Adventures In Spirituality: Large-print Edition

HELLOH FRIENDS,

I’m back with more of what I’m calling my Internet Thesis on the Holy Life. Can I get a hallelujah, and can I also say I take great offense at Donnie Trumpo Jr calling his juvenile beef with the media a “witch hunt.”

How dare he? 

I can’t even.

juvenile beef : ))) witch hunt : )) : 00 >: /

Well I don’t have much of a prologue for you, so I’ll just get back to the story at hand…

*****The Incredible Magickal Mystical Wizard-like Special Ops Psychic Safari********

I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, but there’s something about a psychic safari that’s a double-edge sword. Sure it’s amazing that you managed to channel a huge world event through your sloppy drunk stream-of-conscious ramblings, but it’s also a sad trombone moment when you realize—what does it matter? Who benefited from my unconscious insights? Why did I not call the CIA when I saw all this gibberish about airplanes & New York & flights & departures & skyscrapers & ruins & 911 calls & death in the skies?

From the summer of Y2K to the summer of 2001, I filled my notebook with this specialized gibberish. But I was a fiction writer back then. I used stream-of-consciousness to limber up my brain for writing stories. I remember in the Summer of ’01 I had a short story returned to me from the Missouri Review. A real paper manuscript mailed back in a SASE, with red marks and a full page of editorial feedback. [I’ll bet you whippersnappers don’t remember when “being a writer” meant sending stacks of paper through the US mails…]

Poetry/gibberish was just a hobby/guilty pleasure. It took a couple of days after 9/11 till it dawned on me —oh, that’s what all the gibberish was about. I showed the “poems” to Moonchild and he agreed it was pretty eerie and uncanny, but he didn’t say much about it, which was odd.

The last entry in the notebook was from Sep 4, 2001 after a particularly debauched Labor Day that left me hungover for 2 days and sober for the next 2 years (yes I was newly sober when 9/11 happened). 

I was both intrigued and frightened by the whole deal. But the scary, spiritual part of the psychic safari was just beginning. I did not write at all for a few weeks following 9/11. I was too absorbed in the reality of it, plus I was a little scared to put pen to paper. And, like I said, I was sober.

One night in late Oct, I woke around 3 a.m. and felt the need to write. As a lifelong insomniac, my usual method for dealing w/ sleeplessness was to lay there and worry and fret and seethe with anger and finally fall back to sleep 10 minutes before the alarm went off. But the urge to write was very strong so i got up, found my notebook, didn’t turn on any lights and just listened…

…I could hear voices that weren’t my own. Just the tiniest vibration of sound behind my ears, like someone whispering from far away. And I wrote down what they were saying. I couldn’t really see what I was writing—I just scribbled as fast as I could what all these voices were telling me. And yes, they were talking about 9/11 and what really happened. I won’t get into the details, because I would sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist and also I know there are Russians reading this.

I know “hearing voices” sounds crazy enough. And I know 89% of you are thinking “Oh VT’s not psychic he’s just insane.” But I can’t describe it any other way. The voices were coming faster than my own head could think, faster than my hand could write.

So, whether you believe it or not, I continued waking up just about every night from Oct — Dec 2001, and took dictation from the afterlife. I got used to it. It was scary at times, but mostly I felt they just wanted their stories heard. They needed to tell the truth. I began to hear from people who were not involved with 9/11, departed friends or relatives, telling me to just keep doing what I was doing. Stay on the path they said.

I didn’t mention any of this to Moonchild until mid Dec. First of all, I wasn’t sure what to call it. Or that it wasn’t some post traumatic backlash or psychotic lapse. Plus, Moonchild remained somewhat reluctant to talk about or read the original pre-cog poems. Something about it bothered him.

So it was with trepidation that I showed him my 2 notebooks full of late-night chicken scratch. I really wanted his input, and didn’t want to feel like I was keeping secrets anymore.

He gave the pages a cursory flip-through and said “Oh, you’ve been doing some automatic writing.”

I’d never heard it called that before. I explained about the voices and the urgency to capture everything they said. I asked if he could help, or if he wanted to try doing it with me. He vehemently refused—I had never seen him so upset, so unsupportive. Basically he said, NO I will not do this with you. In fact, I don’t think you should be doing it either, it could get out of hand!

We ended up fighting over it for hours, through the night and into the next day. And those of you who know us know we don’t really fight about anything. In the 20 years we’ve been together this was the only real contention we’ve had. I ended up ripping those notebooks to shreds and throwing them in the garbage, which I still regret.

WHY was Moonchild so vehemently opposed to my psychic safari?

Well…because he’d already been on his own psychic safari.

[Once upon a time in a small town in Indiana there lived a lady much like my early spiritual mentor, Tante Venice. Only her name was Bettie and she was Moonchild’s mom.

Bettie was the leader of a semi-clandestine Spiritualist group who practiced consciousness-raising through meditation, deep breathing and other means, such as automatic writing. I’m not sure if their group was called ‘The Psychic Safari’ or if that’s just what Moonchild called it.

When Moonchild was 12-13 he demonstrated a gift for channeling. That is, serving as a medium between the spirit world and 1970s Indiana. He became part of Bettie’s spiritualist group and mostly channeled a Chaldean astronomer named Omar, who advised the group on personal issues as well as the whole geopolitical situation.

No matter how innocently it started, young but oh-so-adult Moonchild was used mercilessly to channel Omar over the next several years. It was a lot of undue pressure for a teenage boy to manage, but the group really counted on him. It went on till the relationship between him & his mom deteriorated and he had to move away at 17.

Once Moonchild got some distance, he and Bettie were able to repair their bond, but it was never the same.

Bettie died in July 1999, one year before my own psychic adventure began. I have no doubt she had a hand in it.]

So yeah, that’s why Moonchild had concerns about my channeling getting out of hand and wanted no part of it. And though I wanted to respect his wish not to continue doing it, the spirit world wasn’t ready to leave me alone.

My psychic safari went on till the end of 2004. I never heard the voices quite as strongly as I did in those months following 9/11 but I did hear from many soldiers after we engaged in the business of war. Just wanting to tell their stories, the truth about what was going on. 

The last bit of channeling I did from that era of clairvoyance was an “automatic drawing” of a tidal wave looming & people running & a fish jumping out of the wave yelling ’Tsunami!’. A few weeks later was the big tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

From Oct '04 —not exactly as described, but you get the picture

In 2005 I started drinking heavily again, and the psychic safari was over. I had another brief fling with automatic writing from 2011–2013. And in 2014, I did two airplane drawings: one right before flight 370 disappeared, and another right before flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine. Other than that I seem to be of little interest to the spirit world : ))

(Oh, I still do have prophetic dreams sometimes.)

********YEPILOGUE**********

So, how did all this telepathic activity inform my spiritual beliefs? It of course created more questions than answers. It caused me to start thinking about it in terms of DEATH rather than CREATION.

I had pretty much satisfied my need to know how the world and its oceans and plants and animals were created by delving into the organic sciences. By looking into the microscope. All the building blocks & lightning strikes of creation were visible and accounted for. 

But what about these invisible voices, this consciousness that seemed to linger after our personal containers expired? Which instrument could I use to study that? I had become the microscope. Except I was more like a stethoscope.

When I was a Funeral Director the main thing people asked besides whether I was a necrophiliac (no, gross)

was if I ever got any 6th senses from the dead, and I had to say no, I never detected anything resembling a soul hovering around the embalming room, or any part of the funeral home (except maybe the casket room). The death trade did nothing to enhance my already low opinion of the human race : ))

But my years of channeling through automatic writing really switched on my curiosity about the human condition. This is where my obsession with people began. What makes us who we are? Why are we so intent on turning ourselves into simple organisms when we are vast complex radiant galaxies? How do we paint ourselves into the corners of gender, race, age? Why don’t we take the time to know ourselves? Why have we created a society that goes against nature and why have we desecrated the planet that supplies us with our basic needs?

I got some answers to those questions through channeling but it’s all very complicated and this is long enough already, so perhaps I’ll stop here and see if I can formulate any intelligent thoughts about what happens after we die. I feel like I understand it pretty well but organizing it into concise language may not be my strong suit : )) 

I will try though. Next time. In The Octopus Diary.