Angels I’ve Met

There’s no way anybody can convince me that God wants me to be rich, successful, or even happy for that matter. If She did, She would have created better circumstances for me to maneuver in. I’m not persuaded either, that God is aware of minuscule happenings in my life or even gives a fig. He probably figures He doesn’t owe the human race anything after listening to us whine and bitch for thousands of years.

I don’t believe angels really walk the earth disguised as humans either, even though I’ve met a couple under really bizarre circumstances. It’s too airy fairy for me. Beliefs like that probably stem from the need we have as children to feel secure and protected. If we aren’t confident, as adults, that we can take care of ourselves, we create powerful beings whose total existence is centered around protecting good people.

That being said, let me tell you about two flesh and blood angels I’ve met.

Both were African American (is that still the politically correct attachment?) street hustlers. One taught me an invaluable lesson in faith and the other one saved my life and I never even saw his face.

Many years ago, when parking fees were reasonable, I had to go downtown to deliver paperwork to an attorney. I’d just moved into the area and had no idea of where to cash a check. Back then, there were few places that would cash checks other than banks and my bank was across town in the old neighborhood. I figured parking wouldn’t cost over a couple of dollars and started looking for change.

I emptied my purse and found five or six pennies. Pulled pillows off the couch, nothing. Checked the car floorboards, looked under the seats and in the storage compartments, nothing. Then I remembered some cash I’d stashed in a book. I was using it as a bookmark actually. Three one dollar bills.

I folded them in half and zipped them in a side pocket of my purse to ensure they didn’t get lost in the rubble and headed downtown.

I found a parking lot a few blocks from the attorney’s office that charged a dollar for a half hour. I was elated. I figured that even with a wait of twenty minutes, I’d be back to the car within an hour. Even I, with my limited math skills understood three dollars minus two equaled a burger, small fries and drink (remember those 35 cent burgers?). Anyway, I wasn’t a half a block from the parking lot when I was accosted by a black street hustler. The only reason I mention race is that most people still think of angels as blonde, blue-eyed, exceptionally clean, exceedingly calm individuals.

My angel’s name must have been Antithesis-el. He was a dingy, laughing bundle of energy with the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. His teeth were outstanding, so clean they glittered. That was the only time in my life I’ve seen happy teeth.

Anyway, he wanted money. I explained that I only had a few dollars and had to pay for parking-I didn’t see the necessity in mentioning lunch on the way home. He kept smiling and bouncing and asking. And then a little voice inside my head said give him the money. I thought about it for a half-second. I could take a chance and give him a dollar. But if I returned to the parking lot five minutes after my hour was up, I wouldn’t have enough money to pay the parking fee.

 The little voice said give him three dollars. That was out of the question. I spent the next block arguing with Happy Angel and the irritated voice in my head screaming give him three dollars, it’s okay, give him three dollars! As I protected my money from the clutches of the angel and the disembodied voice, I became hungrier and hungrier. By the time I’d walked a couple of blocks, not even a Nazi death squad could have ripped that dollar away from me.

 I lost both the angel and the voice at the building entrance.

 I didn’t have a long wait. The attorney was in a hurry so he didn’t ask questions, just glanced at the paperwork, thanked me and I was free to go. I was back at the car with time to spare. I unzipped the side pocket in my purse to retrieve two dollars to pay for parking and was dumbfounded to find it empty. I felt inside the pocket,  pulled the lining inside out and it was still empty. My purse had been hanging on my shoulder from the time I walked out of the apartment until I climbed back in the car to head home, so my measly little three dollars couldn’t have been stolen. And I hadn’t unzipped that pocket so it couldn’t have fallen out.

My first thought was holy crap, my car will have to sit here until someone drives downtown with enough money to get me out of this mess. I felt like I was going to throw up. Almost-ex was going to have a field day with this one.

In a fit of desperation, I dumped the contents of my purse onto the car seat. Out rolled eight quarters. They weren’t in the purse when I emptied it at home, so there was no way that they could have been laying on the car seat in front of me. But, by that time, it didn’t really matter. I grabbed them, paid the attendant and headed home where I immediately poured the contents of my purse onto the bed. No dollar bills. Even my pennies were gone.

But I learned a great lesson that day. I finally understood that the whole universe was created especially for me. Not to make me rich, or happy or well loved, but to offer faith and understanding and belief in the impossible.

I got it.

The second angel appeared later at a time when I felt deserted by the Universe. (Isn’t it amazing how quickly the magic of miracles can fade?) I’d forgotten the lesson on belief in the impossible and was as far down in the pits as a body could get.

My car had been viciously attacked and destroyed by a minimally insured vehicle, and because of a stupid oversight on my part, my insurance wouldn’t pay for a rental. I considered renting on my own dime, but when I added up the costs, I figured taking the bus for a couple of weeks wouldn’t kill me.

 What I didn’t count on was a two mile walk every day to and from the bus stop. Mornings weren’t too bad, but that walk got more and more onerous as weeks turned into months and the days shortened. If I worked late, I had to jog to the bus stop, catch the last bus and then walk down an unlit, deserted street to get from the bus stop to my apartment. Sometimes, if the moon was hidden, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my nose.

One night a couple of months into the ordeal, after a particularly bad day at work, I was so exhausted I could barely step off the bus. A man exited ahead of me, but I was too tired to pay much attention except to note that he was so big he had to turn sideways to get his shoulders through the bus door and he was dressed in an exceptionally dirty, blue overcoat.

I had to cross a busy street to get to the last leg home. The man stood away from the curb waiting for the light to change. I was impatient so I stepped around him and onto the street with the intention of crossing against the light.

Only when I was in the street did it dawn on me that I probably should have checked the traffic. I was shocked to see a line of cars coming toward me-fast. They were only a half of a block away and I just stood there  looking like an animal caught in headlights. I saw the cars coming, I knew they were going to flatten me, but I just couldn’t move.

Then I felt myself lifted up by the neck and deposited back onto the curb. A half second later the cars roared over the space on the street where I’d been standing. I was too rattled to turn around and thank the man who’d saved my life. When the traffic light changed, I hurried across the street into the darkness of Grogan Street.

 The night was moonless. It was so dark I couldn’t see my feet or the road. I stumbled and almost fell a couple of times. I could hear the man walking behind me, so close I wondered why he wasn’t stepping on my heels. But, unlike me, he didn’t seem to have a problem walking blind.

 As I approached a dimly-lit pet cemetery, I smelled a wonderful perfume so strong that it was almost overpowering. It lasted for at least a minute and disappeared when I passed the last of the tombstones. The footsteps behind me stopped when the perfume disappeared. I turned around to see if the man had fallen or if he was still standing, I wanted to know why he’d stopped walking. Although the light was almost nonexistent from the cemetery, everything behind me was still backlit from the main street. Had anything been within a block or so, I would have seen it. There was nothing.

 No sound, no silhouette, no movement, no man who had been walking less than a yard behind me. I stood in the street for a few minutes waiting to see if anything moved. All I got from my effort was the feeling that the world was perfect and every thing in it was perfect. The euphoria lasted until I got home and couldn’t find my door keys.

Were these men actually angels? I don’t know. But the circumstances were too weird to be mundane. And the lessons too profound to be circumstance.

When friends ask me why I’m so nice to street people, I tell them these stories… In detail.

Debunking the Debunkers

 

A little while ago I began writing the great American exposé entitled Thank You Very Much For Your Stupid Opinion, But There Really Is Something Weird Going On Out Here, dedicated to the slipshod art of paranormal debunking. And then, much to my dismay (and glee), I found www.debunkingskeptics.com/Contents, a treatise by Vistonas Wu, which made my exposé a tad useless. Wu offers unbiased logic to showcase the extent to which skeptics will go in order to deny the existence of the supernatural.

Granted, there are also far fetched paranormal beliefs and stories as in the story of another society, living under the earth’s crust, that isn’t quite human but does have some humanoid traits, or the belief that vampires are gearing up to change the entire human race into blood-suckers because we’ve treated them so poorly (which doesn’t really make sense unless vampires are planning to switch from sucking blood to crunching locusts for sustenance). Anyway, on my weirdness scale of one to ten, these stories are a solid ten, but so what?  I don’t care if there are sub-subterranean creatures as long as my daughter doesn’t marry one and I’ve been around blood suckers long enough to know how to handle them. So I really don’t understand my strong need to address the irrationality of skeptics.

They are mundanes for god’s sake, which means they’ve never had an extra sensory experience. They’ve never seen a ghost, or had a near-death experience. They’ve never felt the exhilaration of astral travel or they’d no longer be mundane. But for some reason they’re willing to expose their true irrational nature by claiming to be experts on the inexplicable. Do I smell agenda here? Maybe that’s what mesmerizes me, that and the total illogic of their “logical explanations” – many of which are at the top of the weird scale.

So what inspires a person to set himself or herself up as a debunking guru? 

Throughout the ages Christians have felt the need to kill for Jesus. The burning times didn’t bode well for heretics and women, especially women accused of Witchcraft. And although there are probably a hand-full of folks who would still like to continue the practice of Witch burning, Christians, for the most part, have calmed down and turned their attention to performing good deeds rather than organizing Witch hunts. In other words, they have a life. So there’s little reason to believe that most debunkers are debunking for Christ.

Jews, according to my Jewish friends, are open minded about the subject and some even embrace metaphysical beliefs. So we can safely assume that most debunkers are not debunking for Godly merits.

I don’t know too much about Muslim interest in debunking, but since I’ve not run across any Muslim debunkers, I doubt that Allah is paying a lot of attention to metaphysics right now.

There are skeptics who casually look into metaphysics and conclude that meta-physicians are demented and weird (and that’s not a bad conclusion from the mundane point of view). Some go a bit further and acquire a rudimentary knowledge of the subject they reject. Then they share their opinions. This is what we do as human beings. So even though I don’t agree with their conclusions, at least they’ve read a few pages about the paranormal. 

Die hard, in-your-face debunkers, show little knowledge or experience with the supernatural, yet seem obsessed with the thought of showing ignorant New Agers the error of their ways. Why? Do wayward metaphysical beliefs impact them in any way? No. Do we pose impending danger to them? No. Do we give a poo about what they think? No. Then what’s the deal?

I think it goes back to agenda. If they can expose a whole society of wrong thinkers, they can market themselves as superior. There’s something in their make-up that demands acknowledgment of their mental brilliance. The problem is that nobody can prove jack about anything. (Some folks are still trying to determine if we’re really alive or only a dream within a dream.) There are just too many outside determinants.

A few years ago there was a fellow in a small town outside of Houston who debunked for the police. Eventually he established himself as the public protector against evil card and palm readers, metaphysical thinkers, Witches and new agers, because he knew they were all devil worshipers. Especially the Witches.

Now anybody who’s sat in on Witchcraft 101 knows that Witches don’t believe in the devil, much less worship it. Satan is a Christian entity that never transcended well into Witchcraft in spite of dire warnings from organized religion trying to herd heathens into the light. But that didn’t keep this fellow from compiling a list of “How to Recognize Devil Worshipers.” He believed that all people who claim psychic abilities worship the devil, without question. According to him anyone who carries a long staff is in league with Lucifer. Chanting is definitely a sign of devil worship. We should watch rock hounds and pebble puppies too, because of their obsession with the earth. Eventually, he demanded the local library give him a list of people who’d checked out books on new age beliefs, the supernatural, Witchcraft, Paganism or anything remotely connected. Luckily the head of the library, a good Christian lady, who obviously had a life, told him to get lost in no uncertain terms. I heard later that librarians were added to his list of suspected devil worshipers.

Unfortunately, this unwarranted zeal and profound ignorance is found in way too many debunkers. But zeal and ignorance don’t bother me as much as the inability to draw logical conclusions. Now please don’t misunderstand, I know that conclusions can’t always be logical, but some attempt at sanity should prevail. For example, a skeptic was trying to debunk a story that hundreds of people had miraculously seen the Virgin Mary appear in the sky. Apparently they had all seen exactly the same thing down to the last detail without any verbal communication within the group. The debunker’s explanation was they had been caught up in a mass hysteria that had somehow been mentally transmitted throughout the group.

Didn’t he realize the significance of mental telepathy reaching hundreds of people so strong as to bring them to their knees in rapture? I wonder if he ever recognized that he’d espoused what he was trying to debunk. Too often skeptics tie themselves into knots and come up with the most absurd explanations of paranormal activity in order to deny its existence. When the “rational” explanation of a happening is stranger than the supernatural explanation, I suspect the debunker has abandoned the mundane and been seduced by the dark side.

And there’s the charlatan syndrome. Skeptics have found and exposed frauds. Good work. But then their logic descends into the nonsensical. They seem to think if fraud can be proven with a few mediums and psychics, every medium and psychic in the world must also be fraudulent.

Psychics have been accused of reading a client’s breathing patterns, body language, vocal inflections, and sweat glands. Psychics, skeptics say, fish for information with questions and then extrapolate pertinent data (even if the only question is “How are you today?”). Since it’s obvious to skeptics that anybody who’d even consider having a psychic reading has to be painfully desperate or uneducated with immature reasoning capabilities, they conclude these poor people are under the spell of any idiot who owns a deck of cards. That a sane person would pay for a reading just for fun is beyond their comprehension, even though having a psychic reading may be cheaper than going to a mediocre movie.

I only deal in possibilities and probabilities, if for no other reason than to keep my sanity. One should always have a skillful way out of any crazy-making, never-ending discussion, and being able to say something like “Since I only deal with possibilities and probabilities, you are possibly correct in your theory. (translation: Not likely Turkey, but I’m tired of this already and I need a drink, preferably a double Jack). This is the best way I’ve found to deal with obstinate people.

Now I’m going back to Vistonas Wu. After all, we have so much in common.

 Forrelle

Hauntings and Husbands

 

I was married when the weird stuff started, and although we’ve been divorce for over twenty-five years, I don’t think he’s forgiven me yet. He lived in a perpetual state of distress because of the probability that he was married to a mentally unbalanced woman and the fear that I was intentionally inviting the weird and terrible into our home. Probably correct on both points. Suddenly being able to see things that couldn’t possibly be happening does have a tendency to unbalance one.

It started one dark and stormy night when I was reading in bed. I’d been to the corner grocery (in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood) and found a book on metaphysics tucked between books on Jewish history and Biblical interpretations.  All I had, to the penny, after selling a bag of coke bottles was $1.10. I wouldn’t have bought that particular book except it was the only one I could afford. The price was $1.10. I can’t remember its name or the author, but it she was a reporter who started out debunking metaphysics and wound up a believer. After the first paragraph, I was captivated. The stars must have been aligned just right or fate intervened to connect the dots, but whatever happened, I took a nose dive into the occult.

I was lying on my back in bed reading the enchanting little book and decided to flip over to my tummy to be more comfortable. I balanced on my knees, fluffed the pillow, positioned the book to catch the best light and was immediately floating over a wagon harnessed to a skinny horse. There were four long poles attached to the corners of the wagon with lanterns hanging from the tops of each pole. In the darkness, it looked like two men were throwing carpets onto the open wagon. As I drifted closer, I saw that they were lifting bodies, wrapped in rags, from the street and heaving them onto the wagon. 

Then I saw a mist rising from under the pile of bodies and knew it was my soul separating from its body. I also knew that somebody had thrown me out before I was actually dead because it was easier than taking care of me for a few more days. I think I smothered to death underneath the pile of bodies. So there I was, totally unaware of being on my knees in bed but conscious of watching myself floating above the wagon watching myself floating up from the wagon, and knowing that I was physically being squashed on the bottom of the wagon. In spite of being surrounded by several me’s, there was no “real” me other than an awareness of what was happening. I was seconds from connecting with the person who threw me out when ex started shaking me and asked if I was okay.

My amazement wasn’t shared by ex when I tried to explain that I hadn’t gone to sleep with my eyes wide open, but I’d had this weird experience that encompassed darkness and death and souls rising up from dead bodies. He asked, rather sarcastically I thought, if I was on LSD. I made a mental note to keep my mouth shut if anything strange happened again. That’s why I didn’t bother to tell him about the ghost.

I don’t know when I actually became aware of the ghost. Or maybe it was a poltergeist. It was always rummaging through the apartment at night, regularly going through the same dance routine. It announced itself by crackling for a minute or two on the dining table, then moved to the base board, hit an unplugged television with a loud pop, moved back to the baseboard and crackled its way into our bedroom where it exploded in raucous crack from the radio beside the bed. I don’t know how ex could have gone for so long without hearing the serenade since he insisted on sleeping on side of the bed by the radio.

But he was oblivious until the night he thought he heard a burglar trying to break in through the back door. He shook me awake and said he was going into the living room to reconnoiter (I swear to God – military background) and, if he yelled, I was to call the police. I heard crackling moving along the the baseboard and felt obligated to tell the end of the story.

“Okay,” he said. “You go see what’s going on and, if it’s a burglar, yell and I’ll run and take care of it. If it’s a ghost, you take care of it.”

I remember stifling a giggle. Men in the protective mode do not tolerate giggles.

“There’s no problem,” I told him. “Just listen. Right now it’s on the base board by the door, in a minute it’ll come in and make a pop in the radio. No burglar, no problem, just Casper.”

“You’re so full of sh…” was all he had time to say before the radio exploded with a grand finale pop. He flung himself into the air and landed on the wall by my side of the bed. I still can’t imagine how any human could perform such a feat without a lifetime of specialized training, but from that night on, I got to sleep by the radio (radio control was a contentious point with us).

I don’t understand ghosts or hauntings or creepy noises in the night, but I know weird  happenings exist. What they really are is the mystery. Some people believe ghosts are shadows, remnants of people who have passed on. Others think ghosts are souls of the deceased, who for some reason, won’t or can’t leave the earth plane.

Whatever they are, they can materialize into forms that look as real as if they were still alive. I had a friend who’s husband reacted so strongly at the sight of a ghost standing at the foot of their bed that he shot it. The bullet didn’t seem to bother the ghost but it smashed a valuable antique mirror. His wife thought long and hard about using him as target practice. She felt justified because she’d told him about the ghost several times and he just laughed and made sarcastic comments. It’s a man thing I guess.

Then there are the experts who believe that we, who see or hear ghosts, are delusional. Debunkers disparage folks who think that dead is anything other than forever inert. But have you read any of their explanations of ghosts and weird happenings? They’re a hoot.

And just when we thought we were having fun, we learned about astral projection.

Astral Projection

Kerry, my friend and owner of the board, decided to connect with God again. As she explained it, in the event we ran into trouble, she wanted to bring in the big guns. It sounded like bait and switch to me. But  I wasn’t too worried about trouble from the supernatural, since I’d been trying to conjure up at least one spine tingling touch of evil from the beginning and nothing had happened except lectures on the God seed and the evil of aspirin addiction.

Unmarried ministers love to visit new parishioners. It’s rumored that visitations are only time they get a decent meal. Anyway, the afternoon of dinner with the minister, Kerry swore that she shoved the board and planchette under the couch until both pieces touched the back wall. She spent all afternoon cooking, cleaning and lecturing her Catholic husband on how to interact with a Protestant minister.  When Brother Miller arrived, Kerry seated him on the couch for a before dinner drink (fruit punch probably).  She was ready and in control – for about two minutes. That’s when  she saw the planchette, totally exposed, sitting between the Brother Miller’s feet. Dinner was served immediately. As she succinctly screeched later, “I put the damn thing under the other end of the couch.”  

She seemed a bit antsy about the board after that, and a particularly fiery sermon on hypocrisy didn’t help her attitude, so I wasn’t surprised when she asked me to keep the Ouija  in my apartment. She didn’t really believe my husband would commit me to a state mental facility if he came across it. I knew better. We worried over where to hide it until I realized that it would be perfectly safe in the clothes bin, since a man of my husband’s stature wouldn’t be caught dead within six feet of dirty clothes, either on the floor or in the bin.

Things settled down after a while and the board talked about weird topics like soul projection and astral classes on spritual development. Then one afternoon the Ouija told us that Kerry’s husband would be calling in a few minutes to tell her to come home. It said that he was in trouble with some bad characters and would ask her to take the baby and move to Oklahoma to  live with her grandmother. But the Ouija said that she shouldn’t go, that she would be better off staying in Houston. We giggled at the ludicrousness of the information. John was a young, successful stock broker who was already being mentored by upper management. We were still laughing when the phone rang. It was John wanting her to come home.

She called the next morning and verified the conversation. Said it was almost verbatim with what we had been told by the board. Apparently John had cheated a couple of old ladies-sisters-out of thousands of dollars, unaware that their sons were mafia related. He wound up almost beaten to death.

While Kerry was waiting for her divorce to become final, I met a woman at work who claimed to be able to soul travel. I didn’t quite know what it was, but it sounded like fun so I volunteered Kerry and myself to go with her. By this time, Kerry had truly found Jesus and was ready to bail anyway, so I figured what the heck. This would be a great send-off.

Elaine gave us specific instructions. So there I was at 11:30 pm in bed and relaxed, lights off, eyes closed, breath deep and even when, suddenly, there was light. My eyes were still closed and I couldn’t move, but I could see everything in the bedroom and hall just as if someone had flipped a light switch. Except there were no shadows, just a glow. I could see everything from the floor on one side of the bed to the floor on the other side. I was dumfounded and delighted. But I still couldn’t move.

Then I heard Elaine’s voice in my head telling me to relax, that I was stuck half in and half out. The next thing I remember was hovering over a hippy party on the beach. Drugs, alcohol, and sex. Too bad I can’t remember a damn thing other than hovering.

The next morning I woke up with the hangover from hell. I slithered to the telephone, called Elaine and forcefully begged for an explanation. I think she was trying to laugh before she slammed the phone down, but she sounded more like a goat bleating. Kerry didn’t answer the call, said later that she didn’t even try, she was too busy planning a  painful way to kill me. She didn’t go to work for three days. Felt like a hangover she told Elaine.

Apparently, and I’m still not sure how this works, the energy of drugs and alcohol can transcend from the physical to the astral where we were hanging out – literally – and affect life forms there. Elaine told me later that I was the one who insisted we attend the beach party. I was the one who refused to leave and had to be heaved back into my body by several strange entities. I was the one who got astral demerits for that night.

Then Kerry and I started having strange dreams, too similar to be coincidence.  We couldn’t remember the specifics but we’d both wake up exhausted, feeling like we’d been on the docks loading ships all night. Apparently, in the dream state, we were studying energy and eventually a pattern of information emerged from the fragments we were able to piece together: 

1. All energy, in its natural state, is neutral.  We determine the positive or negative of it.

2. We can pick up positive, negative or neutral energy from the physical level as well as the the astral.

3. The ability to change negative energy into positive (or positive into negative) is a learned skill that can be  used at will. The board used Jesus as an example. He was bombarded by so much hatred that He could have been incapacitated, but instead He transfomed evil into a powerful energy that allowed him to perform miracles.

4. Energy is alive. When we take it out of neutral and give it a personality, its life force is activated and it grows throughout a specific cycle by transforming and absorbing outside energy.  

5. Trying to destroy the negative energy within us is like spitting in a tsunami. The key is knowing how to transform it into something beneficial and powerful enough to help us move forward through any barrier.

First Steps Into The Paranormal

I’ve had two near death experiences, many out-of-the-body flights (until I was banned from the astral for causing pandemonium, but more about that later), meetings with ghosts, and various and sundry experiences in almost all levels of the paranormal. So you can see why I consider myself as somewhat of an expert on the subject of weird.

What I write is true – as far as possibilities and probabilities go. That is, the situations I describe are true. My interpretation may be off by a mile. But so what? Nobody really knows much about the supernatural anyway. And it’s okay not to know. Not knowing pushes us to think, to reason, to freak-out. If you stretch the definition of supernatural, not knowing means that you and I know just as much as the Pope or the Dali Lama about what happens after we die.  And for most of us, personal knowledge of what to expect in the next ten thousand years or so is vitally important.

Anyway, it all started with the Ouija board and two bored housewives who disliked daytime TV. Every Saturday morning, we’d take a couple of almost – house – trained teenies out into the world for their early cultural experiences and when they were almost comatose from exhaustion, we’d head home for an afternoon of boredom.

One day my friend brought a Ouija board to liven up our Saturday afternoon tedium. And then the weird started.

Both of us were from families firmly entrenched in fundamentalism. We weren’t allowed to dissect the afterlife. The Bible said heaven or hell. Period. (Being Protestant, we didn’t know about the holding tank.) So no good could come from thinking about afterlife, since it had been spelled out in detail for almost two thousand years. Our job was to figure how to get to heaven and circumvent hell.

Even with extra tithing, using the Ouija wasn’t exactly circumventing hell. Back then the board was seen as an evil symbol of the occult that should have been banned. Occultists wrote reams on how the Ouija opened portals into darker realms, allowing evil spirits to slip into the physical sphere and cause all sorts of problems. Ministers warned against it from the pulpit. Sinners gathered in open fields (or by bar-b-que pits) to burn the board along with obscene (Playboy) and other objectionable books.

We were beyond delighted when the planchette  started moving with the tips of our fingers barely touching it. At first, it just went around in circles and flung itself in frenzied arcs across the board. Then it spelled out Lova, and for many years we communicated with this entity from the astral.

But Lova wasn’t the only entity that came through. There was Gertrude who claimed to be a Jewish fundamentalist (I’m certain she used another word to explain her Jewishness, but it’s been so long ago…). She was against all drugs, (can you imagine that in the seventies?) in any form, including aspirin. And using even the most innocuous swear words put our souls in mortal danger. Unfortunately we lost her during a football game when one of the guys screamed, “Look at that son-of-a-bitch go”. She’s probably still praying for us.

A Rabbi stopped in a few times to say hello, and there were several ministers. I still can’t figure out why they appeared. We wanted the weird and evil.

On the up-side though, the board allowed us to see things outside of our range of knowing. I think it’s called remote viewing now. We could describe what a person was wearing, eating, or doing anytime day or night. I don’t know why we made our in-laws victims of our addiction, but in our defense, we had to have somebody to practice on. It didn’t take too many direct hits until none of them would talk to us, even though we were forbidden, by the board, to discuss one vic with another.

Eventually our need for new practice subjects led us to metaphysical groups and our problem was solved. But the strange thing was, as soon as we stopped calling our in-laws, they started calling us for information that could only come from the board. There has to be a cellular fascination with the Occult that’s difficult for most folks to ignore, no matter how much it terrifies them.

Did I mention that even though my friend and I were both from fundamentalist families, we were closet back-sliders, wandering aimlessly through our atheist phase?  So when the board started talking about the God Seed we would immediately box it up and find something else to do. We even resorted to cleaning house on occasion.

But the board was persistent and over the next several years we were given shards of information in surprise attacks.

The Ouija said that each person has a God Seed inside his/her soul. We can ignore it and let it wither, but if we choose to nurture it, wondrous things will happen. Then it talked in terms of Plato’s man in a cave. If we’re confined to a cave from birth, we have total freedom, for our essence isn’t bound to our body. To understand this is to experience total freedom – the freedom to fly, to be anyplace at will either in the physical or the astral.

If we allow the God Seed to grow we can be ecstatically happy, no matter what our circumstances, for happiness comes from within and is not dictated by outside influences. We’ll also be perfectly healthy, because we all have the ability to heal ourselves. Original thought comes from a higher energy we can connect with at any time, so we’ll always have genius at our fingertips.

Although it sounds wonderful, and this philosophy is touted by both metaphysicians and ministers even today – especially today when popular  me-me-me thought seems to be that the higher powers want us to be happy, rich, successful, and respected without having to do much more than think about it. Meditate, metaphysicians whisper to us. Pray, ministers demand of us. That’s all we have to do.

Does anybody else see the absurdity of this?

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