"I of my own knowledge…"

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.

(more…)

,

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

This 19-year-old risked his life on Marye’s Heights to give aid to the wounded on the other side while the battle was still going on. The federals when they realized what he was doing stopped shooting and sent thunderous cheers. The boy was killed the following September, a month after his 20th birthday–but his generous act had assured that his name would live.

Overcoming the real enemy

Last Friday and Saturday, my friend Jim and I visited the sites of two Civil War battlefields: Fredericksburg and The Wilderness. In 2006, similarly, we had gone together to visit the battlefield at Gettysburg,

Those who have been following this “Chasing Smallwood” thread know that I am in contact with a Union veteran named Joseph Smallwood. Jim is similarly connected to a Confederate veteran named Hank who, like Joseph, survived the war. But Hank, unlike Joseph, has continued to be bitter about the war, having lost his home and his previous way of living to what he considered to be an unjustified invasion of his homeland.

When Jim had suggested that we visit the site of Fredericksburg I instantly agreed–but I also felt butterflies in my stomach. I wasn’t sure that Joseph was looking forward to revisiting that particular ghastly experience. Yet I knew it was important.

(more…)

[continued from previous post]

R: All right, I think I understand that. It seemed though that the guys, as representing a different level than you as an individual, seemed to see things from a different perspective than you do, and they’re trying to teach us on this level to understand their perspective, but we don’t in fact see without the time and space dimensions. So I’m wondering that about another level. Whether there is talent there that we can understand that would be different from the first two layers here.

F: Well, the only thing that comes to mind right away on that, it is that in fact it isn’t an “us” and a “you,” and it isn’t a “they” and an “us,” it’s all one thing and these distinctions that we go along with making, still you have to remember they’re not real distinctions. It isn’t Frank on one end, the guys on the other end, even though it’s convenient to look at it that way. It really is that you are seeing a part of a being and in trying to understand what you’re seeing, you’re dissecting the parts, and that’s true as far as it goes, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the parts are parts of one thing, and this goes all the way up and all the way down. We know you know that, but we need to continually reemphasize it, because your spatial analogies — which we really don’t think you’ll ever be able to get out of while you’re in the body — by their very nature separate things into here and there. And your time analogies separate into now and then and when. But the separation is not real, it’s just convenient.

We understand your question. Is there a difference beyond us as noticeable as the difference beyond us in your dimension where everything is compressed into matter? But we have to say, one world a time.

R: OK, we’re ready to release that for now unless you have something else to say about that.

F: No, just that you can think of it as, if you would magnify pictures of the ganglia of the brain, and think of that as a miniature picture of the way reality is, and don’t look at it logically but look at it as a picture — in other words don’t analyze it by logical but  analyze it by your spatial appreciation — it’ll give you some sense of the holographic nature of things. It may, anyway. (more…)

Prodded by a reader, i have begun to put Chasing Smallwood together into a form that can be emailed, so that you don’t have to go way back and read it moving backwards, so to speak.

If you want the first installment (parts 1-10 ) email me at muddytracks@earthlink.net and I’ll send as an attached file.

For those who followed the long thread — 46 parts long! — that I called Chasing Smallwood, I went back today and renamed each part so that rather than saying, for instance, Chasing Smallwood – 46, it says, 46 – Life’s end. I realized, rather belatedly, that since the thread is all contained in one category, there was no reason whatever to repeat the name in the title of each post, and there was every reason to rename each one as descriptively as possible, so that if you are searching for a remembered post you may be able to find it easier.

Sooner or later I will email this to those who have signed up to receive the thread in one neat package rather than as is. (Go to the page named In Email Form)