So far you’ve read about dragonfly tour guides and metal things moving and re-materializing, are you sure you want to go any further down this road? It is just going to get weirder. My first teacher who I mentioned earlier was a Theosophist, hoped that everyone in the class would learn to channel, or communicate with spirit guides. She claimed to know certain ways to connect with the spirit world so we would bypass mischievous or harmful spirits and connect directly with Ascended Masters.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know your eyes are rolling in their sockets, I can’t help that. I had serious issues with it too. I grew up in a rather conservative branch of the Lutheran church, so fortune telling, channeling and all that other Woo Woo crap all came from the power of the devil as far as I knew.
So on the one hand, I wanted to continue going to the classes because what I was learning was helping me to stop being afraid of every weird thing that happened to me, on the other hand, now the teacher is talking about all this “devil shit” and that scared me. Then there is one other thing: I have always been afraid of things that go bump in the night, all my life I steered clear of scary movies, ghost stories, absolutely anything of an eerie nature. I quaked at the thought of monsters under my bed even as an adult. Yes, I admit it, I still am a scaredy cat. This fear is also one reason why I was so determined I was not going to have any part of that bullshit spirit guide jewelry repatriation program. You saw how well that turned out.
Mood music
The classes met every second month on Saturdays. A little over a year into the classes just before we left one spring Saturday the teacher said that next time we would learn about channeling, and she would give a demonstration. So of course that gave me a whole two months to get all worked up. OMG OMG I’m so scared, I don’t think I can do this. OMG OMG What if I go and the Devil gets a hold of me and won’t let go? OMG OMG Should I go, or should I not? You get the idea; visions of Linda Blair in the Exorcist with her head spinning (which I did not see, but heard about!) had me practically shitting myself with fear.
Finally, the night before the class I decided I had to suck it up and go to the channeling class. The teacher drug it out. All morning long she talked about how you protect yourself, and how you open yourself to communicate with the Ascended Masters. By lunchtime I was practically sweating bullets. Finally, late in the afternoon she got around to the channeling demonstration.
And you know what? The only thing that happened was I felt LOVED. I couldn’t tell you what words came out of the teacher’s mouth, the words were inconsequential. It felt like the whole room filled with a love so big and huge that it contained everything. That LOVE knew everything about me and everyone in that room, and it accepted all of it. I don’t even know how to describe it so you might get a sense of it, but the LOVE that filled that room knew every bad thing I ever did, and it accepted and LOVED all of that. It was beyond my comprehension of love. The closest feeling I can relate it to is the way you don’t get mad at an infant for soiling its diaper. You just understand it is expected babies are going to mess their pants, and it does not interfere with the tender feelings you have for an infant.
After that I never worried too much about that power of the devil crap anymore. Love like that just blows the devil out of those ideas. (Heh, blows the devil;-). I still wasn’t up for channeling the thoughts of dead people though, no matter how loving they were. What can I say? Some fears die harder than others.
That summer I took a short trip on a long weekend. As I drove I listened to a recording of a Deepak Chopra lecture in which he talked about everything in the universe being alive with awareness. He compared an atom of gold to an atom of lead to make his point. And as simple as he made it, I just could not begin to fathom that inanimate things could have some kind of awareness.
I stayed in an older motel right on the Straits of Mackinac. It was a place I used to look at with longing when I was a little kid, because it always looked like everyone was having such a good time there. This was my first time staying there; it was comfortable, and clean as a whistle with million dollar views. But I noticed something when I went in to the bathroom; on the bowl of the toilet was something that looked either like a long hair or a hairline crack. I bent down to get a closer look, and when I did the words, “Vitreous china!” popped into my mind. It wasn’t like hearing voices, the words just seemed to burst into my mind from nowhere.
I have actually worked as a plumber’s apprentice, so I knew toilets are made of vitreous china, but still I wasn’t quite sure what was going on here. I shook my head and bent down once more, and again the words, “Vitreous china!” popped into my head. And it wasn’t just words, they came with a feeling that resonated in my heart like joy. For a third time I bent down and ran my finger across the blemish to see if it was a hair or a crack, and again those words and that joyous feeling popped into my mind/heart, “Vitreous china!”
“For crying out loud the toilet is alive! And it is talking to me!” You can imagine the things that were going on in my mind. “How in the hell can this be happening?” I wondered. And then, follow me here, I thought “My god, how can it be so happy? It is a toilet for crying out loud, the view, imagine the view!”
If the Deepak Chopra tape had me wondering, the talking toilet had my mind spinning at warp speed, Scotty, not to mention feeling more than a little over exposed in the bathroom. Later that evening when I brushed my teeth, I rapped my toothbrush against the sink to get the excess water out of it. Immediately I remembered the living, talking toilet and thought “Oh no! I hope I didn’t hurt the sink!” And I got a joyous response. “That’s OK! Vitreous china!”
Sleep did not come easily that night. After that the plumbing fixtures didn’t talk to me anymore, thank the fsm. I was just left to figure out what happened. Perhaps the awareness of inanimate things is simply focused on being or holding the awareness of what it is, just like vitreous china, I concluded.
It wasn’t until I starting thinking about how to tell this story that I related it to the channeling lessons. All these years later, it occurs to me that my experience with the “talking” plumbing fixtures may have been a compassionate and very ironic lesson in channeling. If there is one thing I’ve learned through years of these experiences, it is whatever “this” is I am interacting with, it has a highly developed sense of compassion and irony, and a raucous sense of humor. So I can completely imagine this: “Dear one, if you don’t want to talk to the dead Ascended Masters, as you call them, here, start with this toilet. And dear one, while you’re at it see if you can get an inkling of understanding of forms of lower consciousness.”
So there you have it, my classmates were learning to channel Ascended Masters, and I was sent to remedial metaphysical plumbing school to channel a “talking” toilet. The stories just keep getting weirder, don’t they? And what a slooooooooow learner I am to take nearly 20 years to catch on to the channeling lesson! Sweet mother of the fsm, if I was going to make these stories up I would make myself appear much smarter than this, really. I don’t blame you if think I am merely a babbling idiot with a powerful craving for attention; but I hope, at least, you found a few moments entertainment here. Thanks for reading.