustained it for even a minute or two. After a moment we talked about what had happened. It was a complete shock to me that his experience was perfectly identical to mine, seen from the exact same point of view. In order to be certain of our observations, we took turns describing the details. He would , for example, indicate that the young woman was wearing a yellow dress, and I would then point out the white collar, he'd say, "with ruffles," and so on. He also verified the same information about the location of the barn, kitchen, etc. We had perceived the same experience from the same point of view. That was very surprising to me, since it seemed more logical that with him looking at me in the restaurant, he should have perceived things in the farm house from a position facing me. As two separate individuals we perceived an identical experience, right down to every thought, as if we were the same person. Until then I would not have considered such a thing possible. It was at this point that I began referring to the "telepathy exercise" as the "psychic window technique," since it was obvious that more than just telepathy was possible, that the exercise can produce a "window" into other forms of psychic perception.
Later that evening we used a Ouija board to see if we could get more information about what had actually happened. The "personality" we contacted (our first time using the board together) identified itself as Koda (yeah, that's where I borrowed the name from). When we asked what year the event had occurred in, the board responded with apparent gibberish- a stream of repeated Cs, Xs, Is, etc. Then we suddenly realized the letters were Roman numerals indicating the year 1883, which matched my original impression. The board continued, saying that my friend and I were both "thoughtforms" created by that girl. In other words, we were both future incarnations of that one person, alive at the same time. That's another condition I would have thought impossible, except Seth (mentioned in the introduction) describes what he calls "counterparts" as being multiple incarnations of the same "multidimensional self" alive at the same time. If that is actually what was going on I can attest that you wouldn't necessarily know a counterpart if you encountered one, since I didn't really care much for this particular guy. He's nothing like me at all. I haven't really had much experience with Ouija boards. They are operated by having more than one person (usually) place their fingertips on a "pointer" that slides across the board, the pointer spelling out words as it stops over the printed letters. The pointer (planchette) that comes with the commercial version of the game is made of plastic, with little felt-tipped feet and a clear plastic window you look through to read the letter selected by the "discarnate personality" you supposedly contact. More serious occult types often use a crystal bowl as a pointer. A woman I know well, and trust, once told me that during a session with a large group of people, the crystal bowl had actually come off the board and moved up and down her arm. That summer in 1984 was quite exceptional for the amount of metaphysical development I experienced. One thing I should mention briefly is my experiencing three different dreams at more or less the same time, while simultaneously being conscious enough to describe them to my girlfriend. She had come home while I was sleeping, at the precise moment I was experiencing a transition from one dream to another. Somehow I was able to describe three different dreams as they were occurring. In one dream I was a toddler playing with small race cars on a plastic track I could bend into loops. In another I was a nineteenth century artist, working with an explorer and a deaf mute assistant, drawing pictures for an expedition in the Northwest Territories. In the third dream I was a woman traveling with another woman. We had driven a car to a parking lot in the mountains, parked at the foot of a trail at the base of a steep rock cliff, and further up the trail discovered a secret doorway into a cave filled with gold artifacts. Back in the LA apartment, when my girlfriend entered the room I began to tell her about the dreams, and as I described them to her, they continued happening. I was playing with the little plastic cars, then the explorer was standing in the back of the boat while the deaf mute and I were attempting to pull the boat up onto the shore of a large river or lake. The woman and I were deciding to grab all the gold we could carry and leave the cave, then the explorer fell off the back of the boat when it suddenly lurched forward, and my mother told me to move my race track out of her way. It seemed that the trail to the cave may have been located in the same place where the explorer had fallen in the water (much to the amusement of the mute and I). Then we couldn't find a way to open the door from inside the cave. Each of the dreams had missing gaps in them corresponding to the amount of time I spent in the other dreams. All this time I was describing the dreams to my girlfriend in a half-awake state of mind, so one can say that I was in four different "worlds" at more or less the same time, or at least in very rapid succession. Because I was so focused on metaphysics at that time, I felt I might actually have a chance of succeeding to do telekinesis. (Mind moving matter, also referred to as psychokinesis.) Like everything else I had achieved, I had no real way of knowing how to do it, but I was very heavily involved with the Seth books -- and the idea that anything can be accomplished if you truly believe you can accomplish it. (That's still the best advice I can give to anyone today.) I sat alone at the counter in the same Burbank restaurant where my friend and I had transported our awareness to that farm house, and psyched myself up to move a spoon balanced on the rim of a water glass. The idea was that I would hold my finger tips near the end of the spoon handle, concentrate on a "magnetic-like" force emanating from my fingers, and use that "magnetic-like" force to gently nudge the spoon handle downwards. If I could get the spoon to rock up and down a tiny bit, I could continue to apply a slight force during each downward motion and the growing momentum would eventually cause the spoon to fall off the glass. I tried that for about an hour with no success. But I was very determined. I had seen people on TV supposedly moving objects with their minds, some of it clearly documented as having actually occurred. There was one Russian woman, for example, who could make metal cylinders roll back and forth inside a clear plastic box. If that person could do it, anyone could. One just had to be very determined to succeed. I put my hands together as if in prayer, nearly touching but not quite, and tried to imagine a magnetic-like force between them. At first all I could feel was the heat radiating from each hand, but then by moving my hands slightly apart and back together again, concentrating on feeling a force between them, I could actually begin to feel a push and pull quite strongly. Every object in the universe has some sort of energy field around it, so when I placed my finger tips near the spoon handle again I concentrated on the idea that my fingers were radiating a force that opposed the force in the spoon. If you have ever placed two magnets together so they pushed against each other, that is the feeling I was trying to generate. I didn't want to move my hand up and down because that could create a "wind" that might move the spoon, so I moved my finger tips first over the spoon handle, then off to the side. I didn't want to "think" about what I was doing, because what I had read indicated that thoughts have to stop before such things are possible. So in my mind I thought of a "sound." Every time I wanted the force to increase as I moved my finger tips over the spoon handle, I imagined a sound like, "unnnn, unnnn, unnnn." Then I concentrated on being mentally aware of that sound without actually thinking it. There was also something else going on that I only recently remembered. As I was concentrating I could feel a "band of pressure" around my head, that sort of "expansive" feeling I mentioned in reference to my first out of body experience. I now recognize that particular sensation as a psychological indicator of a heightened state of awareness. I don't know if others also experience it, or something like it, but it is often present when I do such things. These days I strive to attain a state of concentration where I experience that sensation before I attempt anything of this nature. After two and a half hours of this, I finally noticed the spoon beginning to move in a way I could be sure wasn't a result of the air conditioning, my breath, or the pressure of my elbow resting on the counter top. I actually got the spoon to rock so much it eventually fell off the rim of the glass. I was ecstatic! But I was also very aware that the last thing I wanted to do was deceive myself that I had performed telekinesis if I actually hadn't. I continued practicing for a total of five full hours, knocking the spoon off dozens of times before I felt I knew what I was doing well enough to repeat it again in the future. For the next two months I used telekinesis to knock a spoon off a glass at least ten times a day just to make sure I wouldn't forget how to do it. The reactions from people in restaurants ranged everywhere from, "work of the devil," to, "Oh, that's no big deal. They teach that stuff at UCLA." (Of course, they have never taught such a thing.) Dozens, perhaps hundreds of people saw me do that little trick. The girlfriend used to get annoyed from the sound of the spoon falling onto the table at home. It wasn�t long before my situation with the girlfriend ended up derailing my metaphysical efforts. When my quest to find financing for Audio Animation failed we went through a nasty break up and I moved from LA back to my father's house in Salt Lake City. Life was such hell for a few weeks that I hadn't been practicing, and when I returned my first effort to do it again was in front of a good friend, who was also the most "chained to reason" person I've ever met. The (plastic) glass I was using had a bit of a flattened ridge at the top of the rim, which prevented the spoon from rocking freely. I was also in frazzles from the break up and moving everything I owned across country, so I couldn't concentrate well enough to do it. I tried again several times over the next few weeks but failed every time, and finally gave up trying. I haven't tried again in years, but telekinesis is definitely a reality. (I should note that from my subsequent research, the idea of "opposing magnetic-like forces" may have nothing to do with telekinesis. I am unaware of what the actual forces involved really are.) A lucid dream is one where you are fully aware, with your normal consciousness, of the fact you are dreaming. The OOBE experience described earlier occurred while I was fully awake the entire time, but my first lucid dream was initiated from the state of awareness between waking and sleeping. I was in my early twenties and had been attempting to initiate a lucid dream every night for about three months. I had no real clue how to do this but felt the intent should be enough to make it happen. Finally one night as I was drifting off to sleep, doing my usual, "remember to have a lucid dream" mantra, I had fallen asleep but was close enough to wakefulness to recognize that phrase happening in my mind. I looked around me and realized I was indeed dreaming, yet I felt as normal as ever. I was standing on a dirt road near the top of a very gentle slope. All around me were fields of grain turning yellow in the bright sun. A monk in an orange robe was walking up the road toward me. He acted as if he knew me well and immediately told me, "Today's lesson is learning to deal with fear." He seemed irritated by my excited questions. "Do you know me? Don't you realize we're dreaming?" He looked me over carefully and said something like, "Oh, I see. You've brought your normal awareness along this time." He shrugged off my pestering questions and led me to a group of buildings where several, very large, open tanks were buried in the ground. They were filled with water, and in one tank the water was boiling fiercely. We walked along a wide wooden plank that stretched out over the boiling tank. The hot steam burned against the skin of my face when the breeze blew the vapors toward me. "You are here to learn how to deal with fear," he said. "Look into the tank." I looked and saw another monk swimming about, smiling and waving at me in a friendly way. "You feel the heat and your mind tells you that if you fall into the tank you will be boiled alive, but you also see that our friend is not harmed. You must overcome your rational fears and jump into the boiling water." I figured that since I was dreaming, nothing could hurt me, so I jumped in. The water was warm and comfortable. I looked up at the monk on the plank above me who was shaking his head in disappointment. The next thing I knew I was completely dry, walking with him on the dirt road again, back toward the spot at the top of the knoll where we had first met. I asked him what I did wrong. "You must be fully afraid, and yet go on," he said. "The problem was you were never afraid to begin with." I told him I knew this was a dream and nothing could hurt me, so what was the point of being afraid? As we reached the top of the low hill I noticed there were railroad tracks crossing the road there. He pointed out across the fields to a large diesel train rounding a curve in the track about half a mile away. "You must stand here on this track and allow the train to strike you with all it's great force. You must allow yourself to be fully afraid, but under no circumstances are you to jump out of the path of the train." He positioned me on the tracks facing the oncoming train, which was just a couple of blocks away now. I could feel the ground trembling slightly beneath my feet, and felt the warmth of the sun on my face and the gentle breeze moving my hair. This was so very real, but it was just a dream. I had to remind myself of that, and for a moment I was afraid it might not be a dream, that I would be smashed into a gooey spot on the front of the train if this wasn't a dream after all. I looked at the monk, who was eyeing me carefully, and clearly recognized that I don't usually stand in fields in the middle of nowhere with monks in orange robes after jumping into a tank of boiling water without being harmed. I was dreaming all right. The train blew it's ear piercing horn and the ground shook as the mass of steel approached the crossing. Everything seemed totally real and my heart was pounding. The train raced toward me at around 70 MPH, the weeds swirling in the wind on either side of the approaching engine. I could see grease marks on the yellow paint and saw the face of the frightened conductor just as the train reached the road, shaking the ground hard now. The horn roared, hurting my ears as I steadied myself for the impact, two seconds, one second -- Nothing. The massive train was half an inch from my nose when it froze as still as a photograph. "What a rush!" I shouted to the monk next to me. He just shook his head as he held his chin, looking disappointed. "You were not truly afraid," he said. "We will have to take this up again some other time." He turned and began walking away. I followed after him like an excited puppy. "But I was afraid! What did I do wrong? When will we do this again?" "In about three years," he said almost half consciously. "Three years!" I whined. "This was great! Let's do it again tomorrow night!" But the scene before me began to lose it's cohesiveness and blurred into the darkness of my room as I awakened. I waited anxiously for those three years to pass, but much to my disappointment a similar lucid dream never occurred. I suppose it's worth mentioning another related experience that happened at roughly the same time of my life. This was attempting to have an out of body experience where I would project my awareness to a physical location nearby, a place I could return to in order to verify I had actually been there. I had selected a local, all night restaurant I went to often. I thought that if I could get out of body I could go there, see which waitresses were working and who the customers were, then after returning to my body I'd drive over and check for verification. On this particular evening I had been talking about astral projection with a friend, and we had decided to both try to go there at the same time. I had been attempting to do something like this for a couple of months every night as I went to bed. I suppose the discussion with my friend that night made a difference, because as I was on the verge of falling asleep I suddenly felt myself "swoosh" up out of my body, as if I had been pulled up by a giant rubber band. I felt myself go right through the ceiling, through the attic space and then stop just above the trees over the house. I was exhilarated. The view was incredible and I had that wonderful weightless feeling. I didn't want to "wake up" suddenly so I immediately turned my attention to meeting my friend at the restaurant. I didn't know how to "move" though. So I thought about how I get there when driving, and suddenly I was floating over an intersection in the dark, about half a mile from my destination. Next I thought about the parking lot at the restaurant and was there after a brief moment of disorientation. I was floating in front of the glass door to the building, about two feet off the ground. I tried to push the door open but my hand went through it. Someone walked out and I used that opportunity to "swoosh" myself inside. (I didn�t realize that if my hand could go through the door, so could I.) I was now in front of the cash register, still about two feet off the ground. I willed myself to turn and look at the clock I knew was on the wall to my left, but I couldn't move. I couldn't rotate my field of vision to see who was at the counter or who was working. I became very frustrated and angry at the whole predicament because all I had to do is see who was there and I'd have evidence I could investigate. But I was stuck like a stick in the mud in front of the bottom part of a sign that read, "Please wait to be seated." My anger got the best of me and I suddenly woke up, my body again leaping to a sitting position on the bed as I felt that hard slam back into it. (At least this time the body I returned to was warm as usual.) D�j� vu is a feeling, often a certainty, that we have experienced a presently occurring event on some previous occasion. It feels as if one knows exactly what is going to happen next, exactly what a particular person is going to say and what the reaction will be. It's like watching a 3-dimensional scene in a movie that you've already seen. It happens to a lot of us at one time or another. My most vivid encounter with this type of experience took place on two separate, but mysteriously connected occasions. Part one occurred when I was in my early twenties. A good friend of mine, Steve, brought his soon to be wife, and I brought a girlfriend, on a camping trip to a large reservoir in the Uinta mountains, a couple hundred miles east of Salt Lake City. The unusual occurrence began when we stopped at a lookout point to take in the view. We had driven there in my 1968 GTO which was only a few years old at the time (I bought it back after it had been repossessed). While at the lookout point we had all gotten out of the car and walked around, then ended up sitting in the car again, but without respect to where we had been sitting while driving. I was in the front passenger seat, my friend Steve was in the driver's seat, and the two girls had ended up in back. We were just sitting there talking when Steve threw a small bit of wadded up paper out on the ground (an empty cigarette pack, I think.) I politely told him he shouldn't litter, particularly in such a nice, natural environment like that, and suddenly his face went pale. He started raving about how all this had happened before, about the girls being in the back seat and us being in the seats where we were. He was adamant about it. I mean he made such a big deal about it half an hour passed before he'd let it go so we could be on our way again. None of the rest of us could detect anything unusual. It was perhaps two years later when all of this became really weird again. Steve and I had gone out to the desert west of Salt Lake with a girl I was just getting to know. We had driven most of the night and had stopped at a watering hole for sheep called Simpson Springs, on the edge of the Dougway Proving Grounds, a restricted military area containing many square miles of pretty much nothing but empty desert. We had all taken a small amount of LSD earlier, which was wearing off as the sun began to rise. Out of the desert we heard a loud, reverberating "boom" followed by a deep rumble. We all looked at each other to make sure we had actually heard it. Before we could say much about it we again heard the same booming sound, and all of us got out of the car (my GTO). Off to the north I saw a white puff of smoke burst from the desert floor. I pointed it out just as another boom shook the air. Three dark spots were lined up perfectly beneath the disappearing mist of smoke. Suddenly another puff of white smoke appeared at the end of the line of spots, making four dark spots now, and a moment later another boom rolled over us. We had feared something supernatural, but realized the army was firing artillery shells over the mountain range into the test area. We relaxed and went back to the car. I was sitting in the passenger seat, Steve was in my driver's seat, and the girl had climbed into the back. Steve wadded up an empty cigarette pack and tossed it out the open door onto the ground -- and suddenly I knew all this had happened before. It was as if I were watching a replay of a scene from another dimension of reality, but for the life of me I couldn't remember when it had happened. The other two blew off my amazement as insignificant, but I became obsessed with wanting to know when it had happened before. I just wouldn't let the subject drop. Finally I made the others listen to my explanation of the details, the seating positions, the liter being thrown out, and finally Steve clicked on the event in the Uinta mountains when it had been him doing the freaking out. It wasn't until that moment that I remembered the earlier event. When we realized Steve had reacted so strongly to the first event without any prior experience involved, and this time it was me freaking out, all of us were quite awed by this mystery we call life. About ten years ago I awoke from a dream where the image of an inertial propulsion machine was displayed before me. It occurred after I had spent about a week seriously pondering how centrifugal force might be used to propel a spacecraft. The image consisted of a series of golden balls moving in a beautifully complex circular motion. I didn�t pay much attention to the image until I had gotten out of bed and walked across the room and found the image was still there. It remained for several minutes.
Nearly all of the previous experiences happened to me many years ago, but this next story is quite recent. On January 3, 2001, I met a woman, Sherry, in a coffee shop and she became my wife six weeks later. Our romance was fairly typical other than our habit of having conversations of such intensity they lasted hours and left us both exhausted. I had been a confirmed bachelor all my life and would have stayed that way if "the gods" had not interfered. One night about three weeks after we met we were laying next to each other in bed, both of us on our left sides, her in front of me. As we were about to fall asleep I noticed seeing "pre-dream" images and began describing them to her. I perceived myself standing inside a bare, white room near a window opening without glass. The walls were about two-feet thick and I had the impression I was in some sort of prison on a hill overlooking a valley. Two men approached and stood outside the window opening, looking in. One was a tall man wearing an eighteenth century military uniform including a tall red hat. "It's French or Spanish," I told Sherry. "French," she said, speaking with a sense of authority. "The other man," I continued, "is short, with curly, brown hair." The short man sneered at me, as if he were proud to have finally gotten me into his trap. Sherry said she was seeing the same image and repeated that the men were French. I began wondering if there might be some reincarnational aspect to all this, and mentioned I had developed an impression over the years that I might have been a blond girl in France at about this time. The "prison" image faded as I told Sherry about two, very brief scenes from what might have been a life experienced then. In one I am the blond girl, about eighteen, running joyfully free on the top of a high hill overlooking a small ocean bay dotted with white houses near the shoreline. The other scene is that of a young French gentleman strutting down a city sidewalk along a cobblestone street, carrying a black cane with a round, silver handle. For some reason I felt that the young man had been responsible for my death as the blond woman in that life. "The cane has a gold handle," Sherry said. I was laying on my left side, and suddenly the air a few feet above me became "energized" with bluish light and a bolt of incredible, lightning-like energy shot down into my right side, out through my stomach, sideways into Sherry's back and out through her stomach, disappearing about two-feet in front of her. Both of us had our eyes closed and we both saw and felt that bolt of energy go through us. Both of us described it as being about two-inches in diameter and described it as taking the same path. At the moment the "lightning bolt" went through me I had a very clear realization that scared the wits out of me. Sherry had been the man in that other life who was responsible for my death as the blond woman. I recoiled away from her with a sense of utter revulsion. But Sherry immediately said she had not been the man with the cane, that I had been him. She knew with absolute clarity that she had been married to me then. Confusion overwhelmed me. We talked about it that night and again over the next few weeks. In the course of our conversations we seemed to piece together a fairly detailed story of a life together in France during the mid-to-late seventeen-hundreds, much of which I'm not sure I really believe, in spite of coming up with parts of the story myself. Sherry insists I was a Marquis, part of the royal aristocracy, young, handsome, arrogant (figures) wealthy and politically powerful. She was younger than me, dark hair and eyes, beautiful - the spoiled daughter of a wealthy businessman. To give you an idea of how we came up with that information I will explain what occurred when I asked if she remembered how we had met in that life. I had no idea how we had met when I asked her the question, but as soon as I asked it I saw a mental image of a beautiful, dark-haired young woman wearing a wet dress, walking out of a stream or lake. She responded to my question by saying we met by a river where she used to go to look at her horse. She said I had given her the horse as a result of our first "wager," and that wagers were involved the first time we met and were a continual part of our relationship. I asked her what the first wager was, and she told me it was a deal where I would buy the horse for her if she would strip off her outer garments, walk out into the river up to her neck in only her thin, under-dress, and let me have a good look at her -- but no touching, of course. We both knew the horse was black, and she asked me if I knew it's name. "Something like Silver Shadow," I said. She said it's name was Moonlight. Sherry's recollection of such details is much better than mine, but you can see how we both contributed to putting pieces together by asking the other for "verification." In this way we assembled a story that seems to satisfy us as to what happened in that life, though I don't have the interest at this point to search out objective verification. It seems the two of us were indulgent hedonists, and trying to keep her materially satisfied over the course of our marriage led me to abuse my political position. The scene we were observing before the energy bolt went through us, of the French soldier and the short aristocrat, was at a prison just before I was executed by my political enemies. The blond girl (perhaps myself as a "counterpart" in that life) appears to have been a lower class mistress I had gotten pregnant. I had promised the world to her, but when the "wife" found out the girl was pregnant she used her clout to send the girl back to England, where she may have taken her own life. Or so goes the story as best as we can piece it together. As far as I can tell at this point it could all be nonsense. There is one more point involving Sherry I think I should include here. It has to do with what I call "interference from the gods" for lack of a better explanation. We were in the same restaurant where we had met, and the moment I asked Sherry to marry me I "heard a voice" say, "Now everything will begin." That startled the heck out of me because I had never "heard voices" like that before. At the same moment Sherry felt "an impression from beyond herself" telling her that everything was fine. Now when I say I "heard a voice" I don't mean I heard a voice in the way one normally does. It was "an impression that conveys the sense of having heard a voice." I guess you could say it was as much like actually hearing a voice as seeing images in a dream are like seeing things in real life. I was aware that the "voice" was male and not my thought, but it didn't come from the room around me. Sherry also pointed out something later which jogged my memory -- a pyramid of grey energy, but missing the top, had settled around us just as we perceived our impression of voices. I have no explanation for any of this. But don't think you are being left out of any wonderfully romantic, cosmic influences if your relationships don't have all these metaphysical connections. Our relationship was hell. We ran off and got married after six weeks, then split up two weeks later, and broke up every two or three weeks after that for six months. Every time we would break up it seemed "the gods" would push us back together again. She lived fifty miles away so when someone "stole" her car she had to live with me so she could get to work, and one time the spark plug blew out of her next car while it was parked in my driveway. She stayed with me during the several days it took me to fix it. This sort of thing happened so many times we finally decided to just stick it out a while. We managed to live together consistently for about five months, until Valentines Day, 2002. We filed for divorce and can't even speak to each other these days, though I still see her occasionally in the restaurant where I hang out. All this "cosmic" stuff is interesting, but that doesn't mean it's always fun.
In this chapter I have described my most significant metaphysical experiences, but far more than this is possible. I highly recommend reviewing the "mini encyclopedia" of metaphysical phenomena in the appendix in order to learn about the many amazing phenomena that have been reported throughout history. Much of this book will attempt to explain how such things are possible, and how to experience some of it yourself.
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