THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

Relatively, I am not sad these days. It seems that as I keep up a regular practice of meditation - that is meditating for at least 15 minutes, once a day - I am able to refresh my spirit enough to cast off the creeping shadows of sadness and depression that approach my consciousness every day. There are things happening in and around about my life that could lead to a pretty strong episode of depression but the joy that clearing my energy via meditation is relatively saving my life right now. Fuuny, but I thought that I'd spend my time writing this blog energy talking about the things that are not going right that could bring on a depressive episode - but I didn't. I jumped right to the good part of the story and talked about what is working. I'm kinda proud of myself for doing that. And happy that this happened. All the same, just for the sake of clarity and record, I do want to talk about these things because they are not going to go away on their own, not very easily a...

This is my annual, typical, probably getting boring blog entry about my relationship with my dad. Dad's birthday was yesterday (October 5, 1932). He was born in Springfield, Ohio and that is where he is buried too. He died on September 7, 1969 in San Leandro, California). 36 years, 11 months and 2 days of living in this world was all the time he was allotted to figure things out with. His last couple of years, he became very quiet. Well, he was a pretty quiet man all the time that I knew him - he was not a big thinker or talker (the total flip side of how my step-father was - he was a huge talker and very extroverted. probably the greatest influence by an extrovert I ever experienced was from him.) no, my dad was very introverted. and where I was going with that thought was that the last couple of years of his life he was more quiet than usual - and I think that was because of the physical pain he must have been in. He died from lung cancer. 75% of his lungs were eaten up by the ca...

Continuing on from what I was talking about in my last posting, I've come to realize that I've just experienced what I call, an existential realization that doing anything at all with your time in life is futile. How I recognized this happening was because it happened to me once before. 20 years ago. I was at UCSC and discovered a new manner of creative self-expression which I felt could lead to ultimate discoveries of self-awareness.  That was when I was taking playwrighting classes and my mind was open to so many avenues of creativity. I felt that becoming a playwright was the grandest calling I had ever experienced. I began to work on ideas for several plays all at once. My mind was in constant motion and truth be told, I was the most manic I had ever been in my life. After about two weeks of this high anxiety and very little sleep, I had an epiphany of thought. In the flash of a second, I realized that no matter how different my work could be, compared to any other playwrit...

So I've been taking this online novel writing course with one of my most favorite, living authors (Francesca Lia Block) for the past 5 weeks. She invited writers that had existing manuscripts to come and learn under her guidance how to get our stories written in a fashion that could help us sell them (for publication). It took me awhile to figure something out about what her methods and goals were, but now that I've figured this out (for my own sake at least) I feel torn about whether I want to learn how to write this way or not. I wouldn't call her method or goals formulaic, but in a way, that's how they are starting to seem to me. Here's what I'm starting to think is what's going on. Popular fiction has "a feel" to it. There are standard elements of storytelling involved that hook readers that work to keep them transfixed while reading a novel. The reader wants to be drawn into a mysterious series of events that contain tension and unexpected d...

This dream memory is from yesterday, so I do not have crystal clear memory of everything I saw and experienced, but I do remember the essence of what was shown to me. This is what I need to record and share. I was in a world of another dimension. It was a dimension similar to this earthly one; people looked like people, buildings and cities etc looked as they do here. The thing that it took me awhile to realize was that the matter of which everything was built from was "less dense" than the material density of our world. Things were not transparent, but they were "softer". The closest idea I can give you of what matter looked like was that it was malleable like play-dough but it looked like the dense styrofoam-like stuff they make floatable toys for swimming pools with. What I started to see happen was that people were walking around and with just their hands, they could make this stuff manifest out of the air and shape it into whatever they wanted it to be. (Li...

This was the first time that I've ever experienced this type of healing meditation. I've listened to recordings of these bowls on CD for years, but have never felt the effects on my body like I did tonight. I sat in the front row as close to the bowls as I could be. I sat with as straight a back as I was able to for as long as I could. I did not practice deep breathing, mainly because that's something that I'm just not doing right now. One thing I think that's missing from this guys technique (haha I'm a critic right off the bat) is that he doesn't make it a guided meditation, telling us which chakras are being affected by the different toned bowls... I'd just like to be able to do my own visualizations of working with corresponding chakras while a certain bowl is working on that chakra. In the end result, I don't think that for now that this is necessary. Maybe in the future, I'll find someone that does do that. I'm just mentioning this ...

Not sure why I slept so well last night and even woke up early this morning from a very curious dream. So here we go... I was sitting in a very full diner/cafe with my chromebook, very busily writing away (hopefully working on my novel!). And I just happened to look up and saw Scarlett walking into the cafe. I really don't know if she did not see me, or if she simply chose to ignore me and not sit with me. Which would have been a simple progression of her current method of treating me - of ignoring me. But I really do not think that she knew I was there. Practically every single seat in the place was taken. I don't know how she even got a seat at all but I saw her sit at three different tables, the last one was next to a table where about 5 women were sitting and she was her typical jubilant self and asked them all how they were doing. After seeing her move around so much and still not seeing me, I sighed in desperation and decided to speak to the person sitting nearest to m...

So I've been having better experiences of sleep consciousness recently than I have over most of the past year. Finding the right combination of sleep meds to take - to prevent me from either sleeping TOO deeply, or not sleeping deeply enough is an ever going quandary. (Right now I'm using small doses of seroquel, trazadone and melatonin, as well as healthy doses of red kratom. Haha, you are probably thinking "this guy is NOT well"... You are right to think so, but I'm light years better than I used to be with all the meds I used to be coerced to use.) Anyway, it's about 2 months now that I've been having dreams again. They are not always technicolor or memorable. I will work on getting better at recording them though. So this dream this afternoon (yeah, I still have weird hours of awakening consciousness) had to do with two communities of people, who were neighbors in what really felt like rural Oregon. I was not exactly a member of either of these commu...

A major phase of my life is in the process of ending. 10 years ago I got a notion in my head that I wanted to have a relationship with a muse. And I made it happen. I didn't find a muse that would engage romantically with me, which was probably the rules I had set for my experiences in this lifetime, but I found one that allowed me to grow extremely close to her - we were hard-fought and hard-won best friends, but there were also a LOT of forces fighting against us being able to have anything at all together. I had other muses over this past 10 years too, but none of them grew as magnificently in scope like this one particular one did. The others were chance and random encounters, many of which I spent only an hour or two with, and many of them have remained in my life as distant friends. What I'm talking about though is the death of my need for a muse. The lessons I've learned from this one youthful spirit being in my life have been such unexpected blessings to me. I f...

Tattwa cards are a meditation tool created by members of the Golden Dawn organization. I'm just starting to experiment using them when I meditate. They are reported to be a tool offering quickest access to the astral realms. I made a random selection from the deck tonight and began a meditation that only lasted about 10 minutes. So, you focus without blinking on the image on the card for as long as you can. I repeated my guru's mantra, Om Namah Shivaya while I focused on the image, to help keep my mind from wandering. I let the rule of "not blinking" be my guideline for when to become able to close my eyes and "meditate". When I reached that point I simply let go of the card and closed my eyes. I did not get a very strong representation of the card's image inside my inner version, so I just accepted an energy representation of its presence. I let it fill the full, inner space of my mind's eye. I approached it, and entered it. This is when thing...

I'm getting my meditation routine back in order. I had slacked off from doing my two meditations a day over this past weekend. I'm so glad at how this is finally becoming a regular practice in my life! So I started to read a book about "remote viewing" (RV) yesterday. It's something that I've been curious about learning how to do for a long time, but all the literature I've seen before makes it sound like a lot of very disciplined work is needed and I've given up trying before I even start. So when I was meditating tonight, my mind was wandering just a little bit and I had a thought where I wondered if I could find out if going to San Francisco tomorrow night would be a safe venture for me. It was a weakly powered, wandering thought. I was not intent on finding out the answer, but a vision arose. I saw a picture of the earth from distant space. Floating in space, not too far from earth I saw a group of angels and they had computer-like screens th...

So last night/early this morning I had 3 very memorable dreams that had visions of Scarlett inside of them. (I took different sleeping pills than I normally take, is the only reason I think I slept differently and was thus able to dream. Plan on repeating the procedure tonight.) The first dream had both Scarlett and Roezi in it. Roezi stood near me while Scarlett was packing up things in the place that she lived at as if she were getting ready to move to somewhere new to live. I don’t know what Roezi’s purpose was in the dream. She stood near me but didn’t really speak to me. I think I did see her mouth moving so she probably had things to say. Scarlett said that she was waiting for her photographs to “complete printing” or “to arrive”, something like that before she was going to go. It looked like she lived in a cabin in a forested area. The second dream was just Scarlett and myself. We were riding in a car (I was driving) at nighttime on a street in Portland, Oregon. It might ...

I've known about floatation tanks for a couple decades but never ever thought I'd get an opportunity to use one. I always thought I'd have to go through a college/university research program to get access to one. Little did I know that when I signed up for a month of yoga classes at Yoga Fusion in San Ramon that I would find out that the owner had a flotation tank that he rents out hourly at his cottage in Danville. As soon as I heard about it, I signed up for two, one hour sessions. Today, two months later I finally had my first experience. I had a little bit of trepidation about the experience, but overall I knew I was going to be okay and not freak out. Getting into the tank and closing the door by myself was the most difficult aspect of it. You go into a space of total darkness. If I were to have a claustrophobic freak-out it would have happened right then. It didn't. I was surprised at the experience of floating so easily. I had never been in a body of water like...

So I discovered a new "teacher" the other day. Her name is Roberta Grimes. I heard her talking on Coast To Coast AM. Her area of expertise is communicating with the dead, as well as some other areas. I don't want this posting to be only about her - because she has done other things in her life that I want to delve into as well. She really pushes the point that it is possible to speak to our deceased ancestors. I've known this for awhile but never had a sense of confidence instilled into me the way Roberta did so for me. So, last night I thought about which deceased ancestor I should try to reach, and quickly I decided on my cousin Jade - she died a little over two years ago. (Her mother died less than a year ago - I will say more about her in a bit.) I've suspected that Jade has been available to me as a spirit guide - but never had any convincing experiences which gave me assurance that she indeed was. So I meditated last night with the intent of finding he...

Past lives, that is. When I was at Intuitive Way, one of their main focuses was about reading past life information for people. We were taught to read them by getting intuitive (clairvoyant) impressions from their aura (and chakras). We were not taught how to read our own, personal past lives though. By that I mean that I was not taught how to read my own past lives. I could read the past lives of a classmate though. So I want to find out how to read my own past life information. And I've found some literature that describes how to do it. It's not all that complicated to do either. You basically need to be able to enter into a trance state, and then follow some guided visualizations to get you into the right place to find that information. I tried doing this the past two nights. The first time I tried it I specifically wanted to find out past life info about my very close friend and I. I wanted to see what we were in past lives together. Clear as day, I got to the right pla...

I spent the last 5 years nurturing a very powerful friendship with a young woman half my own age. She literally became the best friend I've had since I left Santa Cruz when I last lived there in 1995. We went through a lot of changes, she and I, during these five years. There were times when we were extremely close and spoke to each other every single day, and then there were times when we would vanish into our separate cocoons of isolative depression for months. We learned a lot of things together too. This was one of the highlights of our friendship, how we would discover something new that we wanted to learn to do, and we would practice developing these new skills together. Another thing that was powerful about our friendship was how dynamic it was. We adapted to what was going on in the other person's life. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time going into details of what I'm talking about, that's not what this post is about. I want to talk about changes I...

Last night at class - the first night of the second month in ITP3, it was a training class (as opposed to a class when we do readings).. The topic was about how to clairvoyantly read a question that a readee asks. The main emphasis was that the more we are grounded and in a state of "running our earth and cosmic energy" the more clearly we will be able to see in a person's aura what the answer to the question is. This is going to be a testimony of what information was given to me, as I ended up being the guinea pig for the class to experiment with. My seven female classmates all sat in a long row and "read me", finding answers to my question. My question was that i was wondering why I had started to feel sadness recently and I didn't know why. (Personally I did have some ideas of my own..) What they said aloud that they saw eventually led back to my original ideas.. I thought I was feeling sad because I miss getting to spend time with my best friend (long ...

More updates about my experiences at Intuitive Way. I went to the center on Thursday night, both this week and last week. It's a night that we are invited to come and participate in doing readings for other people, people that specifically come to the center to have aura readings. This was my first time to do this, last week. I was given the role of "reading the rose" of the people that came in. I had only had one other experience of doing this and it was a very short exercise we did in class. I read one of my classmate's roses - there was just enough time to read one of her past lives. My vision was clear and I really believed what I "saw". So that gave me enough confidence to trust that when put on the real role of reading someone else that I'd be able to do it. The first reading, last Thursday was with someone that has completed all of the training at IW. Not someone I had met before, but his wife is in my class and I heard her talk about him. Str...

Okay, class at Intuitive Way this week was INTENSE First off, I came very close to deciding to quit the program. As an alternative to what I would do with my time, I even went so far as to sign up for some classes at DVC... (which I may still stay enrolled in, more on that later). As it turns out, I did not quit IW last night. I almost did not go to class. If it weren't for an answer to an email from one of the owners of IW where I got a boost of confidence that I really needed to be there to face down the difficult emotions that were being stirred up, because if I don't become able to face down every dark obstacle that arises, I'm never going to grow... anyway, I'm tempted to go into personal detail about "my issue", maybe by the time I get to the end of this entry, we'll see... The topic of class last night was about working with our masculine and feminine energies. In meditation, we were led to identify where our programming about our understandings o...

I'm sorry for not telling more about what's been going on at Intuitive Way. I should be writing up all of the experiences I have there because they are so very powerful. Earlier this week I participated in my first psychic reading where I was a part of the team of readers. Maybe I'll write some about that after I write the details about what I experienced tonight. So instead of getting an "aura reading" like I had been receiving in the earlier parts of my training, now I get feedback about how well I am using the healing tools that I have been taught. I met with David, who is one of the founders of IW, and over the course of 30 minutes he checked out my abilities. Overall, I was pleased with the information he gave me. I am successfully "running energy", "blowing pictures", and have solid grounding. He told me that it appears that I am coming to terms with understanding what type of healer I am.  This little bit of confirmation that I am inde...