GOD
_____________________
Other World
__________________________________
Us
Then she said, “The lines don’t really exist; it’s just a way of making a point, and the point is this: we never get to see GOD because GOD is totally beyond human comprehension. But there’s a kind of intermediary world between us, between this world, and GOD. Some people call that world the Other World, or heaven or hell or Nirvana, or the psychic world, there are a hundred names, but it’s really a kind of buffer world. It’s a world we don’t really know in the way we know our world because it’s non-physical and beyond our control. But sometimes we get a
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chance to visit it, and sometimes its inhabitants visit us.
“We call the inhabitants of that world, spirits, ghosts, Gods, visitors, angels, aliens, allies, you name it. I prefer spirits, or guides. You might think of them as carriers of the intent of GOD. You can talk to them, just like the prophets did, and they’ll talk back, but you have to remember it’s always in metaphor, so it can be very difficult understanding exactly what they mean.
“The only sure thing we can say about the Other World is that we sense its existence and we sense an order to it that we don’t fully comprehend. Oh, there have been some throughout time who say they have been there and comprehended that order, that it has been revealed to them by God: Moses and Joseph Smith are pretty good examples.
“The only problem is all of their descriptions are completely different. As far as God talking to them goes, they’re not lying, they’re telling the truth, but they’ve mistaken a powerful spirit for GOD. Don’t get me wrong—those spirits, those Faces, can be very powerful: they can change civilizations, but they’re not GOD.
“Let me give you another example. Right now, you pretty much know where you’re going when you leave me and you’ll probably get there. Probably.
But when you go to sleep tonight you don’t have the slightest idea what you’ll dream about. I could lay you any odds you’d guess wrong. That’s because when you dream, you enter a different world and you have to play by its rules, and despite your college education, you don’t have the chance of a snowball in hell of figuring them out.”
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Chapter 28: The Beatles and the Witnesses
June 2005, Sarasota
I woke up one morning completely panicked. I’d had a very disturbing dream about Alice. I knew it was important. What was particularly striking was the setting of the dream—the George Washington Bridge. As a young man, I lived in Washington Heights, the Manhattan neighborhood where the bridge terminates. I used to regularly take evening walks on it; I could see all the way to the Battery—
and sometimes beyond. I never tired of the view—it was absolutely breathtaking, especially at dusk, when midtown changed to a dense forest of light.
One evening, as I began walking back towards the Heights, I spotted a small metal enclosure I had never noticed before. I looked down through the barred gate and saw a series of steep stairways and platforms that seemingly led down to nowhere. I scaled the five-foot gate and worked my way down. I was stunned to find myself in an enormous concrete room the size of a small cathedral.
What really stunned me, however, was not the size of the room—but what was inside it. High above my head I could see one of the bridge’s huge main cables entering the room and then splaying out in a fan of about fifty smaller cables that were bolted onto a huge steel semi-circle jutting out from the monstrous anchoring block embedded in one of the walls. It was eerily beautiful, like a giant lyre.
Then it came to me: I was inside one of the rooms encasing the monstrous concrete blocks used to anchor the main cables. Until then, I had poetically assumed the huge towers somehow held up the bridge’s weight, but that was a poet’s fantasy. In reality, the bridge set up a giant tug of war between the monstrous anchoring blocks, the towers, and the cables holding up the roadways.
To insure the anchoring held, the weight carried by each main cable was spread out onto the fifty or so anchoring points on the steel semi-circle. The result was a lyre to end all lyres. Pythagoras would have danced a jig.
The wonder of that evening never left me. So forty years later, when I found myself climbing down into that same cavernous room in my dream, it didn’t seem at all strange that Alice would be waiting for me. She motioned for me to come over to where the frame of the giant lyre was attached to the anchoring block and pointed to a small tunnel that had been bored into the block.
It looked too small to enter, but she clambered into it and yelled for me to follow.
I could hear her cackling. I was terrified I’d be trapped, but crawled in anyway.
The tunnel was very tight. I was shaking when I crawled out. I wanted to strangle Alice. Then I saw I had come out into an identical room. Or had I come back to
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the first room? I couldn’t tell.
The main cable above my head was again splayed out like a lyre of about fifty smaller cables. Alice again pointed to a tunnel bored into the anchoring block holding the frame of the lyre. This time, it was about the size of a tennis ball. The term “worm hole” popped into my head, the term physicists use to describe theoretical paths to parallel universes. Alice motioned for me to follow before disappearing into it. I could hear her cackling. She sounded very far away.
I refused to follow. The tunnel was insanely small. I was sure there were even smaller worm holes ahead, maybe an infinite number of them. I was frozen with fear. I didn’t want to go, but I also didn’t want to be left alone. I began to bang frantically on the splayed cables, one after the other, like I was playing scales, and then the dream ended.
The bridge was obviously a reference to Alice being a psychic “bridge,” but what the dream really wanted to show me was what held those bridges up: the endless anchoring lyres within the endless rooms. I took the lyres to be a metaphor for art, and in particular ancient oral poetry, which was chanted to the strumming of a lyre. I took the rooms to represent what they almost always represent in dreams: completeness, wholeness.
The dream seemed to be confirming that bridging the conscious and unconscious—bringing them together—is made possible by those endless lyre-rooms, which I took as metaphors for the kind of ongoing wholeness made possible through the creation of poetry.
There was one last level to the dream. Constricting tunnels are a well-known dream metaphor for the birth experience—a reminder of our terrifying journeys down the birth canal. The dream was predicting that Alice would be guiding me through a rebirth, and it wasn’t going to be an easy one.
Jung saw these rebirths occurring whenever the contents of the unconscious become conscious. Each time that happens, our worldview changes—sometimes dramatically, sometimes very slightly. Jung called this ongoing, integrative process individuation, and saw it as the goal of life. Creating a poem, of course, supplies one such avenue for integration, something the dream emphasized by showing the lyre to be central to each room. I took it to be a confirmation of everything I believed about poetry.
I wasn’t quite prepared, however, for the terrifying rebirth the dream was predicting. I had always seen Alice as someone who had appeared to help me unravel the myth. The myth, however, played no part in the dream. The dream was solely about my transformation. Not only was the dream telling me my rebirth would be a terrifying experience, it was also telling me that I would not 128 ALICE HICKEY
continue with Alice. I would have a failure of nerve and attempt to seek refuge in art alone (playing scales on the lyre).
The dream also clearly indicated how afraid I was of Alice. This didn’t completely surprise me. Alice had always made me more than a little nervous—I had absolutely no idea where her bottom was. The dream didn’t do anything to lessen my apprehension.
Nor was I really clear as to how much of the dream was truly prophetic and how much of it simply reflected that fear. Either way, the dream indicated I was in way over my head. This dilemma was further complicated by the fact that Alice had appeared almost insanely devilish in the dream, whereas in real life she had always been immensely helpful, not to mention rational.
I wanted to discuss the dream with her, but I also felt I needed some time to sort it out. It made no sense to endanger a valuable friendship by suddenly freaking out and calling her a witch. Besides, I had other problems. I was still trying to figure out the meaning of the Spirit’s latest messages about the Witnesses.
One avenue I had been following was that “The Witnesses know everything,”
meant the meaning of the myth was completely contained in the myth itself and that the insights of others—as well as any later personal insights I thought valid extensions of the myth—weren’t needed to understand it.
It didn’t say the subsequent insights were wrong, simply that they weren’t needed.
This was enormously helpful, because one of the problems I kept encountering was the continued appearance of clarifying visitations , most of which I haven’t included in this book. (For the curious, a few of them are in the on-line Appendix.)
The problem was they turned out to be a two-edged sword, because the clarifications often turned out to be not only confusing, but contradictory. As in any good party where people keep dropping in, I decided it was time to shut the door. Diane agreed with me. She told me once an opening was established between the two worlds, especially a new one like mine, all kinds of spirits tended to collect around the edges, and the wrong ones could do some real damage.
“What kind of damage?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know. But if you think you’re confused now, you have no idea. You can’t stop them from coming in, but you can neutralize them by ignoring them. Stick them in the freezer is my advice.”
As time progressed, though, something kept telling me I should reopen the door on “The Witnesses know everything. ” So I did. The fact of the matter is you can never really close the door on psychic events because you are always dealing with
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metaphors, and some of them only become apparent with time.
That is the difference between insights gained through the conscious, logical mind (a process that insists there should be one solution) and insights gained via the unconscious mind. Messages from the psychic world are never a sure thing. As Joan once said to me, “I always know what the voices are saying, but I'm never really sure what they mean.” In short, you have to feel your way. You have to take your chances.
One thing that kept bugging me was why “Listen to the Witnesses” and later on,
“The Witnesses know everything” were messages about the Witnesses. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of them if for no other reason than they represented us: human beings. It was the Listeners who had me over a barrel. I could find no counterpart for them in any myth about man and creation. Perhaps there was one, buried somewhere, but I'd be damned if I could find it. And I was a very hard looker.
Yet if there was anything I had learned, it was to pay very strict attention to what the voices were saying. It wasn't an accident the Spirit was re-directing me towards things I thought I completely understood. Obviously I didn't understand the Witnesses as well as I thought I did, because the Spirit seemed to be telling me I needed a course correction—a refocusing on the Witnesses because there was something I’d missed the first time around.
The problem, of course, was determining exactly what that “something” was. In our popular psychic movies, the hero always gets a specific message such as
“Take the path to the left,” something as plain as cake. But that's Hollywood. It’s one more indication of how little we understand the nature of psychic knowledge.
In ancient Greece, great prophetic institutions like the Oracles were always consulted. For Greek leaders to take any significant action without doing so would be like a modern general going into battle without consulting his electronic intelligence: his satellites, radio intercepts, and the like.
We often dismiss the Greeks’ estimation of the importance of the Oracles as irrational, yet at the same time we praise their politics and philosophy as being of the highest rational order. But you can’t have it both ways—either the Greeks were rational or they weren’t. Alexander the Great is a good starting point. It’s clear Alexander wasn’t a New Age time-waster. He was a winner as we say today .
Yet it’s also clear from the historical record that he valued oracular information perhaps even more than his own (and Aristotle’s) logical deductions. Why?
Because the Oracles’ prophecies had proven to be true over and over—it’s as simple as that.
Alexander, however, was also aware that the oracular message was always in metaphor—the lingua franca of the unconscious. Modern thought has never come 130 ALICE HICKEY
to grips with the critical ramifications of this fact. What it means is the interpretation of the metaphor was never a sure thing—which is why so many interpreters lost their heads. And why Joseph in the Bible was elevated from stable boy to Pharaoh faster than Jack jumped over the candlestick.
It also meant that Alexander always left his prophetic sessions with a tragic sense of his potential glory and his potential doom. He knew that prophecies—for all their ability to break through the fog of time—were highly volatile messages. To paraphrase Joan, Alexander and his interpreters always knew what the Oracles were saying, but were never really sure what the Oracles meant.
This is something we have to come to terms with if we are to correctly evaluate psychic messages. It is a different way of knowing, one with its advantages and its limitations. To not take correct advantage of it is to be an ostrich. Forget that we can't explain how it works in modern scientific terms. The fact of the matter is that psychic insight does work—we have records of it throughout history—but we can't expect interpretation of it to be 100% accurate. Nor can we expect a logical prediction to be 100% accurate. A logical prediction, after all, is only as good as its assumptions. Both are ways of trying to understand what is happening to us and both have their limitations and advantages.
I think many people do experience true psychic events, but unless the events are extremely powerful, those same people usually wind up convincing themselves it was a random “hallucination” because they've been conditioned to think psychic events don't exist.
But hallucinations brought about by either mental illness or neural failure or chemicals like LSD are nothing like true psychic events, not even close. In a true psychic visitation, there is an overwhelming sense of a superior truth being communicated. It lacks the morbidity associated with illness and the distortion associated with chemicals and would never be confused with a hallucination by anyone who has experienced both.
There's one more thing I want to say: physical phenomena and psychic phenomena operate completely differently. We can’t reproduce or test psychic phenomena as we can physical events. All those laughable experiments of people trying to guess playing cards selected by someone in another room are good examples of how ignorant we are of the true nature of psychic events. We have absolutely no control over real psychic events.
They occur when they occur. Nor can we simultaneously experience them with others, although that does happen on rare occasions. Examples would be the reported communal viewing of the Virgin at Fatima and Guadeloupe. Although religious people see these as miraculous spiritual events, I am really talking about the same thing when I call them psychic events. It is simply a matter of
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terminology. Some reported communal viewings of aliens would also fall into this category. Most of the time, however, we experience psychic events subjectively, within our own consciousness. It’s no wonder that unless we have experienced a true psychic event ourselves, we find it hard to believe in them.
Unless these things are kept in mind, any attempt to evaluate psychic events will fail. You have to be extremely strict and yet, strangely enough, very flexible in attempting to interpret psychic events. The idea is to be very strict in viewing the message, to never go outside it, yet be very flexible in the ways you allow yourself to interpret it. You have to feel your way.
I tried to keep that dictum in mind as I re-examined the messages about the Witnesses. I had never considered the possibility that “Listen to the Witnesses”
might have meant I should listen to the Witnesses in the same way as I might listen to the Beatles. Just listen to them, stupid.
As soon as this thought entered my head I realized I had been concentrating on the written version of the myth in examining it because it was almost impossible to do that with the oral versions, as they didn't sit still for examination, only absorption. They affected the heart, not the head. What the Spirit was trying to tell me was to simply listen to the Witnesses in the same way as I would listen to the Beatles—as artists, as poets—because what the Witnesses had created was a poem, not a logical treatise.
And finally, I saw “The Witnesses know everything” was not only telling me to stay within the confines of the myth, but it was also reminding me to remember who I was listening to—poets, because poets in the preliterate world were those who knew. They were transmitters of knowledge, not rational knowledge like e=mc², but the kind of knowing that allows you to understand the meaning of love and hate and death and birth in every fiber of your body.
I began re-listening to the oral myths and letting them enter me in the way only oral poetry can——which is something I suggest for anyone who really wants to understand what I'm talking about. This was also something I expressed to Diane, telling her I had come to the conclusion I had been ignoring the obvious. She agreed. “You can be very bright at times, Justin, but to tell you the truth you have a habit of thinking yourself into a corner more than anybody I’ve ever met. By the way, I keep getting that Alice is here to help you understand why ISLAUUGH
appeared to you; but I also keep getting Alice is probably as mystified as you.”
I was surprised by that, but it helped explain why sometimes when I asked Alice a question, she’d come right back at me with a question of her own. I never occurred to me that Alice might also be in the dark. But then again, I’d never asked.
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Chapter 29: Alice and Betty Fill in Some Blanks
June 2005, Tavernier
Diane may have been right about Alice being in the dark about ISLAUGGH, but I was in the dark about so many things I was starting to lose track of them. At the top of my list was why Alice and I had ever come together in the first place, and even more, why our meeting had set in motion a whole series of psychic events. It couldn’t have been just an accident that right after I had finally managed to step through the looking glass into the world of speaking, Alice had suddenly appeared, followed in quick order by ISLAUUGH and then The Witnesses Log—
not to mention Betty with the spittle.
Could all of those events have been random? Maybe, but they didn’t feel random.
They felt like movements in a much larger piece—except I had no idea what that larger piece was. To further confuse matters, I was now confronted with the fact that Alice had been a good friend of Kiki’s, maybe a best friend. How could that be and I was unaware of it? You would think Alice’s name would have come up in at least one of my conversations with Kiki and Pinga over the years.
In theory, of course, there were a number of ways to explain it. I could have simply accepted it as a true statistical anomaly—shit happens; forget about it.
There was another possible explanation why Kiki had never mentioned Alice to me: she hadn’t seen any reason to bring her up. After all, Kiki was her friend, whereas I was Pinga’s.
At times, that explanation even made sense to me. Kiki was a very private person.
You could see it in her eyes. They were very bright and very dark, like a bird’s, but they were always flicking back and forth, looking for a place to hide.
Although I sensed early on she was psychic, she would never talk about it. Her world was her world, thank you very much. At least that’s the feeling I always got. The fact that she couldn’t always keep a cap on that world didn’t mean she didn’t try. One of the things that always amused me was how she tried to look as normal as possible whenever I was around. And then she’d lose it, start hopping around, whistling like a finch or something like that.
Despite all those reasonable explanations, I continued to look for evidence of a conspiracy, anything that could prove there was a reasonable explanation for at least some part of what was happening to me. Catching Pinga in the act of fooling me would undoubtedly have upset me, but at the same time, it would have made what was happening far less intimidating. Pinga, however, swore his mother had never spoken to him about an Alice Hickey, or anybody by the name of Alice as far as he could remember, and besides, he said, Kiki had a lot of friends he’d never met. Maybe he was telling the truth or maybe he was having some fun with
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me, I couldn’t tell.
I have to believe that’s why someone as overwhelmingly psychic as Kiki had doted on him so. She must have viewed him as a special gift: someone to help her turn the world upside down. It didn’t matter that Pinga never spoke about his abilities. Leprechauns are never thinkers; they’re too busy pulling the rug out from underneath the world to be slowed down by anything like thinking. Not that you’d ever catch them doing it anyway. Things just seem to happen whenever they’re around—all by themselves, as they say.
That’s why if you were to start up with Pinga about the psychic world, he’d nod very politely and wait for the conversation to go away. Part of the trickster’s bag of tricks is to make you believe he’s not a trickster. This isn’t a conscious maneuver; it’s part of the trickster’s nature to blend in, to disappear among the apple carts he’s upsetting: Who, me?
But he wouldn’t be so quick as to deny that whenever he was around, shit happened. Like any true leprechaun, Pinga was very aware he had an effect on the world. He knew there was something about him that made him succeed in what he did; he just didn’t care to give it a name, or ask why, or how. He was too busy having fun. But he was also a trickster with a very quirky sense of humor. And there was nothing funnier to him than someone falling flat on his face. Especially yours truly, Mister Know It All.
Maybe it was all those years of living with Kiki talking to the microwave that gave him his particular sense of humor; who’s to say? One thing for sure, he seemed to have found in me the perfect dupe. I still hadn’t recovered from The Red Light Bar.
Not that there was anything malicious about him; Pinga was extremely good-natured. But like any leprechaun, he couldn’t stop tricking the world. That alone was sufficient reason for him to have arranged for Alice and Betty to come into my life. He knew enough of what I was going through, and he also knew enough about Alice and Betty's psychic gifts—if he did actually know the two of them—
to have cooked up a dainty pie to set before the Spring. It wouldn't have been for any earthshaking reason either—just some fun. Nothing more complicated than that.
Of course the other explanation I didn’t even want to think about was that Pinga really didn’t know Alice, exactly as he claimed, but that Alice had somehow discovered that Pinga and I were friends and approached him about having some fun with me. The possibility would have seemed like more low-hanging fruit to Pinga. Irresistible. I can’t tell you the labyrinths I traveled down on that one. I eventually decided the only thing to do was put Pinga and Alice in the same pot and bring it to a boil.
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