The rocky road to higher realms in Daydreaming on the Porch

Recently, another diarist wrote here about a former work associate who quit his job to start over in a new career because he had started “hearing voices.” Turns out he realized he was a medium who went on to write two books about his experiences.

This got me pondering the realm of strange and difficult to explain or prove experiences about which most of us are clueless, and probably for good reason. These include the true nature of consciousness, spirit, intuition and parapsychology that are open doors to these other realms. Each of us in our own way is sensitive to these realms, but we don’t know how to enter them unless some extraordinarily inexplicable, incomprehensible or otherwise far-out experience plays across our limited field of senses and awareness and jolts us out of our normal sensory boundaries. Many devout and deeply religious or spiritual individuals have gained thus access. Near-death and out-of-body experiences. Communication with the dead and with the spirit world in general. The Sixth Sense, reincarnation. Mysticism in religious traditions.

There are people who claim to have seen and encountered extraterrestrial beings from elsewhere in our universe or from parallel universes or space-time dimensions we can only theorize about. Who am I to judge the truth or falsity of their claims? Who can understand the deepest mysteries of the mind? Are most of us shielded from otherworldly realities? I tend to think so. But then again, probably the great majority of people of have “seen” UFO’s” or, as they are called now, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), keep it to themselves for fear of being ridiculed or considered unstable. Or maybe they feel being open about this would put their jobs at risk.

Mediums are “sensitives” who are supposedly intermediaries between worlds of being — material and spiritual — for lack of better terms. Personally, I don’t know how people who have had first-hand experience with extraterrestrials, or who can contact the dead, maintain their sanity. But maybe they are the “sane” ones? Maybe it’s the rest of us who wander daily in the world of the five known senses, and who claim there’s nothing else beyond what we can prove exists, are the crazy ones.

Although I can’t claim to have had an overtly supernatural or paranormal experience, I am open minded and willing to grant the truth and validity of others’ experiences. I personally have not seen a UFO, nor have I been abducted and experimented on by aliens. To me, the 1982 movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” is much more intellectually thought-provoking than any of the “Star Wars” movies filled with intergalactic good guys and villains engaged in preposterously silly spaceship warfare and battles. Rod Serling’s 1950s TV series “The Twilight Zone” is much more harrowing and realistic than any contemporary horror shows or movies. Most of us have brains to think with, but Hollywood treats the masses who slurp up its entertainment fare as if they were all just stupid sheep needing to be entertained or babysat.

Finally, this about my personal experiences with extra-sensory perception, intuition, enlightenment and awareness. Mental illness, in the form of severe depression, is something I have been afflicted with twice in the past. It is perhaps the most excruciating and unendurable experience imaginable, plunging one into the very abyss, your own personal black hole. I have written about these experiences a number of times, because, as with so many subjects I have written about over the past 23 years, I have felt compelled to do so as writing is so necessary, therapeutic and cathartic to me. Despite the extreme mental anguish, and actually because of it, surviving this passage through the most treacherous mental rapids, brought me, ironically, deeper and more penetrating insights than has ever been possible in a normal state of mind. Some would say these insights, often of a profoundly spiritual nature, are delusions or the by-products of temporary insanity or psychosis. But my experience, and that of many others throughout history, proves otherwise. From the “dark night of the soul” comes knowledge, healing and wisdom that can transcend completely what we strive for so mightily in our everyday lives. Ironically, it’s suffering that often paves the way to enlightenment and emergence on the other, calmer shore, far from the raging sea of torment one has passed through. Why is this? It is because we have endured the trial by fire. We have received the deepest kind of awareness that lasts a lifetime, and which despite our re-entry to the accustomed lives we lead on a daily basis, is there to remind us of what we can achieve and experience if we absorb and out into practice the lessons learned from this oftentimes harrowing mental and emotional process. Unfortunately, our normal, daily lives and existence wipe away these deepest feelings, emotions and connections to the paths of enlightenment we embarked on, often unwillingly. Very few indeed can sustain this level of wisdom in this life. The gurus, sages, mystics, clairvoyants, sensitives, and teachers of esoteric wisdom down through the ages have been able to persevere, and that is why they stand out among us more ordinary mortals. This in no way implies that a cell, steady faith or spiritual search cannot yield the same or similar individual results for so many of us.

Given all this, I must state that I am endlessly mystified and fascinated, and sometimes repelled, by those who blast off on bizarre, insane” rantings and rovings into the worlds beyond.