Epilogue

Aftertime

To the Native people of the Americas, that world of the spirit is as everyday as eating and sleeping.

—Joseph Bruchac, The Waters Between: A Novel of the Dawn Land (1998)

Parapsychology is not even a science, but it may be on the route to revelation.

—Eileen Garrett, Many Voices: The Autobiography of a Medium (1969)

Fallout

A few days after I returned from the Lifeline workshop, the fall semester began. I was busy with registration and the rush of the first week, when everything is gloriously fresh and chaotic all at once. The faces of students still show nascent signs of interest and lectures are fun to deliver. I was finding the reentry process much smoother this time around. I felt energized, and I looked forward to continuing my inner journeys.

One morning, I woke up feeling unaccountably agitated and anxious. I hadn't had any bad dreams I could recall, and there was nothing on my schedule that day that might prompt such feelings. So I brought a Hemi-Sync tape with me to work. I figured I'd have time before my 8:00 A.M. class to meditate. That would calm me down.

When I got to my office I put on my headphones and listened to the soothing sounds of the tape. Then I went to class. I did feel much better as I began my lecture. But about three quarters of the way through the hour, I suddenly felt like a punctured tire. There was nothing left. I plopped down on the edge of the desk (which I never do—I'm always pacing or writing on the board as I talk) and glanced at the clock. It was eight-forty—twenty minutes to go. I didn't think I could make it. So I finished up my remarks, and in an uncharacteristic gesture (and to the barely concealed delight of my students), I dismissed the class early. I was feeling worse by the minute as I retreated downstairs to my office. I thought I would just rest for a while and, I hoped, regain my stamina.

It was around 8:45 A.M. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

A scant few miles away over the clear Manhattan skies, the first of two airplanes was crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Holed up in my office for more than an hour, I had no idea what was going on in the world. I emerged from my room into the busy hallway only to encounter a fellow professor who had just arrived on campus.

“Did you hear?” he asked, his voice trembling. “They attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon! We're at war!”

I couldn't absorb his words. They made no sense. I walked upstairs to the department office, where the radio was playing nonstop. So it was true. By this time, clouds of acrid yellow smoke filled the sky. It was from the fire. The towers had collapsed. It felt like a nightmare, unreal. We stood around in a group, half a dozen professors, shaking our heads in disbelief. Someone mentioned Pearl Harbor. We found out that all the tunnels and bridges were closed. The city was locked down. The phone lines were jammed. I couldn't call home and I couldn't get home. We didn't yet know how many people had died. I thought about them—thousands, we already suspected—who had suddenly, shockingly been obliterated. It was overwhelming.

Then it occurred to me: What about our Lifeline group (and all the Lifeliners out there)? Could we—I—do anything to help? At least it was a plan.

I returned to the solitude of my office. I took some deep breaths and tried to enter a meditative state. As I focused my intent on the twin towers, I was met with a hot furnace blast of emotion. I felt like a spinning top swept up in a tornado. I was helpless. Part of the problem, I knew, was my own distress. I couldn't relax. Later on, I realized I was in a mild state of shock. Hot rage had alternated with teary grief and cold, numbing disbelief. It was like riding a roller coaster. I hoped that others had met with more success.

Several days later, I communicated by email with members of our Lifeline group. They all told similar stories. There was just too much shock on both sides at first. But a few had managed to help, and the retrievals were still going on.

In late October, I received a handwritten note from George, one of our group. “Felt your presence at the W.T.C. site,” he reported.

Had the strength of my intent enabled me to get through on some level anyway? As Bob Monroe often said, just because you can't remember it doesn't mean it didn't happen. So much, even in our nightly dreams, is beyond our ability to translate into terms the conscious mind can accept or even understand.

Questions Galore

As the initial trauma of the attack wore off, I was hounded by a number of disturbing questions. Was this the “big event” involving many deaths that I had been sensing—and dreading—for months? Could this have been the reason that “by chance” I found myself in Lifeline when I had wanted to take another workshop? Furthermore, how many others out there had experienced similar foreknowings? Were we somehow being prepared, on a collective levet for this horrific episode? Could anything have been done to prevent it had these warnings been taken seriously?

My students were consumed by questions as well. In several classes, there were heated debates about religion, for it was impossible to ignore the critical role that religion had played in the events of September 11. Some students argued that it was a cruel perversion of religion that led the attackers and their sympathizers to claim that they were doing “God's work.” (In a bizarre twist, some prominent American religious “leaders” seemed to agree. They stated that God had removed his “protection” from the United States because we allow women to have abortions, don't force children to pray in public school, and recognize the civil rights of gays and lesbians.) But others pointed to the long, bloody, history of religious wars, intolerance, persecutions, and crusades as evidence of religion's complicity. They argued that even if religion was not the sole cause of social conflicts, it seemed impotent in the face of them.

I admitted to my students that the vengeful, egomaniacal “gods” of the fundamentalists always struck me as little more than childish revenge fantasies. If they existed, they would no more be worthy of worship than don Vito Corleone, General Custer, or Genghis Khan. Interesting literary characters, perhaps. Worthy of our (or anyone's) devotion? Not on your life. They're devils.

But the issue goes deeper than fundamentalism, deeper than rival theologies. I know I'll take a lot of heat for saying this, but there is something in all the “higher” religions of civilization that lends itself to fanaticism. That “something” is what I have called Answerism: the illusion that one can attain (or has already attained) Absolute Truth, and the consequent tendency to treat certain beliefs and authorities as sacred cows, beyond critical questioning. Answerism is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, for it is inside us, inflating us with corrosive self-righteousness and immunizing us against deeper self-awareness. There is no greater source of corruption than the conceit that one can explain everything, once and for all.

Answerism is on the wane, but it is not going down without a fight. It is deeply afraid of the future. Like a star that burns brightest before it winks out, we see a resurgent religious fundamentalism, both here in America and abroad. Battle lines are being drawn.

As long ago as 1924, the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood declared that we would have to learn to become content with issuing a series of partial and infinitely revisable “interim reports” about reality. Fortunately, there are a growing number of individuals on the fringes of our religious and spiritual traditions who realize that no answer can ever be final or complete, and that it is the free play of consciousness itself that matters.

Inquiry, sparked by wonder, fired by curiosity, and freed from the arbitrary constraints of stale dogmas, will lead us to develop our own natural sensitivity in creative partnership with our rationality. So we will once again become close and inspired readers of Nature's great book—Eve herself—and the exquisitely intricate patterns of meaning woven therein.

We have no other choice.

Parapsychology en Route

Which is why, in the wake of 9 / 11, I began to feel more urgently than ever that official parapsychology is on the wrong track. Top psi researchers can still blithely dismiss anecdotal evidence (personal experiences) as not providing data worthy of scientific consideration. Their Holy Grail is proof in the laboratory through controlled experiments. For them, only EHEs that can be objectively measured and quantified are significant.

I have no doubt that useful things can be learned in a laboratory. I'm not against research or technical precision or technology. But if we continue to defer to Scientific Authority and its dictates, we will not learn to trust the data provided by our own experiences. Nor will we learn how to interpret that data, which is couched in the (to us) still arcane languages of Non-Verbal Communication (NVC). We will remain fledgling birds waiting anxiously in the nest with open beaks to be fed the sacred worms of Knowledge. In the meantime, we may starve to death.

I couldn't help wondering: What if everyone who had foreknowledge of the September 11 events had trusted their perceptions and shared them with like-minded individuals? How many of us were there? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Millions, perhaps? Who knows? I refuse to believe that I am that unusual or special. Nor can I help speculating that if a mass network of people who knew how to spot and report an interesting psychic anecdote existed, those awful events might have been preventable.

Not having enough faith in ourselves may well be the ultimate intelligence failure.

Could this faith be what all the world “authorities”—political, religious, cultural, and social elites—are afraid of? What if democracy is only in its earliest infancy? The greatest revolutions in human history may lie ahead, as we embrace and nurture the evolution of our natural sensitivity.

“Being psychic is simply being more sensitive to the sea around us,” writes Joe McMoneagle. “It's simply a method that allows for [an] additional sense of being.”1

We all must learn how to swim in this sea of information and surf the waves of possibilities. Can it be done? Yes, it can. We are all natural sensitives. It is just a matter of recognizing and developing our abilities.

The philosopher Paul Feyerabend was suspicious of the privileged status that official science occupies in our culture. He insisted that “Laymen can and must supervise Science.” He added that “it would not only be foolish but downright irresponsible to accept the judgment of scientists…without further examination”² (Feyerabend's italics). We must do even more. In effect, we must do an end run around official science and religion alike (and all the other officials). Science and religion have not lived up to their own principles. Both have allowed attachment to dogma (materialist metaphysics, statistical analysis) to dampen the spirit of scientific inquiry, which is unafraid to follow truth wherever it may lead. We must hold the feet of science to the fire of its own inner truth—whatever the cost.

As far back as 1972, the maverick psi researcher and transpersonal psychologist Dr. Charles Tart proposed a revolutionary “state-specific science of consciousness.”3 He asked his fellow scientists to relinquish their taboos against subjective self-reporting and anecdotal evidence. He invited his peers to enter into non-ordinary states of consciousness and study them from the inside, by experiencing them, instead of just observing events from the outside and quantifying the results.

These trained psychic explorers of inner space would then reflect on their experiences and compare notes to test the hypothesis that altered states of consciousness (Focus Levels) might yield insights into the existence of nonphysical realms. The lust for statistical proof would be replaced (or at least supplemented) with the exciting challenges of firsthand exploration.

With a few exceptions, Dr. Tart's proposal was not warmly received (at least on the official level) by his fellow scientists.⁴ This, despite the fact that Dr. Tart had achieved widespread (if grudging) respect for his meticulous research and theoretical work. His colleagues were reluctant to modify or even suspend their assumptions—at least they didn't want to be seen doing so in public. If indeed they had had their own EHEs, most were reluctant to say so openly. They might go so far as to admit that an early anomalous experience in childhood (a dream, vision, or out-of-body episode) initially sparked their investigations. But they would not take the next logical step of making such inner experiences (and themselves) the focus of their inquiries. Unlike, say, archaeologist J. Norman Emerson, they could not bring themselves directly into their work. That would be “unscientific.”

As my friend Steven Rosen notes, in parapsychology reason and intuition may be unified in theory, but in actual practice, they remain separate and far apart.⁵

I no longer believe we can afford to wait for these timid scientists to develop the backbone they need in order to break ranks with the most conservative elements of their own tradition. We must take matters into our own hands (and psyches). We laypersons must launch our own expeditions to the forbidden planets of consciousness.

Further Explorations

In the flurry of emails exchanged in the wake of September 11, I reestablished contact with Gina, one of my fellow Lifeliners. It was Gina who first suggested that we do some “partnered exploring” sessions. We would meditate on the same day and time, and attempt to “meet up” in the Focus Levels. Afterward, we would report our results (before reading our partner's report, of course) and compare notes via email.

I jumped at the chance—how could I not? I told Gina it was a great idea.

Sometimes our results were mystifying. It was almost as if Gina had taken a slow train to Boston and I'd hopped a red-eye to Chicago. But other times—well, listen to this:

During one session my tape player malfunctioned just as I was easing into Focus 10. Cursing and fumbling in the dark, I changed the batteries and began again. I was sure I wouldn't be able to relax. But no sooner had I closed my eyes than I received a vivid impression of a very thin woman with closely cropped dark hair. She looked distressed or confused. She also looked familiar. As for the rest of the session, it was fairly unremarkable. I must have “clicked out” because it seemed as if no time had passed before I was receiving the signal to return back to C1 (the state of normal waking consciousness).

I realized why the woman I'd glimpsed looked familiar: She reminded me of Kim Hunter, the actress. I remembered her playing the female ape-scientist opposite Roddy McDowell and Charlton Heston in The Planet of the Apes. I wondered why I'd thought of her? But it was such a minor thing. I hadn't yet told Gina that I'd struck out. No matter, I'd email her the next day.

On the way to work the next morning, I tuned the car radio to the news and traffic report, and something caught my attention. Kim Hunter had died the previous day.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

When I arrived at my office, I turned on the computer and hurriedly dashed off an email to Gina. Later that same morning I received this reply:

It is VERY interesting that you should mention Kim Hunter. One of the technicians here that works for me also moonlights as an actress in local theatre. She knew Kim Hunter from her New York theatre group. Doris (the tech) said, “Yesterday she [Kim Hunter] was on my mind and I [felt] I should write her a little note to say hello.” This morning Doris got the news that she had passed. I said to Doris, funny that you should mention it to me, she MAY BE LOST [in Focus 23]. I told Doris that I would do a meditation at lunchtime to make sure she gets to the Reception Center [in Focus 27]. I also told Doris that she must have been very afraid when she passed, usually it's the fear that keep[s] a person wandering around in the “fog” [of Focus 23].

Sure enough, Gina went into meditation and found “a very frightened Kim” wandering around in the grey mist that many people experience as Focus 23. Gina moved Kim to the Reception Center in Focus 2 7 (the Park) where she was met by what Gina described as “a lively group of friends and family.” She said that Kim appeared “very happy and expressed her thanks over and over.”

Where will these new explorations lead? It is to be hoped to the yonder edge of further “boggle thresholds”—and far beyond.

Eve's Way: Paradise Renamed

Michael Grosso refers to anomalous experiences (EHEs) as “soulmaking” experiences because they enable us to know ourselves more deeply and to become ourselves more completely.

Living out of our EHEs means following our curiosity and not taming the wild impulse to question what we have been told. We must be courageous and irreverent—just like Mother Eve. We must listen to the forbidden voices of our inner selves and learn to trust our imagination, intuition, and creative inspiration. Becoming and remaining sensitive to the invisible bonds that link all forms of life, physical and nonphysical, is the one true aim of those who would live out of their EHEs.

Pioneering psychic explorers like Eileen Garrett,6 Jane Roberts, and Bob Monroe have shown us that it is possible to develop our sensitivity without abandoning critical reason, and without falling back on shopworn dogmas.

Can we follow their brave lead?

What new theories of reality and self may come if we follow their example? What new philosophies will be born if we celebrate Eve as our hero instead of condemning her as our chief villain?

Many of the thoughtful sensitives and sensitive thinkers mentioned in this book have already provided important pieces of the puzzle. Carl Jung thought it likely that all the pieces would not be in place for at least another few hundred years. Perhaps he was right.

Yet we already know what the new views will not say.

They will not say that nature (and our own nature) is evil or sinful or fallen. They will not assume that the divine is apart from nature. (Indeed, any god who claims to be separate from nature is suffering from dissociative disorder, Theologicus Ridiculous, and is urged to seek immediate treatment.) They will not abhor the physical body or the feminine.

These new philosophies will not assume that life is a series of accidents. They will not dismiss cosmic meaning as a bad joke, a trick of perception, or the result of intellectual dishonesty or moral cowardice.

Nor will they hold that our individuality is an illusion or curse. Our uniqueness and our freedom will not be despised as burdens best surrendered to other humans, or as unwanted gifts returned, with a sigh of relief, to the cosmic All-Giver. They will not long for escape from the cruel karmic “wheel of rebirth.” The left-brained rational ego will not be something to be “burned off” like a useless ugly wart but, rather, will be used as a booster rocket ignited by the fuel of EHEs into a creative expansion and cooperation with other, previously hidden and denied aspects of a larger selfhood.

These greater realities will be seen as intersecting and interpenetrating even the most “mundane” moments and activities of everyday life, as well as the Earth on which we walk and the cells of our bodies.

In other words, whatever these new philosophies will be, they will be unlike all our conventional theories, religious or scientific, Western or Eastern.

Ironically, some of our best guides to the future are peoples we previously disparaged and discarded in the past: the native tribes of our American continent. As the Abenaki writer Joseph Bruchac observes, to these indigenous peoples the “world of the spirit is as everyday as eating and sleeping…It is a given. A gift like the gift of breath, which still remains the greatest mystery”7 We should be grateful for this gift. We must accept it, humbly and sincerely, as the American Indians did.

We can't all be Indians, says the Sioux philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. in his famous manifesto, God Is Red. However, he adds, we can and must learn to think indigenously—if we hope to survive. What would this mean in practice?

According to Deloria, “It was not what [Indian] people believed to be true that was important but what they experienced as true.”⁸ The major world religions, he says, stress the adoption of fixed beliefs and practices: a universal gospel of salvation or enlightenment expressed in general formulas. The Indians' spiritual sensibility did not rest on such abstract notions, but was shaped by their particular (and changing) environment and their immediate relationship to the living family of consciousnesses that inhabited the world around them.

“Hence,” concludes Deloria, for the Indian, “revelation was seen as a continuous process of adjustment to the natural surroundings and not as a specific message valid for all times and places.”9 The spirituality of the Indians was thus always a work in progress, an ongoing process of inquiry, and not a finished product.

In his essay on “Vision and Community,” Deloria picks up on this theme of the pragmatic and questioning nature of the Indian spiritual way. He takes the established religious traditions to task for what I have called their Answerism. Not only do the great religions ask philosophical questions about the meaning, value, and ultimate purpose of human life; they grandiosely claim “to provide answers to these questions knowing full well that both questions and answers must come from honest and open participation in the world.”¹⁰

In other words, the only thoughts worth thinking are those that arise out of contemplating our personal experience of the magic of nature's invisible bonds. According to the philosopher Schopenhauer, a thought not based in our individual experience and reasoning is like wearing a silly wax nose.¹¹ Lacking any organic relationship to the person's mind, it is only a put-on.

Thus what the Native Americans have to teach us is not undermined by their dwindling numbers, or even by the sad, violent history that the dominant society has foisted upon them. Their living legacy of a highly inquisitive and adaptable spiritual consciousness must be acknowledged and permitted to penetrate and color our awareness.

“Tribal religions do not claim to have answers to the larger questions of human life,” writes Deloria. “But they do know various ways of asking the questions and this is their great strength and why they will ultimately have great influence in people's lives.”¹²

By sowing the seeds of our philosophical reflections in the fertile soil of our psychic sensitivity, sympathy, or whatever one wishes to call this natural magic, we are making our way back to paradise—the inward source of truth. That has been the central argument of this book.

As we have seen, paradise is not a place or destination, but a “dialectical” way of being in the world. This just means that we hold a continuing conversation with reality in which the questions we ask invite “answers” in the form of exceptional experiences, experiences that in turn provoke further questions, and so on, in a never-ending, perhaps infinite, process of self-discovery and healing.

This is not merely a personal healing, however, as I have tried to show through my own example, but a reconciliation with others-indeed, with what the Sioux Indians call “all our relations” (mitakuyé oyasin). These “others” include animals, plants, nonphysical teachers and friends, ancestors, family, our own past, and even the consciousness of planet Earth herself.

In order to accomplish this project of reconciliation, I have argued, we must triumph over our own individual fears, as well as overcome the obstacles in our beliefs that have been placed there, like clogged filters obstructing our perceptions, by the scientific, religious, and philosophical authorities of our culture. Not to mention the political, economic, and social elites who benefit from maintaining the ideological status quo.

Thus one of the key implications of my argument is that the cultivation of psychic sensibility is inextricably linked to a truly egalitarian democracy of spirit. I have suggested that the politics of the psychic, and of all exceptional human experience, cannot be overlooked or minimized if we wish to understand and transcend both the internal and external barriers to our further development and growth. Power is a concept that students of the psychic will have to take far more seriously in the future.

My quest has taken me very far afield from where I once expected to be. There have been many unexpected twists and turns, reversals and epiphanies, sorrows and joys, along the way. Yet this path has also led me to repair a relationship, broken off early in my childhood, to natural sources of wonder, wisdom, beauty, and truth both (and at once) inner and outer. I still have so many unanswered questions, and still hope to have so many more new experiences. But this is as it should be.

For many years, in many quarters, there has been a longing for, an eager anticipation of, a new world religion that would somehow overcome the defects and shortcomings of all the old myths and solve all our problems for us, once and for all.

What I have tried to show in this book is that the new religion—the new worldview—will be each individual's open-ended inquiry into their own experience of the great mystery, in gratitude and wonder, with no strings attached. When we embrace this quest, we make the future here and now.

We must not sit idly by and passively wait for the world to be remade for us. Such bright utopian hopes so easily fade into dark apocalyptic visions when disappointed (as history tells us they must). We cannot be rescued from ourselves.

Only when we elect to accept our personal responsibility and our innate psychic powers do we begin to make ourselves whole. Then we can trace the roots of our understanding to the magic of our lives, and to the magical life of the world.

That will truly be paradise.

Coda

It's springtime in Maine. We're at the lake again. The snow banks are beating a hasty retreat into the woods, and the thick crust of ice is melting off the surface of the lake. The air is perfumed with the sweet scent of decaying pine needles—Mother Nature's aromatherapy, free for the inhaling. I feel it in the air: Summer will be here in no time.

It's too soon yet to put up the hummingbird feeder. But it's not too early to think about what I might say to my old hummingbird teacher, if we should ever meet again.

Thank you. I am learning. I'll pass it on.