as waves upon an endless sea...

That I could know that I have lived for 74 years and know because I actually remember, I actually have clear memories in my body, my mind, my heart, my soul. I have equally clear memories of lives I have lived before, though I have doubt because I cannot prove it was “not just my imagination.” But, considering what I’ve experienced this lifetime and can prove, I actually no doubt about the ones that came before and most likely will come in the future. The soul is on the ride and plunges into this form and that, hopefully with some forethought as to “getting there” and “being here to get there.”

 

I sit with certain intentions, with an open mind of sorts, “waiting on the Lord,” as it were. Now I’m more willing let thoughts come and “let them be”; the computer has to catch up, has to reboot itself, make sense of what has arisen and been absorbed. Then to digest, to organize, which is to have a sense of comprehension in the face of utterly overwhelming complexities. One still must ride the crest of one’s existence. Then the wave rolls over and crashes, one is thrown down, smashed, drowned; then to rise up again to the next crest of the next wave of one’s own existence. And the waves come until the ocean itself fades and vanishes. We are as but waves upon the endless sea. 

MY MULTIDIMENSIONAL LIFE

My life has been tempered by numerous experiences of “the other side(s).”

I begin by listing events with approximate age. I am now in my mid-70s.

I should note that there was no use of drugs in these occurrences.

 

1.     Ghost, age 6-7. A man who had hung himself in what was my bedroom approximately 6 months to a year before my parents bought the house, appeared materially to me initially but because I was so frightened by his appearance, changed to more a ghost-like foggy figure and visited me regularly for more than a year, almost every night. There was a record of a news article in the Times-Union of such a suicide at the address of my home.

2.     Ghost, age 10. After my grandfather died, I saw him the next morning puttering around in his garden in his backyard. I was looking out a second-story window. I found fresh footprints from his Italian rattan pointed shoes in the fresh dirt of the garden.

3.     Ghosts, age 16. My girlfriend lived in a refurbished old 17^th century schoolhouse in which the children and teacher had taken refuge in the cellar from the local Indians. They had planned on escaping through a tunnel with a trap door. The Indians, however, came in through the tunnel and killed them all. From the first floor above the small door in the floor that led down a ladder into the cellar, I heard furniture being moved and children’s frightened voices. When we opened the door into the cellar, it was untouched and empty.

4.     Demon, age 18. When I was in college I was interested in “black magic” and wanted to “conjure” a demon. With several witnesses present, I performed a “black mass” in my dorm room and a demon did appear, looking rather like a child-sized black cat with a human face and red eyes.

5.     Past Life, age 20. I lived in an apartment in my later college years. This event began with a repeated dream that unfolded over seven nights. It occurred in 18^th century Ireland (1728 appears on a gravestone with my Irish name engraved on it). I am in a gravelike hole with a heavy door on top of me with an iron grating through which I can see out of the hole. People are throwing rocks down upon the door, crushing me (which is how male witches were dealt with at the time—which was repeated in the Salem witch trials which occurred a bit North of where I was living). The same woman appears in each dream, standing above the hole and looking disapprovingly down at me with a steady gaze. On the eight day I am going down the stairs from my apartment and see that the new tenant who has moved in is the SAME WOMAN as in my dreams! However, I do not make the connection, having no belief or awareness of anything such as past lives. The woman stops when she sees me, smiles, and says, “Seamus, it’s been a long time.” I have no idea (at the time) what she is talking about. But more awareness does come to me in due time.

6.     Past Life, age 22. I am attending a music festival in the wheatfields of Sussex, England, with a British friend whose house in am staying at in St. John’s Wood in London. There is a crowd of thousands of young people pushing and straining at the entrance to the festival, which is a large area surrounded by a high wire fence with uniformed security guards located along the fence and high towers with spotlights. It is dusk and the gate is now opening and the crowd is pressing forward. Suddenly the blinding floodlights on the towers shine upon the crowd, moving over the crowd. When the light hits me, I freeze in terror, as if I am going to die in that moment. Through the dust cloud enveloping me, I see people with shaved heads, wearing rags, some with yellow and black stripes all around me. My stomach is sucked in; I am ravenous with hunger. I am afraid and confused. Then, just as suddenly, I am back in the crowd of young people. This experience happens one more time when the spotlight shines on me again. This time I realize that I have had a flashback to my past life as a Jew in a concentration camp. More reveals itself to me in due time.

7.     UFO, age 24. I am walking in a country lane near when I worked, and feel as if I am being watched. I look up between the trees and see what appears to be a small black cigar-shaped object hovering above me. I cannot tell how big it is because there is no reference point behind it. I makes no noise but follows me for perhaps a half-hour before it just flies off at an angle and disappears.

8.     Ghosts, age 25. I am employed as a child care worker and houseparent in an institution for “emotionally disturbed” children. It is an old institution, established in Victorian times. It had initially been an Episcopalian orphanage. It had been hit by a cholera or smallpox plague that killed almost all the adults and children. The atmosphere of the institution, which was composed of many “cottages” with up to twelve children, was scattered over many acres in a birch and pine forest. I noticed that when I went outside at night, I felt oppressed, even assaulted, by the darkness, as if something was literally grabbing at my clothes and even shoving me. In fact it was frightening but I didn’t know what it was. My wife actually saw figures in the dark and avoided going outside at night. For a number of years I had been studying the occult as well as Hindu philosophy and teachings. I had read that “ghosts” live on the “astral (or emotional)” level and were attracted to people whose consciousness was astral in nature. Interestingly, at that same time, I started meditating with a Theosophical group, and was able to “elevate” myself to a “mental” level and thus was able to develop a kind of “immunity” to the ghosts, or so I thought. Then a number of events occurred that were very disturbing. First, in broad daylight, I noticed approximately twenty people dressed in black Victorian Episcopalian clothing standing at the edge of a meadow in the dark shade of the forest. Then, one night our little apartment became very cold with an inky smoke and my wife and I were visited by some very malevolent ghosts, who I could not only feel but who materialized right in front of us. We were terrified and had no idea what to do. Eventually they left. About this same time, the young boys in my cottage were also being assaulted by the ghosts, who came to their beds at night and pinched them as they materialized in front of them. The boys would come to my room crying and terrified. My meditation had worked but only a bit. I kept lights on for the kids and we decided that we would “pray to Jesus” to protect us and make the ghosts go away. I told them to tell the ghosts, “In the name of Jesus Christ, leave here and move on.” We practiced over and over until they felt that they could follow through with it, even if they were afraid. They were angry about what the ghosts were doing as well. They called on Jesus to “stand with them,” told the ghosts where to go, and it worked. None of us ever saw or felt another ghost around us again.

9.    Ghost, age 25. I visited a friend in New Bedford who lived in an old house where the wife of a whaling ship captain had died. I was sleeping on the couch and noticed a woman leaning over me in the dark. I thought it was my friend. I talked to her and then she just vanished.

FIGMENTS OF OUR OWN IMAGINATIONS

 

We live our lives. We follow our stories as they unfold and unravel. The story of oneself is the web we weave, like the spider, from our body, from our notions of ourself. Our living is the very path we make of ourselves. It a circle that continually flows from itself into itself. And we spin seemingly eternally. It is the story of ourself, of our life. We follow it, we are it; it flows from us. It reflects us to ourselves and we reflect it back as ourselves, like two mirrors reflecting their images back and forth perpetually, but the images arise only in the reflecting mirrors, reflecting nothing but the mirror image which has no actual substance. We are images produced as such in our own imaginations, which go so far back as to be solidified, substantialized as memory, even as experience. We attempt to define “ourselves” as “something,” as a substantial thing. As we either fail in that, if we are honest, or invent a character to star in our story, we may also find that we can be satisfied with “an idea of ourselves,” as if such an idea were actually real rather than imagined. And we find others who think similarly and with similar kinds of images, and then “imagine a greater image” agreed up by a group, which provides a solidity, a path, a story one can sink one’s teeth into and gather sustenance from it as if it were real. And this is what we do, even who we are: figments of our own imaginations.

 

 

I Like the Idea..

I like the idea that there is a God who rules the world and the heavens. I like the idea that bad people go to Hell -- forever. And that good people go to Heaven. I like the idea that God is punishing me for my sins. This makes all my pain purposeful, meaningful. I like the idea that God is vengeful enough that he actually thinks about ME and MY sins enough to give me extreme, tortuous pain to make me pay for my wrongs now while I'm still alive. That's compassionate rather than sending me to Hell with its eternal pain. I like the idea of angels and demons, of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, but mostly of the fact that stories are MEANT to be told and heard. Because for some reason I am just FULL of stories; utterly melodramatic stories that make me laugh and cry and inspire me. 

I have been doing Buddhist zazen for forty years and I am now realizing that I DON'T LIKE ZEN OR BUDDHISM because they don't appreciate melodrama or good or bad people and really don't tell stories. For them it is all just phenomena and illusion and samsara. So when I die, I just vanish. Buddhism does teach reincarnation, which makes total sense to me and which I can attest to as being real and true. But Zen is very unconcerned with reincarnation or time or being, leaning more towards none of that, Emptiness. 

Can I possibly swallow the B.S. of belief and superstition and stories and melodrama as presented in good religious traditions? You're darn tooten' I can! I can enjoy a good pretending that makes me happy, a nice story that Jesus loves ME! I may know it's absurd but life is absurd, humans are absurd as well as insane (though a real Believer doesn't think such things or even hold those opinions). Can I even pray to Jesus? I may always have to preface my prayer with, "Lord, I'm not a believer but I can pretend well enough. So perhaps, even though you don't exist and God doesn't exist, you can still listen and answer." 

I like the idea of being "righteous" and feeling it. I know someone who has completely duped himself into believing his own B.S.. He quotes from the Bible as though he personally knows God who wrote it and believes he does. I don't think I could deceive myself so well as that, but I can play along and feel good and be good and go to Heaven when I die. I like the idea of a God who punishes my ass for my sins and makes me whole again after I suffer. And, believe me, I do suffer in this poor old body. And, what's more important, I count my fucking blessings.

What If the Southern States Had Seceded from the Union? What would have happened?

The southern states were allowed to secede from the United States in 1861 without causing a Civil War with its immense loss of life. The Union tried to bribe the border states who had slaves not to join the southern Confederacy but failed. Most of the Western states and territories who had slaves also seceded and joined the Confederacy, though the northern states still had twice the population of the Confederacy and almost all of the heavy industry in America. The Confederate States of America still had cotton and tobacco, and traded primarily with Britain who profited from its own cotton-weaving mills throughout England.

The North had its heavy industry and its population largely of European immigrants. Some Western states, such as California and Oregon, with few slaves, sided with the North, whereas the mid-western and southern states with slaves sided with the South. The Confederacy planned on invading and occupying its southern neighbors, such as Mexico and the Caribbean, though there were few resources in those areas, and the Confederacy would have to purchase all its machinery and weapons from England or from the North, though the North would sell them no armaments. However, the South did have some shipyards to construct a navy and merchant vessels. The South held its millions of slaves for the production primarily of cotton. The South did not thrive; they had to support their slaves and they possessed a large population of poor, uneducated, unemployed and often unemployable whites numbering up to five million. These whites were not allowed to migrate across the borders to the North, so many of them began to move to the mid-west and western areas, putting great stress on those economies in addition to the stress they created in the South. The North continued to thrive with its well-established industries, which included cloth mills which were sold much of the cotton from the South. So the North as well as Britain were profiting from slavery which lowered the cost of cotton to them.

The North didn't want the slaves to come North; they didn't want to support them and were themselves racist. Lincoln had proposed to the Blacks in the North that they have their own country to be purchased by the United States somewhere in South America to which all the free Blacks would be sent, but the Blacks had balked at this, stating that they were more American than the white Americans, for their families had been in America for three hundred years. Lincoln knew that the slaves of the South were its primary resource and that cotton would die without their labor. The North sent Blacks into the South to preach rebellion among the slaves and also secreted arms to be used in such a rebellion.

But very soon, within five years, the Southern production of cotton began to fall drastically due to overused land that was no longer productive and also to drought, as well as a restive slave population that had on occasion turned on its masters and burned plantations. The Confederacy was imploding. And then the border states of the Confederacy petitioned for reentry into the Union. And states in the Confederacy began to rebel against their government led by Jefferson Davis and the plantation owners. The plantation owners began fighting among themselves. As their need for slaves diminished as their cotton diminished, they tried selling their slaves, whose value became nil. But they were afraid to send their slaves to the North, rightfully fearing the vengeance and violence of hundreds of thousands of slaves freed from their plantations. Within five years the Confederacy folded. Britain, with no reason to support them without cotton, rekindled friendships with the North. The South became worse than a third-world nation: deadly family feuds, religious wars, culture wars erupted everywhere; people starved. The mid-western states became battlegrounds for these same warring groups. Every southern state now turned to the North for help, for food.

The North eventually allowed all the Confederate States back in the Union. The slaves had all found their own freedom when the plantations failed and they became obsolete as human property. The North broke up the plantations and gave land to the Blacks, which was greatly resented by the large population of poor southern whites, who were eventually coopted by the old powerful families of the South, and were willingly used to "put the Blacks in their place" via the Jim Crow laws. This became much easier as the southerners again took control of the American Congress and Senate and pushed their racist policies. And so it remains to this day as is evident in the Republican Party.

The Future of Technological Humanity

At a certain point, though it started out gradually enough, humans got the idea that they could be like machines. They could replace all parts and organs and even computerize their brains. They would still be able to simulate pleasure and a kind of satisfaction, as if they were very fulfilled and successful humans, but would be able to pretty much do away with pain, including the pain of death, because the machine could last indefinitely and any thoughts of death or of pain in general could be programmed out or simply erased before they consciously registered in what was still called human consciousness. There were problems with this idea of computerizing and robotizing themselves, of course. Though living became convenient, as if one were a kind of temperature-controlled, automatically defrosting refrigerator, the elements of love and truth had to be included in the human algorithm. And humans still had to be organic enough to reproduce and consume food, and, more importantly, to want to reproduce and eat. Interestingly, there were adjustments that could be made so that eliminating food was more or less mechanical, like switching the bags in a vacuum cleaner. But something vital to humans was lost in the process; the ability to give birth stopped, at least in the "technologically advanced" areas of the world. It was then that the less technologically developed areas were adapted to reproduction; the females were fed well and kept virginal as long as possible and were then impregnated by sperm from males of the technologically developed parts of the world. This worked for perhaps twenty years but due to the mechanization of the males and to their lack of interest in having actual families, the sperm count diminished substantially. By this time the adult male population in the lesser developed areas had been removed to do manual labor elsewhere, and the global birth rate fell dramatically. So it became expedient to further the race through purely technological means. Humans were so technologized and computerized that they were now clones who were programmed to believe they were in fact human, even with so-called hearts and so-called blood in their veins. The human race had actually ceased organically and then the clone human robotic race ended with the great solar storm in 2087 that destroyed all satellites and shut down Earth's electronic grid which, at that point, powered every human. Some had prepared batteries and underground nuclear energy for such an emergency but all systems were so interlocked that nothing survived.

Knowledge is NOT Wisdom (Beingness)

 

There are so many profoundly interesting sources of knowledge that really do draw my interest to an amazing degree. There is so much knowledge to be had. It draws me incredibly. Yet, as I recently read in the book of Aboriginal truth, knowledge is NOT wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to live wisely, to be able to apply such knowledge in living. My way, which is closer to zen Buddhism is not so much a way of knowledge but a way of being. Knowledge is helpful to understanding which is helpful to being, but is not central to being. So what if we know our true history? It does lead us in the direction of our true being, I believe, but it can also became a false pursuit, a distraction to being, even an obstacle. I have pursued it and still do actually but now I see that knowing the true history and development of life and human life, though absolutely of interest and even importance to me, is not the essence of being. In zen practice, it would be considered simply “phenonema” to be recognized and not pursued. Now I can study it as an interest without pursuing it as “the way.” I prefer to simply “observe what is” here and now as it presents itself through the focus of “my” being. If “my being” happens to expand in the process, fine, but I feel I should trust myself in this matter, rather than trying to force some kind of expectation upon myself to be something other than I am. This may reflect and even be my own shortcoming, my own lack of vision and expansiveness, but it is my own mistake which I will come to recognize as my own. It is not someone else’s whom I may follow and cannot necessarily undue or correct within myself. I believe I can untie a knot that I have made but not necessarily someone else’s that I have taken upon myself. I already have enough knots within myself tied by others who I have taken into myself that I have to learn how to untie. Such knots become so integral to one’s own being that to simply sever them is to sever a part of oneself. So unlearning is a painstaking, conscious, careful undertaking. We cannot throw the baby, i.e. ourselves, out with the bathwater no matter how dirty and polluted it is. I tried to throw out Catholicism within myself but it will always remain embedded within me, like an old wire fence embedded within the layers of bark on a tree. I cannot cut it out but I can be very aware of its continuing presence and even learn to hold a reverence for it and understanding of it, and of myself.