"I of my own knowledge…"

I have been re-reading my book Chasing Smallwood, because I gave it to someone who hasn’t any background in altered-state communication, and wondered how it would strike the unprepared reader. It had been some time since I’d looked at it, and so I could look at it from a detached perspective.

My first reaction was, I needed a good editor! The editor who edits his own copy has a fool for a client. I was so close to the material that I couldn’t see that some things needed spelling out.

My second reaction, though, was, “wow, what good material this included! What great communications!” And that’s still my reaction. Here’s a little dialogue with Bertram, an English monk — well, he’d have called himself Norman rather than English, I suspect — from the 1200s.

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Are you among those who are confused by the concept of an e-book?

If you look around on my site, you’ll see that my novel Babe in the Woods and my non-fiction exploration Chasing Smallwood are both available as e-books. But what’s an e-book?

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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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Someone said that she had come late to the discussion, and was having a hard time orienting herself in the material. I can certainly see how this could be a problem, so I promised to try to deliver a road map. Here is my first attempt.

In this blog, I am attempting to confine myself to what I know from my own personal experience. It is true that what we “know” may be wrong. Nonetheless, what we know from experience has more validity for us than things that we have merely heard, or read, or in one way or another have been led to believe, without personal experience having ratified it.

However, a good part of what we know from experience begins with the experience of resonating to something we hear or read. When I first read Carl Jung’s book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, something within me immediately said, “this is true.” He thus provided a link between who I was then (or rather, who I thought I was) and who I would become. This happens to us a lot. In relating my experiences, I am hoping and expecting to serve the same function for others. If they need to hear what I have to say, they will wind up on this site “by accident,” because our Upstairs guidance knows how to steer us to whatever influences we need.

So, one continuing thread in this series of posts consists of transcripts of my interactions with the other side, beginning in 1993. To follow them chronologically, begin with the series of Black Box Session transcripts, then proceed to the TGU Session transcripts that I am still in the process of posting. These will be followed by another series of black box session transcripts from 2004. By reading these sessions in chronological order, you will walk along with me, so to speak, and will acquire terms and ideas that are built upon later. I must say, it has been quite an extensive educational process.

A different way of approaching the material, and one that some may find more accessible, would be to follow the long thread I call Chasing Smallwood. This is a series of transcripts of active-imagination sessions that I had with a “past life” personality who lived in the 19th century, went west to Oregon, came back east and served in the Union Army during the Civil War. These sessions began as my attempts to understand and obtain documentation for his life — at least, that’s what I thought was going on. As usual, however, the other side had its own agenda, and the series took an unexpected and remarkable turn. This is still unfolding, and I cannot quite see where it is going to end. Whether it will be as important to others as I think it is, I can’t tell. But it certainly is changing my life.

So there are two ways to approach this material: Start following the Black Box and then the TGU Session transcripts, or follow the Chasing Smallwood material. A third way, equally valid, would be to begin with the earliest posts and proceed chronologically, browsing. If anyone has suggestions on other ways to proceed, I would be glad to hear them and pass them on.