Thinking about Solanum melongena further, it struck me that the chemical reality of the plant is probably what was making such an impression on me. It contains alkaloids, as do other Nightshades, and Solanum melongena has a long historical background and interaction with humans, being native to India so far as we know.

I believe now there is a definite connection with Solanum melongena and Finnish deities, in particular Tapio, Pekko and Mielikki, also possibly including Akka and her many connections with other Realm Beings, personalities who work with her as evidenced by some of my trance material.    What I’m learning about dark plant energies, I will post here in the future.  In the meantime, there are some great articles about nightshades with the links below.  I’m starting to understand why us Witches are so drawn to Nightshades:

http://herbalwitchcraft.com/blog/2010/07/18/nightshades-in-the-garden-today-black-nightshade-wild-tobacco-jasmine-tobacco-peppers-and-wild-petunias/

http://witchofforestgrove.com/2011/07/11/plants-can-be-witches-too/

https://magickshop.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/a-finnish-prayer-to-the-sower-gardening-magick/

Blessed Be!

What Wiccans Are All About

Looking at the intricate world of a leaf puts one in a trance of life, a celebration of chlorophyll, stored sunlight energy, a deep understanding of the Earth and her parts and the plant spirits that inhabit the plant itself.  Go outside and look at a leaf that catches your eye and really be with it for a minute.  That is really all you need to know about being Wiccan.

Furthermore, polytheism is a mixture of deities and beliefs, yet one thing sets us apart from others:  we do not believe in just one god or worship one god to the exclusion of others.  We are ditheists and believe in a dual godhead.  I honor the God and Goddess in my daily devotional in the morning and honor them in everything I decide to do. They are part of my breath, the molecules in my lungs, the blood and tissues and frequencies composing all of my physical self and all the electrical intensities composing my nonphysical self.  Their friends and alliances have taught me about electrical reality and how our inner self, inner ego and subconscious mind exist electrically encoded.  This may sound far afield from most Wiccan literature, but it’s quite practical and reasonable.

I am an eclectic solitary male Witch who lives on the Gulf Coast of the United States and I take great pride in the residence I live in, which is beautiful to me, and on the property I live on, which even though it’s rented is still sacred ground to me and my plants, and in my wonderful fur person/feline friend and I am fortunate to have a loving boyfriend as well.  I learn from the dirt, the conifers, oaks, palms and nightshades. I learn from the gods of ancient Finland who are part of my heritage and my future.   Personal responsibility is the defining tenet of my personal philosophy and I think is central to Wiccan belief.   Most issues revolve around the truth of being honest to yourself, taking personal responsibility for the things in your life and acting accordingly as it relates to your children, the environment, your job and everything else that affects your life.

I do believe there is a form of justice that accompanies personal responsibility.  We are individually responsible for our actions and are held accountable for the things we do.  If our subconscious records everything we do, one reason justifying that is that individuals learn from it.  Since we have entities, that is a separate self we may have to answer to.  We as personalities are not in a position to negotiate with our entity – they probably have the final say in our fate.  Our free will is limited by them in any case.

We all have entities so far as I know, they are like a check-in for humans, to ensure we are getting somewhere and understanding our mistakes.  Entities are not perfect, nor are the gods, though I’m sure they would seem that way from our current vantage point in the physical dimension.

One thing I’m absolutely sure about is that the gods have no control over anything happening in the physical realms.  That surely implies then a co-creation with us here on Earth.   We co-create reality through their auspices and creativity and playfulness, but they have no direct say in human affairs.  They, like our entities, have to follow the “hands off” model.

How Wiccans View Climate Change

Most Wiccans I know are closely allied to atheism and its embracing of rationalism, scientific reasoning and common sense.  I’ve long thought there is a strong correlation with atheism, Wicca and rationalism, the Enlighment ideals that some of our country’s principles were founded on, and the post-Industrial Revolution emergence of Pan, the Arcadian Greek god of the forest, whose pan-pipes and wonderment of nymphs and the forest, and embracing of sexuality, are dynamic forces forming our democracy and culture on into the 22nd century.   As most people are aware, 99 percent of the scientific community agrees that cilmate change is factually real and is basically irreversible at this point.  I think we have waited too long to enact even basic measures such as solar power and reduction of use of fossil fuels and the next two generations will pay a heavy price for these miscalculations.   What is needed is an embracing of scientific knowledge and a country-wide education and understanding of the basic concepts behind global climate change.  It is a formidable dilemma and must be worked on at the global level. There is not much practically speaking that can be accomplished at the consumer level.  Things are way beyond that now.

Wicca, Feminist Theology and Liberation Theology

An equality develops in Wicca, a balance between male and female energies that compose all personalities, a universal duality that all personalities are made of, based on the basic bisexual nature of all human beings.  As such, women and men are heralded as equals in Wicca within the religious system and are treated equally and have equal roles to play in ritual as well as life and society.  Maintaining this balance should be paramount in any democracy, as it honors the God and Goddess within all of us and extends a feeling of mutual humanness to all individuals, based on the idea that we are all individuals first, then we fall into the male/female category.  Being an individual person is the focal point of spiritual identity and questioning, and is the only rational way in proceeding when questioning identity: seeing yourself as an individual first and foremost removes any imbalanced effects from over-focusing on maleness to the exclusion of femaleness and vice versa.     A Divine Imbalance results that sustains a society indefinitely, based on principles of freedom and fairness and just actions.  There is an incremental pull towards these more positive actions all throughout recorded human history.    Liberation theology is by no means perfect but it does represent something important in the human psyche that has been overlooked – a call towards a  more just world where people are treated fairly, and with the religious mythical figures pointing out the flaws instead of espousing nonsensical dogma and reinforcing rigidity in personalities which only results in further negativity and the degradation of its adherents.

Beliefs to openly embrace all forms of sexual orientation

All groups should embrace any and all types of adult sexual orientation that is basically reasonable, sane and healthy for all involved.  To my mind, this includes polyarmory or polygamy, if such were desired, by consenting adults.  I personally like monogamy and think it’s good for me, but this wouldn’t take into account other individuals, or even future incarnations of relationships. As creative as human beings are, I’m sure we will invent even more ways to interact in relationships.  So long as permission is granted among consenting adults, I see no real problem with any type of arrangement in a Wiccan religious context and this should be the norm.  Trends that deviate from this should be treated as aberrations or systems of belief that disempower minorities or specific subgroups in a culture.  There is no place for this in Wicca.

As Pagans and Wiccans, if we do not get our act together and consolidate strong positive efforts towards protection and prosperity for ourselves and everyone in the United States, we are destined for a tortuous road ahead.   Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research has written some great articles on this subject and I encourage all of my readers to read his Op-Eds and columns.

Use your strengths with plants, plant spirits and land spirits, and the ties with your own personal gods and goddesses, to fortify the bonds of democracy this country was founded on, the principles behind Pan’s emergence in the post-industrial Revolution world of literature and poetry, and the imagination and hearts of many a 19th century writer.  Ronald Hutton does a fantastic job of discussing this subject here.

Looking at human events historically, one thing does hold true, and is a steadfast positive point for the future.  One can see the threads of justice, freedom and fairness progressing through all of history up to 2011.  It’s the one prevailing factor lying deep within human consciousness, and it benefits all of us to trust that and to abide by it, as without it, we are nothing.   Things will work out for the positive, so mote it be.

I am certainly familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance.  I was a daily cigarette smoker for a few years starting at the age of 19, in 1988.   I also began working out regularly with weights and within a year I realized I was not going to be able to continue smoking indefinitely.  I could feel the congestion in my lungs and the artificial masking in the tissues from cigarette smoke.  I read up on the literature and realized tobacco was more addictive than heroin and is the number one killer next to alcohol.  Supplemented with my father’s wisdom…”smoking will kill you for sure…” it was clear I had to make a decision to quit.  I enjoyed working out and jogging two to three miles every other day.   After several more months of smoking while simultaneously jogging and exercising, it became apparent to me I was dealing with two conflicting belief systems, and I knew one of them was going to defeat the other.  The cognitive dissonance effect was the emotional/mental conflict I felt about the two behaviors.  I wanted to smoke, but I didn’t want to smoke.  I believed smoking would lead to irreparable damage to my lung tissues and destruction of my pulmonary vasculature, but also believed smoking was not all that bad, and may not result in any type of health impairment.  Moreover, I believed jogging was good exercise and got my heart rate up, and the rapid heart racing didn’t complement cigarette smoking. I could feel the wear and tear and I was not happy.  So I had set up a conflict for myself. It took years for me to resolve the conflict.  I finally quit smoking in 2002 forever. Nine years later, I haven’t smoked but it was incredibly difficult, a mental trickery of sorts that has to take place over a long period of time.  Smoking, for me, was an almost knee-jerk reaction to help cope with stress.  I didn’t develop adequate coping skills as a teenager, hence my need to find other ways to deal with stress.

The feelings of conflict in such a situation are overwhelming and enormous. It eats away at you interiorly until you do something about it.  Basically, I now believe this to be an issue of integrity, and solving it was paramount to my well being and my mental stability.  It wasn’t just about a chemical dependence on nicotine. That was fairly easy to quell and it abated after a few weeks to minimal levels.  What was so difficult was the mental aspect, learning new coping mechanisms, trying out new ideas.

The basic idea I’m getting at is this:   It bothers me on some level to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously.  It doesn’t feel right and it doesn’t make logical sense.  None of us are machines and we do make errors of all kinds; however, I have a theory about life that we are here to differentiate between positive and negative energy and thinking, and to learn to be more positive in our thinking than negative, because moving on into other dimensions after this life requires a certain mental finesse is acquired before we are allowed to move on from this physical plane.   Clearly, I believe we as personalities survive death and I have no conflicting beliefs there, but I do believe that some people are inherently evil and though I don’t believe the source of their negativity comes from one particular thing versus another, what I do believe is that they have made a faulty personality construction, one that turns people into monsters or worse.  This has serious and usually fatal consequences for either one or more parties, including the “evil” person.  I could not have reached the point of confidently saying I believe we survive death without Seth’s guidance and what I consider to be superior intellectual knowledge. There is distortion in Seth’s books and some of his statements I believe to be inaccurate or exagerrated, but not out of an intent to abuse or harm.  That being said, I find people are much better off having read Seth than not.

I think now that holding contradictory ideas at the same time, and believing both of them, is one of the most harmful acts a person can perpetrate on themselves.  And it’s peculiar because it can easily go without notice, hiding under your nose for years until you finally stir the nest up enough to figure out something has gone awry.  That’s what happened with me, and I’m passing on the knowledge now to my readers.  What do you believe that is conflicting or contradictory, and why?  Can you get to the bottom of why you hold those two ideas?  It’s usually not a deep-seated reason.  We are separate from our ideas and feelings, they’re aren’t “us.”  It makes you wonder, if that’s true, then what are we really?  And how did we get here?  Those questions still have no answers.

Many people live their lives being irresponsible and a burden on others. They are negative and consume a lot of energy and constantly take and never give back. They have exceedingly bad characters and usually their lives end in tragedy or misery or both.  Life is chock full of these people.  You can probably go outside right now and walk through your local town and see a few of them.  There are terrible abusers, really negative and bad people who really do exist and will only do harm to you.   All the positive thinking in the world won’t flush these people out of the world.  Why does this happen?  Because it can.  Because energy has a free-wheeling basis to it and we are in a system of reality where almost anything can happen if you focus on it long enough.  This entails some responsibility on the part of both parties obviously, in any event that is experienced, but consciously we all know that really horrible events that happen to people are not created or asked for in any form or shape whatsoever.  With that in mind, it’s clear then that some people are simply what we term evil and certainly fit that mold, and there will be more of these scoundrels in the future, you can bet on that.  The only thing you can do is protect yourself and try to live as rationally and reasonably as practically possible, use common sense and avoid negative people.  Don’t let people manipulate or control you and don’t let people take advantage of you in unfair ways. Most negative situations have many warning signs before they get much worse, so heed the warning signs and get out of the situation, get away from the negative person.  I believe some personalities are corrosive and not well constructed at all. They do not know how to use energy, they may even be simply an embodied fragment or collection of fragments that are unevolved and have no care in the world what happens to you or your loved ones.  You can discern these types of people fairly easily once you know what you’re looking for.  And it has nothing to do with good and evil in the conventional sense, but in plain old common sense and good judgment.  Use them or face possible unpleasant consequences.  There is no other real “rule” in life, in my opinion.   That is my essay on “karma.”

Seth never stressed the idea of unity in any way, and I agree with him on that; at least, I agree with what I have perceived as his overall tone that we are all separate individual personalities who have a built-in integrity and that should be honored and respected.  He gives information to Jane and Rob about other lifetimes they had, and they had ensuing experiences that confirmed that for them, in their personal life, at their own pace and within their own complex understandings as individual people.  This is highly important, and I am frankly shocked that many “spiritual” people have so stressed this idea of “unity” and “oneness” to the point of creative strangulation. It’s like pouring bleach onto the creative strands and threads of life and then smiling as if you heartwarmingly said something deeply rooted in psychological understanding.  Nothing could be more murderous to our creative natures or the bents of our soul than taking the axe of oneness to your mental world.

I completely understand why Seth wanted to work with Jane and produce the Seth books.  I always wondered why Robert Butts wanted to take so many notes and participate so heavily with Jane in a sort of in-grown affair where they spent most of their time focused on what Seth was saying. I know Jane had the ESP class, but she did stop the classes eventually.  Even at the time of the Seth video in 1974, Jane looked arthritic and it appears she had a hard time even turning her head to the side.  She was already well on the road to her body being deeply affected by whatever it was she had, rheumatoid arthritis or not, she had a physical condition that needed attention by medical people.  I understand Seth’s disdain of the beliefs behind institutionalized medicine.  They aren’t perfect.  The system needs to be altered so it’s more like Norway’s system of healthcare.   We as Americans are so caught up in living our lives that I don’t think many of us have considered the fact that it might be better if we all contributed together to help the disadvantaged.  I don’t buy into the idea that big bad corporations control all of us like robots.  We do not have to buy their products!  You can live fairly well without giving much money at all to corporations.  They are what they are – simply a collection of people running a business.  They curtail anything that gets in the way of profit.  That’s just a fact of life and always will be; in fact, it’s against the law for them to do otherwise. They don’t have a choice, they have to maximize profits or the guy in charge will be replaced by another who will do the job required.  If people really wanted to minimize the effects of corporate greed, they’d do something about it.  People are happy being consumers and being uneducated.  I have never run into one person who knew of the Seth books, nor do I run into many people who are avid readers of non-fiction or books about political theory or life.   I have enjoyed reading Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wolin, but good luck finding someone who has read it!

To get back to Seth though, I find myself wondering what was really going on with Seth, Rob and Jane.    I know Jane was a creative person, one of the best really in all of history, and I respect her for that tremendously.  Her disciplined approach to the Seth sessions is respectable and admirable and she had what it took to be a good writer.  She wasn’t the best speller in the world, as I noticed going over her private papers at Yale University Library.  But you don’t need to be a whiz at spelling to produce creative material, a body of work that has far surpassed most all writers throughout history in terms of quality, its ability to produce comprehension of things people don’t normally think about.  I know the Seth books are a bit on the abstract side.  I’m an abstract loving person so that’s why it fit right into my left-handed nature.  I was actually left-handed as a child but when my mother took me to buy Lefty scissors for kindergarten, she changed her mind because we had a problem finding Lefty scissors, and she said I’d be better off being right-handed because “everyone else would be right-handed.”    That has some wisdom in it, but not a lot of creativity there.  I have always used my left hand just naturally but I write with my right hand.  Interestingly though most of the important people in my life are left-handed or have some left-handed leanings and tendencies (something odd I’ve noticed).  Seth said usually he was left-handed when he was alive in a body (see Session 211 from 11/24/65, Early Sessions Book 5).  He said he discarded “more bodies than he cared to tell,” again I’m paraphrasing.

When you read Seth’s books, in particular the Deleted Sessions books and Early Sessions books, and I agree with Sue that they truly are the heart of the Seth data, it’s clear how creative Seth was and how much it deeply affected Jane and Rob’s life, in fact I’m sure it was their life, I suppose that goes without saying.

The Sinful Self concept, when I first encountered it, was a shock to me.  As any avid Seth reader knows, when you get to that section of Jane/Seth’s writing, it is quite the revelation.  It opens up a whole other area to explore of Jane’s psyche and I have to agree with Carol Leigh Rice over at Silk Road Visions blog, this is where things get really strange and many piercing questions come to the forefront.  It appears the Sinful Self caused Jane’s physically incapacitating effects and didn’t have much empathy for Jane as a person or human being.  This does not sound like an evolved personality or even a personality who gives a damn; in fact, it sounds like a quite disconnected and perhaps deeply psychotic fragment. Part of the dilemma here is defining what the Sinful Self actually is.   As I read all this material on the Sinful Self, I came to the conclusion Seth was describing Jane’s Sinful Self as a fragment of her own personality, embedded in her psyche, with its roots of origin in her Catholic upbringing and experiences in the church with church doctrine and belief systems and priests, supplemented by her life growing up with an abusive mother, Marie, who was disabled.  Jane couldn’t even lie in bed with her mother without causing her mother to feel pain, so Marie obviously had the same condition Jane died of in 1984.  It was clearly a genetically inheritable disease.  I don’t care how much you work with your beliefs, if you have sickle cell disease for example, you are not going to be pain free your whole life.  It doesn’t work that way, and to think so is foolish to say the least.  So I’m of the belief that with all its inherent flaws, the medical establishment will always be needed by us to maintain health and equilibrium, to treat the sick and infirm and to help people get whatever intervention they need.   The more health care leans towards the profit making model, the more inhumane it will become, it’s just in the cards.  There is no way around that.  The only solution is to remove the profit part of the equation. There is no other way.

I now have incredible insight into the vital need for religious beliefs thanks to Seth.  I understand it emotionally, it makes sense.  Most everything Seth said makes sense, but goes against the grain of much of the gravy poured on us all in this physical dimension.  Religions are not perfect, but they surely fulfill a deep need in people. This is why people put up with negativity in the name of their religion, because it is that important to them.  It is taken quite seriously by people, and for a reason.

I also have to agree with Carol Leigh Rice that Seth was probably trying to get information through Jane but was not able to do so.  Seth mentioned countless times that Jane would block him when he was trying to talk or get information through her.  I find this situation kind of absurd and ridiculous, though understandable given the circumstances.  This further alludes to the fact of how much power we actually have as personalities.  If information is not allowed in, it’s simply not allowed in.  We are not at the mercy of spirits or disembodied personalities who want to control us. That is all bullcrap.  We have control over our lives, of that I’m sure.  We have freedom to act as well, obviously.  I don’t believe in predestination or determinism, at least not in the strict sense.  But there is only so much freedom and only so much one can do.  We are greatly limited by genetics and the socioeconomic background we come from.  These things define and shape our lives.  Every once in a great while, a person manages to slip through the cracks of our class-based culture here in America and progress into a more advanced class status.  But this is extraordinarily rare and never achieved by 99.99 percent of people.   It’s aggravating to me that Jane would block Seth, particularly about important issues dealing with reincarnation and maybe even topics that would have helped Jane be a healthier person.  So there is some definite tension there betwen the Sinful Self, Jane, the readers, Rob and Seth.  It all becomes ever so real by reading the books.

I believe the Sinful Self concept lives on in most all of us with Christian heritage.  We believe in it, it’s part of the structure of our lives or of the lives of our loved ones.   We Pagans have come to see at least the errs of the ways of monotheism, but that doesn’t make us better people than monotheists, just different.  In the end, we are all just people in a body.  So long as you don’t treat people horribly, you deserve respect and some dignity.

Digging deeper though, I have to wonder why Jane would block Seth.  After all, they published things that seemed quirky, Rob kept a thorough documentation of everything going on with them, so it stands to reason that they were honest about what they wrote about.  The whole integrity of their writing depended on their honesty and I believe it is there.  I also believe Seth is a real personality and has his own independent existence separate from Rob and Jane.  One thing that frustrates me about Seth is that he never fully explained what it is he does and he refused to answer questions posed by Rob on many, many occasions.  I don’t really understand why Rob put up with this behavior, I guess he felt he had no choice, or he didn’t want to risk Seth getting offended or deciding to end the project.  This may be because Seth convinced them he was connected to them through a prior entity (Seth said that he,  Jane and Rob were offshoots of the same entity).  I do not think Seth had nefarious intentions or that he wasn’t above board about what he was doing.  If he were, we probably would never know anyway, and surely he knew that.  He didn’t go to any great lengths to convince anyone of anything though, which is refreshing in a disembodied personality.  The whole affair on some level I’m sure is quite scandalous to certain types of people. I am not one of those people.   I do sometimes have feelings that maybe the things I do are not natural or good or normal,  for example with over-using the computer (I sometimes spend countless hours online) but I’m able to cast aside those feelings and feel an exuberance about myself and life that out-runs the negative thought. I’m sure this is fairly routine neurological fare for most of us.  I don’t think there is anything far-out or abnormal though about Seth or being able to talk to a Seth-like personality.  In that vein, Seth has certainly enlightened me and for that I’ll be forever grateful.

When I look at how life has actually happened to me and to others I know, I cannot honestly say that I feel I’m creating my reality. I’ve studied my dreams for 20 years and recorded them, written them down and have been analyzing them. I do not see an obvious connection where I am using subconscious belief systems either to create reality.  What I do see in my dreams is a lot of me imagining other situations that are similar to situations I’ve encountered before, or having experiences that are certainly not mine yet it’s me in the dream.  Who has these experiences then?  I’m thinking they are way more real than may be suspected on initial introspection.   I would even go so far as to call the other “me’s” in my dream who have different experiences as fragment selves of my own, sort of like a forking off of my personality into another self; from my viewpoint, a part of my self that forked off and went on its own way, but got with a different guy, dated different people, has different habits, but I still think of it as me subconsciously in dreams.  I see the subconscious as a dimension, an area of the mind sort of like a place.  In this medium, I have dreams.  So the subsconscous to me is a dimension meeting area where different parts of my overall self can meet up and compare notes, look at things in different ways, and learn from the experiences of the other fragments of my self.  I certainly see that in my dream life.

My recalled dreams involve strangers, some weather information, some precognitive information, I’ve had a dream that I later in fact experienced some of the events from, like the 1990 dream at my father’s house.  If we want to make something happen in normal everyday life, clearly we have the power individually to do whatever we want to do.  We can act out anything, but it always has consequences attached to it. The smarter of us avoid the dumb shit and stick with things that make us happy or fulfilled or contented or entertained.   Life presents us with oddball things sometimes or spontaneous things, which can surely change the course of your life, but overall I’m a creature of habit and I like it that way.  I enjoy living on a quiet street in a brick ranch style house with a giant front and back yard.  I am content and peaceful.  I can do my channeling work and write, play video games or read Pagan blogs, and read books, and put in my 40 hours a week of work on the computer.   Where do the gods fit in to that story?  They fit in because I want them to fit in. I think all people have a vital need for some kind of spiritual sustenance or food or energy. For me, it’s more of an energy thing.  I enjoy the energy of Paganism, of ritual in privacy and by myself, and I enjoy thinking about life and philosophical meanderings.  I enjoy reading Seth books by Jane Roberts.  I enjoy watching YouTube videos and seeing how other people think.  I find the antics of some Christian fundamentalists deplorable.  I cannot believe the moral depravity of some politicians.  I do not understand why people think it’s okay to take rights away from women or minorities when we are doing so well.  I do not understand why differences in religious belief have stirred up so much disdain, like the Hindu guy who tried to pray to a Hindu god before Congress a few years ago? The voices of dissent were some sort of stupidity, a leftover sort of hatred of other gods.  That certainly makes the Hindu gods have an appeal they didn’t have before. After all, why are people so against him praying to Hindu gods if there is nothing to it? Why not just entertain the guy for a minute and get on with the meeting?   There is something deeper going on internally with people with religious beliefs. They take them seriously.  What I don’t understand though is why they don’t question their beliefs more. I cannot take things on faith anymore.  I want proof or some evidence that it’s real or at least possible, and that it’s also a reasonable choice and a practical one, and if I’m going to believe in a god or goddess, I want that god or goddess, whatever flavor they happen to be, to work with me and maybe help me evolve spiritually (nonphysically), send some mind expanding dreams my way, some interesting concepts that make me think, some theoretical issues I could play with or write about.  Where are these gods?  And what for that matter does it mean to be a goddess or a god in the first place?  To me, that means you have graduated to another level of reality in the afterlife which would have to be composed of varying and assorted different dimensions (let’s hope so or we’re all going to be bored to tears).  The afterlife environment has to be tons more exciting than where we are now, right?  It just has to be, otherwise what’s the point of it all?   There has to be an evolving of consciousness, of our minds and experiences as an individual, that brings us to a larger idea of ourselves, a larger idea of our potential and an opening up of more choices for ourselves.  There has to be a trade-off; by losing the body, you get something else in return.  And what’s the point of a body anyway?  We adopt them for a time and then we leave them, sometimes tragically and sometimes peacefully. And who determines that while we’re at it?  Why do we leave our bodies the way we do?  Physical life, it seems to me, is quite demanding and not a fun place at all. It can surely be a lot of fun if you’re looking for fun, I’m not saying it’s all depressing and stupid.  But I am saying overall throughout history being in the physical dimension is not something I would ever choose to do, ever, under any circumstances. I would avoid it like the Bubonic plague.  Why would anyone want to come to a dimension to be a physical person to be saddled with the horrible possibilities here?  It just doesn’t make sense.  The other possibility in this vein is that in order to grow and develop, we had to have an environment where negativity does in fact exist and flourish but also that positivity flourishes too.  So we get a mixed-up world of both things where sometimes we have fantastic lives and sometimes miserable lives, usually a combination of the two, but still there are too many questions.   This must be where the idea comes from that “only good things come from hard work” or “it’s good for your character” type of stuff.  Without the difficult challenging parts, we do seem to do poorly sort of like a cloned sheep. We don’t hold up to what life metes out, we have to have a certain biological integrity that is backed up by a functioning neurological apparatus before we can flourish here. That much at least makes some kind of sense.

And what about politics and corporations?  Are there gods behind those too?  I personally find the idea of polytheism way more interesting than the idea of monotheism, particularly when applied to a physical life and what goes on in it.  We deal with different personalities every day and hopefully we learn a lot from that and you’d think over the last say 50 years, since 1961, we would have learned at least how to build better communities with healthier kids and a more improved structure to life.  After all, we have to stay here anyway, it’s not like we can all catch a bus to the afterlife if we want. So if we’re stuck here, why not make the best of it?

So one would think the gods and goddesses would be there to help us all through this maze of craziness, albeit sometimes intriguing and focused and colorful, yet that has not been my experience exactly.  I’m certain other energies have been watching me, charting my progress and teaching me in classes in dreams (another common dream theme for me over the years has been taking classes).  I once took a class in a dream by the same woman who was teaching me art history in college. I told her about it. I don’t think she cared much though.   People aren’t interested in dreaming it seems to me. Nobody wants to talk about it nor do they take it seriously. Dead seriousness of course would be beside the point, but curiosity and interest would be much appreciated!   I rarely find dream investigators, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever found one.   If the concept of a god or goddess was wrong or off the mark, why do so many people need it? Why do so many worship, pray and have deeper feelings that life is more than just the physical stuff we encounter.  Clearly, it’s important to us to have gods.

My criteria for godship would be they have to be smarter than me but also they have to be creator entities.  But even that concept falls flat on its face, because that could accurately describe our own entities.  I believe our personalities have a larger self called an entity.  The personality originates from the entity.  Much like we have two biological parents, we also have an entity, a more complicated structure that is comprised of all our various personalities that inhabit physical reality in different time periods (or sometimes the same periods).  There is much overlap and creativity, since at our hearts I think all people are highly creative beings.  But what if our entity, our “higher self,” is a creator entity?  Does that then mean we are all fixated with our entities?  Why blindly worship something you don’t even understand?  I don’t think any of us really understands how we got here or what we are – I haven’t seen any convincing proof. I have seen some damned interesting theories, some seem more true than others.  For example, I believe other sentient beings exist in other dimensions, even some physical-like places.  So there have to be reptilian beings who are much like us, being intelligent and forming communities, sciences and religions, only they are more reptile in nature and origin.  I’m sure this kind of variation goes on ad infinitum.   So who made all this stuff?  I don’t think any particular entity made all this stuff.  Perhaps a group of entities created the physical dimension as a medium, but what about the inner lives of all us people?  What about the subconscious mind?  That is not really a physical place like the store down the street is a place.  But try to find that store down the street while you’re dreaming.  I never can find it, nor can I even gain enough of my senses to even think that way.  This is why I do not understand the concept of lucid dreaming.  If anyone qualifies as an expert of sorts on dreaming, it has to be me.  I’m sure other people have taken efforts to remember their dreams, in fact I know they have. Others have made dream diaries and written about them as I am doing.   In looking at my dreams though I don’t see any common “gods and goddesses” threads.  I don’t see a connection to an idea of how we got here in the first place.  All I see are things relating to my own personality, my sense of self, and how I relate to the larger universe on a personal level, but only insofar as my own understandings as an individual person are concerned.  I cannot see what it’s like for Person X.   I can feel empathy for others in dreams and I have, and I do in life every day.  But I have no real conscious control of my dream life like I do my physical life.  But one could make an argument that even my physical life is fairly structured for me already, prepackaged and unable to be changed in any direct way.   Since I can understand these things about myself, that I can’t control my dream life, I have some control of my physical life, it’s not all that surprising we believe in gods.   There is a much more intriguing idea buried here, though, enveloped in the experiences we have every day.  It is there that the gods live for me, in the shadows of my dream life hanging out in the background, waiting for me to initiate a conversation with them or receive some inspiring thought given by them.  It’s a mystery and always will be I’m sure.

Something I consider interesting nowadays is the origin of my current personality. None of us remembers before birth. Why is that?  I’m wondering if personality is formed in response to, or as a result of, simply entering into the physical system, then allowing nature and nurture to work their magic on us and give us some rough draft of what will later become the future you.  There are several of these to pick from apparently, according to Jane Roberts’s Seth personality who wrote many books on the subject.  I could qualify as an expert of sorts on the writings of Seth, but I’m quite sure there are thousands of other people out there who have a better grip than I do on the intricacies and meanings conveyed by Seth.  I think Sue Watkins is of course phenomenally more an expert because she personally knew Jane.

The gods lurk in our psyches, in our personal lives, our intimate thoughts, in physical places like our graveyards, in varying forms.  There are plant energies, tree energies, insect and bird energies, star and sky energies. I am a believer in the wind gods, though I’ve never worshiped them or invoked them in ritual.  I am an eclectic solitary Wiccan practitioner since 2005 who is evolving now in mid-2011 into something else: a more confident but darker Pagan.  As readers of this blog already guessed, I’ve been a big fan of the Seth books by Jane Roberts.  Jane died in 1984.  I interviewed a good friend of hers in 2005, Susan Watkins.   I bought more unpublished Seth books and went to Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut, to read more Seth sessions from cardboard boxes, filed away in the beautiful dark wooden halls of Yale, probably never to be read by many human eyes for some years to come.  All in all, Seth is a mixed bag for me.  He’s been my hero when I needed one, a super spirit of sorts who came into this world in 1963 writing books and telling the world, in clear and easily understood language, how things are in the afterlife, and even in regular Earthly existence.  But after reading some recent blog posts on Silk Road Visions blog which are incredibly interesting, I came to several realizations about my friend, Seth.  I have no doubt that Seth is what he said he was: a personality.  I own over 20 of Jane’s books and the amount of data Seth channeled is simply overwhelming.

My boyfriend and I ventured into a sleepy fishing town near where we live, well within a 20 mile radius. There is a small restaurant/weekend place there called The Mockingbird that teaches Yoga classes in the back or something. They promoted the local Democrat at election time and have sensible people employed there. This is my kind of place.  Native American artifacts were unearthed in the same town  in the last few years near the bridge. There is an interesting feel to the place that sits wrapped around bodies of water and it’s kind of remote and private. Further intriguing to me, because I love abandoned buildings, is a stretch of highway that has been abandoned and some older lonely buildings that are crumbling in the background here and there, victims of the 2005 hurricane.  We ate some nice fat hot dogs and had root beer which for some reason tastes better there than the kind I get at the store even though they are still in aluminum cans, and walked to an adjoining antique shop.

Stretching for at least a city block, the antique store was filled with so much inventory I was not surprised when I eyed an old photograph of women workers in a factory somewhere in the south during World War Two.  I thought about the positive effects the personal efforts of each of these women had on the future of America, and how each woman in the photograph contributed something to the war.  I’m certainly not a fan of wars of any kind but it is heartwarming to know that the women left behind in the early 1940s wanted to help. Were they forced to? Did they all do it out of sheer necessity?

The merchant who ran the store was friendly and talkative.  I think she is a conduit or a first or maybe second stop of energies picked up [by her] that are traveling elsewhere, a connection to previous personalities, a go-between or carrier that could pass on whatever nonphysical glob it was she took from me to the appropriate people who would in turn pass my energy glob on to others.  I felt the definite pull from her, sort of like an energy vampire, but I have had this ability since my teen years so I have gotten really good at finessing out what is actually going on, learner of more subtle trickeries and slights of hand that us common folk partake in.

She maneuvered around the store, showing us around and being as friendly as she could muster.  When we left though I couldn’t help but think a part of me was to be taken somewhere else and reassembled in some kind of star magic that would help me later on.  I’ve been considering contacting some old personalities in my dreams to see if I could, theoretically anyway, make contact with someone and get some verification or proof of their existence, just to quell my incessant mental questioning about survival after death.  Do personalities survive?  I’m not sure yet.  I think we do survive in some manner, but not the way we think we do. My grandfather died in the last few months and I don’t really feel him around as a distinct unique personage anymore, but I do feel him, if that makes sense.

The world view of any given person takes data from the external world and welds it into a larger picture that can be grasped and understood and psychologically dealt with on the upper levels of human personality, what we call the ego and subconscious levels.

In essence, I agree strongly with two points made by the author, one being that I concertedly feel we human beings will destroy ourselves if we don’t stop the endless bloodlust for profit or find a way to diffuse the greed that has been behind the attack on labor rights since the 1970s in the United States and likewise been behind the climate crisis and dysfunctional US foreign policy.
Further, I also agree that in part what we see happening on the world stage can be largely attributed to Freud’s Thanatos, an innate desire for destruction involving many levels of the human energy systems we call personalities and the accompanying subjective worlds that all of us feel and breathe and live on a second-to-second basis.

Taking a strictly logical approach to solving the problems of the world, focusing on the problems, enlarging them to the exclusion of everything else, so that we are all vigorously focusing on what is wrong, is the incorrect approach to take in this situation; in fact, it surely spells disaster in the next 20-30 years.  Practically speaking, the only workable, sane and truly sound solution to humanity’s problems lies in another more fruitful direction, that of the magical approach endorsed by Pagans, Wiccans, Seth/Jane Roberts and anyone who utilizes their intuitive nature and subjective states to bring about more positivity in the world.   This is done not by dismissing outright what is wrong, but realizing it is one possible world chosen out of many, to look at the negativity and death and destruction and move on from it the only way we can, by focusing on the future, being active in our political process and our communities, by growing our own food, being as self sustaining as possible, and not relying on corporate stores to provide us with everything.   Attacking dogma and rigidity and lack of empathy, denial of reality by others — these are astute and wholesome.  But to outright attack magic in general or subjective approaches to solving life problems, is what got us in this worrisome predicament in the first place.

Some individuals are simply hedonistic, some are not.  Some are prone to greed, some prone to cancer or sensitive in the health area, some of us are prone to great creative acts or being a genius in the arts, physics, mathematics or even in mechanical things.   I don’t have a doctorate nor do I lay claim to being a genius, but I do know that life holds in its vastness a pragmatic understanding of reality that exceeds any one world view or way of solving problems. I know that focusing overmuch on what is wrong  doesn’t work.   We as a species have to embrace our differences and learn to build communities built not on strict logic or overly secular values, but on a sense of community, a notion that whatever your beliefs are, there are no absolutes in any reality, that polytheism is as natural to human understandings as rain is to the land, and living that way would go a long way towards solving the human dilemmas of greed by corporations and their attempts to gaining control over the middle and lower classes.   Respecting one another’s beliefs without tearing each other apart is paramount, in fact it’s a necessity.  The logical approach alone, when overly stressed and used as the sole tool for solutions, is a barren wasteland that yields only a few shriveled fruits.   Many civilizations have denuded their forests and resources and fallen but we have come too far to turn back now.  It is my firm belief that we as a species will evolve into something else.  I don’t think we will solve all our problems or eradicate all greed from human nature, but working with what we have as an artist works with paint, we can perhaps make a livable future.

-For further reading on this subject, I refer the reader to The Magical Approach by Jane Roberts, Copyright 1995.

When one starts to look at energy itself, on a molecular level, there is no “feminine” or “masculine” energy determination, it is all simply energy.  So for us as human beings, the real distinction in energy types comes from how we personally as individuals use energy.    As a gay man being effeminate as a young boy and adolescent, I came to know the meaning of “feminine energy” as a great liberator for my mind, body and nonphysical side.  Human identity is much larger than we give it credit for – there are several aspects to the identify of just one individual.   There is the conscious mind with its thoughts and feelings, though feelings are felt more by my whole body, and thoughts are received in my brain.  I don’t ever recall thinking my thigh was having a thought about something, or that my right knee was pondering if it should eat that piece of pie or not, so for us thoughts are centered in the brain as the receiving station.

Feminine energy has been likened to divine energy, or energy that equates to a higher purpose for humankind.  Contrasting this to the Christian worldview, energy only seems to be wholesome and good if it remains in the parameters of a fairly strict behavioral code, e.g., no premarital sex, church attendance and formation of social cliques that ostracize others unlike themselves, adherence to beliefs that homosexuality is evil, sinful and morally debasing based on Biblical teachings.   Trying to respect someone’s religion while simultaneously realizing they hold to these kinds of beliefs is challenging to say the least.  In the end, one comes to a point of decision-making with fundamentalist types.  You either have to accept them for who they are and move on or argue endlessly with them in different ways.  I cannot maintain friendships with people who are fundamentalist Christians of one stripe or another, because I’m too frank and outspoken in my beliefs, they become uncomfortable or think I’m unreasonable or perhaps their beliefs feel threatened, so they retreat.  Nonetheless, they have not dealt with the deep skepticism I have unleashed, nor do they, in the future, seem to care much about confronting the reality of what I’ve said or asked them to ponder.

Two characteristics embody the modern conservative Christian Republican:   the first is denial of reality (there is justification of this denial of reality using religious beliefs focused on hatred, not based in reason or logic, but in emotional reactions, and of course as I said earlier, emotions are felt more in the body than in the mind),  the second is lack of empathy; along with these goes a strong dislike of letting people control their own bodies .  Most controversial topics nowadays in 2011 stem from issues relating to the body:  abortion, consenting sex among adults who are gay, gay marriage or just simply being unmarried heterosexuals and living together.

The basic problem here is not so much one of semantics, but of profound habituation of thought centered around a religious book that has been translated from its original version as the Tanakh, into other languages and lost meaning in translation.  Rigid dogma eats away at the creativity of individuals and yields a non-thinking entity with a lack of compassion or simple ability to reason and feel the struggles, needs and desires of other human beings who may not hold their cherished religious values. Proselytizing then parlays its way in as a second coating to ensure the heaviness of such mental suffocation until the personality underneath is all but sterilized.

How did things get to be this way?   Looking at the history of Christianity, it was plagued by sometimes intense violence and hatred and we certainly have come a long way in our understandings and in living together in a democratic society.  The Christians seemed hellbent from the beginning to destroy Pagans and their religions and felt quite threatened by it.  But why?  Even historically, earlier Christians identified science and learning with Paganism.  There is a stunning parallel here that I hope to clear up in Part II of this installment.

Nature itself seems to self regulate and has an inner wisdom that defies human logic. It is a gestalt of intelligence beyond the comprehension of any one particular person.  This intelligence that grows trees from seeds, coordinates the lives of all creatures, including humans, also has ways of managing human populations.  If things become extremely imbalanced and stay that way, Earth eventually makes changes necessary to self correct.  Seeing that we are over-populated, and living in industrialized countries, there will be increases in the populations of homosexuals.  It just makes logical sense.  We can’t afford to bring 2 million more people in the next ten years to our planet.  Such a course would be disastrous in the long term, and it is the long term that the mass consciousness is focused on.  If we as a race don’t start focusing on the future more, and with sane and rational solutions, we have seen the best of times go by.  True freedom comes from us humans creating ways to live together in communities that embrace the core of all life – individuality, and also by liberating ourselves from whatever evils exist in life.