What's New
Thursday October 19, 2006: Six more stories in the Consciousness Fiction projects section, all the recent shorts while I continue working on a novella called "Jesus and the Time Travellers". Enjoy!
Sunday July 16, 2006: I continue to write stories, blog entries, and movie reviews. Life is good. For some summer fun, I recommend getting a bucket of sidewalk chalk and making a Driveway Labyrinth, enjoy!
Saturday December 17, 2005: Since turning 42 at the end of October, I'm building my daily attention to my websites and essays and stories. Success so far includes a new commitment to posting daily movie reviews at MysticalMovieGuide.com and having self-consciousness fun with my new blog, check it out!
Wednesday September 14, 2005: Holy smokes, I just stayed up til 3am and wrote a one-act play called "Cathar Sis and The Rapist". Enjoy!
Thursday June 23, 2005: Catching up on more entries, I added two art show stories from 2002 and 2004 in the Adventures section. Also, I've been working on making the site more compatible with Netscape and other browsers, so everyone should be able to navigate around, though only Explorer may see the animated stars in the home page.
Saturday June 18, 2005: My first what's new entry here in 3 years! See, you just never know when you'll return to something. Well of course I've been busy. We did 4 years of the Mystical Art and Talent Shows at the Cambridge Swedenborg Chapel, 12 shows in all, and now I'm taking a break as we cut back to 1 show per year. I helped my friend Kurt Leland get a website online with plenty of his own astral adventures. I continued to work plenty on the Mystical Movie Guide, and now I've started a series of strange stories that I call Consciousness Fiction, with an eye on eventual filming. Enjoy!
Thursday August 15, 2002: Seen any good movies lately? But of course, there are more directors than ever exploring consciousness, life after death, etc. Let the amazing Mystical Movie Guide help you find a good flick to share with your soul... now under construction...
Wednesday April 10, 2002, 4:44 am: NEW NEW NEW! Yes, I finally pushed myself to put a lot of material on this site and complete all the sections to reasonable degrees. I napped earlier, but oh my gosh look at that, it really is 4:44 am! I'll have to call in late to work (yes I have a day job).
- The annual sermons I've been giving at the Swedenborg Chapel are under Precedents
- The 50 page spiritual autobiography I wrote for a 2001 essay contest is under Adventures
- The Supports and Links sections have been appropriately begun.
- I was moved to expand the comments on the Afterlife page under Connections.
- I cleaned up the design and made all essays printer-friendly. I like to read from paper, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
What was the impetus for packaging up the site after being so long full of holes? Well, I did finish this big essay to pave the way for a book, and I wanted to take a next step in making my views available. Also, my friend Alexander D. came back from a workshop with Buhlman and Taylor, which he raved about, and then a few weeks later William Buhlman wrote me coincidentally to ask for permission to link to my site. Then there's my friend Kurt Leland who's a great channeler and author, and I'll be making a website soon for him. So that's it I said, I've got to polish up my own stuff and finally declare this site ready for prime time. I've got plans for more essays, more Spirit Depiction Art Reference Gallery links, some jokes and quotes, and a guestbook or forum, but no promises when since I'm so busy with the www.SoulStirring.org art shows and other projects. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!
Monday July 30, 2001:
What's New is that this site is finally going to get a little bit of context. It's been up for a year with more to be done, but the story behind the story can finally be told. And I found the coolest little spiralling graphic for a What's New page; it'll be one of the few graphics on this site that I didn't (couldn't) make myself.
The name AstralResearch.org came to me after I woke up from some exciting dreams on the morning of June 10, 2000. It has since become the glue that is me, between several different projects and sides of my life. OrdoVirtutum.com was both transpersonal and sometimes too personal; it is my 1998 semi-channeled ecstatic homage to Hildegard of Bingen, who helped me discover my spiritual self. SwedenborgChapel.org is the place that my spirit friends took me, to grow in a good physical community; I was honored to redesign their website in the spring of 2000. Spring 2001 saw the rise of SoulStirring.org, our long brewing dream for the mystical art community that could be nurtured by the chapel.
AstralResearch.org was always meant to be a good destination for my own inspirational autobiographical essays. I didn't foresee that it would soon be the resting place for my own father's eulogy, or that an endlessly ambitious psychic art directory would grow from a workshop with Alex Grey. I also didn't foresee that an idealogical conflict would turn me off to my own project's name for many months; it turned out that astralresearch.com was a synchronous neighbor with whom I found friendship at first, then apocalyptic echoes of the sort I was still leaving behind. These people are interesting and smart, but they're also anxiously stockpiling psychic defenses for the astral judgement day, and my side/site was always meant to be much lighter and freer than that (if you understand the symbols then you don't have to become them). But I've accepted now, all ego and counter-ego aside, that this could be just where I belong: I like the idea of astral research, and I'm speaking for an organizational principle, a quieter, gentler alternative to the combative and commercial. There is just so much God energy at work in the world, today as ever before, that I wouldn't want to ever stop looking for angels, higher selves, or our own wiser spirits in their manifold forms, and furthermore evidencing my contacts with. Spiritual intelligence. Lots of art love. Which brings up the second synchronicity of my astral neighborhood. My inspired design for the chakra person lighting up to astral liftoff, I discovered months later, is wonderfully reminiscent of the International Insititute of Projectiology and Conscientiology logo. I like these people a lot, right down to their preciously awkward Brazilian translations (my brother-in-law hails from, and the South of U.S.A. connections keep cropping up in my life).
So here it is summer 2001. The Soul Stirring shows are phenoms. I'm living happily ever after because Kimberly and I got married last October at the chapel. We're back from our 2nd annual workshop with Alex and Allyson Grey, those avowed soulmates who also met in Boston. Everyone has their darker sides too, but so what. I've developed a great balance of friends both near and far, incarnate and discarnate, and my own spirit and I are on the best of terms yet. Nothing but projects as far as the eye can see, opportunities with Love written large overhead. So let's reopen this glue called AstralResearchorg, even as I write a book about It. It what? My own God-given life, that's what. Trust the Goddess who Loves you and the All That Is who knows you are there; there is nothing more powerful and lovely than your very own life. Pick your diamond self out of the dust, see the gold that never tarnished. Wipe your own steam off the mirror, and taste the fruits of your own existence (for it is by their fruits will you know them, and they have become us). Discover your very own Life.
I always like to check in with myself after I write. So how do I feel now having said the above? I'm buzzing out! I didn't exactly soul surge, I didn't weep, I didn't channel. I feel too good to be righteously driven. I have just spoken from my honest position, and for this I have become deeply, profoundly, and warmly high. I've got a good soulful buzz on; in the old lingo I'd be trippin' for God. But I don't seek out drugs anymore, because I like being more of myself. So with any luck now, I'll be cleanly and lucidly out with my own spirit tonite, and we'll look for a teacher together, maybe one of those monks we saw chanting for consciousness a few nights ago. And maybe by morning I'll have something to write Home about. Or maybe I'll just be more in Love.
Yep, this is my own AstralResearch.org after All. And it's a place you can share, because it's what being human can be all about.
PostScript, next morning: yes I did start out on an adventure with my spirit last night, however I backed out due to fears for my physical well-being (unecessary in a dreamworld of course). So we ended up sitting on a beach and talking in symbols about that. I had an appointment with a sunny dentist's chair this morning, so I see the connection. Astralresearch isn't about glamour after all, it's about learning. Much of the time I find, our spirits simply need to learn more about our physical fears, and our incarnated minds need to learn more about the nonphysical possibilities for fearlessness. The interface is richly instructive and probably the point. I only recently solved my decades long recurring nightmare of being on many parallel train tracks and hearing a train coming. I'd wake up in a terror not knowing which track to be on in order to not get hit. Finally one night, with my spirit nearby, I went *through* the track and into the ground, to safely wait for the train to pass over me. No more nightmares after that! Maybe next time I'll just hitch a ride and see where she goes. :)
