This is a post about many things --- things that are real, strongly evidentially real, yet are lesser and lesser acknowledged. I post about this because I believe that our "culture" is seriously screwing up... and I have no idea how the trend will be stopped.
Regular readers of the blog will recognize some of the material which follows. So be it. I need it to illustrate the point of all this.
The time is early morning in Houston, Texas. A big man, a very big physical man, is driving in his truck to his work as a hazardous materials containment specialist at Bayer Industries. Into his mind comes a vision: cars wrecked ... police cars angled into the median's greenspace ... ambulance at the scene ... witnesses stopped. But nothing is there. Several minutes up the road, there is the scene. It arrays itself just as he has seen it earlier. He has "clairvoy'd" the situation.
This becomes common for him. Not everyday, but often enough. Other rarer instances of clairvoyance happen. It doesn't frighten him [except for the one instance when he awoke to a vision of his wife's business burning down], but usually amuses him.
Who is this strange guy?
He's one of my brothers. A very strong man who nevertheless has psychic sensitivities [giving the lie to certain caricatures].A past weight-lifting champion who now [as an elite hobby] is an assistant coach for the USA Olympic Weightlifting Team. ... and one of the people that I know the best in the world, and trust his telling of the truth completely.
The bottomline is: Clairvoyance is real.
Once upon a time, back in 1870s Wisconsin all the years through the 1920s of this century, an old woman would sit in her bedroom and, occasionally, late at night, be drawn to the window. There emerging from the woods that edged the farm would be a lighted carriage with glowing horses. It would race across the meadow and disappear. In the morning the old lady would announce that someone the family knew had died that night. ... and she, "Old Sutka", would be correct.
Who was this strange lady?
Who was this strange person?
... my beloved Grandma. Maybe she brought the Gypsy way of seeing around corners to our family.
The bottomline: Clairvoyance is real. Clairvoyance is real. Clairvoyance is real.
And please don't insult the Swords Family by trying to debunk it. {especially if the Big Boy is present]
It's 1958 in the summertime, and two brothers are listening to the radio. Some guy has called into the big 60,000 Watter up river and is telling everyone downstream about the UFO he is watching. The listeners find it thrilling to be hearing this in real time, and go out to look. But nothing's there. Still the guy is nearly twenty miles away, so what the heck. Listening a while more, the UFO seems to turn. This time the brothers walk to the end room of the house and look out the window ... and there it is.
The neat domed disk floated across the window flashing its lights though slits in its rotating dome in color sequence, just as the radio witness had stated. The brothers watched it proceed and then they turned and raced outside, scrambling down the hillsides to get a second view. And there it was again, meandering away framed by the Big Dipper constellation.
Who were these strange people?
... they would be me [far left above] and my brother [fourth from left.] Needless to say, I can't get any closer to this claim.
The time is 1966. There's a big UFO wave going on, but the three teenage girls don't know it. They've driven up into the hills to allow one of the girls to make a raid on her hopeful boyfriend, perhaps clarifying some intentions. The other two girls stayed in the car to wait loyally for their friend. They were listening to a powerful Chicago station to pass the time.
Then the radio began breaking up. they heard a whirring sort of sound. The sound seemed directly above the car, and the countryside suddenly lit up. They felt as if their hair was standing up, and perhaps even felt lifted a bit. Straining to see outside, all that could be seen was a very bright circle of light, as the humming grew louder and louder. The girls crouched down and began crying. Time passed without sense of doing so, and the third girlfriend came back to the car, totally unaware that anything had happened. The next day the two girls who had the experience met and made a pact to tell nobody about it.
And who were these strange people?
Well, one of them is my sister-in-law. She is a fine and mature woman whose only "flaw" is that she's willing to believe in these sorts of things. Knowing that her brother-in-law is a UFO expert, she treated her own encounter with sacred diligence as she wrote it up for me in detail.
The Bottomline is: UFOs are real. You can decide to debate what KIND of real they are, but you have to start at least from that platform. AND there's no ignoring the strangeness of them and copping out with simple mundanities, this is a serious complex mystery.
It's the 1880s. In Wisconsin "Old Sutka" is seeing visions of the White Coach and Horses as persons pass away. 700 miles away, in the upper Ohio River Valley, a legendary doctor named Ackerman is trying to prevent them from doing so. He sees much success and he sees much death. For his large family he builds one of the first classic "row houses" in Old Wheeling. Over the decades it survives and becomes a National Historic Home.
In the 1990s, residents move in who, for the first time in many years want to aggressively restore the home. They do. It receives honors on the Historical Registry. The entire neighborhood begins to improve, drawn by the magnet of the wonderful structure.
Inside its walls other, more private wonders are occurring. Locked doors are opening and closing. Television sets are activating in the middle of the night. The husband of the house, a no-nonsense Mr. Fix-it type, is irritated by this nonsense. Nothing that he does, however, puts a stop to it. Thankfully, the "intrusions" are benign and infrequent.
They are sometimes, however, startling.
Two ladies, mother and daughter-in-law, are seated in the kitchen following a luncheon meal, and enjoying themselves over coffee. A moderately loud rattling disturbs them. They look about for the source. It happens again. They now see that the "culprit" is a pottery container of kitchen utensils parked on a shelf to the rear of their big iron stove. It rattles again, and they see it clearly now.
From its utensil group, a single device raises out of the container and spirals forward into the kitchen. As it loops in the air, it carries forward 6-8 horizontal feet, and arcs down clattering onto the floor. The mother is boggled, but the daughter-in-law has become so used to things like this that she just says: well, you've got our attention. Anything you want to say? But there the activity stopped.
Well, they would be my brother [top left] and my sister-in-law [bottom right], and my Mom [in the center]. Crazed mad fools all.
The bottomline: poltergeist effects are real. The issue cannot be their unreality. The issue is their cause. AND it must be a serious analysis. These events are markedly strange. To assume some simplistic bonehead wave-off of an "explanation" is intellectually crippled if not downright dishonest... and it is certainly insulting.
In that same house, there are occasions when a "figure" seems to pass briefly out of rooms, or across doorways, or stand darkly in a corner before disappearing. These are brief typically and therefore evidentially dangerous. But with one person this is different.
From the beginnings of her visiting the house to be with her grandma [who she loves with a dearness that I've never seen before in a child], this little person has told the house residents of her meetings with an "imaginary playmate" named "Kenny." These meetings used to occur quite regularly, but now that she is grown, only infrequently. She would describe Kenny very vividly, down to the early twentieth century clothing worn.
Because of the "other" phenomena, the grandmother, my sister-in-law, naturally went on the hunt to find a historical Kenny associated with the place. Nothing. No "Kenny" was registered anywhere. It was just one more mystery.
Then something changed the game. And old Ackerman relative was located and was happy to answer questions about the old house and its occupants. Well into the conversation the topic of a "Kenny" was brought up. The family member was surprised. She said: that there was no one named Kenny in the family, but, for reasons that she didn't know, one of the young boys was always called "Kenny", and that would be why one could find no record of such a person.
Back at the house, old pictures were dug through to find one with the boy involved. Showing the picture to the young girl, she pointed at his portrait among the family group and said: That's Kenny!!
The bottomline: strange things... strange VERY difficult to explain things... can occasionally happen in environments that we humans occupy. "Apparitions" even, perhaps interactive ones, may be occasionally occurring. NO ONE in that family knew of any Kenny to create a cheat. But "Kenny" was real anyway.
The little girl is the one in the darker dress with my Mom's left arm around her. She is a remarkable child. She lives more EXACTLY in the moment of The Now more than anyone I've ever experienced. Unlike the rest of us, who usually have some sort of "intellectual stiff-arm" giving us some distance from raw reality, she does not. Make of it what you will.
It's the latter 20th and early 21st centuries, and in Proctor, WV {yes, some of you will be delighted to know that there really IS an "Out Proctor" of sorts} an extremely organized person is going about her duties selecting clothing for the day's work. She is organized on these matters almost to a compulsive extent --- it is perhaps one of her rare faults. She's a registered nurse, and in that profession a certain organized discipline counts.
But this day it "turns" on her. An article of clothing is missing. It should be EXACTLY here. But no. The hunt is on. Everything is turned over and over, Each hanger in the closet is separated and inspected ... many times. Laundry room and machines are investigated, multiple times. A husband is accused of sloppy chaos production, which he stoutly denies saying that it's more than his life is worth to mess up her clothes closet.
This goes on for days. Then, days later, the migrant piece of clothing is there PRECISELY where it should have been all along --- a spot thoroughly inspected dozens of times in the interim.
This has happened to her MANY times in her life, and she notices because of who she is and how she arranges her life "just so" in these regards.
So, yes, who is this strange person?
That would be my youngest sister [above Mom to the right]. My other sister has this phenomenon too, but not nearly as much.
It's just a couple of years ago when a fellow went to the doctor's for a quarterly appointment. He made sure that his pockets were properly full of wallet, watch, keys, Cursillo Cross --- the four things he always carried, and always stored on a corner of the sink top in the kitchen. It was open and handy and hard to miss, so, since there was no one else living in the house [and he had no one to displease with such minor clutter], it was efficient.
The appointment was over and he unloaded his pockets. The watch was gone. He almost tore his clothes apart looking --- several times. It was lost. At the doctor's, in his friend's car, dropped somehow in the street or sidewalk? For several days he continued to search those pockets and stare at the empty spot on the sink top. The nearby microwave was removed. Nothing there of course. After a week he decided that he needed a pocket watch and bought a new [cheap] one. It would do. He kept it with him three days.
Then, the following morning, the old watch was sitting on the sink top in the open space beside his wallet, keys, and Cursillo Cross --- AND the new watch as well! Steeled to such matters by other known weirdness, he just laughed.
And who was this strange character?
That would be me.
Bottomline: weird as it is, and so much so that one REALLY wants to deny its reality, these events, which I in total ignorance label "Trickster Events", happen. Why? I'm buffaloed. The hypotheses are all decidedly Out Proctor but the phenomenon is solidly in our midst.
So.... what else is "out there"?
I suspect a very great deal indeed.
These are two of my best friends and most spiritual. On the right is Father Mike Howell, who witnessed a Spinning Sun phenomenon while taking [under some protest] a vacation to Medjugorge which he felt was a waste of time. {he did it because a priest friend wanted badly to go, and really wanted the company --- almost as a Joke of the Universe, Mike saw the phenomenon and his friend couldn't}.
On the left is Richard Dailey, a deeply spiritual Catholic, who nevertheless has had a Native American Spirit Guide attached to his family for many decades. Richard has had so many interactions with this entity that it's more like casual conversation at this point than anything else. The main thing for me is that it shows that highly organized religion beliefs [such as Catholicism] need not conflict with assists from other routes to spirituality.
When my father died, just after his funeral, a magnificent buck deer walked a bee-line across yard and street and uphill into our yard and stared into our living room window for the most awesome time at us as we gathered in silence there. It then turned and walked the precise route away beyond the neighbor's house across the road. {Mom's art, by the way, above --- although she was not drawing this exact scene}.
Dad used to say, in times of family stress: "It's OK, gang." And we always rallied because of his strength. Here, it seemed, he did it one last time.
Many years later, outside the nursing home where Mom passed away at 3am, four of us got out of the car and were presented with two calm deer looking at us then walking away. ... in an urban streetway.
This is not the "can't get around it" type of experience that the previous mentions above have been... but when one opens to a wider Universe pointed to by those other phenomena, a leading hypothesis for Dad's and Mom's deer becomes quite acceptable.
I and my family have been blessed, and I mean that word blessed, by many wonderful things [I haven't even repeated the mind-stunning "Helen Lane" encounter --- see earlier on the blog] which serve to keep our minds and souls open and delighted by the Universe we are given to inhabit. Why is that?
One acceptable theory would be that we are just lucky. And that might be all that there is to it. But it could also be that this family doesn't have any impregnable barriers to open-mindedly considering such possibilities. And in a way that itself is remarkable to me, because these people, my siblings, are the most "alpha" personalities piled together that I've ever seen in any family group. Powerful strong successful people full of ideas and happy to let you know about them. [often awkward socially by the way, but we've learned to appreciate one another despite rolling our eyes.] How did such personalities survive modernism and its catastrophic restrictive materialism?
This is the great man. Dad, my blessed Dad. Here was the brilliant brain --- most overall intelligent person I've ever met, and I've met a bunch of them --- who despite that, refused to lose his youthful explorative curiosity. The man who would pray in the living room after a hard day's work, and would drop it immediately whenever one of his kids came running in with a question. I am almost certain that I will never meet someone so intelligent and spiritual at the same time.
This is the basis for our family's curiosity and rejection of the irrational unscientific stance of the debunking without study or cause. If he had lived longer, he would have just laughed at the foolishness of some of the people I've had to interact with. He wouldn't have spent much time with them --- speaking to such people is like speaking to a closed door, a complete waste of energy. But he would have explored alongside me, and, oh, that would have been the greatest of times.
All of this is about the future of our world --- no kidding, that's what I believe. Catherine Crowe, one of my new-found heroes, saw this clearly far back two hundred years ago. She saw the Enlightenment for what it was --- both creator and destroyer. It was creating "light" but doing so in only a restricted illuminated space. It was sort of like a magnificent Drunk and The Lamp Post --- inspecting minutely the only area that was already illuminated while ignoring the vast scope of reality. It became so dominant that it began to define reality as only what it could see with its kind of eyes. Catherine saw it extinguishing vast areas of the real. She wrote her great protest, The Nightside of Nature, to try to wake us up.
The Dilbert cartoon points to a result of this which is bad enough, the refusal to acknowledge many aspects of reality truly experienced and fascinating to say the least. Horrible as it is, this is just one step in the process.
Enjoy the future.
I've one last thing to say to the debunkers. I really don't get your motivation [I realize that I am speaking to almost, though not quite, no one who reads this blog, but I can't help but "complete the thought" here.] But whatever your motivation is, do me a favor --- in fact do the entire world the greatest favor you can grant: JUST SHUT UP.
Fine, piss on individual events if you must. But get off the broadbrush smirking dismissal of entire categories of experience. You seem, some of you, to believe that you doing some kind of service to humanity --- others seem just perverted trolls.
... and for me and my family's sure knowledge of many of these things: JUST SHUT UP.
To the rest of you good folks: bless you and may you "stay-in-touch" with a wider world [as Obi-wan Kenobi might say].
Without apologies, sincerely yours, The Professor.
