“I of my own knowledge…”

18. Columbia Gorge

Tuesday Sept. 27, 2005. As it happened, it is a day when I do everything right.

The day before, I had driven past all the river attractions to get to Mount Hood. Awakening at Timberline Lodge, I am tempted to keep going west toward Portland. But I still want to see the river! So I decide to retrace my steps to Hood River. I know I’ve done the right thing when the turn-off I need proves to be less than a mile from the road leading from Timberline. I drive down to Hood River, decide against stopping for lunch, and therefore arrive at Cascade Falls at just quarter to twelve – with the Columbia Gorge scheduled to leave at noon.

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14. Fort Klamath

Saturday Sept. 24, 2005. If we could have found the road we were looking for, we wouldn’t be stopping at this little park in the middle of nowhere. You know how it is. You’re traveling and you have your mind set in one direction, and anything you pass looks less interesting than the thing you think you’re chasing.

We are on our way to Bend from Crater Lake, and although Bend is to the northeast, we will have to travel southwest down highway 62 in order to pick up 97 for the long trek back north. The map seems to show a small road that will cut off some of the long dogleg, but even though we look carefully, the only road that cuts away seems to be headed in the wrong direction. Okay, we figure that we must have passed it somehow. Next step: Find somebody and ask. The little sign by the small white building says Fort Klamath.

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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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