The sixth in a series venturing beyond the veil of the obvious. The point of this series has been to illustrate, drawing upon actual events in my own life, situations and occurrences which cast definitive doubt upon the conventionally accepted rational materialistic worldview. I hold that the only honest and plausible explanation for the kinds of events depicted here is that the realist consensus is wrong and must be replaced by a spiritual worldview — and it is at our collective peril that we persist “forward” wearing our status quo blinders. The previous episode can be found here. A useful explanatory orientation to the entire series is also worth seeing.

“A human being is part of a whole, what we call the ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” – Albert Einstein

Two in the Morning

A woman I was very close with, and whose mind I knew, was sleeping in the next room across the hallway. It was about 2AM. I was asleep in my own room, I think peacefully. It was late springtime, perhaps early summer. The door opened, only partly awakening me, that is arousing me towards some intermediate level, but still permitting sleep if nothing further disturbed me. But then I felt her hair and shoulder climbing into bed next to me; I heard her voice call my name, and recognized her scent. I also began perceiving the state of her feelings. She needed to talk, needed help.

I sat up and placed a pillow behind me to lean against the wall, and another for her beside me on my right. We held hands. She spoke, relaying her present circumstances, succinctly and frankly. Calmly yet with urgency. Quietly. As though we were not entirely alone. My body was not nearly physically awake yet, but my inner being became very alert and receptive. Before relating what she told me, I must make it completely clear to you that this person was one of the most grounded and down to earth individuals I had ever met, in fact I would say inspiringly so. She naturally broadcasted a radically ‘present’ and warming empathy into any conversation she chose to take part in. Honesty and compassion flowed out of her in all circumstances. And a certain quality of listening that made one feel instantly and humanly recognized and respected. She knew out of our entire history and relationship that I would take seriously whatever she had to relate, and therefore could be perfectly frank and direct. She spoke approximately as follows:

An entity is harassing me, refusing to leave or let me sleep. It is here with us — now. I have been struggling with it in my bed for half an hour, for a while, arguing. It wants me to do something I am refusing to do. It is very persistent and does not want to accept my decision. It is aggressive, intrusive, not a benevolent spirit.

Unphysical Intruder

I could detect no other presence. It was not as though I had any particular talent in this sphere of activity or anything. Yet I took her 100% at her word — it was evident to me that she spoke the truth and only came to me out of a feeling of urgency and a sense that I could be of help. I remembered, from a prior experience and conversation, that she possessed an apparently genuine sensitivity about such things. For example, years earlier we happened to be together in a hotel room on New Year’s Eve when she roused me and said she’d just had a distinct awareness that my mother was briefly present in the room. She had only met my mother twice before this and they had only begun to form the most preliminary impressions about one another. Yet, within only a few hours, we both learned that my mother, some 500 miles distant, had passed away within ten minutes of this episode.

I squeezed her hand softly and leaned closer against her, side-by-side, projecting solidarity, support, and interested engagement. The whole bedroom became more serious. She could tell from my now fully alert posture that I was going to work with her. I did not proceed out of some sort of ghostbuster expertise but from the sheer force of my humanity. I began by asking her specifically what the entity wanted.

She relaxed slightly, more confident now within our unified defense scenario. It is proposing that I accept to become like a medium for this region, to permit my body to become the vehicle of a spirit, a voice, a higher being who wants to give new instructions and teachings to the souls living in this area. It says the time is ripe for a newer more explicit message to be transmitted, and that I am the ideal channel, the right person to facilitate this.

After a silent moment she reiterated. I do not wish this and have made it clear that I do not want it. But the entity remains, agitating. It is trying to coerce me. We then were both quiet for a minute, gathering strength in our own ways within. I knew that this was a malevolent force of some sort. No matter how much reality one was inclined to attribute to such perceptions, if an entity violated the concept of human freedom it was adversarial, not an agent of good.

Then I knew what to do. And I seemed to know it with fearless confidence. I do not know how. It just came to me as we sat there silently confronting what for one was a palpable menace and for the other a completely unknown quantity.

Havoc, Then Peace and Certainty

I told her to breathe calmly but deeply — she was already doing this more or less — and that we should get in synch with each other, exhaling and inhaling. I told her to picture the goodness of the cosmos, all that was love and kindness and truth-seeking, and to picture it as a concentrated force, a brilliant but not harsh white ball of light. Inside us, in our centers. I said to picture only this and not the intruder. And then I said to begin saying these words repeatedly, slowly, to herself, along with me, while still picturing the image: Christ Within Me; Christ Within Us; Christ Within Me…

I want to emphasize as an aside here that neither one of us were particularly religious folk at all. We went our own way, did our own thing, formed our own ideas.

Quickly I could feel her assent, as well as her concentrated effort upon the actions I had recommended. It soon began to feel like we were both doing it, as one, in harmony. Holding the image and repeating the mantra. Christ Within Me; Christ Within Us; Christ Within Me… All the while in utter silence. Shortly, I began to sense something else, transmitted subtly in her hand’s grip. Assuredness and calmness were increasing. The intrusion was weakening. It was working. And I continued the exercise with a singular focus, placing specific emphasis upon the words “within us” whenever they revolved past my inner feeling.

I think I may have also felt a kind of lessening of tension within the room. After only a few more short moments she relaxed next to me and felt comfortable enough to speak. It was working, she informed. The entity was beginning to depart. I continued. Then she seemed to feel entirely relieved but before an unqualified sense of victory could take hold, one of the most strange and alien occurrences of my life took place. It was unforgettable and absolutely unique within all of my experience, and it took place inside of me, inside my body, in the area between my intestines and lungs, a vast region. It was sudden and non-biological. It was at once a physical sensation but not a physiological or anatomical one. It was just about the furthest thing from ‘imaginary’ that I had ever encountered. A force or movement was present within my trunk and it moved rapidly and randomly, so it seemed, three dimensionally about the center of my body. It crossed organ boundaries at will, zigzagging like an obsessed insect. But it felt more substantial than an insect. More like a walnut. It felt angry, all in a rage, bent upon destructive punishment. It was an agent of chaos working against the ordering forces of my organism, as if searching for a weakness or an entrypoint. And doing so at an incredibly high velocity. Sometimes thinking back on it, I picture the hectic trail of its activity as the entity itself. And other times I think of it as the resulting disorderly sensation of its traversed rage-path against my life forces. But what felt certain was that it was due to a being. A non-physical malicious entity had willfully invaded the energy patterns within my torso in such a way that I was entirely defenseless and unequipped to respond. It was vivid and stunning. And in a matter of seconds — it was gone.

I cannot say whether it simply desired to make evident to me its power and eternal enmity for interfering on behalf of my friend, or if it actually was intent upon inflicting spiritual damage upon me but was prevented through my invitations towards Christ. But no sooner it departed and my innards felt normal and unaffected. Only the awful sickening memory of the brief invasion remained. The woman did not even notice it had happened to me. I had the sense that the expulsion was entire, and permanent. And my friend voiced this belief even more strongly; she seemed certain of it. She thanked me and we rested a while quietly. After about ten minutes she squeezed my hand and left to go to sleep, saying that the entity would not return again to entreat her. The refusal was accomplished. And the two of us felt strangely at peace, absolutely confident somehow that our night’s sleep would be undisturbed. We did not feel the need to speak of it with each other ever again.

Conclusion: Science Has Rejected Human Experience

So ends the narrating of the tale per se. If your interest only extends this far you needn’t read further. Below I will speak about my thoughts and reactions to what I have narrated.

Naturally, all sorts of questions arose in me in consequence of this event over the next days and months. What had actually happened and what did it mean? What does it imply about the usual way of conceiving reality in 21st century North America? And what does it signal for me personally? There are not many, if any, serious vehicles or avenues for discussion about such matters. In fact it requires some courage to even write about. The natural tendency of people is to ignore things like this and brush them aside. Some people, those who have ‘skin in the game’ regarding scientific realism, can and will be openly hostile and dismissive that their worldview is being subjected to the slightest possibility of having its immunity from scrutiny removed. Others, with an undisciplined romanticism of sorts, will reflexively and vacuously seize upon such stories as nutrition. This kind of response is just as unhelpful, perhaps moreso. The thoughtful person who undergoes such an experience wants more than anything an open but serious and rigorous examination partner to help explore these phenomena. Lastly, another quite large chunk of listeners will have general sympathy for unconventional explanations and views of things, or at least that is how they will represent matters to themselves, but their concealed bias will invariably categorize events like this as ‘tricks of the mind’ or something similar. I firmly reject this. I was there and I know what I experienced, and it is as I have reported. My approach when deciding to write about such material is to rely upon the general quality and character of all of my previous writings in the belief that many readers will grant me a certain benefit of the doubt based upon their estimations of my reputation along the lines of clarity, precision, perceptivity, and concern for reality. And that is fundamentally the philosophy behind the entire ‘Adventures in the Supernatural’ series. I put it out there with faith in my street cred because I think it is important. I do not so much care about the readers who reject the veracity of it for various reasons of their own, but write it down for the ones who will think about it and perhaps not make up their minds until years later.

My current view is that the world, reality, is inherently spiritual in nature to the same degree that it is more obviously material, or physical, or ‘natural’. In fact moreso, because I do not think it believable that the spiritual aspects of reality can have arisen mysteriously — emergence is the usual academic term employed — from an originally purely physical aspect. I think it has to have been the other way around: that the physical manifestations have arisen out of a previously entirely spiritual condition. This implies the active involvement of beings employing their own deliberate and conscious agency. People do not like this territory because it implies religion or theology to them and they want to feel they, and us as a society, have comfortably and irrefutably outgrown those sorts of perspectives. But there is no reason whatsoever that a new spiritual perspective upon reality cannot be developed with the benefit of logic and reason and analysis and a scientific bent. What was once believed and approached via faith because of our collective stage of evolution can now be greatly expanded and enhanced with new powers of discernment. The myths should not be discarded; they should be penetrated! All that needs to change in order to take steps in this direction is that the vast inner landscapes which we call our psyches must be welcomed and included as grist for the mill of scientific inquiry, instead of purposefully ignored. It is this last point that I will expand upon a bit in the following concluding paragraph.

It is not widely realized by those who swallow the historical picture of modern western civilization spoonfed to them by contemporary education that a deliberate change in scope took place at the outset of the development of the scientific method. This method of looking at, investigating, and valuing the truth of things began to take hold around the 15th and early 16th century in Europe. The contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote eloquently about this in 2012, and he was soundly trounced by the scientific and academic establishment for his heresy, even though he enjoyed an exemplary reputation prior to this. (I wrote about Nagel’s take here.) And what did this scope change consist of? It eliminated from consideration anything experienced interiorly, subjectively so to speak, by the striving scientific investigator. Feelings, intuitions, and especially moral associations became strictly segregated out. Only what could be measured and observed by the physical senses or by extension its tools were to be considered as a valid commentary or observation about any phenomena. Prior to this change it was absolutely natural to consider all types of perceptions which arose when phenomena were encountered. The inwardly felt effects of a thing were not considered as something less relevant about the thing than what could be externally (objectively) measured. You can trace this revolutionary tendency beginning with Bacon if you care to, and observe how it rapidly led to an increasingly materialistic way of thinking about everything, seemingly justified by the ensuing fantastic leaps in knowledge and technology for more than 500 years. And if you are unprejudiced, you can also see how eliminating one entire broad swath of reality or experience like this would lead to a systematic region of ignorance dwelling in the center of our modern worldview. And that is why we are here, where we are! Why everything seems so riddled by contradiction and confusion, globally. Our souls, and the planet, can no longer collectively endure this willful ignorance about half — or more — of reality without catastrophic consequences. Spirit cannot be discovered by means of measurement or scientific instrumentation. It is not physical. It is pre-physical. Only our subjectivity can be trained and harnessed to explore this terrain which has been veiled too long from our collective awareness. The spiritual reality — meaning the beings who encompass it — awaits our human engagement. And they await with devoted anticipation.

“Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought. And humility is attentive patience.” – Simone Weil

_______RS

Thanks for reading about my supernatural adventure. Special thanks to those readers who have formed no judgements about matters mentioned herein and who instead are committed to living with the ideas and thinking about them. No hallucinogenic agents of any sort were employed at any moment during any of the events described within the “Adventures in the Supernatural” series of writings. May you be open to your own supernatural adventures, while taking care to retain your clear-eyed reason and mental sobriety, to protect yourself from delusion.

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