Celebrating the Big 40

Wow, I reached my 40th birthday a few days ago (November 11) and my wife – gracious, wonderful, and adoring that she is – thought it would be a great idea to throw a party to mark the occasion. I never really had a birthday party growing up; my family’s birthdays were always with grandma and grandpa, mom and dad, brother and sister … I never really had a party with friends. I never complained about it growing up; it never was that big a deal to me – so long as I got cake and presents (every young kid’s dream).

When my wife and I sat down to come up with a guest list, we were both wondering if anybody would show up, for the simple fact that my social life is about as active as a garden slug’s; I don’t get out much and am really quite an introvert. I think we were both stunned and amazed at the turnout – the house was packed – and though a lot of the cards and gifts were done as purely humorous jokes (LOVE the Boo Box and Whoopie Cushion), that everyone spent so much of their time, energy, and money on the cards and gifts (no matter how silly they were) and then deliver it all and play in our crazy games and stay late into the evening was such an amazing blessing. For someone like me who doesn’t get out into the world all that often, I am truly humbled by everyone who held me in their thoughts and celebrated this day with me. And there were some who couldn’t make it, but they did send their congrats through email and phone, with some warm and heartfelt messages (more than just a simple Happy Birthday) that I am truly honored and blessed to have received … As morbid as this may sound, it actually gives me hope that someone might show up when it’s time for my funeral!

I guess you never really know just how much of an impact you make on other people’s lives. Whether it’s really big or really small, it doesn’t matter in terms of size, but what matters is that some kind of an impact has been made, and it is an honored one. That’s what happened to me at my 40th birthday party.

This notion of impact is much larger than that of my own birthday party, however, because it is two-fold. I believe the impacts you have made on other people are greater than perhaps you may realize. You are all valued in so many ways and are such a blessing in this world; not just for me, but for everybody and every day that you interact with people. That you came out to celebrate with me, I hope to reflect back to you the worth that you are in my life and to possibly consider just how magnificent you are to everyone you come in contact with.

In being an introvert and a self-proclaimed shut-in, it’s a wondrous “wow” moment to see all these people you honor, admire, look up to, and respect, suddenly turn out to celebrate your 40th birthday. On the inside, we are always second-guessing ourselves, almost waiting for someone to come and find something “wrong” about us that forces us to slink into a fetal position and say “You’re right, this is how bad I am.” Okay, that might be an extreme example or caricature, but at any rate, it’s still a wonderful moment to see, read, and realize just by having everyone show up and send such gracious comments that perhaps you do have things to contribute, an honored part to play, a sense of value and worth outside the walls you keep yourself confined in. In writing this, I know it makes me sound like I have zero self-esteem – that’s really not the case – but it does make one realize that you do go beyond your own little world, your own little walls, and affect others. Too often we are reminded of how we do that in a negative fashion; this weekend was a snapshot of how we do it in a positive light.

WOW. WHAT AN ABSOLUTE BLESSING. I hope you, dear reader, will take a moment and reflect upon yourself, and honor that spark within you that does go out into the world and bless others who you meet. And maybe, just maybe, grant yourself a special precious nanosecond to accept that, and understand that you are an amazing blessing, even when you may not realize it.

Another reason I wanted to celebrate my 40th birthday was to acknowledge something within my soul that I knew to be true – there have been other lifetimes where my spirit never reached a 40th birthday. Somewhere deep within me, I knew there to be many such incarnations. In celebrating this event, it was to honor those portions of my being that never made it this far, and to hopefully in some small way carry them with me as I go forward into the future. Whether or not my reincarnational selves are aware of this, I can only hope, but I know somewhere inside me (as I’m sure you do, too, within your own self) other lives my soul has lived never got to see this part of existence – 40 years old. And that is, truly, something to celebrate.

When I consider my last reincarnational self – a young man blown to pieces in the Pacific theater of WWII, who never made it to the age of 25 (and my terrible fears of booming fireworks every July 4th reminding me of the blast of the cannons that shattered that soul into death) – is it poignant that I have my birthday on November 11, veteran’s day? Hah! Just goes to show, you may be down, but never out! (And to think, it took me nearly 39 years to realize the significance of my birthday being on veteran’s day! I never really made the connection before.)

There was a lot to honor in this celebration … Other portions of the self, friends, family … At 40, I know I am moving ahead with something I lacked earlier in life (not creaking bones or aches and pains), but a greater awareness of magic, love, and the realization of just how blessed we all are to have each other on this journey, in this time, in this life, on this planet.

Now that’s a Happy Birthday.

Until next time.

The Medium's Lingo

Sometimes I think people have this erroneous idea that when a medium is talking to a deceased person, they think the dead is right up next to the medium’s ear whispering information. “Tell him my name is Joe, and that I had a heart attack.” Indeed, I believe some people think this is the way it should be. Though in some instances, information can come through the auditory senses (clairaudience), more often than not, various other methods are used to “speak.”

During the heyday of spiritualism in the late 1800s and early 1900’s, the investigators of the Society for Psychical Research in England and its American counterpart ASPR worked with many talented mediums that left them astounded believers. Richard Hodgson, a staunch skeptic, came to the US to study an enigmatic Boston housewife, Leonora Piper, who had confounded one of ASPR’s founders. Hodgson’s sole intent was to find out how she was fooling everybody; he even went so far as to hire private investigators to shadow her around town to see how she was “stealing” information about potential sitters. He is quoted in an article from 1914 as saying “I had but one object, to discover fraud and trickery … of unmasking her.” Through years of blind experiments and tests of unimaginable conditions (such as being poked with needles during a trance, or having foul smells placed under her nose to trip her up), Mrs. Piper turned Hodgson into a believer, as well as the highly regarded and respected psychologist William James, who declared Piper his “white crow.”

When Hodgson collapsed on the hand-ball court and died of a massive heart attack, it took eight days to make his way for communication through Piper to a new SPR investigator: The former Hodgson took control of the medium’s body and started writing. It was very tough at first (initially breaking the lead of the pencil due to uncertainty and heightened emotions as he tried to scrawl his initials). But eventually – through perseverance and practice – he got the pencil flowing and proved his identity by offering information Piper had never known about him, but could be validated. He also revealed how difficult it was for spirits to get information across to those here on earth. He said he had to “impress the mechanism” in order to get information through, describing Piper’s body as a field of light that scattered things in a random fashion; it took concentration and effort. He said there were certain spirits that, with much practice, were able to impress the energy easier than others to get the information into conscious awareness. He alluded to the notion that those of us on earth really have no idea as to what the medium has to go through, and so he did his best to describe the process; it wasn’t perfect, it was prone to errors, mainly due to the fact that consciousness is so variable and can distort the incoming impressions. “I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying to find his hat,' Hodgson told Professor William Newbold in a July 23, 1906 sitting. “And I am not wholly conscious of my own utterances because they come out automatically, impressed upon the machine (Piper’s body)…I impress my thoughts on the machine which registers them at random, and which are at times doubtless difficult to understand. I understand so much better the modus operandi than I did when I was in your world.

Indeed, F.W.H. Myers, who is credited with starting the cross correspondence phenomenon (see my earlier post “Telepathy, Super-psi, or Talking to the Dead”), wrote through a medium after his death how hard it was to send a transmission. “The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulties of sending a message – is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass which blurs sight and deadens sounds – dictating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary.” In cases like this, the message seems so clear, but apparently, it can be a game of hit-and-miss. The cross correspondences spell this out through many examples, as similar messages were received through various mediums, with only slight alterations between imagery or words, which would be expected by such limitations as “frosted glass that blurs sight and deadens sounds.”

As we can see from these early pioneers, it’s not as simple as someone speaking into your ear. Mediumship is its own language that oftentimes has to be “built” individually per medium. According to these initial explorers and modern mediums of today, a spirit will oftentimes show the medium something relevant to the medium’s life as an analogy to the spirit’s own. For instance, the medium may see an image of his own grandmother, simply to reference that he has a sitter’s grandmother coming through. The medium may see a shot of fireworks going off connected to a calendar date, giving him the impression of a birthday or anniversary – and it’s the same image for different spirits. Same with bodily sensations – heat may mean illness, or heaviness or blackness suggesting “Things aren’t right.” In other words, each spirit has access to symbols, feelings, sounds, from a personal library attached to the medium. How this works, how a spirit accesses this and understands how to impress the medium’s consciousness with the symbols, I can’t begin to imagine.

But the overall process seems to be understood: Images, feelings, smells, sounds … These are all techniques employed by the discarnate in order to get through. And they come in quick snapshots – rarely is it like a piece of film being thread through a projector that lasts from the beginning of the reading to the end. Yes, sometimes I see moving pictures, but they do not tell the complete story; the complete story can only be discovered within the context of all the images, sounds, feelings, etc., being experienced. Some add onto the others, creating a larger picture and meaning, while some are at times disjointed and require deeper examination.

Communication, as we all know, is a two-way street and we can assist our friends in spirit in developing this dialogue.

How?

Since a good percentage of clairvoyant perception comes in symbolic images “plucked” from the medium’s life history, the medium can create new memories, thus new symbols, to give spirits a greater vocabulary to choose from. I tried this technique over a year ago, and it has worked surprisingly well. Since I believe everyone has this ability, this means you can do it, too.

How to do this, you ask? It’s actually quite simple, in principle (the work comes in practicing mediumship itself, overall). Choose a picture (say an image of ballet slippers) and write beneath the image what it means as a symbol (“Dancing or dance.”) And then, during the course of a reading, if a snapshot of those ballet slippers appears, when you place it within the context of other messages coming through, you can piece it all together into a message that might say “He says you love to dance.” All it takes is creating an image, defining its meaning, and then committing it memory (that may take awhile).

Will these images be used all the time, every time? No. For instance, I have a symbol for being a musician and liking music. I had a client whose mother was an avid musician, yet the symbol never came up during the reading, but it had come up in other readings before. That’s okay; with all the other information she gave, there was no question that she was communicating. Again, since we don’t know all the fine details of how this process works, we can’t say why some spirits use the symbols while others don’t – when it seems they could have. Similarly, we have millions of words to choose from (according to Webster) yet we don’t always choose the most appropriate and instead stick to what we can use “off the cuff.” Since the act of communicating through a medium has its limitations (time, energy, and process), it may very well be whatever a spirit thinks they can grab more easily and transmit through the energetic matrix, and thus certain possible cues are abandoned in favor of others perceived as “easier to transmit.”

It may not be an easy method, or it might require education, practice, and skill. As Hodgson stated through Piper, some spirits are very practiced at communicating while others aren’t.

The other ingredient to making this communication happen more “smoothly” is the relaxation process within the medium. Since it appears the spirits have to impress our energies, the less chaotic and frantic we are, the better this process is going to be. I notice when I let go of expectation, stress, or even mild concern during a sitting, I get information a lot quicker, with deeper nuances. This is partly the reason why so many professional mediums suggest meditation as a daily practice.

Early mediums used a form of trance state in order to get out of their own way. It was within this trance that their consciousness would be suitable energetically to have spirits come through – either in automatic writing or direct channel. The trance medium usually declares no recollection of the sitting, as if they had left the body.

In many cases, the early mediums employed what they considered a “control” spirit, like a spirit guide, who would deliver the message on behalf of the deceased. It was believed that the control spirit had more practice in impressing the medium’s consciousness, plus aid in keeping the body of the medium protected. Today’s mediums are considered mental mediums, where they are consciously aware of the Now moment and are still in complete control of their faculties. Some claim to use spirit guide controls as the messengers, while others don’t. I, myself, feel I am communicating directly with the individual and not through a control, based on several factors happening at the time of communication, such as location of where the information is coming from, feel of the individual’s personality, etc.

In either case, the method of communication seems to be similar, if not altogether identical. It’s not talking like you and me having a conversation, it’s more like watching, listening, and feeling … And when things impress upon the consciousness – that feeling of heat, weight, accompanied by a visual image and maybe a memory of a sound or a familiar fragrance or a word which is completely unique within the stream of your regular mental awareness – that’s when the messages begin.

Until next time,