"I of my own knowledge…"

“By our overvaluation of physical power and scientific truth, aloof from other human needs, we have paid the same price Faust had to pay when he made his compact with Mephistopheles: we have lost our souls, or to speak in more psychological terms, we have depersonalized ourselves and have turned our conscious thinking selves into automatons. Is it any wonder that our whole civilization goes on repeating processes it has once started, even when they have lost both of their original meaning and any valuable human end? Behold the way in which we continue to produce butter and wheat we neither eat nor share, goods that we do not have the social providence to distribute, knowledge we do not have the intellectual capacity to assimilate, instruments of mass extermination whose use might put an end to the human race.”
Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, 347

“To be on friendly terms with every part of mankind, one must be on equally friendly terms with every part of oneself; and to do justice to the formative elements in world culture, which give it greater significance and promise than any earlier stage in man’s history, one must nourish the formative elements in the human self, with even fuller energies than axial men applied to this task. In brief, one cannot create a unified world with partial, fragmentary, arrested selves which by their very nature’ must either produce aggressive conflict or regressive isolation. Nothing less than a concept of the whole man — and of man achieving a consciousness of the cosmic and historical — is capable of doing justice to every type of personality, every mode of culture, every human potential. At this point a further human transformation, so far not approached by any recorded culture, may well take place.”
Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, p 444

A long beautiful quotation from Anna Karenina has its application to many an unhappy young man out there.

“Then, for the first time, realizing that for every man, and he himself too, there was nothing ahead but suffering, death, eternal oblivion, he had decided that to live under such conditions was impossible — he must either find an explanation to the problem of existence which would make life seem something other than the cruel irony of all malevolent spirit, or he must shoot itself.
“But he had done neither the one nor the other: he had gone on living, thinking and feeling, and even at that very time married, had experienced many joys and been happy whenever he was not pondering on the meaning of his life.
“What did that show? It showed that he had been living rightly, but thinking wrongly.
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“What is ideally desirable, at this stage of man’s development, does not exist in any past form of man, either biological or social: not the pure Hindu, the pure Muhammadan, the pure Christian, nor yet the pure Marxist or the pure mechanist: not Old World man nor New World man. The unity we seek must do justice to all these fragments, and be ready to include them lovingly in a self that shall be capable of transcending them. Any doctrine of wholeness that does not begin with love itself as the symbol and agent of this organic creativity can hardly hope to produce either a unified self or unified world; for it is not in the detached intellect alone that this transformation must be effected.”
Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, p 455

In December, 2005, I began several months of regular altered-state “conversations” with a man named Joseph Smallwood, who had lived in 19th century America, had  gone west to Oregon in the 1840s, had lived with the Indians in Minnesota, and had fought as a Union officer in the Civil War. At least, that’s the story.

Chasing Smallwood has four interlocking themes:

•             How to communicate with the dead. You can learn to move between normal consciousness and an altered state (which is not trance channeling, nor automatic writing, nor self-hypnosis) in which you allow someone else to form the words. The process is worth learning, and you can learn it yourself if you care to. I have been doing this since 1989, arguing all the way. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to know ahead of time what you are doing or how it works. How to bring it through and not choke it off is the hardest thing you need to learn. (more…)

On December 18, I told the TMI Explorers list what had been happening, and what had just happened that day:

Email, 12-18-05:

“Speaking of beyond time and space, something interesting has been happening these past couple of days. You may remember that I connected to that life as Joseph Smallwood, the young man who visited Emerson one day in the 1840s. Well, when I was in Oregon in September I went looking for signs of his having been there (hoping to find traces of a monograph that I think he wrote) and a researcher I was talking to suggested that maybe he returned east after getting there. A thunderclap! Of course he did! He was a Transcendentalist, and probably an abolitionist. He would have been about 40 when the Civil War began, and no way would he have sat it out.

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,

By the time I sat down to write, in late 2005, I had had 18 years’ sporadic experience of getting stories of “past lives.” Over the years I had discovered (invented?) a cast of characters that included:

Joseph the Egyptian, a member of a priesthood with responsibility for their people’s spiritual and mental health, long before the time of Christ..

Clio, a young diviner in fire, a Roman in about the time of Christ.

Bertram, a Norman English clergyman of the 1200s.

Senji-san, a Japanese monk of the 1500s.

Robert McLean, a Scot of the 1600s.

John Cotten, a Virginian smallholder of the mid-18th century.

Joseph Smallwood, a Vermont man who became a Civil War soldier.

David Poynter, a Welsh journalist and psychic investigator who bridged the 19th and 20th centuries.

Katrina, a Polish-Jewish girl who died at age 8 in a concentration camp in 1942.

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In March 1993, three months after doing Gateway,  I did another TMI residential course called Guidelines, designed to get participants into closer touch with guidance. Although I didn’t realize it until later, I entered the program not only expanded, but wildly ungrounded. This must have been hard on the other participants, but it made it easy for me to take another giant step. Doubt inhibits. Trying to define in advance of experience inhibits. Worrying too much about fooling yourself, or about making a fool of yourself in front of others, inhibits. Being ungrounded is not generally helpful, but in this instance it did allow me to move, as I was not in the mood to inhibit anything!

Guidelines has a chapter in Muddy Tracks too; all I want to say here about the program is that on the final day, I got to have a session in the isolation chamber that I call the black box, and for the first time I was able to allow the guys to come through using my voice rather than my pen. Just as in automatic writing, the words welled up within me, only this time instead of writing the words, I spoke them. All sessions in the black box are taped, and the participant is given a copy of the tape, so I was able to walk away with an hour or so of conversation from the other side, lest I should later doubt that I had done it.

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When the breakthrough came, it didn’t take place out of thin air. I had been preparing myself for it – unknowingly – for a decade and a half. We need to talk about automatic writing as I experienced it.

I began just by beginning, not knowing what I was doing. I sat down with pen and paper and sort of waited for something to happen. It’s easier to do this than to explain it. I placed myself in a state of openness, in the way that you would if you were waiting for a friend to talk to you. Usually I asked a question to start things off.

At first I was trying too hard. It can be difficult, remaining receptive when you want something to happen! I didn’t know what I was waiting for, you see. I thought, “well, start.” So if I pushed the pen across the page a line, forming letters as I was moved to, sometimes I’d get words that didn’t make sense together, sometimes nonsense words – letters that didn’t even make real words – and sometimes just blankness. But sometimes things worked, and before too long I recognized what attitude worked, and then I had the secret. It is a matter of imagination as much as receptivity. I often tell people, “if you can’t get started, just pretend for a while. Make it up deliberately, knowing you are doing so. Persist, and at some point when the real thing kicks in, you will know it.” It should go without saying that as important as anything is: Never deceive others or yourself. The former is merely a matter of integrity; the latter, though, involves discernment.

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So here I am, more than 60 years old, and I am talking to people who are not in bodies. Some have been dead a few years, some for decades, or centuries. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how long they have been gone or how famous they were or weren’t. Apparently I may talk to nearly anyone I wish to, provided that I have a reason to do so. I seem to have tapped into the invisible world’s Internet.

If this were merely my own experience or my own delusion, it wouldn’t be very important to anyone but me. But since it appears to be a skill that anyone can develop, I propose to tell you how to do the same thing I’m doing. To do so, I need to sketch out how I got to this point, but you don’t need to follow my path. In fact, you couldn’t if you wished to. You have your own path, whatever it is, and it’s the only one for you.

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