Now the much promised new direction into the paranormal, opening with the book, "The Journey of Robert Monroe" by Ronald Russel. It is so packed with information and even more questions that I might finally showcase it in the Book Review section, but for now, a discussion of how different such studies are from the strictly spiritual/religious topics generally treated up to this point. We begin with Truth.
The sacred, as the mystics see it, is first and foremost concerned with personally encountering ultimate reality. It is, by definition, from Plains Indians to Zen Masters, something beyond description, analysis, or anything that we might relate it to. The Mideastern religions call it Love and the Far East "void," but for all, anything less simply gets in the way, including what we here will be discussing, psychic phenomena and spirit contact. After several months of reading the mystics, going into these strange lands makes me feel almost heretical, sinful even, as all seem a mere dabbling, a playing about the edges of what should be our true purpose. But I have to look at it this way: it is no more heretical than our science, and as long as the investigation does not lead us to attribute ultimate qualities to any of it, I feel it is no more harmful. In fact, it is better: what we find in the worlds that exist beyond (or within - space is often irrelevant) our own seem to offer greater opportunities to climb the first steps towards truth. They are often more inclusive, and more, they can convince us that our ordinary reality is simply a certain plane in an infinite multi-verse, allowing us to rise beyond the heavy gravity that holds us to this particular illusion (that is, to the belief that THIS is the real world, beyond which there is nothing of importance.) And besides all that, it is fascinating stuff.
How I came to be interested in these other realities is beyond the stuff of casual hobby. I had a keen interest in it long before I jumped on the hippy high bandwagon in the early 70's, and it may go back to the experience I had when in 4th grade. Playing army with BB guns, I was shot in the eye; but instead of falling on the ground in screaming pain, I rose above it, literally. My consciousness became that of the disinterested Observer (so called by others, I have since read, but a name I gave to it before I had read of it), floating above the scene, taking it all in with calm dispassion. Why were these boys running around like that? I could see it all as if from a height of about 100 feet, and as I could not really hear them, I came closer, then closer still, until I heard a kid on the ground screaming obscenities. I got closer to inspect the reason for this, and, zap!, I was in that kid, back to me, hollering words I did not know that I knew (I still don't know how I got those words and phrases - kids and adults around kids did not use them in those days). Years later at age 14, while visiting my Aunt in California, I went with her to the grocery store and at one point found myself perched just above us, as if sitting on the top of a stock shelf. I watched and listened to us speak with the same dispassion as before. Here there was no trauma or anything of interest at all. Years later I would have a few more during my time of drug experimentation, which may or may not be dismissed, but why this, and what was it? (as an aside - on writing the last sentence, the internet connection was suddenly lost - fortunately, the program saved the words above in the "draft" column. Coincidence?)
Many weird things have happened since, and I found in my hitching days that MOST people have had odd things happen to them. How could I not wonder what was going on? Going beyond the recommended reading of the college classes, I found that since the 60's, a whole boatload of people have written about otherworldly phenomena. (This, by the way, was a good thing that came out of the 60's- one no longer had to hide as securely behind a facade of sanity to get along in society.) Robert "Bob" Monroe, who I am reading about now, was a great example of this liberation. Born in 1915, he had had tremendous success in media until the late 50's, when he began to spontaneously leave his body. He thought he might be sick or going insane, but nothing the doctors could tell him pointed to anything. He began to study the phenomena personally, until he published the results in 1971 in his first book, Journeys Beyond the Body. Fascinating stuff, and I will get into his life and experiences in the coming days.
To end with, though, a note on a feeling, sometimes stated, that arises from this biography of Monroe, in keeping with my opening paragraph; in his first book, he believes that he has come upon the Creator in another world, the world where he feels that heaven and hell reside (much more on that later). This "god" seemed to be omnipotent, but also as strict and fear inducing as a prison guard in a North Korean reeducation camp. He came away, he said, feeling that everything he had learned about God in his youth had been irrevocably shattered. Years later, however, he found that many, many more layers of intelligence existed beyond what he had experienced - that, in fact, much of what he had previously experienced had been colored by his own inability to translate what he was witnessing directly to his discursive mind; in other words, he had had to translate everything into his present categories. The god he had witnessed, then, might not be a god, and almost certainly not THE god (or at best, a limited interpretation of it). The "feeling" that I got was that at this point, he no longer believed that he was finding ultimate truth. Instead, he would find that we are part of an infinite geometry of truths and worlds and beings, there being one exception - a place he called HOME. Referred to at one point in the Bio as "Nirvana" , it may just be the place we are looking for. But the rest more than likely are intersecting realities as real as ours, and often much more profound, but still not HOME.
More later, FK
The sacred, as the mystics see it, is first and foremost concerned with personally encountering ultimate reality. It is, by definition, from Plains Indians to Zen Masters, something beyond description, analysis, or anything that we might relate it to. The Mideastern religions call it Love and the Far East "void," but for all, anything less simply gets in the way, including what we here will be discussing, psychic phenomena and spirit contact. After several months of reading the mystics, going into these strange lands makes me feel almost heretical, sinful even, as all seem a mere dabbling, a playing about the edges of what should be our true purpose. But I have to look at it this way: it is no more heretical than our science, and as long as the investigation does not lead us to attribute ultimate qualities to any of it, I feel it is no more harmful. In fact, it is better: what we find in the worlds that exist beyond (or within - space is often irrelevant) our own seem to offer greater opportunities to climb the first steps towards truth. They are often more inclusive, and more, they can convince us that our ordinary reality is simply a certain plane in an infinite multi-verse, allowing us to rise beyond the heavy gravity that holds us to this particular illusion (that is, to the belief that THIS is the real world, beyond which there is nothing of importance.) And besides all that, it is fascinating stuff.
How I came to be interested in these other realities is beyond the stuff of casual hobby. I had a keen interest in it long before I jumped on the hippy high bandwagon in the early 70's, and it may go back to the experience I had when in 4th grade. Playing army with BB guns, I was shot in the eye; but instead of falling on the ground in screaming pain, I rose above it, literally. My consciousness became that of the disinterested Observer (so called by others, I have since read, but a name I gave to it before I had read of it), floating above the scene, taking it all in with calm dispassion. Why were these boys running around like that? I could see it all as if from a height of about 100 feet, and as I could not really hear them, I came closer, then closer still, until I heard a kid on the ground screaming obscenities. I got closer to inspect the reason for this, and, zap!, I was in that kid, back to me, hollering words I did not know that I knew (I still don't know how I got those words and phrases - kids and adults around kids did not use them in those days). Years later at age 14, while visiting my Aunt in California, I went with her to the grocery store and at one point found myself perched just above us, as if sitting on the top of a stock shelf. I watched and listened to us speak with the same dispassion as before. Here there was no trauma or anything of interest at all. Years later I would have a few more during my time of drug experimentation, which may or may not be dismissed, but why this, and what was it? (as an aside - on writing the last sentence, the internet connection was suddenly lost - fortunately, the program saved the words above in the "draft" column. Coincidence?)
Many weird things have happened since, and I found in my hitching days that MOST people have had odd things happen to them. How could I not wonder what was going on? Going beyond the recommended reading of the college classes, I found that since the 60's, a whole boatload of people have written about otherworldly phenomena. (This, by the way, was a good thing that came out of the 60's- one no longer had to hide as securely behind a facade of sanity to get along in society.) Robert "Bob" Monroe, who I am reading about now, was a great example of this liberation. Born in 1915, he had had tremendous success in media until the late 50's, when he began to spontaneously leave his body. He thought he might be sick or going insane, but nothing the doctors could tell him pointed to anything. He began to study the phenomena personally, until he published the results in 1971 in his first book, Journeys Beyond the Body. Fascinating stuff, and I will get into his life and experiences in the coming days.
To end with, though, a note on a feeling, sometimes stated, that arises from this biography of Monroe, in keeping with my opening paragraph; in his first book, he believes that he has come upon the Creator in another world, the world where he feels that heaven and hell reside (much more on that later). This "god" seemed to be omnipotent, but also as strict and fear inducing as a prison guard in a North Korean reeducation camp. He came away, he said, feeling that everything he had learned about God in his youth had been irrevocably shattered. Years later, however, he found that many, many more layers of intelligence existed beyond what he had experienced - that, in fact, much of what he had previously experienced had been colored by his own inability to translate what he was witnessing directly to his discursive mind; in other words, he had had to translate everything into his present categories. The god he had witnessed, then, might not be a god, and almost certainly not THE god (or at best, a limited interpretation of it). The "feeling" that I got was that at this point, he no longer believed that he was finding ultimate truth. Instead, he would find that we are part of an infinite geometry of truths and worlds and beings, there being one exception - a place he called HOME. Referred to at one point in the Bio as "Nirvana" , it may just be the place we are looking for. But the rest more than likely are intersecting realities as real as ours, and often much more profound, but still not HOME.
More later, FK
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