Michael Prescott's Blog

The ineffable strangeness of the creative process

Recently I was at a dinner party where one of the guests, a medium and healer, offered to read Tarot cards. I'd never participated in this kind of thing before and found it very interesting. We were each advised to shuffle the cards and then cut the deck into four piles while thinking of a question. The question I framed in my thoughts was, “Should I finish the book I'm working on?”

The book in question is a thriller along the lines of the other ones I've written over the years. But even though I've already written a good deal of  the book, I'd been having a lot of trouble with it and was starting to think it just wasn't going to work out, I decided to let the mysterious Tarot cards tell me what to do–though I didn't necessarily intend to follow their advice. After all, as Alice would say, “Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!”

Anyway, the medium drew the top four cards from the deck and told me I was going in the wrong direction and needed a change of perspective. When she was not entirely satisfied with what she was getting, I prompted her by asking my question out loud. At that point, she elaborated that the book I was writing needed to be rethought, and that I should step back, look at it from a new perspective, and try a different approach, or I would be unhappy with the results.

Of course, you could say that the initial answer was too vague to be meaningful, and that the second answer was tailored to the information I had provided. Nevertheless, I couldn't disagree with the answer I got, so I decided to take it as a legitimate message. Regardless of where it came from, it still felt right to me.

But that left me with a dilemma. It's easy enough to talk about taking a step back from the project and coming up with a new approach, but it's a lot harder to actually do it. I spent a good deal of time over the next couple of days trying to see the book in a new light, filling many pages of a notebook with ideas on how to rethink the story, and basically beating my head against the wall, without anything to show for it except a pounding skull. I reached the point where I just couldn't stand to think about it anymore. I was exhausted, discouraged, and thoroughly sick of the book.

So then I tried something new. I addressed any spiritual entities that might be responsible for the Tarot card message, and I did so in rather impolite terms. “Okay, you guys,” I said, “you're telling me I need to rethink the book, but you're not giving me any help. I need some new ideas here, or a new point of view, and obviously I can't do it on my own, so it's up to you. If you really want me to do this damn book, you're going to have to figure it out for me, because I am done. You got that? I've had it. I'm tired and I'm going to bed, so if you want this stupid book to ever get written, then you guys show me how to do it. Otherwise, just shut up about it.”

With that tirade out of the way, I did indeed go to bed. And as I lay there in the dark, it all came to me–a new structure for the story that would solve the plot problems that bothered me, make the characters more interesting, and provide a smoother narrative flow. I can't say exactly how it came to me–I don't really remember–but I think I saw the pieces of the story rearranging themselves into a new and more pleasing pattern. I do remember thinking that maybe I should get up and write it all down before I forgot it, but then I decided I probably wouldn't forget, so I just went to sleep.

The next morning, I remembered all of it quite clearly and wrote it down, filling four notebook pages . What I had was a drastically revised synopsis of the early and middle parts of the novel–the problematic areas. Of course,  the actual book still remains to be written, or rewritten, but the basic story seems to work now, and it didn't work before.

Did the Tarot cards really send me a message, or did I just hear what I wanted to hear? Did some higher spiritual entity–a guardian angel, or my higher self–provide me with the solution to my creative block, or was it the workings of my subconscious mind? And does it even matter, as long as I got the answer I needed?

I don't know, but to be on the safe side, I apologized to my spirit pals. “Sorry I was rude to you last night. I can get a little impatient about these things. Thanks for coming through for me!”

:-)

I'll do a full review later, but for now I wanted to say that I'm enjoying the book Consulting Spirit, by Dr. Ian Rubenstein, about a British medical doctor's gradual acceptance of his own mediumistic abilities. It's written in a wry, engaging style and captures the natural (and healthy) skepticism that most people bring to this subject. Sometimes I think that accounts like this, presenting the reactions of ordinary people to anomalistic phenomena, are ultimately more convincing than any amount of scientific evidence.

Here's the book's sales page on the publisher's site, which includes links to various online bookstores (left side of the page, below the cover photo):

http://www.anomalistbooks.com/book.cfm?id=60

Aaron Lazar, a writer with whom I correspond via email, has posted a heartfelt blog entry about his wife's brush with death on New Year's Eve - and her near-death experience. It's well worth a read.

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474981002147

Some of the comments are interesting, too.

Dream a little dream

A couple of weeks ago I had a fairly vivid dream, and as soon as I woke up, I wrote it down. In the dream, I was one of many students, or perhaps interns, at what seemed to be a kind of hospital with bright white corridors. We were all dressed in white outfits, and part of our daily schedule was a meeting in a large bright auditorium, where an instructor or supervisor would deliver a lecture or review the day's schedule.

On this particular day, there was a pop quiz. The tests were handed out, and I experienced the kind of anxiety that sometimes comes over us in dreams–the realization that I was totally unprepared for this test and could not answer a single question. While I sat staring helplessly at the test paper, the instructor interrupted to say that he'd been informed that one of us had told a patient, “I forgive you.” He wanted to know who'd said this. It turned out I had. At that point, the instructor declared that I no longer had to take the test because I had already learned what I needed to know.

What was most intriguing to me about this strange dream was the issue of forgiveness. It appeared that at some earlier point I'd said I forgive you to a patient at this hospital. And this was evidently a major breakthrough for me. But what did it mean? Why would anyone express forgiveness to a hospital patient anyway? After all, people who come to the hospital are either seriously ill or seriously injured. They don't have anything to be forgiven for. It seemed to make no sense.

As I thought about it (now wide awake), here's the interpretation I came up with.  Normally, when we think of forgiveness, it involves people who have done something morally or socially wrong–people who have behaved in a way that is cruel, insensitive, or thoughtless. These are the people who need to be forgiven, if we are going to forgive anybody. But what makes a person behave that way? Isn't it a kind of spiritual sickness or spiritual injury? Aren't acts of cruelty, insensitivity, and thoughtlessness merely expressions of the person's own pain, incompleteness, fear, or sense of inferiority?

If wrongful acts are the result of spiritual disease or damage, then it might make sense to offer forgiveness to someone who comes to the hospital–if it's a hospital focused not on healing the body but the soul. Patients in that hospital would be suffering from spiritual maladies–maladies that no doubt made them seem like bad people, or at least highly disagreeable people, while physically incarnated–maladies that caused them to do things that now stand as a guilty memory and a hindrance to progress. The ultimate cure for such people might indeed rest, not in memorized answers to a standardized test, but in compassion, empathy, and heartfelt forgiveness. In that sense, saying I forgive you might be the highest form of healing, and the ability to say it would be proof of having learned the most important lesson the institution could teach.

Of course,  it's possible the dream had no meaning at all. But I doubt it. 

A reader directed my attention to Roy Stemman's impressive takedown of British TV personality Brian Cox, who has used the term "nobbers" to characterize believers in the paranormal. "Nobbers" is British slang for "idiots," or so I gather.

http://www.paranormalreview.com/articles/20110709

It's fine if Cox knows next to nothing about the paranormal, as long as he doesn't posture as an authoritative voice on the subject. When he does, he comes across as a bit of a nobber, I'd say.

Because of a lot of personal and professional things that have cropped up, my blog posting will be pretty light for a while.

Feel free to discuss among yourselves. :-)

Slices of life

As readers of this blog know, I've been puzzled by the divergence between two sets of afterlife reports. One set essentially involves a trip to either a disturbing, hellish limbo or a beautiful paradise (known as Summerland to Spiritualists), while the other set involves an immediate awareness of a higher self that chooses various incarnations for the purpose of growth.

The trouble is that the first set of reports (often found in NDEs and mediumship) typically has little to say abut reincarnation and suggests that the earthly persona continues after death. But the second set (obtained through hypnotic regression and the channeling of allegedly advanced spirits) insists on reincarnation and regards the earthly persona as a temporary role that is quickly discarded. 

Moreover, the two sets of reports differ in other aspects. The first set focuses on an earthlike environment of gardens, parks, homes, and even cities, inhabited by beings in human form, while the second set tells of a more abstract environment of pure geometry in which souls see each other primarily as glowing lights (with different colors of the spectrum relating to different degrees of spiritual evolution).

The easiest course of action would be to jettison one set pf reports and concentrate exclusively on the other. But I think there is pretty good evidence for both, although the first set has been more extensively investigated, and the second set is weakened by the inherent problems of hypnosis (e.g., hypnotized subjects may confabulate or may be influenced by the hypnotist). If I had to choose just one set, I'd go with the first, but I suspect that there is some truth in each set -- but not the whole truth in either.

Noodling on this, I sketched out the simple little diagram reproduced below. I admit this could look a lot better if done on a computer, but I'm busy right now and don't have time to put together a better chart. Still, this crude drawing at least gets the basic idea across.

The idea is that the Self, in the sense of the totality of the spiritual entity that we know as "I," may extend across various levels of existence. Spiritualists are always talking about different planes of reality, and the implication is that we travel from one plane to the next. But suppose that our Self actually cuts across all the planes simultaneously, and what "travels" is only our awareness (or at least our primary awareness, in the sense of of our principal focus). Moreover, suppose that time either has no meaning in this scheme or operates very differently from the way it does in our spacetime universe. The end result is that the Self could operate on various levels at once, and the story told by the Self when focusing on its experience in one plane would differ from the story it tells when focusing on a different level of experience. 

Though I did not mark it this way in the diagram (because I didn't think of it), we could label each sub-Self as Self 1, Self 2, Self 3, etc., with higher numbers representing higher levels of existence. Note that the Self is depicted as a circle on each plane, and that the radius of the circle varies consistently as you go from one plane to the next. Awareness on higher planes is represented by a bigger radius, while awareness on lower planes is represented by a smaller radius. This simple graphic tries to express the idea that consciousness expands as it moves deeper into the system.

Note also that various circles are slices of a cone, which represents the Self in its entirety. The cone expresses the idea that these circular slices or cross-sections are part of a larger, continuous whole which bridges the gaps between the planes. Because the Self is ultimately one entity, no matter how it may be sectioned into slices, no part of it is really cut off from the rest, which means that the relatively restricted awareness of the earth plane can come into contact with the higher awareness of higher planes (perhaps through prayer, meditation, or a burst of insight sometimes known as "cosmic consciousness"). This viewpoint also dovetails with the hypothesis popularized by Aldous Huxley that the brain serves as a "funnel" or "filter" restricting a wider range of consciousness. 

Perhaps this diagram, though obviously simplistic and metaphorical, can make some sense of the conflicting sets of reports. NDErs and ordinary mediumistic communicators are reporting from the level of awareness depicted here as "limbo" or "Summerland." Those who recall past lives under hypnosis, and especially those who recall a life between lives, may be reporting from a higher (or deeper) level of awareness. In this respect it is worth noting that between-lives therapists insist that only the deepest stage of hypnosis can access these memories. Naturally, the reports of purportedly high-level channeled beings would also reflect a higher plane of awareness. 

What is perhaps most noteworthy is the implication that all of this is going on at the same time, or perhaps "outside of" time. While it may seem as if we are engaged in a long and tedious struggle to attain spiritual enlightenment, this model suggests that we have already attained it -- in fact, that we never had to attain it because it was part of us from the beginning. The various lower levels of awareness with their more restricted range (represented by smaller radii) are part of a continuum with the highest level of awareness, so whatever we are seeking on this plane has already been found (actually did not have to be "found") on the higher plane. And the awareness on that plane is just as much "I" as the awareness on this plane; it is not a separate entity, though it may feel separate from the limited perspective of earthly life.

Finally, notice that the various cross-sections form a series of concentric circles, suggesting that each smaller circle is contained within the larger one. Nothing is lost; there is only expansion to a wider point of view. If this is correct, then it may be wrong to say (as, in the past, I have) that the ego is sloughed off after death. It may be more correct to say that the ego is subsumed within a wider consciousness that places it into a more appropriate perspective, thus robbing it of its power to mislead or confuse. This higher awareness, even on the limbo or Summerland planes, would be consistent with many reports of communicators who see their own mistakes more clearly than than they did on earth, and who (especially at the Summerland level) have risen above their earthbound limitations of perception. The field of induced after-death communication offers many examples of communications that seem to come from this level of awareness.

I'm not sure how clear this all is, and being busy, I can't revise and clarify my remarks as much as I ordinarily would. But it just may be the case that the apparent contradiction between the two sets of afterlife reports can be resolved by looking at the whole issue from a different perspective. 

My thanks to commenter Juan, whose remark about slicing off circular sections of a sphere probably got me thinking along these lines (although I realize I am not going in quite the direction he suggested). 

 

Crazy from the heat

So last night I was working with a large-capacity USB thumb drive which seemed to be processing information very slowly. I had the bright idea that if I reformatted the drive in a new way, I could increase the speed. Of course, this meant that all contents of the drive would be erased, so I would have to fill up the drive again. I thought it would take 10 or 20 minutes. But it turned out that my plan didn't work. The reformatted drive was no faster than it had been before. And it ended up taking me about 3 hours to fill it up again. That's 3 wasted hours, not to mention a certain amount of frustration.

What's the point of all this? Only that a lot of the “pressure,” “stress,” and “burden of responsibility” that we feel in our lives is self-inflicted. I could've saved myself 3 hours simply by not reformatting the drive and leaving well enough alone. In an effort to save a little time (by making the drive work faster), I ended up wasting a lot of time, and the drive doesn't work any faster anyway.

Today I tried to tally up the amount of time, mental energy, anxiety, and guilt that I cost myself by creating unnecessary assignments, imposing arbitrary deadlines, or interpreting unimportant issues as matters of life and death. But I couldn't do it, because the list of the endless. The mind really does work overtime to make itself crazy.

When we hear people talk about how stressed out they are, a point they often make with an unmistakable note of pride, it's worth considering to what degree their stress translates into worthwhile results. You can make yourself nuts in all kinds of ways, but it doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be accomplishing anything. Sometimes the person daydreaming in an easy chair turns out to be more “productive” than the one who's running around like a headless chicken trying to accomplish a hundred things at once, and mainly creating confusion or pursuing dead ends.

A lot of people seem to feel they have to stay in constant motion. It's been said that sharks must swim ceaselessly, because if they stop swimming, they will die. A fair number of people in today's society seem to feel the same way. They are always running as fast as they can, even if they're running in place. They're taking on more and more jobs, even while complaining about their inability to handle the jobs they already have. Sometimes, of course, they have no choice; the demands of a tyrannical boss or a clamorous family may be impossible to ignore. But I think in many cases people take on more responsibilities, more activities, more burdens, more stress simply because they feel that part of them will die if they risk inactivity.

And they're probably right. Were they to choose inactivity on a regular basis, as a major part of their lifestyle, part of them would die or at least atrophy. You know where I'm going with this. The vulnerable parts, the part that insists we keep climbing that mountain even when we've forgotten why, is the ego.

The ego cannot abide inactivity. It feels threatened by silence and stillness. There's a reason why the Bible tells us to listen to the small, still voice inside ourselves if we want to hear the voice of God. The ego is not a small, still voice. It's a loud haranguing voice, a chattering and nagging voice, a desperate and pleading voice, an angry and complaining voice … but never small or still. It is always insisting on your attention and, if you let it, it will give you more and more projects to do, for the sole purpose of maintaining its control over your life and your thoughts.

I'm not much for New Year's resolutions, since I've found I never keep them, but if I were going to make one this year, I'd resolve to listen less to the ego and more to the still, small voice. That mission, should I choose to accept it, would probably do more to reduce stress and nurture true productivity than anything else I could try.

For a little more on this topic, see this old post, especially the quote from Barbara Sher at the end. 

A cryptic post

To celebrate another year of blogging, here's a cryptic crossword with themes drawn from this blog's contents. Click on the image to see a full-size pop-up.  

When the puzzle is done, the red squares, read from left to right, line by line, will spell out a message. 

If you haven't done a cryptic crossword, here are some hints on how to solve one. 

Print out the image and the clues, and sharpen your pencil. Answers will be provided in a later post. 

CLUES

ACROSS

1. “Cry, sis,” a parishioner said unerringly to a ghost 

6. Ghost hunters study things that go this in the night

8. I feel fart developing in postmortem existence 

9. Partic. sixth sense

10. Like a blog post or a legal case

13. Mystic river

14. Stock index dictated the way

15. Lore and complicated British clairvoyant 

17. Not the end? 

19. Control lapel flower in another life

20. Sounds like Santa’s vehicle will do Buffy’s job

21. Debunking project: no beta males need apply

22. Skeptic hides in lusher meringue

DOWN

1. K.C. announced sleeping prophet

2. Skeptic Asimov is a current designation

3. Boston medium and Irish exterminator 

4. Randi’s alter ego? 

5. His pony’s possibly a path to past lives

7. Mixed-up guerilla joins E.R. without a psychic showman

10. What 7D may do to dinnerware

11. My shrew upset by “F” from psychical researcher 

12. Charles’ pie

13. Starting with D-Day there’s no place like it, and there was no one like him

14. Russell’s goal omits E.T. 

16. Addled heart on physical plane

18. Declare a toast to psychic experiment 

Just learned that today only (Dec. 24, 2011), the ebook edition of Mark Anderson's "Shakespeare By Another Name" has been marked down 50%.

Sale ends at 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time.

http://tinyurl.com/864g3gj

Buy now! After all, isn't the purchase of bargain-priced merchandise what the holidays are really all about?