In psychological terms channeling is probably to be considered a dissociative stae; I think that that is the proper term. (See my Q & A post of a couple of days ago) Although to be in such a mental state can be a pathlogical condition most of the time it isn't. If you've ever had a great time with a good friend, just sitting and having an animated conversation, sooner or later one of you will say, "Oh! Look at the time! Have we really been talking for two hours? It seems like ten minutes!" This is the simplest example of being in a dissociative state that comes to mind at the moment, and no-one would say that either you or your friend were in a pathological condition. On the contrary, having such a good time with your friend would probably leave you both rather bubbly, spirits in a bouyant and happy frame.

One of the things I've had to put up with over the years originates in the bias inherent in Western culture, especially since materialist/reductionist ideas, memes and views took over much of modern psychology, starting with Papa Freud back in the 1890's. Before I get into that, to be clear, the "thing" to which I refer comes out as a question, "How do you know that what you are experiencing is real, and not the product of your imagination?" To be able to answer that properly, I want to invite you on a quick tour of the history of Western culture as we know it. Some of what I am about to write will repeat some of the stuff I wrote in a post I made a couple of days ago, but rather than have you bounce back and forth I shall contain evrything here. Also, I am not adding footnotes, simply because any of the statements I make are easily verifiable and are in accord with most historical overviews of Western cultural history.

At the time of Jesus' birth, "Western culture" meant the empire of Rome. All of modern-day Europe and America is descended from this edifice that held historians, philosophers and theologians in awe for nigh unto two millenia. In the childhood of Jesus and his siblings, the emperor Augustus had succeeded in unifying and administrating a good chunk of Europe, northern Africa and the middle East. There were roads, paved roads, throughout much of this empire; couriers ran regular despatch routes to and from Rome; soldiers were sent to frontier outposts, roataed on a regular basia; virtually very seaport in the Mediterranean was a hub of international trade of breathtaking proportions. Although the empire favored the rich and upper classes, "common folk" had access to the most just legal system since the days of the Babylonian king Hammurabi some eighteen centuries before.

The primary objective of any political power structure, whether that of Augustus or George W. Bush, is to keep itself intact and functioning. Anything that might rock the boat was watched, and if needs be, eliminated. Unfortunately for Augustus, the people of his day were woefully out of touch with this singular political reality. There were all kinds of spiritual movements going on, and not just in Palestine where Jesus lived. In what is now modern-day Turkey, there were groups of people who followed ascetic ideals and lived in communes; the same held true for upper Egypt. Some of these groups were directly evolved from some form of Judaism, although many more were strictly the end result of revelations given to this or that teacher. In the first century AD alone, there appeared "prophets" with names like Elkhesai and Cerinthus, and the notorius Apollonius of Tyana. There were literally hundreds of wandering teachers proclaiming variations of the philosophies of the earlier Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Plato. Of these, many were little more than clever charlatans out to make a few bucks, but there were quite a number who were sincere.

The government of Augustus kept a wary eye on the more popular of these prophets, especially those who might have gathered a sizable following. The reason for this watchfulness ought to be transpaerent; should any one of these "prophets" get it into his head to start saying, "Hey, you know, Augustus is a Nazi/liberal nutjob, he ought be knocked off!," the financial interests of the empire - not to mention the life of Augustus himself - would perceive said prophet as a threat, and rightfully so. Jesus got caught in just such a situation: the King of Israel was not recognized as such by either Roman law or the Roman government; furthermore, the environment which had produced Jesus was decidedly unhappy with the presence of Roman soldiers everywhere, and often small guerilla groups would lose no opportunity to knock off Roman soldiers and government officials. (As a sidebar, if this reminds you of present-day Iraq, it is no coincidence; just goes to show how some people never take lessons from history) To nutshell this, Jesus was a political threat in a land full of political threats.

I wish now to fast-forward to about200 AD. The Church, which had gotten itself into every corner of the empire and beyond, was deeply divided between "Gnostic" Christians and "Orthodox" Christians; the latter became the Catholic/Orthodox Church axis as it is today. The Gnostics claimed that every believer, that is, every Christian, was entitled to and would receive after some diligent spiritual development, a very personal revelation from the Risen Christ. Some of these revelations as they have come down to us are quite extraordianry and colorful, having in some instances little reference to Christianity as it is understood today. On the other hand, the Orthodox maintained that there were no more major revelations coming from Jesus; what revelations there were, were considered to be in the writings of those believed to have been His earliest followers. Eventually the Orthodox group became a part of the Roman government and spent several centuries eliminating the Gnostic and Pagan competition.

Human nature being what it is, however, the Church would no sooner finish mopping up one dissident group when another would pop out of the revelatory woodwork. The most successful of these was a young German priest named Martin Luther. The Church countered by labeling anyone whom they caught espousing Luther's ideas - or anything remotely similar to his - as followers of the Devil. These poor buggers were treated with the same legal severity as those accused of witchcraft, indeed, the line between "Lutherans" and "witches" became extremely blurry in the minds of many canon-law experts, who usually had the local soldiers at hand to enforce their edicts. This resulted in extraordianry bloodshed across Europe, thousands being burned for not being quite in line with Church policy. Of course, this resulted in many devious people coming up with simple plans to get rid of rich Uncle Pietr or an annoying neighbor: tell the local magistrate that the uncle or neighbor was a witch, and buh-bye!

It was not until the eighteenth century that there was any clear-headed examination of this whole odious situation. With the rise of the French philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau, the supernatural basis upon which the Church's existence was based was seriously seriously challenged. Because the Church had had nearly fifteen hundred years to accumulate all kinds of marvelous and unprovable stories, it was by now a sitting duck for the clear reasoned barbs of Voltaire and the not-so-clear, not-always-well-reasoned but colorful attacks by Rousseau. Things did not change in the next century as a polymath named Karl Marx saw through the whole social structure in economic terms - the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - and this did, for a short while, set social and psychological scientists free to explore things of the mind and soul (if, in fact, there was such a thing as a soul). One of the jobs of any scientist is to accumulate facts. The next step is to analyze and explain these facts within a system of hopefully rational hypotheses: because of this, that happens.

In Great Britain and in America, two pioneer psychologists, F.W.H. Myers in England and William James in the United States, began to tackle the thorny problems which arose from many phenomena which by now had been relegated to the social broomcloset by the combined efforts of the Church's attitude and the unwitting assistance provided by the rationality of the philosophes of the previous century. And so it was that Myers and Jmaes tackled things like ghosts, telepathy - and spirit mediums. In so doing, they each uncovered much that was either delusional or downright fraudulant. Myers, who died in 1901, was convinced that there were genuine ghosts, real telepathy, and some spirit mediums who were what they said they were. James, who died in 1910, was not quite ready to give full validation to such things, but any reading of his last essays showed that he wanted to.

Something else appeared to muddy the water and that was the appearance of Sigmund Freud. Freud was a medical doctor whose training made him able to see only what was plainly observable. Unfortunately for the good work of Myers and James, anything that smacked of the supernatural originated in childhood sexual trauma or in the regressive, infantile stages of personality that Freud hypothesized. It went downhill from there to the utter reductionist model of people like B.F. Skinner, and all of this in spite of the considerable sqwauking of protesters like Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung. Although much of Reich's work is derided as nonsense, the man had a much more scientific mind than Jung, and many of his ideas cannot be lightly dismissed - even things like his much-boohaha'd orgone enrgy...which, it turns out, is a real phenomena. This is not to belittle Jung, whose mind worked more in mythological terms, and whose work is plainly that of a literateur. All this is well and good, but generally, in America and Europe, if you are hearing voices, or channeling, you have a pathology, bub! It's not as bad as it was when reductionist/materialist philosphy hit its zenith in the 1950's with the work of Skinner and Harry Stack Sullivan. Out of that school came one of their own, dyed-in-the-wool as like them as could be. This man was vacationing in Mexico in 1959, his thirty-ninth year, and he ate some mushrooms as he sat poolside. His name? Doctor Timothy Leary.

Long forgotten is the fact that first and foremost, Leary was a doctor. he was trained in scientific method by the most rigorous of the Harvard psychiatrits of his day, the afore-mentioned Sullivan. Leary was no dreamy-eyed prophet. That came later, but if you ever met or knew him, he could be a ball of energy, but he was always the scientist and doctor.

Let me close this long trip into the past. We who channel make claims. Some of these claims threaten other people's secure vision of How Things Are. This is nothing new; what I dread is the day people like myself inevitably get drawn into the power structure, as did the Orthodox Christians and the Freudians. I hope we do better than they.

A real quick one for now - if you want to see the blog that the succubi of Outlands Community has, go to:

http://succubigirls.blogspot.com

I channel because it's what I do. It's become so much a part of me, like eating and breathing, I imagine I would be bewildered if the ability suddenly left me. (Bear with me, folks, I'm thinking out loud to myself to you) It's an extension of being creative. I write. I draw pictures. I do music. I make things out of wood. I channel.

I suppose this post wiil deal with at least a couple of the questions that I get asked. The questions are usually short and to the point. The answers are not always so simple. Let me give it a whirl!

Question 1: Is it possible you're schizophrenic? You hear voices, you've said. Schizophrenics hear voices.

Answer: I've been to therapy. Not for voices, but for suicidal depression, rage and being narcissistic (read: pathologically self-centered). The neighbor's dog has not told me to kill anyone, Jesus has not assured me that I can handle live powerlines, no-one or nothing is telling me how awful I am and that I must cut or burn myself, or kill myself. Or other people. Those with the type of schizophrenia who hear voices usually hear the kinds of things I've listed. If you wanna know what life is like for a schizophrenic, let me recommend two books; since I no longer have them I can only give the titles, but one is by a former schizophrenic - Operators and Things - and the other is by the therapist who saw a young woman through her experience, it is either The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl or The Biography of a Schizophrenic Girl. With the second book, I can give you the author: Margarite Schechehaye. Either way, that ain't me. When I told my therapist about Sara, he more or less said, "Nu, I hear a lot of that these days. So, bubby, what were you saying about your mutha?" Before I leave this question, let me ask one back atcha: How do you perceive your own thoughts? I perceive the voices of Sara, Seima, Llam, Joan of Arc in the same way that I perceive my own thoughts. But they are not my thoughts.

Question 2: Okay, so let's say you're not schizophrenic. Is it possible you are in a dissociative state? By that I mean, one part of your brain doesn't know that there is another part that is claiming to be Sara, or Seima, or Joan of Arc?

Answer: Yes, it's possible. But not likely. It is possible that a part of my mind of which I am completely unaware is playing a baroque form of hide-and-seek on me, constructing an elaborate and convincing charade to get the "aware" part of me convinced that I am in touch with Sara and company. Human minds will do that; many people lie to themselves their whole lives, convinced that they are good people, while those about them know that they are really total bastards. With me personally, you must acknowledge that in many ways I can see lots of trees but not the forest, that is, I have only my subjective experience about which to talk. Except.

Item: Fifteen people (at last count) have seen Sara. The most dramatic of these was at a poetry reading in Bloomfield New Jersey in 2002. About a dozen people, none of whom were aware of my life with her, came up to me after I had read and wanted to know, "Who was that little blond woman on stage with you?" I was startled, but not at a loss: "Oh, that's Sara, she's my wife." To the couple of people who pressed me with, "Where is she now?," I merely answered, "Oh, she's floating around here somewhere. Our lives are so busy I rarely see her." Tongue in cheek.

Item: My personal angel Seima has appeared in the dreams of six different people that I know. One person was totally unaware of her presence in my life and yet he got the name almost right: "...and I think she said her name was Saymir." I shrugged and asked, "Big woman? Over seven feet tall?" (Seima, by human standards, is about 7'5") "Yeah!How'd you know?" To which I replied with a straight face, "Oh, all guys dream about a woman like that sooner or later!" Which is true; 99% of them never recall the dream, though. Pity!

Item: Back at the beginning of all of this, I thought I would go to the one group of people who had the repuation of having a handle on channeling, so one terribly hot day in June of 1990 I went to a meeting of the local Spiritualist Church. I was given five minutes with one of the ministers, a man who utilized the rocking table technique for yes-no answers. But he was aware of "a red-haired man of powerful build, twinkling eyes and an infectious smile, about five foot five. High forehead. Looks like he's ready to burst out laughing." I had told him I wanted to ask a question of someone named Will; the question was, should I publish his writings? The answer, which I already knew, was "Yes." The minister looked puzzled and said to me, "Will seems to be possessed of great charm and immense mental clarity. Who is he, anyway?" Smiling, I told him, "The poet, William Blake. I came here just to make sure I'm not going crazy." With a warm and understanding smile, the minister began reciting, "Tyger, tyger, burning bright..." which Will had been singing while I sat with the minister.

Question 3: "I'm a writer. I've read some of your material very carefully. I've read your essays and other non-channeled material, and you have a very distinctive 'voice' on paper. Some of your channeled material bears no relation to your writing style. But some of it does. Care to comment?

Answer: I'm the first one to notice the same thing. There are times when I relax so completely that I just sit in the chair and watch kinda dumbfounded as the words speed acroos the screen. At such times, my thoughts, my writing techniques, my life experience are neatly out of the way of whoever is in the control booth. Then there are days when I am acutely aware that whatever the person is composing is being filtered through my brain and my use of English. Three notable exceptions are Irlene Davis, who writes with a southern drawl; Catty Cutty of Edinburgh who writes with a Scots burrrrr; and Joan of Arc, whose syntax is French and said syntax shows up quite often in her English. By the way, someone once presented Mr. Blake with a genuinely good question. Blake had claimed he had been in touch with the spirit of Voltaire. The questioner asked, "Mister Blake, Voltaire wrote and spoke in French, and you know English only; how is it that you comprehend him?" Blake had obviously given just that question a good deal of thought, and without hesitating replied, "It is as if Voltaire sat at a pianoforte and struck a key in French, whereas I hear it in English." That may be too cute for some people, but it happens to be the truth. As it is, I have some short sentences in French, Aztec and ancient Chinese that I really must check out someday; the "language barrier," as we call it here at Outlands, sometimes opens a tad and some few words leak through. Joan of Arc has produced a number of these.

Question 4 : I've been given to understand that you at one point owned over 7000 books, had read most of them, and remember huge portions of each, sometimes down to individual page numbers as to where something can be found. Is it possible that you're being creative with historical facts about historical figures, but facts of which you are only subliminally aware? To be blunt, isn't it possible you are doing masterful fiction-writing, based upon your prodigious memory?

Answer : That too is possible. In the mid-1970's I began writing a series of dialogs or plays set in fourth-century AD Corinth, in Greece. This little hobby of mine occupied me on and off for about five years. They featured the same five or six people, one of whom was a wine-seller. Throughout this whole period, the only things that I at all knew about Corinth in that era was it was a seaport, it had a huge markeplace called an agora, and at one end of the agora was a place for the local Roman magistrate to sit and hear legal matters; this place was called the bema, and it was a kind of little throne set up slightly so that the magistrate could look down at the petitioners and the petitioners had to look up at him. Logic and the bare political facts of the era said there had to be a small barracks for a few soldiers to act as the local constabulary near the marketplace. In my dialogs I had put the two wine-sellers diagonally opposite each other in the middle of the market. Again, in my imagination, I had placed the magistrate's quarters and the barrack slightly off the market proper on a gently downhill road that lead to the next town over, Cenchrae. In 1981 I stumbled across the records of the archaelogical team who'd excavated quite a bit of Corinth, and I found it unnerving in the extreme to find out that there were indeed two wineshops diagonally opposed to each other in the middle of the market, and the barracks were where I had placed them. This was long before I'd even heard of channeling.

Question 5 : What one chaneling episode sticks out in your mind as the most prominent? I imagine after 20-plus years there are a number of them, but tell me a good one.

Answer : You're right! There are a lot! Meeting Sara is one; meeting Seima is another, and Hurrain's story is a book unto itself. But I think this one could be quickly told, and again it was before I had ever heard the word, "channeling." In 1981 I began rehearsing music with a woman who was on a spiritual path similar to mine in many ways. We hit it off extraordinarily well, and worked together flawlessly for a few months. One night I went to sleep and dreamed that I was with her backstage at Albert Hall. Onstage we could plainly see the late John Lennon with an acoustic guitar and he was playing his song Imagine. For a moment he looked towards us, smiled, and I seemed to sense him saying, "It's up to folks like you now." I awoke in a sweat and began to cry; John's death disturbed and hurt very bad. The next night was rehearsal night, and my partner and I sat chewing the fat for a few moments. I wanted to say something about the dream when she picked up her guitar and began to play Imagine. She stopped, her eyes full of tears, and looked at me, shaking her head, no, no, no, it can't be, to which I said aloud, "You were there with me at Albert Hall. You heard him, it's up to us." She had; it is.

Channeling is associated with a number of other paranormal skills, at least by we who channel. Out-of-the-body-experiences are one of them, bilocation is another. But channeling discarnate entities is a fascinating thing to experience. For myself, I am acutely aware of who is using my fingers at the keyboard - in earlier days, it was pen and paper - and I am still capable of direct voice channeling, allowing the entity to use my vocal chords, and depending upon our mutual comfort, the rest of my body as well. I hate to use the word, but I allow the entity to possess me; the distate for the word stems from the association it automatically calls up about the Church's use of the word, or perhaps the Exorcist movies. I had mentioned in the previous entry that I'd allowed a 12th century Roumanian duke named Vlad Dragool the use of my facility and faculties. Channeling Dracula as a first attempt was a lesson almost learned, for a couple of years later I made the same mistake with the Reverend Jim Jones. At the outset let me tell you, at the very least, people like these guys are no fun. I'll take Joan of Arc or an angel any day.

I had been in touch with the poet / artist William Blake for a very short time before this, but was not at all convinced of the reality of it. I'd mentioned it to my then-current lady-friend, whose daughter happened to be having a Halloween party in a few days. The daughter was a prototypical Goth - prototypical because this was the mid-1980's. (She could have had a patent on the whole Goth fashion image, she was absolutely the first person I ever knew who went about in vintage black lace clothing, white makeup and all. Fashionwise she was way ahead of her time; in the context of this story, she was fourteen or fifteen) Milly asked me if I could "get" Dracula for her party. Never one to resist what I perceived as a challenge, I said "Sure! No problem!" But I only had the vaguest idea of how to channel Drac or anyone. The only thing I had to go by was what I'd read of Jane Roberts' experiences with Seth. What I had gleaned from her books was that she was in a very relaxed altered state. Now, if anything is my specialty, it's altered states; having tripped over 3000 times I ought to know a little about them. So I arrived stoned, having smoked an entire joint of very strong marijuana. And what did I know about Dracula? That he was a real historical person, a warrior chieftain of 12th century Roumania whose practices included impaling the heads or bodies of his victims and leaving them along the roadways and that he really did drink blood.

The party was underway when I got there, stoned out of my gourd, reeking of my trademark patchouli oil, dressed all in black. I was introduced to Milly's friends, got a shot of bourbon out of my hip flask and started chatting up her mom. A short while later I was asked to make my appearance and do my thang; I asked for five minutes time, smoked another bone and had a pull from the bourbon. I was relaxed. Oh yes, I was relaxed! I walked into the living room and asked everyone to sit in a circle with me on the floor; we joined hands and I announced that I would close my eyes and go into a trance and see if I could find Dracula; I asked everyone to remain silent and closed my eyes.

I thought of the pictures I'd seen of his castle, the countryside about it, the records I'd read concerning him and drifted for a moment, prepared, if I had to, fake the whole thing. (Which is an illustration of how I was back then) I suddenly felt very cold, and felt the coldness travel down my left hand into the hand of the girl next to me, whom I felt shudder; I had the distinct impression that whatever the energy was that went down my right arm was going through the circle of kids and would be coming up my right arm momentarily. It did, but it was magnified through the minds of the fifteen or so kids who were with me in that circle. For a few seconds I was knocked off my pins and had the sense to let go of the girls on either side of me. I didn't want whatever that was going through what I recognized as a feedback loop, exponentially amplified again.

I felt an anger and fear and viciousness that was not me. It - he - wanted to speak. I had gotten some mastery over myself and acquiesced. "So, you young ones wish to speak to Vlad the Conqueror!," he exclaimed with my vocal chords. What da fuck? "What shall I tell you? How the popeys hated Vlad? How they would not listen to him? Ha! I made them listen! For I am Vlad the Unconquerable!" It didn't seem that death had conquered this paranoid killer. I kept getting mental images of dead bodies opened up in ways suitable for display in an anatomy text book. It seemed to be almost like art for him, he seemed to draw an aesthetic pleasure from them. If this was not Dracula, it wasn't me either. I was along for the ride at this point. He went on boasting of his "work" for quite a while, gradually shifting over to how alone he was. The emphasis on his immense solitude, and how unbearable it was for him, began to impress me more and more. I got his attention and mentally said to him, "I'm cutting you loose in a moment, give these kids some advice so they don't become like you." I sensed rage and helplessness; almost against his will, Dracula spat out, "Become something, someone good. Do not follow me." The tension, the electricity in the room was becoming awful. I broke the connection and fell backwards. My head was spinning. When I sat up, I saw open mouths and popping eyes. Well, I had done it. I was convinced I'd gotten the genuine Vlad Dragool - still am convinced - and in my swirling thoughts was the sad realization that time indeed was on his side - but not in the way he expected.

The apotheosis to this story was that when I went into the kitchen to recover, Milly's mom's eyes popped. As I sat and regained my composure, I asked her what she was staring at. "Look at your hands," she whispered. They were not my hands. They were bigger, darker and twisted as if from multiple injuries, the kind that bar-fighters get. As we sat in shock, they slowly morphed back into my own hands. We neither of us knew what to say. Exhausted, I sought out a couch in the basement and blacked out for the next nine hours.

Channeling is like my second full-time job. I don't get paid for it in money, but the satisfactions of it and the at times incredible stuff I see flowing from my fingers onto the keyboard and screen are beyond price. I have been at it for nearly twenty years now. Among those with whom I've had contact are William and Catherine Blake, Stanley Kubrick, William Butler Yeats, Epictetus, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Joan of Arc. In addition to these well-known historical figures are the dozens of ethereal humans, archons, angels and occasional non-human entity which comprise the Outlands Community. Nowadays the path to channel is always open so that I am in continuous contact with many entities; this contact even extends down into my dreamlife. The rare times I need or want to be alone, I am alone; but this is rare, for I have fallen in love, and I do mean I have fallen in LOVE with a number of the ethereal humans. However, as that is actually a separate subject, and I wish to write about my experience of channeling, I shall reserve for the future some words about my life with the Community members with whom I am in love.

I was not aware that I was channeling when I began to channel. I was always reading things by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Saint Justin Martyr, Friedrich Nietzsche and William Blake. I've kept a (handwritten)journal since 1973, and when I transferred my personal journal to the word processor in April of 2005, I had left off on page 5500 something in the handwritten one. This blog is a kind of extension of them both. But I digress - in the 1980's I would wish that I could have thirty minutes in which to talk with these worthies, ask them questions and so forth. It was inevitable, as a writer, that I one night began an imaginary conversation with Saint Justin Martyr. I found myself writing furiously when it came to Justin's part in this imaginary conversation, almost as if I could not stop the flow of words. A veritable flood-tide.

Now, any writer will tell you, they get to analyze their writing style, looking for faulty grammar, over-repetition of favorite words, pet expressions and the like. Oftentimes such analysis is the precursor to editing what has been written, because writers seldom write anything that cannot use a little polishing and clarification: something may not be expressed clearly, or logic may be lacking in something; occasionally, a fiction writer will find he or she has contradicted the basic facts upon which the fiction is based. In analyzing "Justin's" words, I often found myself saying, "This is not my writing style." Curious, I set about rereading his two substantial works, the Apologia and the Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew.

My conclusion was that I had so well absorbed his works that I was able unconsciously to mimic it quite well. I am certain that there are any number of psychologists who would agree with that conclusion. Yet, in the back of my mind was the nagging sense of there having been a presence, someone other than myself who was doing the writing. This must be experienced to be understood - or believed. Also, I should mention that at that time (1980) I was getting over a severe case of born-again Christianity; in that context I would have understood "channeling" as "mediumship" and a snare of the Devil. I went on to "mimic" the writing-styles of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius (somber!), Jan van Ruuysbroek and eventually, Fritz Nietzsche himself. It was in such a dialogue with Fritz, with him gently asking me questions, that I was lead to the conclusion that I was not a Christian. That was a very scary episode for me, and the presence was intense - it was almost like I could feel his hand on my shoulders as I penned the words, "I am not a Christian" in my journal. And yet it was a flood of relief. I was no longer a prisoner to that which is, as the Church has created it, a system of spiritual slavery so awful, so total, it is no wonder that many people will tell you: "Hell is this life! There is no Hell when you die, it's right here and now!" I do not, by the way, subscribe to this view. When a person dies, they take with them what they are; if they are a bundle of fear and rage, it is all that is needed to get the brimstone burning in the afterlife. Word to the wise here, folks.

Since that time, my knowledge of what channeling is and how others experience it has grown a tad. If you are curious, may I highly recommend Jon Klimo's book Channeling. It is a thick book, but it has the delightful feature that you can dip into it anywhere and come away better informed. My own personal experience, that is, reading other people's channeled works, were those of the late Jane Roberts' "Seth" material. Seth was an entity, a very charming and wise entity, who made endless variations on the very simple and very true theme, "You create your own reality." Jane Roberts herself, as she came across in her various books with and without Seth, was a no-nonsense poet and writer who often wrote about how her days passed as she created this or that book; she was a very down-to-earth, almost funky woman you would really liked to have met. Alas I did not; I have channeled her VERY briefly on two or three occasions, but each time I got the impression of someone who is having so much fun, wherever she is, that all she could say was "Hi! Love Ya! Bye!" in a way that made me giggle each time. If it means anything, when I gave away/sold my library of 7000+ books, among the few I kept were all of hers. To me, they are precious.

The first time that I knowingly and willfully channeled someone, it was a person that today I would not for the life of me do again. The fact that I did channel Vlad Dragool is more a reflection of how my life was at the time. But that is another story for another time. As are my thoughts about channeling in relation to the Bible, the Qu'ran and the Book of Mormon. I am certain that my opinions will be upsetting to some, but when I do get around to writing that one, it will not be done to piss people off. Hopefully that will be understood.

Angel Paterson is one of those supposed suburban myths, his location ostensibly being Paterson, New Jersey. I'd written about him in my now-vaporized MySpace blog, and might not have mentioned him for quite a while but for the fact that I met him again.

At the time I'd written said vaporized blog, a co-worker who lives in Paterson had his life saved under what anyone would call unusual circumstances. He's one of those people who become truly comatose when he goes to sleep, and rousing him can be quite the ordeal. About six weeks ago he was living with his family on the first floor of a three-stroy apartment building. One morning his sister awoke to a feeling of terrific heat, went into the kitchen and saw that the building next to theirs was a ball of fire; she was sensible enough to realize that her building was burning as well, and roused her sister-in-law, he kids, the sister-in-law's little girl...and her brother. She thought. When they got outside it was realized that her brother was still inside. The firemen would not, at this point, let anyone near the two buildings because the intense heat aura surrounding them was melting the plastic on cars ten feet away. Suddenly the brother appeared in the doorway; he turned to look back at the apartment; at that moment a loud ->BOOM!<- erupted behind him, and for a short second it appeared like he would be flung from the porch. The shock pushed him but he stopped dead. When he made his way to safety, he told how there had been a loud pounding noise which woke him up. When he went into the kitchen, he saw the flames in the alley between the two buildings, felt the heat and saw that someone was trying to kick the door to the apartment open. He opened the door to see a mailman standing there, yelling at him to get out; he heard a noise behind him and e firebsll blew the door of one of the inside rooms open, throwing him forward - but the mailman caught him.

Mailman? There was no mailman on the porch, his sister said. What would a mailman be doing here at 6:30 in the morning? There was a mailman who caught me, he insisted. He called up the Paterson Post Office partly to thank the man and partly to prove his sister wrong. Sorry, the post office told him; we have no-one here fitting that description and none of our people live in your neighborhood. Besides, no-one would be delivering mail at 6:30 in the morning.

Those of us from Paterson had figured it out. Angel Paterson had appeared, woke my co-worker and caught him when the interior of the house blew to bits.

I had been hearing about Angel Paterson for decades. He was black, white, Hispanic. He was old, young, and in one instance, a middle-aged black woman who snatched baby from a busy street; the baby's mom, off busy earning Negligent Mother of the Year Award, had started chatting up a friend and hadn't noticed that the little boy had toddled out onto Broadway. In another appearance twelve years ago, a very depressed black man was hanging on the outside rail of the bridge-walkway over the Paterson Falls. Suddenly, he said, there was a man on the bridge right by him. The man yelled, "Don't jump!" The depressed guy let go, only to be one-handed by the stranger over the briderail onto the walkway. This is almost believable but for the fact that the would-be suicide weighed over three hundred fifty pounds, yet the stranger caught him and lifted him over the railing with one hand. When the big guy was plopped onto the walkway of the bridge, the stranger looked him in the eye and said, "Your problems are solvable! Go do something about them!" The big fellow told me that he felt compelled to at least try; within a week his life had become managable. Did he know who the stranger was? "He said his name was Angel Paterson."

After hearing these stories once in a while, you get to wondering. There was one time when a man appeared in the middle of notorious Gouvernour street and yelled out, "There's a car full of guys with guns coming this way! Get inside!" Moments later, the three men who didn't heed the warning were gunned down in what is actually quite rare in Paterson - a driveby shooting. They were also the intended victims, according to word on the street at the time.

Angel Paterson has been saving people for over a hundred years. Some of the people I spoke with in the 1970's, people who were 80 - 90 - 100 years old, said he came up with freed slaves in the Civil war era, riding in on the local Underground Railroad. Others claimed he was a former slave of Alexander Hamilton, the man on the $10 bill and who had founded Patterson - the original spelling - in 1792.

About three weeks later I was going to my home in Clifton by way of River Street. The temperature was already 105 degrees and I felt lousy for lack of sleep - 30 hours - and lack of a good meal. The car I was driving stalled dead one block north of Broadway. I got out and began to shove it off the roadway - River Street is always very busy. But I quickly grew very dizzy from the heat, exhaustion and hunger. Suddenly a voice called out, "Get in the car and steer, I'll push you!" I needed no second invitation and this slender young black guy had me on the side in fifteen seconds. I got out saying "Thank you!" He merely smiled. "What's you're name?," I asked. Smiling more broadly, he said, "You ought to know, Roy, you've been talking about me for over two weeks!" "You know me?,"I asked. I know hundreds if not thousands of people in Paterson but I did not know this guy. I was going to ask further questions, but a truck was headed right for me and I had to stand aside. When I turned to face my rescuer, he was gone. The hair on the back of my neck was standing up, and Sara was yelling that she could see right through him. It was, I have no doubt, Angel Paterson.

Two weeks ago I was about to leave the garage I work out of when I saw a young Hispanic man headed my way. I idly thought, he probably needs a couple of smokes. (We share in Paterson) When he got to my pickup truck, he scooped something off the hood. It was my cellphone. Well, the company cell phone. "Thanks man, "I smiled, "you do need cigarrettes, right?" "Yeah, I do," he replied. I gave him four or five stogs. Sara was yelling something from behind me. I went on and asked, "What's your name, my brother?" He had eyes like Jeffrey Hunter's; smiling, he said,

Angel! You know!" By this time Sara had gotten really loud and I turned to see what had upset her. "He's not solid!," she all but screamed. When I turned back...he was gone. Again, the hair on the back of my neck was standing straight out.

Angel Patterson, the next time we meet, you and I must have a little chat!

I'm finally comfortable here at blogger. It's a sort of anonymity yet there is always a chance someone will latch onto it. And I'm quite pleased that I can keep the spam out of the comments, at first it threw me off; I was wondering what the hell the guy's comment was when it dawned upon me, it's a sales pitch, it's, it's SPAM. No more of that, toute suite.

Irlene is home for a few days, Eva and Connie are still with the dolphins off Raratonga. Funny thing is, Irlene set up a blog to write about her experiences with them and at the moment can't access it. Probably belongs to casalemedia, the folks who own MySpace.

Wow, my room is really hot for the first time in about ten or twelve days.

With prices on everything spiralling upwards, I bought a can of cigarette tobacco and a couple of packs of EZ Wider. Was gonna roll a few cigarettes when Stro asked me to wait while he reminded me of something. Cigarettes, he said, originated in Brazil and somehow came to the attention of the emperor Napoleon III in the 1840's, and the rest is history. But, he added, the first cigarettes were much, much bigger, they were cigar-sized and lasted much longer. Hmm. Stro's way of making a suggestion. Eight sheets of rolling paper later, I'd made a fair-sized godfatha out of tobacco, and ya know what? Milder, more nicotine, seems like less tar and it lasted almost twenty minutes. They're a pain to make, at the age of fity-seven I don't like doing tedious work with small results, but if I make three or four a day I think I can live with that and cut the cost of what I spend on stog's. By the way, any of the buy-one-get-one offers are pretty much a ripoff, they're like one-sixteenth of an inch shorter and they burn faster, so you wind up smoking four packs in the time you'd smoke three. When I was a kid my mother would time things (like cooking) by the number of cigarettes she smoked; in1954 an unfiltered Pall Mall would last for just about seven minutes. Today you're fortunate if you get five minutes out of anything beside Amercan Spirit or DuMaurier. Or Dunhills or Nat Shermans.

Since I'm on a roll here, many of the brands I knew when I was young have disappeared. They fall into two categories, those that had been around forever and those that began appearing in the 50's and 60's. Among the older brands were Picayune, Home Run, Sweet Caporal, Fatima, Murad (named for an Egyptian sultan who executed anyone using tobacco); later introductions included York, Oasis, Sano, Waterford, and Newport. Only Newpies survived.

One of the best books I ever read about tobacco was written by pipe-maker Carl Weber, the title is The Pleasures of Pipe-Smoking. He gives a lengthy and well-written story of how tobacco was introduced into Western culture, discusses the different species of tobacco, different kinds of pipes; mentions things about cigars and cigarettes (I think Stro was referring to the history of cigarettes as Weber wrote about them; he (Stro) read the book several times) I don't know whether it's still in print, it was published as a small paperback in the mid-60's.

To shift gears here a bit: on the MySpace front, it was gratifying that quite a number of people sent me their home e-mail addresses, now I won't have to worry about what i write falling into the void. And with that I shall close for the day; God be with you all.

My second night off in a row, it's like I hafta pinch myself.
I just selected Arial for my font, only what I got was not Arial; so I've switched to Verdana, and this font is not Verdana. Ah-HUHH? Maybe the fontfile here should pinch itself.
We spent a lot of time over the last three weeks doing art for our phlogs and can finally take a breather on that. Our biggest one is at Webshots, I think we have like close to 500 drawings there now. Their software is a little quirky but with a little tweaking it settles in and does its job. I'd like to be able upload whole folders of pictures - there's one which has like 100+ drawings in it - but as it is they hafta be uploaded one-at-a-time, and when you reach number sixteen or thereabouts, you must load, because each picture is a separate link back to your picture files, and even with tons of memory like we have, ever-y-th-ing-s-l-o-owss---downnnnnn. So fer half an hour ya sit preparin fifteen pics then hit upload. Still, the end result is worth it. You can see us there at:

http://community.webshots.com/user/thatgemini

...it turned blue, so the software here recognizes a hyperlink. Cool. You can go look and come back.
We're excited because we got Joan of Arc on line in her own blog and she'll be posting the texts to the Testimony that I've been channeling for a little over a year now. As it is today there is a half-page introduction that she wrote specifically for the blog, there will be additions from time to time. Check that at:

http://getablog.net/iehanneddomremydarc

I am aware of at least four other people who have had some form of visionary contact with the saint of cellphones (what the hell was the pope thinking of?!), each is anywhere from somewhat to strikingly different from our experience of her. We at Outlands maintain that this "heterodoxy," if you will, is essential to the transmission of whatever it is that she is saying. (By the way, I would need the permission of these other four people to say who they are and how they may be contacted; if I get enough traffic on this specific subject, I shall ask, but not until then) The bottom line is, Joan of Arc is active in the world right now. If, counting Outlands, there are five people channeling or experiencing her in somevisionary manner, it must be fairly widespread...I should Google her name in its various forms. (her parents and neighbors called her Jehannette when she was little)(Other variations are: Jeanne D'Arcy, Jehanne d'Arc, Jehanne the Maiden, Iehanne d'Domremy d'Arc)
If you are not familiar with her story beyond the movies, you should definitely learn about her. When she was thirteen she saw a light and heard a voice calling to her from across the fields of her father's farm. It was the archangel Michael, although she often refers to him as Elixe. She approached the uncrowned king of France (le Dauphin) and told him that God had sent her to him to ask for soldiers to take the French holy city of Rheims from the English, that he might be crowned king of France. God gave the Dauphin a sign, he gave her the soldiers, she drove the English from Rheims as predicted and Charles was duly crowned.
That all is an oversimplification, especially in light of what followed, but it is well worth checking out in its own right. Joan said that her father had heard a prophecy local to her home town (Domremy) that a girl from the area would begin the campaign to drive out the English and would have the Dauphin crowned; she added that her father had said that if he had any idea it was her, he would have drowned her in a well. That may sound strange and harsh, but pere d'Arc could ill afford attention from either the English, the Lombards or French who were bleeding the populace dry. (Imagine three different George W. Bushes, each claiming the legal right to screw you as a citizen - and getting out the KY when he was in the neighborhood...Ms/Mr Taxpayer, look, you dropped your soap)
Hope I've piqued your interest! Gonna check out for now.

Been running a little ragged. Working seven nights a week again, and Llam gave us an assignment to create a non-alphabetic form of communication. That sounds simple, but what it means in practical terms is that all of us in the ArtGroup, with Seima and Llam himself pitching in, have been creating hundreda of pictures from simple drawings that I make. We have a large chunk of them on line over at Webshots - which is truly a phlog site. If you'd like to visit, we have as of today over three hundred pictures online:

http://community.webshots.com/user/thatgemini

- okay, cool, it lit up and turned blue; the software here recognizes a URL and provides links.

It's good to be able to go off by myself for a bit and piss and moan and tell little stories of the day. Any pissing and moaning I might do today would be about MySpace, which is getting more and more treacherous. You write an e-mail - it disappears. Post a blog - never gets there, it vaporizes. Sending Tom or anyone else gets a robot response which does not answer direct questions. I read a post here at blogger by some young woman whose Space at MySpace just disappeared one day - a year and a half of blogs, pictures, links with MySpace friends - you can make them there - all gone. She got zilch for a response. She'd said she had no porn-pictures, no abusive or racist language in her blogs, just - POOF! And repeated e-mails did nothing.

As far as Webshots, I started off with the free service and upgraded to premium a few days ago. Their software for downloading pictures from your computer to their/your site is a little quirky, and for my taste slow; but it does the job. I think that eventually we'll leave MySpace, not today, not tomorrow or next week, but one thing is definitely certain. As far as the genuine friends whom we've made there, when we do go they'll have plenty of notice and will be asked to trade personal e-mail addresses.

I see that I am rambling about everything and nothing which is my style. I shall close this and go visit Stro Moon Daglo's blog, then maybe Michael Archontas. Ciao.