Adventures
- Introduction: True Astral Adventures!?
- Let's consider what might constitute a tale of true astral adventure...
- How I toured Rome without leaving Home
- my true past life verification of August 6, 2005
- True Synchronicity Stories
- That shaped Carl's life, as told May 2004
- The Song of Isha
Ganesha
- A true lucid dream, as told May 2002, published in Dream Network Journal, Autumn 2002
- Dreamlike Days and Lucid Nights:
How I was Raised by Spirits
- DISCLAIMER: My new 2011 website explains my life much more clearly, back in 2001 I was struggling to make sense of more than I could
- Introduction: The making of a spiritual autobiography, written 2001
- Chapter 1. A JOURNEY OVERVIEW
- Chapter 2. BUILD-UP TO A BREAK-DOWN
- Chapter 3. HILDEGARD AND THE CASTLE
- Chapter 4. A MEETING WITH JESUS
- Chapter 5. RIDING THE DRAGON
- Chapter 6. ORDO VIRTUTUM
- Chapter 7. RESCUING MY DAD
- Chapter 8. HAMMOND FOR CONTRAST
- Chapter 9. SWEDENBORG FOR RESOLUTION
- Chapter 10. HOME AND FUTURE
- Appendix: More Clues from Dreams
- Butterflies and Brother Blue
- A storyteller's chronology of mystical synchronicities, submitted 1999.
Introduction: True Astral Adventures!?
Let's now consider what might constitute an tale of true astral adventure.
Sometimes people will get a totally clear and describable out-of-body or spiritworld experience from beginning to end. The adventure will be easy to write down, sensibly sequential, and make for good reading afterward. This is wild and wonderful stuff, and there are great and varied writers in this category, such as Swedenborg or Robert Monroe. The otherworldliness of the astral places and events thus described will have a logic all of their own, lucidly and irresistably recorded, so that even if you don't believe in other worlds then you will still be able to enjoy a good story.
Sometimes it is possible to receive packets of energy in the dream or out-of-body state, packets which can be unwrapped and unfolded mentally afterward into complete monologues and dialogues. These philosophical triumphs of second-hand theatre can help to keep the reader narratively involved and convinced of authenticity. Robert Monroe called his thought packets "rotes", and such things can certainly make an astral explorer's documentation seem enviably specific, detailed, and lively. But are they accurate? Some people would say yes, others no, and it seems to depend on a storyteller's abilities to receive and transmit styles of information from afar without a repetitive bias of interpretation. Can the words of one transcriptionist can do justice to the variety of beings met in astral encounters? To me it seems more a tedium than an invalidation, that in all of Swedenborg's stories, great as they are, pretty much everyone talks like Swedenborg.
Metaphysical works can become dry and impersonal, if "too channelled" or prescriptive, which can limit the popular reach and emotional involvability of the adventure. It's nice to feel that your storyteller is human and dazzled too, not just know-it-all on a pedestal reciting transpersonal words. So some astral explorers may prefer to invite more creativity and subjectivity for the following of muses or guides, and choose to frame what could have been a spiritworld tour as better philosophical fiction. This could also be politically safer, of course. Thus is it possible that much of the great alternate-reality literature of humanity, such as that of Dante or Lewis Carroll, is thinly disguised astral voyaging of this type, not so much imagined as imaged and re-presented within a personal flair. We may gain poetry and passion at the cost of some accuracy, but isn't that a bit like life itself, a place where the artist's consciousness may be as much passenger as vehicle or driver. It's intriguing for the reader as well, when the fun of pop psychology becomes the analyzing of people's stories for the contexts and subtexts in which even they may be unaware - the old "so what's up with that?" A soul seeks to create a larger impact, as balance is struck between individual and pattern. So a fantastic adventure is still a great adventure, even if only possibly astral/literal, and lessons are still there to be learned.
But even the range of easy-to-tell and easy-to-read astrally indicative stories aren't the whole astral story, are they now. No, not at all. Many people are creatively struggling to bring their spiritworld contacts into daily contexts, with not much recountable to show for it. Flashback to a dream here, follow a phantom hunch there, give a shiver and a tear for a spirit ideal. People often feel the life-changing, life-affirming qualities of inspiration and guidance from places they cannot point to. They may become caught up in the whirlwinds of amazing half-realized and half-foreseen episodes, wherein for a few precious dreamlike days and rational nights the entire meaning of a personal life becomes destined or holy and rare. Only later when the glorified individual must fall back to Earth, will they be forced to invent the personal mythologies they can neither fully explain, nor believe, nor forget. Just to keep real within the unreal, many people will carry the superstitions and faiths or denials of loved ones and kin, perceptual modes and artifacts, for so many things we cannot see, touch, nor hear yet which continue to influence our daiily lives. As human beings we know our way of intuition and emotion to be true and good, even when as logical beings we fear it so, and thus the processes of ineffable revelations regenerate themselves on bigger and smaller scales, in stories we live more than tell.
Cried one theologian entreated to record his philosophy, "Where do I begin? Everything is connected to everything else!" It seems a kind of profanity, a hubris of madness, to even begin to tell our stories sometimes, much less tease out the astral-real parts. Who will feel what we felt, what words can be true? Many articulate souls will keep the silence of actions that speak louder than words, but this is not always for the best, nor do I think it natural. It's good to record, it gives us the opportunity to review and learn more, and many people will reach for the ineffable and grasp pretty well. So living creatively at the fabled brink of genius and madness is not so dangerous or rare after all. If we keep in mind that we're all fashioning from our wits the tangible from the intangible every day, sculpting the physical show-and-tells for our non-physical non-ordinary relationships, then it really just becomes the challenge to stay within sensible ego bounds (not too self-important, not too unimportant a self either) as we work out the ways to recount our God-given adventures.
God-given stories, that's what I call our lives. And to tell a God story well is to show more of God's love. We must find the ways to be good to our friends, to encourage good deeds, and to let someone else know (that someone else often being another side of ourselves) what wonders we've seen and been through.
Myself, I have seen a variety of astral adventures, felt fully and heard. Usually there isn't so much exact, after-the-fact dialogue left to pass on. I remember remembering, I remember forgetting as well. I'm cautious to put words into anyone's mouths. I've also met people who excel in the unwinding (rewinding?) of full speeches, so maybe it's a skill that I too will learn. But for now, even my best astral stories are more like efforts at encapsulations for strange places, wonderous laws, and eternal partnerships, from which may be gleaned yet one more principle or moral in the great cosmic love. I'm also not so hesitant to weave in a larger fabric, for a God's tale that might include my waking life, resplendent with the synchronicities and opportunites that came to me there.
Dreamy days and rational nights, I seek to raise them together and hold them there, in the more light. I like to communicate a whole sense for the mystical life, for how good it can be, rich and more sensible and guiding than not. Yes, such a life comes full of mysteries and always raises more questions than answers. But the trail of a highway to the city of God beckons on, a place full of gardens and earthly delights, made whole and loving by a spiritual intent.
So I wouldn't want to build walls between people, for what can be a spiritual or mystical adventure, and what cannot. Not everyone can recall a whole holy dream, or go out of body, or talk with and see a spirit friend. At least not right away. Many people will get bits and pieces of stuff their whole lives. So let's validate and support a whole genre of high episode writing, the whole mystical adventure story, for that which might encompass and encourage us all.
What follows then are true astral learning experiences, shared from me and my friends and contributors to this website. Hope you enjoy! Let us not expect too much or too little; we should discover that the very act of living a whole life with sensitivity is a mystical journey. The inner state is expressed in a curious reality experience, the consciousness notices, consciousness notices its noticing, and there comes a natural joy. The mind records a lesson, the heart embraces a larger universe. Feel free to find an inspiration for you in these sharings, and relate more than just a little, or not at all, whatever is better and helpful for you. The intentions of love and awe are a reader's to uphold as well, as they were given to you.
