I’ve blogged in the past about Lily Dale. Whenever I go there, I just soak up the peace and spirituality like a sponge and feel renewed. I try to go once a year. Here’s an article about the history of Lily Dale. It describes how some of the buildings came to be, which is interesting. I think you’ll like it.
2010 is a science fiction movie that’s a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. My suggestion would be to read 2001, see the 2001 movie, then see 2010. You could skip the 2001 movie, as it’s not that great, but don’t skip the book, or you won’t get the most out of it.
2010 is an interesting movie in it’s own right, but on top of that, there is an interesting example of mediumship in it. If you haven’t seen it, HAL 9000 is the computer that runs the spaceship Discovery. HAL is also the medium, who is giving Dr. Heywood Floyd a message from someone who is transformed beyond our physical limitations.
Dr. Floyd’s responses are rather typical of people with no interest and no experience with mediumship, either as a medium or as the recipient of a message (the seeker). It’s easy for someone at this level of experience to get hung up about identity, and then disbelieve anyway. In Dr. Floyd’s case, his disbelief could cost him his life. Thankfully, most mediumshiop does not end up being so drastic, and much/most of it is positive, as opposed to avoiding a negative as Dr. Floyd is being encouraged to do. In addition, Dr. Floyd is receiving an extremely clear message that affects the present moment. Most of the time, messages aren’t so clear, and may or may not affect the present. Sometimes, the effects come years later. I suppose you could call Dr. Floyd lucky to receive such a message.
I grew up on science fiction books like 2001: A Space Odyssey , Childhood’s End , and Rendezvous with Rama
Let’s think creatively. What if you turn this idea on its head, and apply it to spirituality? What if you said that any sufficiently advanced spirituality is indistinguishable from God?
What if you turn it on its head one more time, and say that by default, there is no God in the classic singular, all-powerful sense, but there are entities and the like that are so advanced when compared to your current level that you apply the label God?
What if you say that it doesn’t much matter whether classic singular God exists because you’re too far removed from it, but in the meantime, there is/are plenty of God(s) to go around, because there are always entities and spirituality near enough for you to label them, and aspire to?
And what if you are undaunted by the idea that God is too far removed from you, yet you aspire to be the best you can be anyway, on all levels – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual? What if you keep striving because you know that reaching the next rung up on the ladder still means you’re going up, you know that the ladder is endless but it doesn’t matter, because that’s the way it works – up is up, and you continue going up-and-up-and-up indefinitely, because existence is a process, never an endpoint?
What if you say that there is an absolute God that is not personified in any way, but is more like the totality of all there is, and yet you leave room for singular entities and the like of the level that you can still label them Gods, without contradiction?
What if you throw away the idea that God involves worship in the traditional “I am not worthy to receive you” manner? What if God is something that affects you such that you want to be in its presence, to learn from it, to experience it, completely devoid of the “I am not worthy”, “I can never be like you” and similar trappings that go along with the ego-self?
What if pure goodness and positive spirituality means everything, and titles, whether it’s “God” or “Angel” or any other, are completely wiped away like they never existed, because they have no real meaning anyway?
What if moving up the ladder of progression involves transformation that is so complete and total that we are no longer the person that we were, yet somehow we are, without contradiction?
What if mediumship is the only means to communicate with God-by-any-definition?
These things are close to my ideas about God. What are yours?
I woke up one morning this week and remembered a dream experience I had that involved a stone. It was a very unusual stone, rectangular in shape. One of the long sides was perfectly flat, as if it had been sliced and polished. The bottom (polished) edge was straight, and the top edge was rounded like a bullnose. The stone was a very deep blue/purple, and the non-polished long side was a light chocolate brown, almost like the powdered cocoa you see on certain dessert cakes. There was some type of etching on this side, which I couldn’t read, but the symbols that were etched into the stone with a silver-gray, almost paint-like substance, and were easy to see. I held it in my hand and was doing something with it, but I wasn’t sure what it was. The stone had a very interesting wavy energy to it, and as soon as I touched it, I could feel it. I showed it to my wife, who liked it immediately. If you’ve ever sat with a pyramid on your head for a few minutes, you have a good idea of what the wavy energy vibration was like. I was told that I should keep it by my bed, and saw it near the foot of the bed.
As I woke up, I got dimensions and other information. The stone was about 6-8″ long, 2.5-3″ wide, and about an inch thick. The sides were rounded, and after a quick lookup on google, learned that they were a half bullnose. I also got something about a 37.5 degree angle, but no further detail. I tried looking up information on it, but was only somewhat successful. There are isoceles triangles with 37.5, 37.5 and 105 degree angles, and to me, they look a good bit like pyramids, but that’s about it.
There was a second stone as well. It was round, about the size of a softball but would fit in your hand comfortably. It wasn’t perfectly round, as it had at least one flat area to it. It was a light sky blue and yellow-green (chartreuse), and the colors were swirled together a little bit, not distinctly separate.
Stone: Top and side
I got some paper out and started drawing what I thought it looked like. I draw like a 5-year old. With the help of a little drawing software, I came up with the stunning art work you see here. The Louvre called and said they wanted to replace the Mona Lisa with my beautiful masterpiece, but I turned down the offer.
Anyhow, after a little while, I got two words associated with the stones – Arkenham and Celebrinite. I didn’t find any good information on either word.
I’ve never seen or heard of stones like these before. If you have any ideas about it, I’d like to know.
I’ve been writing a book on mediumship. It’s been near to final stages for a while now, as I have been waiting for it to pass my most stringent editor, my wife, who is not only knowledgeable in the subject, but a very critical reader. We’ve gone back and forth over a number of points in the book, some of which become passionate discussions. I wouldn’t call them heated arguments, but they were close.
I gave her another iteration of the book this week, and it finally passed her scrutiny. There are some very-very minor edits left over, but that’s about it. Now I can move on and have others review it.
It’s a big relief for me. It took ten years to get to this point. Time spent writing, letting it sit for months or more, thinking through the material, then editing, and letting it sit again. Like wine, it has been aging and changing over time. Now it’s ready to move forward in the process.
On the very same day, I went to a seminar involving Egyptian spirituality. It was interesting. When I got back home, I sat down to my computer as usual, and the screen saver was a pyramid with the keystone separated from the base, with an eye in it – like on the back of the American dollar bill. My screen saver has a few hundred different items in it, and it’s rare to see the same item twice. On top of that, I had finished reading Dan Brown’s book, The Lost Symbol
I appreciate these indicators from the spirits. I like to think of them as beacons that help to guide and direct you, perhaps like the ones here.
Noches doradas by Amir K. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/childofwar/)
It’s not unusual for photographers run into spiritual phenomena via their photography. Bruce Brigham did exactly that when he photoed a site for his book on abandoned houses in Ontario, Canada and discovered a spirit person beyond a bus on the property. Afterward, he went to a psychic who provided factually correct information about the spirit.
Here is an article about a medium in Australia, but what I found most interesting in it was some things medium James Van Praagh said about communication. Sometimes when you’re doing message work, you’d like to get more information faster, or better information. For the most part, it doesn’t work that way. What comes, comes, at the rate that it comes. You can ask questions to some extent, and it sometimes helps, but that’s about it.
An article came out in USA Today about a study done on what religions people are subscribing to, how often they’re going, and the like. It seems that people are becoming more eclectic in their beliefs, and combining various beliefs and religions.
It’s interesting that a leading voice for orthodox Baptists says that people are just rampantly confused, and adopting a belief-du-jour system. This reminds me of the record companies who are staunchly holding onto their traditional business models while the world is changing before their very eyes. Or any one of the multitude of companies who are hanging onto old market approaches and ignoring the brand new Internet-based world of marketing and selling.
But, be that as it may, there are some interesting findings in the article, such as devotion to one clear faith is fading, and “Of the 72% of Americans who attend religious services at least once a year (excluding holidays, weddings and funerals), 35% say they attend in multiple places, often hop-scotching across denominations.”
You may want to read Ellen Ratner’s response article as well. She says this type of thing has been going on a lot longer than people think, and brings up some of the religious happenings back in the late 1800’s.
I feel like that time period was not only the birth of Modern Spiritualism, but something of a golden age. Reading about it leaves me wistfully thinking about what it was like to have so much public interest at the time. Must have been nice. Too bad we don’t have it now.
Somewhat like the seeker in Harry Potter’s game of Quidditch, a seeker is any person who is looking for something from the spirits, most commonly in the form of a message or reading. Here is a nice little article about how you as a seeker should approach a reading. It refers to readings by phone, but it essentially applies to any type of reading. Some of it applies to messages as well.
Sometime in the last week or so, I kept getting the Terry Jacks song Seasons in the Sun in my head. Then my Dad called me a couple days ago and said that a friend of the family that we haven’t talked to in a very long time and now lives in another state was suddenly in hospice with cancer. Yesterday morning, I woke up with the song again. That evening, he called again and said she passed away in the afternoon. The song came from the spirit folks, but I think she would have liked it.
There are instances where death is good, to an extent. In her case, it lessened her suffering. It also caused a husband and son to talk after eight years of silence. Perhaps more good will come of it, but nonetheless, it is still sad.
People on the Earth plane die every minute of every day. Intellectually, we know this, but emotionally, we ignore it. We have to in order to get on with life. It’s part of how things work. But death has an important role to play. Existence is larger than a single life, and death is a marker between one life and the next. Death is also a very strong reminder to live your life as best as you can. It is a reminder that what you do with your life, while you have it, is important.
