FROM THE FUTURE, COMES THE PAST
Near the end of summer, four months into me being age eight, I spent a week with a friend on Catalina Island, a small piece of land jutting out of the Pacific 26 miles off the Southern California coast, an island much bigger in the overall scheme of things than it's mere 22 miles in length might imply.
My friend was a couple of years older than me and delivered a daily afternoon metropolitan newspaper that big cities used to have in those days. He earned the trip by selling new subscriptions in a contest the paper held. Because of how much work I had done assisting him getting new subscriptions and folding papers everyday he convinced his boss to let me go along. Twenty other kids that had exceeded subscriptions goals were there along with a couple of adult supervisors. We were put up in tent-like bungalows located in the center of town a few blocks from the ocean, given a booklet with food vouchers and tickets that gave us access to do a number of things while there without cost to us, then pretty much left on our own to do whatever we wanted.
One of the things my buddy and I did was take what was called an inland motor tour which was basically a round trip ride into the island's mountain interior in a sort of antique pre-war vehicle that looked like a cross between a bus, a wooden station wagon, and a stagecoach. Part way into the tour we stopped at a place called Eagle's Nest, an abandoned and long since shut down stage stop, to walk around, stretch our legs, and hear about the stage stop and island history. In the process my friend and I wandered off exploring and lost track of time. When we returned the bus was long gone. Figuring another bus would be along at anytime we just went about our business exploring. Hours went by at first without us really noticing, but eventually the sun began going down, the sky darkened, and the air got cold. After trying the windows and doors to the stage stop we decided to hole up for the night in an old stable and wait for morning.
As might be expected I didn't sleep well that night. It was uncomfortable and cold, and I kept rolling over and over. In the middle of the night I noticed a light coming from the the old stage stop building. Since my friend and I had been unsuccessful in finding a way in, and to my knowledge no one had come by since the bus left, it seemed odd there would be any kind of a light coming from inside. I tried to wake my friend to no avail, so I got up and walked over to the building myself, cleaned the glass as much as I could with the sleeve of my shirt and peered in.
I was just barely able to see two men sitting cross-legged on the heavy wooden planked floor caught in the dim light emanating from an old lantern placed on the floor between them. One man, barefoot, was dressed all in black, the other, an older man, sort of dark skinned with short-cropped white hair and beard, was nearly naked and barefoot as well, wearing only what I would now call a loincloth. I tried the door and this time, unlike earlier, it wasn't locked. As I pushed the door open there was a sudden thick, cold-yet-warm tomb-like blast of air shooting right past me toward the outside that I could feel on my face and most distinctly so across both my cheeks and ears. In the process the light went out and the room darkened.
Moments before when I had been outside looking in I noticed a small box of matches near the lantern, so in the dark, on my hands and knees, I started fumbling around until I found them. When I finally got the lantern lit both men were gone. As I turned however, I clearly saw the dark-skinned man standing in the open doorway no more than a few feet away. Time seemed to slow, maybe even stopping altogether. Trying to hold the lantern high I could barely move. In ultra slow motion the light flickered and nearly went out, somehow rekindling itself. In that wafer-thin edge-on moment of darkness the man was gone.
As my ability to move flowed hurriedly back into my body and I regained a more typical sense of my surroundings I bolted out of the building, running at top speed to where my friend still lay asleep, and again tried to wake him and again to no avail. After a while my heart stopped pounding and as the night slowly slipped toward dawn my eyes began to get heavy. I tried to stay awake thinking the men might come back, but they never did. I blew out the lantern and dozed off. In the morning I told my friend what happened and he looked at me like I was crazy. We walked over to the building and just like the day before it was locked up tight. He said I must have been dreaming, but inside I could see the box of matches on the floor just where I left them, plus I still had the lantern.
Eight years later found me as a teenager in high school living under the auspices of my grandmother. During those high school years a sort of unusual single older man moved in next door. He was always barefoot, aways dressed in dark clothes, and always walked wherever he went. Eventually, as neighbors, at least on a hello basis, he got to know my grandmother, who I was living with at the time. One morning he told her he intended to refinish some wood in his house and wondered if he might hire me to help. A few days later, after discussing it with my grandmother and then my dad, I started.
One day after work just prior to going outside he stopped for a few seconds and searched through a stack of books sitting parallel along the floor against the wall. There he found a small, almost pamphlet size book, well worn and crudely made, that had been published in India and handed it to me. The name of the book, which I really didn't have time to absorb because I dropped it from my hands in a sort of stunned disbelief, was titled Glimpses of the Life and Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi by Frank H. Humphreys.
Although my thoughts and feelings would eventually open and morph through it's passage, at that very specific moment in time --- and for years afterwards --- I was sure I had never heard of a Bhagavan, a Sri Ramana, or a Maharshi. Even so, I immediately grasped why he thought the book should be important, and it wasn't who wrote it or what was inside, but what was outside. Outside, on the cover, was a picture of the exact same man I saw that night in the old stage stop atop Catalina. The problem, as I was to learn later, was that the Maharshi had never left India in his life. Matter of fact he never even left Tiruvannamalai, the south India city his ashram was located after he arrived as a young boy in September of 1896. In later years, years that encompassed the exact same time as my experience at the stage stop, he never even left the ashram.
The only way the Maharshi could have been before me in the manner that he was in Catalina was through an apparition, translocation, or bilocation. Most people raised and educated in the west generally don't ascribe to such phenomenon, albeit all the while most have been versed, know, or are familiar with such concepts. They simply ignore or overlook the fact that there are multiple well accepted. well known, and deeply ingrained examples around them in some fashion almost everyday. I was only eight years old at the time of Ramana's visit and it took me a long time before I understood. Once some of the picture began to come together I went on a crusade to learn more, not just reading about such phenomenon, but actually visiting spots where western versions of what I saw actually transpired, phenomenon backed by huge reems of facts, in depth studies and investigations, hundreds of witnesses and objects, all of which I get into below. Briefly however, all encompass highly vetted and thoroughly investigated deep-seated Marian or Marian related sites. Our Lady of the Pillar wherein in 40 AD while Mary the mother of Jesus was still alive and living in the Holy Land, appeared out of nowhere before St. James the Great along the Ebro River in Zaragoza, Spain. The others, chronologically, are the Holy House of Loreto, 1294 AD, Italy; Our Lady of Guadalupe, 1531 AD, Mexico; Mary of Jesus of Agreda, 1623 AD, Spain; Our Lady of Lourdes, 1858 AD, France; and Our Lady of Fátima, 1917 AD, Portugal, all incorporating apparition, translocation, or bilocation.
apparition [ap-par-ish-uhn]
noun
An apparition is best understood as a specific kind of vision in which a person or being not normally within the visionary's perceptual range appears to that person, not in a world apart as in a dream, and not as a modification of a concrete object as in the case of a weeping icon or moving statue, but as part of the environment, without apparent connection to verifiable visual stimuli.
Encountering Mary
"For the preaching point of view, the Buddha has utilized comparisons, similes and metaphors to enable the hearer understanding the 'Dharma which is profound, difficult to realize, hard to understand, not to grasped by mere logic, subtle and comprehensible only by the wise.' Without these figurative images the hearer may have difficulties in understanding the meaning of his teachings."
Apparition, translocation, and bilocation are not necessarily considered your typical common run-in-the-mill everyday garden variety type mainstream phenomenon, often being relegated to the backwater swamps of the marginally suspect and tin foil hat wearing folk. However, even though all three phenomenon pretty much remain low key in society and possibly ill-thought of in general, they are huge in making traditionaly accepted major religions work. People bent by a serious anti-church drive and those with a full unwavering faith along with every thought or belief inbetween have, throughout the two thousand or more years of Christainity, devoted thousands and thousands of hours and pages of research and investigations into apparitions, translocations, and bilocations. Most of the efforts are done in a chance or hope to prove or disprove Jesus or strengthen or weaken Christianity. Personally I have no interest in any religious aspect to it, only that within the reams of research, religious based or not, proof is such that it backs my thesis. Most of what I present below is provided with links to subsantiate or verify my sources pro or con and you can take my word for it and just let it stand or, with all that I make available, you can easily research what I use as strengths or weaknesses to confirm or dismiss for yourself. Starting below will lead you into all six and why, and although it was me who was impacted, it should be of importance to you. It's important because so much of what I write and present hinges on the events on Catalina Island and the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi and the truthfulness and reality behind them. If you as a reader discount what I present as being unrealistic, untrue, and not possible, it undermines everything.
Now, while it is true I have selected as examples six of the western world's most major religious apparitions, I have done so for three reasons: 1.) just that, they are well known, 2.) because of such, they have book after book and article after article of well documented pro and con investigations into them, all in an effort to prove or disprove them, and 3.) even so, any proof or disproof provided over the centuries that might have added or subtracted meaning to it's actual reality or not, it still remains, rather researchers like it or not, each of the six has on it's own well reported physical aspects attributed to them beyond the words of the apparition's observer. For example, in the unfolding of the Our Lady of Guadalupe apparition in Mexico, the person reporting it, an indigenous peasant named Juan Diego who was yet to receive any formal education, was asked to provide proof. The next day he showed up and handed the Archbishop a bunch of Castilian roses in full bloom given to him by the "Lady." Not only was it winter time, but the roses were not even native to Mexico. They were however, native to the Archbishop's home region in Spain.
My avid personal interest surrounding any physical aspect related to an appartition stems from my own experience as a young boy with the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi at the stage stop high atop the mountains of the island of Santa Catalina, California. If you remember, when I ran out of the building that night I took the lantern with me. The next morning when I took my buddy, who doubted my story, back to the stage stop, the stage stop was still locked up tight. We peered into the windows and the matchbox and spent match I used to re-light the lantern remained on the floor where I left them, but I had the lantern on the outside of the locked stage stop with me. If none of it happened in "real life," then how would I have ended up with the lantern outside the stage stop and in my hand? That is a question I continue to carry with me to this day and still bothers me. Even so, it is a criteria and benchmark when it comes to evaluating an appartition. Where it weakens is if the physical item no longer exists and you have to take the word of others that it did. Since in my case the lantern existed and I had it, it gives me the belief that such results can happen, thus then from there I have to evaluate the credibility of the word and history of the appartition and who's making it and if it is valid or not. For more see:
THE MEETING
AN UNTOLD STORY OF SRI RAMANA
At a very young age, long before any of the above events at Catalina, and not knowing everything would eventullay all become entangled, I was going in a totally different direction. I was jumping off one-story porches, garages, and roof tops with a bed sheet made into a parachute or flaring behind my back tied to my wrists and ankles a la the glider chute of Captain Midnight, without parental approval or any knowledge thereof of same. I designed and built bat-like wings with cloth and sticks and attempted to fly, all before my uncle showed up on the scene. However, it was only after my uncle arrived that I truly tried to fly in earnest.
photo source David Heger
TWO YEARS LATER
"The kid needs the Patron Saint of Aviators if he's going to fly that piece of shit again.
"Knowing his mother he would be more at home with Mary Magdalene."
While the two quotes above were of concern to me initially when I first heard them, neither carried a whole lot of weight beyond the short term, and possibly even the near long term because of a total lack of savvy on my part and/or me being not much more than just a ten year old kid at the time. However, little by little, drip by drip, I was beginning to learn I was being nudged rivulet by rivulet along the edges of a small creek estuary into a tributary toward a major river to a much larger sea.
I knew what aviators were, but becoming aware that there was something known as Patron Saints, and of all things, with aviators having one, was in itself big. Years later my spiritual mentor, who I will discuss soon, was raised in a Quaker environment by his mother, a strict if not a dedicated Quaker. By the time I met him however, he was well versed in things Catholic. He was an aviator during World War I, and although an American, had flown for the British RAF in France against the Germans. His best friend, an Irish-Catholic named Patsy, introduced him to a Catholic saint, Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the Patron Saint of Aviators during the war, saying he provides cover and protection to aviators. Years later, when my mentor and I met, because of my attempt at manned flight he said I too was an aviator and told me about another Patron Saint of Aviators, Our Lady of Loreto, named Patron Saint of Aviators by Pope Benedict XV after the war on March 24, 1920. Little did I know, as found further down this page, that Our Lady of Loreto would play such a major role later on in my life, with aviators having nothing to do with it.
Mary Magdalene? Wow, now that was another thing! Just the sound of the name-like words strung together in a phrase for the first time, for reasons unknown, wisped through the air and down into my brain as if I was bathed in extasy. I had lived with a number of families up to that time and continued to do so still into my early teens. So said, I had attended a number of churches because of those families. Maybe not as an official church member and for sure never fully versed in what each espoused, but as a young boy having gone nonetheless. Reading verses, singing hymns, crossing my chest in the form of a cross, close to being baptized if not baptized, always at the whims of others and never of my own volition. Catholic, Baptist, Four Square, Christian Science, Presbyterian, all of which may have mentioned Mary Magdalene, but if they did, it never sank in or struck me like when I heard it said that night in the garage. For sure, none of my same age kids I knew ever heard of her. The only thing I can think of is that somewhere along the way the exposure from the different religious groups bits and pieces of her existance stuck to my brain like so many little magnetic flecks that just came together all at once. It took a Pope-ordained defrocked priest living in a cave in the desert southwest along the Mexican border and an ancient long lost so called Coptic or gnostic papyrus text stashed away in the Middle East for centuries, and not surfacing until 1896 that wasn't translated until 1955, then not in English until some twenty years later, before I was to find out.
PATRON SAINT OF AVIATORS
It was some time prior to having reached age ten that I actually started constructing a real flying machine. Initially, with the help of my Uncle, I began building an over 20-foot wingspan craft based on a Leonardo Da Vinci design. Although I really wanted to stick with Da Vinci, his ideas began to prove unflyable unless we moved into using expensive and exotic materials to maintain strength and lighten the weight, along with hundreds of other modifications.
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In the end we decided on a 400 year later already lightweight circa 1895 Lilienthal design. I had no real idea what my uncle's ultimate plan for the machine was, that is, why switch designs if we were building it simply as an intellectual execution of time and learning, or were we actually going to fly the thing. For me there was no doubt. There was also no doubt who the pilot would be either, me. But, rather than receive a continuing chance of being stonewalled or receiving a no vote, I took it upon myself to bypass any obstacles, man made or otherwise. On the weekend of August 28-29, 1948, I took the craft down from it's construction lair and along with the help of my best friend at the time, Martin Petrosky, hauled it across the street with the following results:
"One day I took the completed craft to the top of a nearby two story building and holding on for dear life, jumped off. At first the flying machine held fairly steady, maintaining altitude and covering a rather substantial distance. Then suddenly the craft stalled, I lost control and it dropped like a rock from a pretty good height, crashing into the front porch and through the windows of neighbor's house across the street. The machine escaped any real major damage and so did I.
"Even though the flight ended not as smoothly as I hoped, primarily because of lack of experience on my part, or as the case may be, none at all, and as I discovered, perhaps the lack of any sort of actual flight control mechanisms as well, I considered my attempt a success --- especially so because of the distance covered before I lost control."
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A couple of nights later, standing in the dim light of the garage looking up at the wrecked craft suspended from the rafters as I had been doing nearly every night since my attempt to fly the thing, a car drove up in the alley stopping in front of the open garage door. Four men got out of whom one was my godfather. My godfather's role in the family was similar to my uncle's. The same as my uncle oversaw me under the auspices of my Stepmother, my godfather, under the auspices of my dad, oversaw my older brother, one of the few people other than my dad that could. When it came to our stepmother, my older brother hated her and made her life as miserable as possible. He remembered our real mother and our family and would not accept her in any role --- plus she interfered with his relationship with our father. He wanted him exclusively and did not like the fact that she took basically all my dad's time.
Although my godfather took watching my brother seriously, when he wasn't watching him he was either drinking or gambling or both. He usually bet on the ponies through bookies or played poker in a series of rotating local games, usually using other peoples money or the monthly stipend my father gave him. The men he was traveling with that night were typical, culled from a larger circle of acquaintances, lowlifes, small time mobsters, gamblers, and card buddies. Just as they were driving up, and what none of us knew, my stepmother's driver had crossed the compound into my uncle's studio from the other way and then, in the dark, stepped into the garage. The men came in carrying beer bottles all rowdy from drinking when one of them said, looking up at the flying machine, "The kid needs the Patron Saint of Aviators if he's going to fly that piece of shit again," followed by another man saying, "Knowing his mother he would be more at home with Mary Magdalene," speaking, of course of my stepmother being my mother, which most likely the lowlife wouldn't know or discriminate against, but still putting the two together anyway.
With that my stepmother's driver stepped out of the dark, all dressed in his $1000.00 dollar hand-sewn tailored suit and perfectly sharp edged dark grey fedora, looking all the same as the Spirit without a mask than a driver and said, "Maybe you should be watching your tongue more around the boy, heavyweight." The men, my godfather, and me included, clearly set aback by his sudden appearance seemingly out of nowhere, the men, in an unchoreographed unison began slowly edging back closer to the open door. My godfather, having a personal working relationship with the driver, immediately put both arms up in front of him mid-chest high with open palms facing towards the driver, and calling the driver by his known name, said, "Nobody meant no disrespect, Nighttime." The driver stepped more into the light saying, "Tell them now is a good time for them to leave." Of which they did. The driver said he needed to talk to my godfather and as they were leaving he turned to me and calling my stepmother "mom" the same as I called her, said he didn't think my mom would be very pleased if she knew I was in an open garage at night all alone with the garage door up, and with that, I put the door down as quick as I could.
It wasn't unusual for people like my stepmother's driver to be called or known by a name other than their real or given name. Not a nickname per se', but an identifying moniker used by others and usually earned or descriptive. Most of the people who traveled in the wider general circles my stepmother traveled in, at least peripherally, were aware who my mother's driver was and how respected he was and how efficient he could be. To those people he was known by the same name my godfather used to address him in the garage that night, "Nighttime." The moniker was used by my godfather specifically to ensure my stepmother's driver that he knew full well the rep of the drivers abilities.
As the story goes, at least how it has come down to me, the reason he was called by what he was known by was because one night in the pursuant of fulfilling a reasonable request by my stepmother in a rather upscale formal black-tie environment, he politely asked three men to comply with her request. The men, making it clear they were unwilling to do so, looking at each other with a three to one advantage and knowing they were in such a high profile setting, one of them said, "And if we don't?" My stepmother's driver stepped forward and leaning into them a little bit said only one word, "Nighttime." Legend has it they complied, although how it was accomplished is not clear.
Relative to me, the driver's concern and what he didn't like was the lowlife linking my stepmother through to what most people think of first when someone mentions Mary Magdalene, especially when put into the same context with Patron Saints. We are talking Mary Magdalene often mistakenly being confused as a prostitute, of which she wasn't or being their Patron Saint, which she isn't. As for the driver and as to what I thought or didn't think, he didn't want anything to remotely impinge on my unwavering high regard of my stepmother. I didn't have any reason to know why the lowlife put together what he did to come to the conclusion he did because I didn't know anything about any of it in the first place. Nor did I put together any inuendo big or small regarding the driver, his concerns being his own. Most of it was adult stuff not kid stuff. Even though over the years with my stepmother I may have crossed paths with the likes of Brenda Allen or remotely Fifie Malouf and on occasion Hostesses through some sort of business transactions my stepmother may or may not have had with them and a short time later the likes of Willie Martello of the El Rey Club and Russ Miller of the Normandie Club, none of it meant much as a ten year old boy me. However, the simple concept of my godfather's friends just mentioning the possibility of Patron Saints of Aviators and Mary Magdalene, with me as a kid grasping onto both concepts, opened a whole new downstream field or exploration with unintentional exciting outcomes.
MARY MAGDALENE
It is highly believed in some circles that the person said to be the apostle John depicted in Leonardo Da Vinci's painting The Last Supper as shown below, is not John at all, but Mary Magdalene. If such is taken as the case, it begs the double question then of where would John be if not at the supper and why would Da Vinci chose to eliminate John totally and replace him by the Magdalene?
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There is not one single specific individual biblical verse in the canonical gospels that says Mary of Magdalene attended The Last Supper, especially so, she herself sitting at the table sharing wine and bread with Jesus and the apostles. Most people let it go at that, thus then, by implication, arriving at the much larger scenario that she wasn't there. However, big problems arise when reaching such a conclusion. One, she had been everywhere else of biblical importance leading up to, during, and following the Last Supper and because of that it is easy to draw, or paint as the case may be, a very positive picture that she was, unless there existed a concerted effort to do otherwise. Many artists of the Renaissance facing a similar dilemma have come up with a variety of answers, ignoring or eliminating her all together or coming up with a work around. Fra Angelico, for example, a great artist of the early Renaissance, painted the Last Supper in the Dominican monastery of St. Mark in Florence well before Da Vinci created his and depicts a female in it thought to be Mary Magdalene without eliminating any of the other apostles.
Another problem with Mary Magdalene being said to having not attended the Last Supper is what the bible itself has to say, at least how ambiguous it becomes when you investigate it on a much broader scale. She was there alright, and the bible says it, but how or what it says and by whom and whom it is interpreted, then how that interpretation, if not left out or deleted, is emphasized relative it's selected importance. Mary Magdalene became stamped so early on in biblical history it is impossible to erase her completely. Deleting her, deflating her importance, or relegating her to the backwash is another thing, which for the most part is what has tried to be done. The bible, whether anybody likes it or not, although not verse specific, by wringing out readily available facts already presented in all accepted translated versions, can and does, by more than just inference, prove big time Mary Magdalen was there. All you have to do is read it.
Please be aware what I've written about Mary Magdalene here is not intended to be a final where-with-all or end-all on her. I have another full essay, or at least one well on the way, that goes into all the details of what I've learned, discovered, and come to know about her. So said, most of what I have to say is for another day and not for here. First, here, the Magdalene plays the role at the level she does only because she continues to show up like an uncut string weaved into the tapestry of life. Leaving her out would pretend she wasn't there. No matter how small her role or how tenuous she appears overall, her thread still holds together much of what is to see or be seen. After all, Mary Magdalene was the first person to see Jesus following his resurrection, of which when he told her not to touch her some think he was an apparition and not in the flesh, albeit highly debatable. Things were much different somewhat later when Jesus appeared in the locked upper room where the Last Supper was held and the didciples were holed up followimg his crucifixion. There, on a return visit, he asked 'Doubting' Thomas to feel the wound on his side where the Roman soldier had shoved a spear in him. Nothing apparition like there. Second, interestingly enough, Mary Magdalene in legend, albeit a bit on the iffy side and difficult to read, has a major transloction event attributed to her that shows up in Volume IV of the Golden Legend wherein on an island in the Mediterranean Sea she saves the life and baby of the wife of the prince of the province of Marseilles in present day France.
Several years ago in a circular fashion I was leisurely wending my way southward through France on my way to Italy with plans to visit a few places new and old to me after having arrived in London, then jumping to Amsterdam. My travels had no particular time constraints except to be in Pamplona, Spain to see as an observer but not a participant, the running of the bulls then to catch up with a friend who was going to be in Cannes, France during just a narrow specific three day open window period of time. After Amsterdam the first stop on my itinerary was a visit to the German World War I and II submarine memorial called the U-Boot-Ehrenmal Moltenort (Moltenort U-Boat Memorial) located in the seaside resort of Heikendor just off the Baltic Sea, from there then, it was on to Paris. My interest in the memorial arose because along with hundreds of other German names that appear on the metal plates dedicated to submariners who died in the line of duty serving on U-boats, a man I met, a former German submariner who strangely enough had been living in Mexico well before World War II even ended, and whose hand I shook was in no way that of an apparition --- being quite obviously alive and well at the time --- has his name and birthdate on the plate that commemorates the fallen crew members of the German U-boat U-196, the same submarine he served on and said to have been sunk in the Sundra Strait off Jakarta in 1944. After seeing his name on the plate and photographing it, I left the memorial for Paris. Before dropping down into Spain however, I stopped to see what I could and what was offered to see at the Lascaux paleolithic cave paintings site, then off to Lourdes, France to visit the Grotto of the Apparitions. See also:
HIGH MOUNTAIN ZENDO
The mother of a very close friend of mine who had been quite ill for years, complicated now more recently by dementia and/or the oncoming of Alzheimer's, had for quite some time prior to me leaving, made a major turn for the worse. Since my travels often took me to various places of worship both historical and legendary, many thought to be holy or imbued with spiritual powers, my friend had always asked that I light candles in her mother's behalf in those places that so allow it. If in doing so seemed to provide a positive outcome for one or both, in that I had no reason not to, I always did when the chance arose. In so saying, I had lit candles in churches both major and minor all over the world the more weird the better, including most of the California missions, another apparitions site the basilica in Mexico City dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the all iron metal church designed and built by Gustave Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame in Santa Rosalia, Baja Peninsula Mexico, and more recently on this trip, having just done so at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, and as well before the trip ended, The Holy House of Loreto, Loreto, Italy. As for Paris, Paris being the home of the Eiffel Tower, I've shown below, a couple of interior shots clearly depicting the Eiffel Tower-like structure of Gustave Eiffel's little known all metal church in Santa Rosalia.
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Lighting candles in Notre Dame for my friend's mother wasn't aligned to any specific request, going to Lourdes was. The idea was for me to obtain holy water from the grotto for my friend to use then accordingly with her mother in some fashion. There are several ways to get authentic holy water in Lourdes. One, you can buy authenticated already bottled water from the gift shop, or two, you can fill a container or vessel yourself. If you didn't bring container a variety of empty bottles in various sizes, shapes, designs, and prices are available from the gift shop for purchase to fill yourself. That filling can be done easily in a couple of ways. Not far from the cave entrance or grotto is a long row of faucets you can use that are all piped together and fed by water from the grotto. If you have the time or willing to wait you can actually go into the cave and fill your bottles from water that seeps through the walls of the grotto, and of which I did.
From Lourdes it was on to Pamplona for the running of the bulls then a ten or twelve hour train ride via Madrid to Tarifa after taking a little bit at the end by bus to hop on the ultra fast ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangiers for a couple of days for no other reason than to just do so. Back in Spain I skirted along the coast through Barcelona into France then on to Cannes. In Cannes I caught up with a friend I met a few years before while volunteering for hurricane duty with the Red Cross. When I met her she was age 23 and just out of college in June having received a Bachelor's degree in Healthcare Administration. She was supposed to start a Registered Nursing program in the Fall when a paperwork SNAFU blocked her access. She was told because the program was impacted not to expect entry in the Spring, most likely having to wait until the following Fall. Free floating and unexpectedly finding herself with nothing to do, she thought she might be of some help with Katrina so she volunteered for the Red Cross. She arrived just at the time Rita hit and I had been evacuated because of Rita's path, meeting up as new Rita teams were being formed. All of us who I had worked with on Katrina were scattered, the Red Cross thinking that at least one experienced person on as many new teams would be beneficial. All of the people on the team, including the shelter manager designate, i.e., the de facto team leader, were brand new. Much to my surprised they took to heart my suggestions and what I had to say and the six of us ended up being a well oiled machine considering we never received another six person team to alternate time off.
After about a week working 36 hour days and sometimes sleeping standing up leaning on each other's backs with no relief team showing up because there weren't any and evacuee numbers beginning to drop to more reasonable levels as many headed back south, Red Cross bussed those left to a larger shelter not far away that had more staff, more room, and better shelter amenities. Doing so, our shelter manager, now redundant and the team too at the new shelter, talked Red Cross into a new assignment. They sent us in the middle of the night to reopen a shut down previous Katrina shelter evacuated because of the onrushing of Rita. The shelter, or what was left of it, was pushing 300 miles east across the state from where we were, located inland a bit from the Gulf right on the Texas-Louisiana border in the direct path of where Rita made landfall.
The Red Cross volunteers that secured the shelter before Rita did a pretty good job putting everything needed out of harms way. Except for the electrical generator, which was left outside and difficult to move, almost everything else was packed away in a small inside room ending with little or no damage. I'm talking cots, blankets, emergency meals (MREs), one gallon bottles of drinking water, flashlights, batteries and Coleman lanterns. Locals who didn't evacuate started showing up for meals and medical care with two RNs showing up by the end of the second day. Red Cross field kitchen began delivering hot meals with dinner our second day and lunch and dinner delivered all the days after that.
The shelter manager sent my friend and me toward the Gulf to reconnoiter a larger general area in the path of the hurricane to see if there was any place gas was available and/or open pharmacies in the larger evacuated communities toward the south while other team members made contact with locals and prepare for returnees that might possibly find they had nothing left to speak of they when they started coming back.
At the end of the day after the evening meals were served and all the dinner containers and utensils were cleaned and set out for the next day pick up and lunch delivery, with not much to do or no electricity for hundreds of miles around we were pretty much done. With the super dark nights and warm humidity my friend and I, just the two of us, would take a couple of blankets to a nearby clearing, spread them out, laying back and looking at the stars in the night sky while resting ourselves. For a lay person she knew more about the moon, planets, stars, and constellations than almost anybody I knew. She could point out their positions, knew the names of the major stars in the constellations, which constellations were which, all kinds of things. On some of the nights, around midnight and with no glare from electric lights for hundreds of miles in any direction eeking into the blackened sky, we were able to locate M-31. That night, the first time she ever saw M-31 with her naked eye she was so excited she nearly forgot there was a three times plus two years age gap between us, she furtively taking naked to heart, me, and heavenly bodies.
One morning we were crossing through the woods when we came across a woman carrying a big camp stove percolator coffee pot. She told us she made percolator coffee every morning and if we wanted some to join her. We followed her ending up in a camp put together by locals we had never seen. At first most didn't like us being there, telling us "we don't need no Red Cross." After talking a little while over coffee it came out I was an Army veteran like many of the men there were. One of the guys had even been in the First Infantry Division like me, only a couple of years later. Even so we still shared a number of places and experiences. Pretty soon any barriers, real or imagined began to fade. After that I noticed some of them started showing up at the shelter for meals with mothers even bringing children for health care from the nurses and men who wouldn't come near the shelter before were coming in to have cuts and bruises sustained clearing back downed trees and such attended to.
A couple of days after our first encounter with the lady carrying the coffee pot my friend and I went to the camp for coffee. While there a huge discussion broke out between the Texas folk and some who had come over from the Louisiana side about who made the best gumbo. So they decided to have a cook off. My friend and I were invited and It was like a giant outdoor party or festival, lasting way late into the night. Someone brought a generator, someone else brought some gas, others strung lights across the main area into the trees. There was a huge bonfire, singing and dancing. I was probably one of the best times I ever had.
A second relief team arrived easing our burden, then a few days later another team showed up. Since our original shelter manager rotated out and with so many volunteers getting in the way of each other as well as my friend and I not liking the one time close comradery of our original team having evaporated the two of us headed back to Red Cross National in Austin for a new assignment.
After standing in line I told the guy we were randomly connected with at Red Cross National, who initially was going to assign us to the mega-shelter in Houston, that we had been in a primitive area for weeks, no running water, electricity, no air conditioning, no gasoline, etc., and that we could use a real shower, a real bed, and time to do our laundry. He assigned us overnight in separate albeit adjoining rooms in an AmeriSuite hotel Red Cross usually sends short term big shots to and told us to report back the next day.
The next day we got a new guy. He asked if we had a place to stay and we told him we had been assigned a place and before we could say anything else he told us the Service Center in Austin just called looking for a couple of people, especially with some computer expertise. He said it wasn't shelter work however, that we would have to work nine hour days, six days a week. My friend and I looked at each other and told the guy we could suffer through it. In Austin we watched the bats fly out from under the bridge a few times at sundown and on our first time off we went to San Antonio, taking in the River Walk and riding the little boats in the canal as well as touring the Alamo. More can be found at Hope Savage, Footnote [10] and in the main text of Maya Ruins and the Spring Equinox.
Which brings us back to my aforementioned trip through Europe and more specifically meeting my friend in Cannes. After Hurricane Rita, instead of returning to school in the Spring or following Fall for her RN like I thought, she simply up and out of the blue joined the Navy, ending up as a crew member on the aircraft carrier the USS Enterprise (CVN 65). It just so happened the Enterprise stopped in Cannes for a three day stay with a departure date of July 27th. Much to the dismay and chagrin of a significant number of her more virile male crewmembers and a few of the ladies no doubt, she spent every available minute or second of her three day holiday in port with her old, ancient, decrepit and over-the-hill as she told them, "grandfather," the good grandchild that she was. The truth being of course, there was no real relationship of anykind between the two us, biological or otherwise, other than what two of us made it to be.
After watching the Enterprise depart from port I doubled back west from Cannes about sixty miles to Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, sort of inland and up from the coast maybe twenty-five miles from Marseille, to pay homage to Mary Magdalene, view her skeletal remains as well as her skull, and visit the cave she dwelled in the final years of her life located about twelve miles away --- that required after arrival an approximate 45 minute walk/hike to the grotto. Having already visited Our Lady of Lourdes, Lourdes, France on this trip I was on my way to The Holy House of Loreto, in Loreto, Italy.
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ONCE A G.I.
"Two years to the day following having been drafted, after having completed my full time active duty as required, I was honorably discharged, or more accurately, separated from under the Army's auspices without incident. As a requisite to that discharge/separation, in that at the time there was a multi-year obligation to the military, like most two year draftees, to fulfill those remaining years, I was required to report for duty as an active reserve member to a designated Active Reserve Unit."
A CIVILIAN G.I, 1968 VIETNAM: Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols, the Highlands, and Cambodia
In the meantime, like I imply in the simple four-line quote above, because of being an active reserve member in a designated Active Reserve Unit, the Army wasn't making it easy for me to adjust to civilian life. I rented a plex from my grandmother's triplex, enrolled under the G.I. Bill at a California State University, all the while boppin' along in all my naive glory like the dude in Robert Crumb's iconic 1960's Keep On Truckin' cartoon, only instead of being really hip, a just out-of-the-Army big time civilian come college student loser --- hearing for the first time about something called endoplasmic reticulum and even meeting a few ladies.
After the Army and having crawled my way up to being an upper division undergraduate in college, but as well, many, years before any of the above events transpired, that is, Lourdes, Pamplona, Mary Magdalene, or my friend in Cannes, who hadn't even been born yet, I brokered a deal with the active reserve, discussed further down the page, and took a semester break from my studies and traveled throughout Europe using a Eurail Pass and an outdated (1968-69) "Europe on $5 Dollars a Day" book that I had bought years earlier but never got around to using. I was in Paris just a few days when by pure happenstance I came across a college professor I studied under that as a teacher I held in a certain high regard. Telling him that not only did he have an excellent forte' for imparting what was needed to be ingested for both a neophyte and a non-major alike in his field, he was also able to make it so palliative and interesting it left students wanting more. In conversation he told me he was on his way to do research for a book he was writing on the prehistoric cave paintings near a town in northern Spain along the coast called Altamira. Saying if I wanted to go along and participate he would give me collegiate recognition for having done so if I ever needed it.
Assisting the professor in some of his field research and getting to see the paintings and parts of the cave much more freely and up close because of his research, plus being there before the decision was made to limit access for researchers and shut down the caves to tourists altogether, has always been a plus for me. When our time was up I headed some 350 miles southwest toward Portugal and the city of Fatima.
The above before-the-before trip so named "traveling around Europe using a Eurail Pass and 'Europe on $5 Dollars a Day' book trip" of so many years ago sort of set a pattern for the more recent trip I've been writing about, Paris, Lascaux paleolithic cave site, and a Mary Mother of God vision site, i.e., Lourdes. From there both trips continued in a similar impetus style in that both trips were done to visit a historical site known for translocation.
BEFORE THE BEFORE
Before the before when I was a very young boy just returned from India and staying with my grandmother and being sent to a series of foster couples, my grandmother, knowing how I was before going to India, thinking I returned with a "skewed perspective on things," she, with no success finding my father in order to get suggestions on what she should do, contacted my dad's brother who lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for assist.
Because I only stayed with my grandmother on an on-and-off basis after returning from India I have not been able to pinpoint all of the specific days, dates, and times I stayed with her. In an effort to determine the specifics I have had to backtrack using a variety of general sources. My dad's brother, my uncle, taking my grandmother at her word, felt any skewed perspective I might have could be spiritual in nature so he took me to see some Native American spiritual elders he knew in and around the desert southwest.
Before a whole lot was resolved I was placed with a foster couple of which in a short time I ran away from. When school authorities informed my grandmother I was "missing" she began a searching for me, eventually locating me months later, a time I have dated as being a few days after watching the Howard Hughes flying boat being moved June 11-16, 1946. She took me to her place at Big Bear Lake for a short time then I was sent to live with my younger brother near San Diego, which may have been the second of more than one time having done so. When that didn't work out so hot again because of me developing a childlike obsession with a hermit man of spells called a Curandero who lived close by, I was sent back to my grandmother before joining my uncle, at my stepmother's compound in Los Angeles, the start of my full time stay with him for at least the next four to five years. By the time I came under my uncle auspices and the memory of being with my grandmother and a couple of foster couples faded into the background it was edging toward the end of summer. Every afternoon during that period of my life, if my uncle allowed it, I would go over to the home of an older boy I met and help fold papers, drink Bireley's grape or orange, and just hang out until he left on his route.
During the summer of that year, well before I went to live with my stepmother, the newspaper had a contest that offered a free one week trip to Catalina Island, all expenses paid, for selling the most subscriptions. The boy was one of the winners, so during the first part of September 1946, a few weeks before school started, he went, taking me with him after convincing his boss how much work I had done, leaving on the Great White Steamer Friday August 30, 1946. The next day, Saturday the 31st, we went on the inland motor tour only to get stuck at the stage stop overnight when we missed the bus back to Avalon.
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At the same time a half a world away, throughout the entire daylight part of the day Sunday, September 1, 1946, from 7:00 AM until 7:15 PM, there was at the Ramana ashram in Tiruvannamalai south India a huge celebration recognizing the 50th anniversary of the Maharshi's arrival at Arunachala. During Ramana's typical or usual schedule he would have taken rest from the meditation hall starting around 11:00 AM until 2:00 PM. However, on September 1st things were different. For one thing, to accommodate the huge number of people expected a large outdoor thatched roof space called the Jubilee Hall was constructed just beyond the meditation hall. Because of the numbers in attendance, Ramana, not wanting to disappoint anyone desiring Darshan, especially so those who may have traveled great distances, took a leave of only one hour, between 11:00 AM and noon which included his after-lunch stroll. Other than that one hour departure Ramana was not observed physically leaving his sofa except for about 15 minutes around 5:00 PM, although on-and-off throughout the afternoon, even with his good intentions, he had been seen either in deep Samadhi or dozing on occasion.(see) pp 131-139 (74) The Golden Jubilee Festivities.
It was on Santa Catalina during the summer of 1946 at a then isolated onetime stage-stop high in the mountains called Eagle's Nest that I had what I have come to discover was a mystical experience. That experience involved not only the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi that I had met in India several years earlier, and who, to have made what happened, happen, must have invoked, for him, the seldom used supernormal perceptual states called Siddhis, but also the man who I would meet several years later that would become my Mentor in things spiritual, linked on this page here for the first time. The best I can figure, the Ramana related Siddhi event as experienced by me at Eagle's Nest occurred sometime after midnight into the early morning hours of Sunday, September 1st local time coinciding with not only the whole of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Maharshi's arrival at Arunachala, but more specifically his 11:00 AM to noon departure from festivities and after-lunch stroll.(see)
My uncle, knowing I had been to India and possibly been with holy men and guru-types, leaned toward my grandmother's concerns as being more spiritual-like than a medical issue. He was fully versed in the Native American spiritual side of things, and even though he had at one time met and knew both Rabindranath Tagore and the Zen master Sokei-an, his knowledge of or in their Eastern spiritual areas was lean. Not feeling he had enough depth or insight into what he was being asked to do he took me to see Swami Prabhavananda of the Southern California Vedanta Society and then Paramahansa Yogananda of the Self-Realization Fellowship, not because he knew them or was familiar with their works, but for no other reason than both were of the highest profile in the Eastern spiritual movement that had taken root on the west coast following World War II.
The people at the fellowships, although nice enough, when they were told of my unshaken emphasis of having seen a dark skinned older man with short-cropped white hair and beard, barefoot and wearing only what I would now call a loincloth looking all the same as an east Indian snake charmer on a mountain in the middle of the night on Catalina Island their eyes glazed over. With any continued emphasis they suddenly began shifting their feet, backing up, doing paperwork, and becoming too busy to listen, with us receiving little more than lip service in return. They said in the Indian Hindu culture such things happen. We could tell they knew who and what we were talking about, albeit covered over with an annoying to us just below the surface disgust-like attitude aimed towards me that when translated went "if such things happen why would it happen to you and not me asshole." When favorable results from either of the two visits were not forthcoming to his liking, my uncle let it drop.
During both of the summers of 1949 and 1950 I spent living off the land like a forest monk in the High Sierras with my brothers and a number of other kids under the auspices of my uncle and godfather. My uncle, almost like having an itch you can't reach, continued to be bothered in some fashion similar to my grandmother regarding my alleged "skewed perspective" on things. So saying, he decided since we were on the east side of the Sierras for the summer, following a suggestion from my dad feigning concern, took me to see a man both my dad and uncle knew, known to be imbibed with deep spiritual qualities. He just so happened to be living at a remote mountain retreat on the east side of the Sierras the same summer we were there. His name was Franklin Merrell-Wolff, a man my father had prospected with during his early years. How my uncle knew him I'm not sure, but it was clear the two of them did know each other when we went to see him. I think before I left that day my superficially applied alleged skewed perspective moved out of an alleged category into a genuine one.(see)
When we left that day, unbeknownst to me, Merrell-Wolff suggested to my uncle he should obtain and read a book by Paul Brunton titled A search in Secret India first published in 1934. Matter of fact, he handed his own copy to my uncle just as we were leaving although I didn't read it then nor do I know what happened to it. Merrell-Wolff was right on target. If you read Brunton's book, as linked below, especially anything that relates to the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, who Brunton calls the Maharishee starting around page 134 you may see why Merrell-Wolff came closer than anybody regarding my alleged "skewed perspective" on things. My uncle came close by pure intuition when he took me to see the movie The Razor's Edge a few years before. It's just that Maugham's use of Sri Ramana being the role model for his holy man in the book wasn't widely known, especially since Maugham called him Sri Ganesha in the book. Learning about Ramana could have cleared up a whole lot for all of us, including me, if anybody could have put together me seeing Ramana. What I call my Mitigating Circumstances screwed everything up. Plus, as close as he was in cleaning everything up, Merrell-Wolff's timing couldn't have been worse.
A SEARCH IN SECRET INDIA
Sometime along the way, before or during the summers in the High Sierras, for reasons left unclear, my father and stepmother departed for South America for a two-year stint. Their departure effectively ended any semblance of our family as a unit, and for sure the childhood living situation I had become accustomed to under my uncle's largely bohemian-like guardianship floated by my stepmother's guiding hand and bags full of money. By the time my dad and stepmother returned after two years, as I learned later, their marriage had deteriorated to such a point it disintegrated beyond repair, pretty much ending for me any return to how it had been.
At the end of the summer of 1950 and the start of the fall school year, with our dad, stepmother and uncle gone, my younger brother and I were living with a new to us foster couple in Gardena, California, all of which I've summarized elsewhere but covered more thoroughly in Normandie Club. The couple, who had tried for some time to have children with no results really wanted my younger brother to raise as their own. Getting me in the bargain, older and with history, was something they never warmed towards and something the woman of the couple, in both words and actions, never ceased to remind me. Two years later, in 1952, during the summer that fell between my 8th and 9th grades, filled with enough of her reminders and things not working out so well, running away to find my stepmother began to appear more and more as my only viable option.
"Even though my stepmother was impressed with the fact that I ran away just to be with her, she felt it would be best we get in touch with my dad and see what we should do next. Unwilling to talk with my grandmother she called the woman of the foster couple I ran away from, who she knew and was friends with, hoping to find out if I should be returned to them or to locate my father, telling the woman that I was in good care and everything was OK. The woman of the couple, Aunt Pauline, told my stepmother to 'keep the fucking little asshole, I don't give a shit what happens to him.' Then she added, 'Don't forget his prick of a little brother, either.' My stepmother, taking into consideration there were no subtle or hidden messages in her response, being quite clear as well as taking her at her word, contacted my uncle to see if he had any idea where my dad was. He didn't, but told my stepmother if she could find no other solution and she could get me to Santa Fe he would deal with situation until everything could be hammered out. With that, having no success locating my dad for whatever reason, rather than sticking me on some grungy multi-day cross desert bus ride to my uncle's and not knowing for sure if I wouldn't just get off somewhere along the way, of which was something she was most certainly sure of and knowing me, most rightly so, she arranged for the same former World War II P-47 pilot that flew my uncle and me to Sacramento a few years before to fly me to Santa Fe, ensuring, she hoped, I would be less likely to get out mid-trip."
A few days later Leo, the ranch foreman, shook me awake during the early morning hours just before sunrise, throwing me and what few things I could gather together into the jeep and taking me west out across the desert. He told me that for reasons unknown, the pick up spot had been changed to a basically abandoned old wartime double 'X' airstrip called Victory Field located out in the middle of the desert about halfway between Willow Springs and Quartz Hill just on the eastside of 90th Street West. We arrived about a half hour early giving me enough time to wander around some of the weed covered landing strip and through a couple of dilapidated dome-like structures that were at onetime somehow related to the airstrip operations before it was abandoned. The plane set down, Leo handed the pilot what looked like a couple hundred bucks, and shortly after that I was on my way to Santa Fe in the back seat of a World War II era North American AT-6.
Little did I know my uncle was scheming all along for the two of us to meet up somehow that summer anyway, it was just that before he could set it into motion formally, fate interceded on his behalf and in his favor. His intention was for me to meet the smartest man in the world, the greatest artist in America, then the greatest artist in the world. In those days the three were, at least as far a my uncle was concerned, none other than Albert Einstein, Jackson Pollock, and Pablo Picasso. My uncle knew both Pollock and Einstein so putting the meetings with them was easy.
The meetings came up because a few years before, on my 11th birthday, my stepmother arranged for me to meet one of my then favorite childhood heroes, the cowboy-western movie star, Roy Rogers. My uncle, shunting aside any aspect that I was only 11, thought the whole idea of meeting a cowboy movie star somewhat flippant, so he came up with a much bigger plan, which took a couple of years to put into place.
The meeting between Albert Einstein and myself occurred the day of a new moon night of August, 1952. That day and date was Wednesday, August 20, 1952. I ran away from the foster couple as soon as I could after school was out at the start of the summer of 1952. Because a variety of circumstance I know that a few days after Monday, July 21, 1952, which was exactly one full lunar month to the day before that new moon meeting with Einstein, I had caught up with my stepmother and a few days after that I was in Santa Fe with my uncle.
Following the flight from my stepmother's to my uncle's, but before the two of us headed east to meet Einstein and Pollock, a several week window of opportunity opened up for me to stay with my uncle in and around Santa Fe. On two or three overnights during that couple of weeks period my uncle took me to see and camp among the ruins of a series of three former Spanish missions and Indian pueblos about 70 miles south of Santa Fe. The three missions were built in and around and basically on top of three former much older Native American settlements. Now days the missions and pueblos are preserved historical sites, but back in the day the three missions as shown below, Abo, Gran Quivira, and Quarai, were for the most part just a series of ruins, left unattended and to their own vices. So said, with no sanctions, we were able to camp and stay overnight without any hinderances, official or otherwise.
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For as long as most people who know about such things can remember there has been a long standing New Mexico Native American legend associated with the ancient Spanish three mission complex of Abo, Gran Quivira, and Quarai, a legend that started and grew well before any of the three now in ruin missions were even built. It told of a young white woman who walked between tribes carrying a crucifix. When otherwise described, she resembled a nun in blue garb, appearing before various Indian tribes in remote areas with no known church presence, telling them to get baptized. Sometime around 1623 AD small groups of Indians, after traveling hundreds of miles, began showing up at Isleta, a Pueblo mission near present day Albuquerque to speak to Fr. Juan de Salas, a missionary who had established church there in 1613 AD. Each year, the Indians, who came hundreds of miles from areas the church was yet to penetrate, spoke about a woman in blue who had sent them. The groups grew in such ever increasing numbers that by the summer of 1629 AD a huge part of the whole tribe called the Jumanos showed up imploring priests to return with them and baptize their people. Initially the story was disregarded as impossible except for one thing, many of the Indians were showing up with what appeared to be European made rosaries.
The young woman dressed like a nun in blue turned out to be Mary of Jesus of Agreda the Abbess of Agreda in Spain, a member of the Order of the Immaculate Conception. The suggestions of being baptized, the teaching of the tenures of the Catholic Church, and many European made crosses and rosaries that were distributed along with a chalice used for consecration that friars in New Mexico used for mass and carrying sacrament in procession, all came from Mary of Jesus of Agreda, Spain, even though she was never known to have left Spain in what would be considered a traditional manner.
One reason so little is known about her well-documented appearances in America is because for centuries the officially sanctioned chronicles of her accomplishments for having done so, written in 1634 and titled Fray Alonso de Benavides Revised Memorial of 1634 Volume IV, were concealed in the Archives of the Propaganda Fide in Rome and unknown to the English speaking world. The original 1634 manuscript wasn't translated into English or made available to the general public until 1945.
Then, because of the above, a highly interesting combination things happened. Between the time my uncle left for Santa Fe circa 1950, I ran away, and my stepmother sent me to be with him a few years later, not only had he read Brunton's book A search in Secret India , but the contents of the above Revised Memorial of 1634 Volume IV by de Benavides translated into English and published in 1945 somehow came to the attention of my uncle. Inside were pages and pages from 1634 fully documenting the account of a woman living in Spain who was never known to have left Spain, physically carrying out duties of the Church, not just Spain in Europe, but also on the North American continent thousands of miles away and more specifically the Santa Fe, New Mexico area. Not only had she survived all of the investigations of the Church for having done so, and going before the Spanish Inquisition was nearly a death sentence, she even survived the Inquisition for having done so. Mary of Jesus of Agreda was a regular live person nun, not some saint or high holy person, but a regular live person nun. Suddenly, rather anybody liked it or not, as it applied to me, having a highly revered Indian holy man with over 9000 miles separating him from India and Catalina Island, and showing up at the old stage stop on the island after having never left India, became much more within the realm of reality.
Within days of my stepmother flying me to Santa Fe but before going to see Einstein and Pollock, my uncle, combining my experience at the stage stop in Catalina with his knowledge of the dressed in blue nun newly garnered from the 1945 translated into English book by de Benavides, took me to the same area where the missions were and where the lady in blue was said to have worked her miracles. .
On one of the nights my uncle and I were camping among one of the mission ruins south of Santa Fe. As typical, we built a small fire ring and made a campfire. The two of us were sitting in the flittering fire's light generally chit chatting when my uncle said we had a visitor. Deep in the dark I could barely make out the figure of man just standing there, and because of the distance, reflecting back only the smallest amount of light. My uncle waved him closer and the distance between him and us was instantly cut in half without any attempt on his part to show movement. Right away I knew we were in trouble. My uncle stood up and spoke to him in English with no response, then Spanish with nothing. My uncle walked around the fire pit to get closer and spoke to him in an Indian dialect. With that the man came even closer, although more traditionally so, i.e., he walked. The two talked at a low volume, the man all along looking and pointing toward me.
Turning towards me to make eye contact, my uncle walked slowly in my direction motioning me to stand. When he got close in an almost whisper he told me the man said we were on the ancient lands of his people and that his grandmother of many, many grandmothers back was given a gift from a white woman in blue who had come from far away and that the grandmother from long ago wanted it returned so it might be used by others, requesting that I be the one to do it. The man asked me hold out my hands. As I did and he came forward I could see he was holding a rosery. The instant the man put it over my hands he took his away, the released rosery falling straight through my hands to the ground below as if they weren't even there. The man, with a stunned but not terrified look, dropped to his knees to pick up the rosery but turned away quickly with his folded arm blocking the view of the sky as though something was in the air above us I doing the same for the same reason. Leaving the rosary he got up running some distance as fast as he could into the thick dark night before it looked like he disappeared in a wisp of smoke, with whatever above us disappearing along with him. My uncle wrapped the rosery in his bandana tying the four corners and placed it in his bag.
Seeing I had a deeply ingrained why me look on my face and aware of the underlying reason for my thoughts, my uncle, thinking the item was from Spain mumbled we were on our way to see Picasso in France the next month anyway, so dropping down to Spain would be easy. I met Einstein and Pollock that summer just as planned, but before I was able to go to France and meet Picasso then drop down into Spain the following happened, as found in the source so cited:
"My father, wanting to know what the hell I was doing with him in Santa Fe in the first place then going on to the east coast with plans for Europe, told my uncle in no uncertain terms he wanted me returned to California immediately --- if for no other reason just because I would be attending a new school in the fall and needed to register."
Needless to say, with the trip to France interrupted years passed before I was able to comply with the Native American's request. However, before those few weeks with my uncle ended, on a very special side trip all on it's own, albeit related to meeting Einstein, Pollock, and Picasso, but with a much heavier long term outcome for me, my uncle also took me to meet a man he called America's greatest real "Real American" artist, a Native American he knew from his old WPA days named Oscar Howe. What ended up special about meeting Howe is the impact it had on me personally several years later when I reached into my 20's and then into my 40's. Because of Howe I experienced a deep spiritual event at an ancient Native American religious site called a Medicine Wheel that continued to reverberate up through my life.
ALWAYS A G.I.
As attested to in a section several paragraphs back up the page subtitled Once A G.I., two years to the day after being drafted and completing my full time active duty as required, I was honorably discharged, or more accurately, separated from under the Army's auspices on a full time basis. As a requisite to that discharge/separation, in that at the time there was a multi-year obligation to the military beyond those two years, like most two year draftees, to fulfill those remaining years I was required to report for duty as an active reserve member in a designated Active Reserve Unit.
As a draftee I was in the Army only two years, but you would think I had been gone forever. During those two years my whole "not going anywhere at the time" life had been completely interrupted, disrupted, and turned upside down. After my return I began readjusting to civilian life and make sense of my spiritual life, especially so some of the spiritual stuff that happened to me during those same two years.(see) Then, under the premise of Once a G.I., Always a G.I., the roof caved in.
Military folk, thinking I could do something that no one else could do at the level I could, offered me the tantalizing prospect of waving the rest of my active duty reserve obligation if I participated in a small task. Given very little leeway not to, I did, and having done so, I was removed from active duty reserve to what was called IRR, Individual Ready Reserve. Relieved from doing weekly, monthly, and a two week summer requirement freed me up for things of long duration if I so chose. Of which I did, or more-or-less because I had to.
When I was drafted I sold my immaculately restored 1940's Ford Woody Wagon and put my low-slung British sports car with two rows of louvers and a leather belt on the hood up on blocks. When I returned I drove the louvered-hood sports car up into my graduate school days. However, tired of people either cutting or pulling back my tonneau cover and pilfering books and going through my backpack and glove compartment while parked in the college parking lot I decided it was time to get an enclosed car. I bought a 1967 Mini Super Austin Cooper with a 1300 cc engine and 10 inch diameter wheels. One of the biggest reasons I did so is because one day as I walked up to my car in the college parking lot I saw two men who I didn't know nor ever saw before, with the tonneau cover pulled back, just sitting there leisurely whiling away their time as they so pleased.
Even though it ended innocently enough, at first I wasn't sure what to expect. As I got closer I could see both men were Native American and it eased a bit as I walked up because one of the men addressed me by my Navajo name. Known only by few, it was given me as a young boy by Harrison Begay, a long time friend of my uncle and prominent Navajo artist, and of which I hadn't been called by for years. They pointed to a road weary camper van sitting all by itself clear across the parking lot saying they were there on behalf of my uncle and wanted me to join them in the van.
In the van were two other people, one a young woman the other a really quite old elderly gentleman, both Native American. The woman was sitting on a bench seat along the drivers side behind a table and as I got in she slid over towards the front of the van patting the seat for me to sit in the newly made open space next to her. The elderly man was in the shotgun seat that swiveled allowing him to turn toward the table. The other two men made themselves comfortable in a jump seat and bed area in the back. The woman lit a Sterno folding camp stove with a lid covered cast iron tea pot sitting on the burner that was placed in the center of the table. Soon steam was coming out of the spout, the woman put the fire out and the elderly man began putting small bits of broken leaves and such into the pot letting it brew. After five or ten minutes the hot liquid was poured into matching clay-fired earthenware cups all around followed by a slight salud then upended, drank down. While we all quaffed down the liquid, the woman included as well, she also disassembled the stove, repackaged it and when done, she set a small box with a lid in its place. The old man motioned for me to remove the lid and empty the contents from the box on to the table. When I did a rosery fell out.
The next thing I knew I found myself in my car being vigorously shaken awake by a tightly gripped hand on my shoulder. The vague glow of distant streetlights illuminating the parking lot and the night sky surrounding me disappeared in an instant when my face was suddenly flooded by a flashlight beam shoved in my face a few inches from my nose, the light crashing through my eyes straight into my brain scrambling my thoughts. The person doing the shaking and holding the flashlight was a campus police officer wanting to know what I was doing in the middle of the night sleeping in the parking lot. Fumbling for my ID while collecting my "where aboutness" I told him I had planned on pulling an all-nighter in the library and when I couldn't make it I decided to head home, apparently falling asleep when I got to my car. The cop had me get out, searched around and behind the seats asking what the paperwork was for and what was in the box on the passenger seat. Surprised the box was there myself I picked it up and not knowing really what to expect, removed the lid, and to my relief showed him the rosery. With that he just let me go The paperwork was a roundtrip airlines ticket to Albuquerque on an early morning flight out of LAX two days away.
How or when the people in the van departed or how and when I got from the van into my car I have no clue. Earlier however, while sitting in the van, no sooner had I imbibed the hot drink with my fellow imbibers than I alone was whisked instantly into the same time and place as the mission ruins in the desert southwest I wrote about previously, not as a participant, but more closely as an above the scene observer watching my uncle and I sitting in front of the fire.
Everything was the same. The feel and smell of the night, the temperature, the small fire ring, the flittering light falling across my uncle and me as it diminished deeper into the surroundings. The figure of man standing in the distance reflecting back only the smallest amount of light. I could see my uncle waving him closer, the two talking in a low volume, the man looking and pointing toward me sitting near the fire ring. I could easily see me holding out my hands, the rosary dropping to the ground and the man running into the thick dark night before disappearing in a wisp of smoke. All those sights, sounds, and smells of twenty years ago fresh and new as if as though they just happened.
The reason? To return the rosery that belonged to Mary of Jesus of Agreda the Abbess of Agreda in Spain that I was commissioned to do when it was left in my uncle's care those so many years ago and never followed up on.
Taking the flight so ticketed to Albuquerque I was met at the airport by my uncle then left toward Santa Fe. A short time later we were meeting with a man my uncle introduced as a retired Catholic priest. The priest lived in a tidy little Spanish-adobe style bungalow amongst several others somewhere on church property, but exactly where I wasn't sure. The retired priest was assisted by a well dressed young man of late teens early twenties that attended to his every need, serving hot tea and keeping the cups full and spiking hot while my uncle and I sat with the priest out on the verandah. The young man didn't join in our conversations, but never very far away if the priest needed him. When the time came we moved inside and it was then the box with the rosery came up. The priest watched as the rosery from the box fell through my hands to the table top. He waved for the young man to bring a clear thick plastic bag about 5 by 7 inches to the table, putting the rosery into the bag with a little initialed slip of paper then having the young man fold over a flap and heat seal it with some kind of a device at another table, yet never out of the priest's line of sight. Once sealed the plastic bag was returned and the priest stamped a dark red melted wax seal insignia along the flap where the plastic flap had been laminated. He handed a letter to my uncle to read then folded it over in threes, put it inside a business size envelope and sealed it. He put a wax stamp seal, the same as used on the plastic bag, over the envelope flap handing everything to my uncle who gave it to me. The next morning I was headed towards LAX and home.
The event in the parking lot happened at the end of the winter break just as the Fall semester was winding down, still however, with some open lag time remaining prior to the actual start of the Spring semester. It just so happened that during that same Fall semester I had enrolled in a two-part special studies class with a semester "A" segment designate for the Fall and a "B" semester segment for the Spring because I thought the project I was working on would require more time to complete than one semester. The thing is I finished the project during the Fall and was just about ready to turn it over to my professor when instead I let it run into the Spring semester. I told the professor I really needed a hiatus for the Spring and he agreed to allow the project, albeit completed, to run into the Spring for my final grade as though I finished in the spring as originally planned. Doing so allowed me to stay enrolled in the university with no break in enrollment, giving me priority registration for the upcoming Fall and not breaking my catalog rights, which any of you who have gone to college knows what that means. That, along with having been shifted to the Independent Ready Reserve the summer before releasing me of any further active reserve obligations freed me up to go to Europe using a Eurail Pass and my Europe on $5 Dollars a Day book starting sometime around the first of the year through to late June when I got roped in to do a bunch of errands for my dad and uncle.
FINDING THE MAGDALEN: A DEFROCKED PRIEST AND ANCIENT TEXTS
Throughout a good part of the Great Depression my uncle, like many of his fellow artists, participated in the fine arts portion of a federally funded program called the Works Project Administration, better known on a much wider basis as the WPA. During those years, because of the WPA and his participation in it, my uncle became close friends with a number of artists who were famous or became famous, of which one of each were Jackson Pollock and Diego Rivera. Late in 1940, Rivera, because of their friendship, sent my uncle a personal invitation to attend the private unveiling for a series of murals he had completed in San Francisco.
"November 29, 1940, the public was again invited to Treasure Island to view Rivera's finished work. An estimated five thousand people privately previewed the mural. A public viewing of the mural was open on Sunday, December 2nd. An estimated 25-30,000 people crowded into the building to celebrate the masterpiece and to mourn the end of the Exposition. The fresco was then packed into ten crates and put into storage."
With money tight, although my uncle had all honorable intentions, he was unable to make the opening. Sometime in 1941, not wanting to slight the great muralist, my uncle got a chance to catch up with Rivera while he was staying and working at the studio of an American sculptor by the name of Frances Rich in Santa Barbara, California. Rivera invited my uncle to visit him in Mexico the following year, setting a date, place and time.
The next year, 1942, even though the attack on Pearl Harbor had occurred just a few months earlier resulting in war breaking out all across the Pacific and Europe, my uncle still honored his invite by Rivera. Amongst the crowd in the train station prior to departure my uncle saw a very striking young woman he didn't recognize speaking with a man he did recognize. The man was a Texas Ranger or law enforcement officer my uncle had met several years before under a set of some rather trying circumstances, at least as far as my uncle was concerned.
He had been traveling by train with a friend of his, the soon to become famous western author Louis L'Amour, to New Mexico from New Orleans after having been to the Mardi Gras. When the train stopped in Sanderson, Texas, a half a dozen heavily armed Texas Rangers along with two U.S. Marshals got on board and started going through each of the passenger cars looking for someone. They made six men, all with beards, of which my uncle was one, get off the train. They took all six into the station and questioned them one by one. Apparently not finding who they were looking for they told everybody they were free to go. All well and good except that in the meantime the train left, stranding him and the other five men in the middle of nowhere. Not only that, the Rangers had made them get off the train without allowing them to take anything with them including their luggage --- and it was the dead of winter and freezing outside. He followed the Rangers out just as they were getting into a couple of cars and asked what were they supposed to do now. One of the Rangers stuck a rifle in his face and told him it was not their problem unless he wanted to make it their problem.
The man my uncle saw talking with the striking young woman in the train station on the way to see Diego Rivera was the same man that stuck the rifle in his face in Sanderson, Texas a few years before. Later in this trip my uncle got a chance to confront the woman about the man she talked to, she denying any such meeting or talk took place. However, even after such a rocky start, over the years my uncle and the woman became friends. She turned out to be Rochelle Hudson, a movie actress who at the time of the early 1940's rail trip through Mexico was travelling incognito with her Naval officer husband, dressed as a civilian and acting as a tourist, doing espionage work for the U.S. Government. By the time the war ended she had become famous in spy circles for the work she and her husband uncovered. The man she denied talking to in the station turned out to be a former Texas Ranger named Rufus Van Zandt, an undercover Special Services intelligence officer during the war, becoming famous in his own right, albeit like Hudson, very low profile.
Rochelle Hudson died in January 1972. That summer, following a request by my father while on his death bed to do so, I transported a trunk he secretly kept in storage belonging to my uncle to his place in Santa Fe.(see) Since Hudson had no funeral in the classical sense and my uncle wanted to give his best to Rochelle's mother, who outlived her daughter by several years, my uncle asked me, on my return to California, to take him to Rochelle's mother's place in a town not far from Palm Springs called Palm Desert. After a few back and forth negotiations, and because I was always a sap when it came to my uncle and always needed negotiations, the sap that I was, agreed. Part of the negotiations were that after seeing the mother I would take him only as far as San Bernardino to catch the train to Albuquerque rather than me driving him all the way back. Although I didn't drive him all the way he of course, altered the negotiations. First, he wanted me to take him as far as Kingman, Arizona rather than San Bernardino and secondly, before we left he want me to take him to see a friend of his that lived in the mountains just above Palm Desert. I figured it wouldn't be long before I would be taking him clear back to Santa Fe. Much to my surprise that didn't happen.
The person we went to see in the mountains above Palm Desert was not in a town but more of a place called Pinyon Crest just off Highway 74. The person was sculptor Frances Rich, mentioned previously above as being in Santa Barbara, but now long since having moved her home as well as her studio to the mountains above Coachella Valley. Taking my uncle to Kingman was another thing. After we got there we waited and waited at the train station which he could have done anyway without me. Eventually two Native Americans arrived, and after briefly introducing me, they showed my uncle a few metal parts in a box in the back of their truck, then bidding me adieu the three of them took off leaving me at the station.
In the military we called it RON, Remain Overnight, and that's what I did, remain overnight, and did so in the same motel I'd stayed in the year or so before with my uncle, the guy behind the counter still remembering me. The next morning, I left on old Route 66 driving about 30 miles south to the little Arizona burg of Oatman. I stopped for one reason, to go into a particular little bar-eatery different from any others around because every inch of available wall space floor to ceiling was covered with dollar bills that customers and visitors had stuck or attached to the walls in some fashion or the other. I had done so myself many years before and wanted to see if I could find it. I had used and initialed a very special bill that I carried around with me that had a nearly unbeatable serial number to play dollar poker with. However, when I got there the walls were so over super-inundated with dollar bills I couldn't find it, especially so in the area I was so sure I put it.
After standing there and searching for awhile a beautiful brown-skinned well shaped hand and arm, covered near the wrist with multiple bracelets went past and above my head and cheek pointing to a dollar bill slightly covered by a folded over bill. As I looked closely I saw the very bill I was looking for, serial number, initials and all. As I turned, the only person who could have done the pointing, a woman with light brown skin and a arm with multiple bracelets, was at a table with a man some distance away. As I walked up to the table the man shrugged his shoulders saying she does things like that sometimes. I told him I was used to such things. He gestured for me to sit down and as I pulled up a chair, the woman, who had a distinct and decisive Mesoamerican or Aztec look about her, neither spoke nor made eye contact with me.
As it came about the man was a defrocked or laicized priest as he called it, who had been sworn in or ordained in a small group by the Pope himself. She was said to be pure undiluted bloodline from Montezuma linage, making her in a sense an Aztec princess. He spoke seven languages, two of which were Latin and Greek, both of which he could read, write and speak fluently along with a smattering of Hebrew. Under request of the church he had been doing research in the Vatican archives and around Europe when he was sent to Mexico City to locate, research, and translate any fragments and remains of Mesoamerican, conquest or pre-conquest era manuscripts or scrolls that may have been kept secret or escaped destruction by the early church. In the process he met and fell in love with, and mutually so, the Mesoamerican woman he was with. Powers that be, after seeing what was going on, sent him, in the middle of the night to the San Juaquin Valley near Fresno or some such place sequestering him in some facility computerizing church documents all day long. Not able to contact the woman prior to his departure nor the woman having any formal knowledge or access to where he was, she simply showed up at the facility unexpectantly totally out of nowhere. The two went on the lam (my words) ending up living in some cave described to me no more clearly than being in another state near the Mexican border, thought by me to be New Mexico.
Although you could say both were being sought after by separate authorities, when I met them they were travelling rather open in a beautifully fully equipped self-contained camper van, donated or loaned to the couple I was told by a benevolent benefactor. Many years later a short-term situation came up where I could use a self contained camper van. Shopping around, and with no experience in such things but remembering how much I liked theirs, I sought out one similar. The closest I came to that matched almost perfectully, with all of the comforts and amenities plus more because it was much newer in the scheme of things, was a Roadtrek 190. The former priest told me the woman he was traveling with had been obsessed on visiting the homeland of her Aztec forebearers prior to their, that is the future Aztecs, migration south to what is now Mexico City, of which, according to Aztec legend, when correlated against our present day calendar, began their southward journey on May 24, 1064 AD.(see)
AZTEC ORIGINAL HOMELAND ATZLAN, HOME OF THE SEVEN CAVES
(please click image)
The two had been exploring for awhile when they crossed into Arizona and she saw her first saguaro cactus she suddenly began insisting on going to the southern Colorado River basin, in of which they had done. They were now or their way back to continue further investigations of the Aztec homeland when they stopped in Oatman. A few weeks before on the way to the Colorado River she began talking about a deified priest or holy man that had lived on an island in a lake or the river. When they reached the location where she thought the island should be there was a lake alright but no sign of an island.
My own research later found there was in fact mention of a small island in a lake placed in the Colorado River written about by the scribes of the Conquistadors. That island is concluded to be the no longer in existent Cottonwood Island. During the time of the Conquistadors and later European settlers the island itself however still had sufficient water flow on either side of its banks to remain a viable intact island. Today however, Cottonwood Island is completely submerged by Lake Mohave created by the manmade Davis Dam slightly north of Laughlin, Nevada. Lake Mohave in covering the island easily surpasses the width, length, and depth of the unnamed original lake that formed Cottonwood Island in the first place. As it was, the island was more than 250 miles north of the gulf, so none of the 1540s Spanish explorers or their scribes, either by land or by river, ever got much closer to Cottonwood Island than 40 miles south of it, if that. Anything they had to say was hearsay garnered from their Native American guides. It wasn't until the white explorers, exploiters, miners, and settlers started showing up in the area and Cottonwood Island was actually being accessed that it began showing up on the radar.
"In 1540 AD, twenty years after the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez first landed in Mexico and militarily vanquished the region's powerful overlords known as the Aztecs, another Spanish conquistador, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, headed north out of Mexico City with a full expedition under his command in search of the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola."
The expedition under Coronado's command was made up of hundreds and hundreds of armed men and horses, plus a 1000 Indian bearers, those Indian bearers mostly if not all being of Mesoamerican or Aztec descent and all of them slaves. At the same time Coronado left Mexico City three ships left port on the Pacific side under the command of Hernando de Alarcon, loaded to the gills with additional stores and materials for Coronado's march. Alarcon sailed up the Sea of Cortez with all intentions of meeting up with Coronado --- without anybody of note fully realizing it wasn't likely to happen, not because the route was unnavigable in any way shape or form, but because the distance between the inland city or Cibola and the gulf continued to widen as Coronado's army marched north eastward. Melchior Diaz, a captain under Coronado's command, sent on a scouting party toward the Gulf of California in search of Alarcon's three ships missed making contact with them by three days although finding supplies offloaded by Alarcon at a spot on the river some 100 miles north of the Colorado River delta.
With no success finding an island where she thought it should be the defrocked priest and the Mesoamerican come Aztec princess headed south along the Colorado River as far as Yuma, Arizona. There they turned back, retracing their route until they reached a spot some 50 miles north of where the Gila River flows into the Colorado. There she began walking up and down along the river's edge while he drove staying as close as possible. After a couple of days she narrowed down her search to a spot a short distance from the river's edge that looked all the same as all the other spots she stopped at except this time she dropped to her knees and started digging. The man took her a shovel which she was willing to use, albeit refusing any help on his part to assist. Soon she came across a jumble of bones and a few skulls that looked like the remains of at least three people. She laid the bones out in a human form facsimile, put ochre marks and black dots on the skulls, performed a ritual over them along with chanting. Then, at the end of the third day she carefully covered the bones in the same spot as if they had never been found and said it was time to return home. It is thought the human remains she performed rituals for had been members of Coronado's Mesoamerican bearer contingent.
Since the discussions between the man and myself had been running long we continue talking by camping nearby. Just west of Oatman at the base of the mountains is a nearly 15 mile toward the river gentle downslope outwash plain facing the north-south flow of the Colorado. We drove just beyond the edge of the mountains and set up camp and made dinner. After cleaning up he and I sat before a small fire to continue where we left off as the woman, who had never uttered a word while I was around, walked quite some distance west from us down the outwash plain watching the sunset. Telling him about a Native American living in New Mexico who gave me a rosery of his ancestors that belonged to a nun in blue to return to her order in Spain, our conversation slowly morphed into a discussion that included an inkling of Mary Magdalene. From there he told me he had personally seen and read an ancient text called the Gospel of Mary that was in with a number of other supporting texts that should have been in his opinion, included with the other gospels of the bible. He related the gospel and other pertinent parts to me in what seemed like an almost word-by-word, line-by-line verbatim story, as if he had a photographic memory or reading the text directly in front of me. I sat there in awe, dumbfounded with what I was hearing, taking in every word and re-questioning if it wasn't clear or if I thought I hadn't heard it right. True, in those days or even now I wouldn't have put myself into any position claiming to be an expert or avowed scholar on Mary Magdalene, but since that night in the garage following my Da Vinci-like flight fiasco I had put in an extra effort learning as much as I could about her, albeit most from the standard mode of operations, i.e., the four gospels and expanded interpretations thereof from a variety of priest and clergymen. But, here I was, out in the middle of the desert with some defrocked priest telling me things from what he called a gospel and none of it except for the cast of characters from any of the gospels I knew.
During our talk the full moon gradually rose up over the close-by mountains behind us, crossing the meridian headed toward the western horizon meaning it was past midnight. The priest, deciding it was time to turn in, bid me good night, leaving only me by the now dwindling fire with the woman still alone quite some distance down the outwash plain, the sun having set long before leaving her basking now only in the brillance of the full moon. Not long after midnight, but well before the moon hit the three-quarters mark grinding it's path across the sky in it's own inevitable way so it could be gone by dawn, I walked to where she was sitting. As I got close she barely turned her head in my direction signaling she knew I was there. More as an excuse to talk with her than anything else I told her I was hitting the sack and wanted to know if she wanted the fire out, bigger, or just let it run itself out. She stood turning towards me and when she did, in the bright silvery moonlight, I could see she was totally naked, not one stich on. Although probably unneeded, semi feigning modesty on my part on her behalf with a slight glance away, I turned towards the fire. She was sitting on a folded in half serape, a sort of tightly woven Mexican blanket-like pancho or shawl when I walked up. She stood only long enough to unfold the serape to full size, then sittng back down she patted the now open space next to her for me to sit down. We were on the blanket next to each other for the longest time without saying a word, sitting slightly curved, tillted towards each actually, and in the moonlight although I couldn't see much of her face some of the time because her long black hair dropped across a good part of both cheeks occasionally I could clearly see she was fabulously well built. Sitting Indian style she placed my forearm part way up the upper part of her bare thigh near her knee with my hand dangling down towards the ground in the triangle space between her crossed legs. Then she removed a gold bracelet from one of her arms slipping it over my hand onto my arm after rubbing a thin oil-like substance across my hand and wrist, alternating her arms until she had taken off four bracelets, two from each arm, putting all four on mine. Each time she did she placed my arm and hand back on her inner thigh further and further from her knee and closer and closer to her body. Sitting next to her with her touching me while catching me off guard and placing my arm further up her inner thigh she suddenly leaned over and kissed me on the lips. Almost immediatly my skin began to flush, the air felt stagnated and I started to burn up, getting dizzy, feeling all the same as having ingested psilocybin or licking a Colorado River toad, the accretion of which, if she had the knowledge, she could have easily obtained from down along the lower reaches of the river.
Although I'm not sure where she could have kept it, she may have been using some all along during her long hours of sitting and had some on the back of her hand and wrist slightly wiping it across her lips before kissing me, if not already there. Before I tripped out or passed out I jumped up coming back to my senses as I began gulping in fresh air. Startled with my strength to override her abilities or the toad's, she stood up as well, with me heading back toward the camp. At first, attempting to stop me by grabbing my upper arm, she then instead, for balance leaned on me to put on a pair of sandals. With a demure look downward, but still with no words, she took my hand interlocking fingers and joining me in the walk back to the fire. Letting her trick pass and given the priest had mentioned the island in the river to me that she couldn't find, but that I had some knowledge of, trying to break the ice because of the difference in our attire, or lack of same with at least one of us as the case may be, with the two of us having never spoken before, I asked if she ever heard the name Quatu-zaca. With that I could suddenly no longer feel her hand with mine, she having instantly vanished, disappeared, or evaporated, the bracelets slipping off my arm and falling to the ground next to her now empty sandals. In the morning I handed the bracelets and sandals to the former priest in exchange for a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee telling him what happened that night. The same as he did in the bar in Oatman he shrugged his shoulders saying she does things like that sometimes. The same as I responded in Oatman I told him I was used to such things.
As I look back I have to admit that night by the fire I took the whole Gospel of Mary thing way too nonchalantly, not realizing what he was telling me wasn't common knowledge. True, up to that time I had never heard of the Gospel of Mary, but it didn't mean it wasn't known in other circles beyond me --- or that a person with a little bit of incentive couldn't research it down. It was only after the fact, when I wanted to see more or learn more about what he told me explicitly that I ran into problems. Years flowed by with not one person I talked to, and who should have known about a Gospel of Mary, knew about a Gospel of Mary, and by then any opportunity for me to find out the source of the defrocked priest's sources had long slipped through my fingers. So now, before moving on, go back and click the toad image.
FINDING THE MAGDALEN PART II: A LIBRARIAN EARNS HER DUE
They say no good deed goes undone. While in high school I worked a couple of days a week after school running errands for a house-bound former merchant marine that had been badly burned when the ship he was on was torpedoed by a German submarine. Because of the attack and the resulting injuries he was hooked up to some sort of breathing apparatus attached to an oxygen tank, plus, on-and-off throughout the day he had IVs stuck into his arms and wires attached in various places for monitoring equipment to record his heart rate, blood pressure and other vitals. So said, for the most part, because he was so hooked up to machines and couldn't move he basically just sat there all day long in a den-like room overlooking the street reading books, newspapers and staring out the window.
When it came to my Merchant Marine Friend he was actually a celebrity or sorts, at least in the loose knit west coast merchant marine community, carrying a certain high level of notoriety and prestige ahead of himself. Not everybody knows it, but almost every original founding member of the 1950's Beat Movement, clear up to Allen Ginsberg, were merchant marines at one time or the other and some of them in the early days of the movement, because of my friend's notoriety, came by to see him. That notoriety stemmed from the mysterious events surrounding his survival after being lost at sea and found alive out in the middle of the ocean months, and months later strapped to a piece of debris, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the spot his ship was torpedoed. So said, because of the close proximity of his home with two major world class seaports, Long Beach and Los Angeles, both crawling with merchant marines and other seafaring folk, it wasn't unusual in those days for any number of merchant marines and fellow seamen to drop by his house and pay him homage. One such person was an ex-Navy man by the name of Guy Hague, infamous as an avid follower of the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi linked previously above.
One afternoon I returned from my errands and was in the process of dusting and restacking books like I often did when I became privy to a discussion between the merchant marine and the former Navy man. The Navy man had said while he was in India he had learned there was NO ego. Now I wasn't sure what an ego was, but the merchant marine insisted there was one. To prove it he had me get down a book and the two of them went over the contents in a somewhat heated manner, all the while neither of them changing or altering their views. When the Navy man left and I was putting the books back on the shelf I wrote Freud's name on a slip of paper thinking I would look him up and read about him when I got the chance.
A few days later, without the merchant marine knowing about it, I went down to the Redondo Beach Public Library in Veterans Park and asked one of the librarians where I could find some books on Freud, pronouncing his name as it looked when written, "Frooed," rhyming with food. The librarian asked "Who?" and again I said "Frooed, Frooed," showing her the slip of paper. By then several other libraians had gathered around, and one of them laughing, said, "Oh, the boy means Freud" (rhyming with "froid") with all of the others soon joining in laughing and pointing at me like I was some kind of a dolt. I ran out of the library as fast as I could, but before I even reached the bottom of the steps one of the librarians caught me and talked me into coming back. She sat me down at one of the tables way in the back by myself and brought me a whole stack of books related to Freud. On and off throughout the afternoon and up until the library closed she went over them with me. As much as I read that day and as much as she tried to explain it all to me I still didn't get or figure out just what an ego was. It wasn't until a couple of years later when a movie called Forbidden Planet came out that it all started to make sense. In the movie the main villain was a creation of the mind, a monster from the Id. The Id was part of the triad Sigmund Freud proposed along with the ego and superego --- and suddenly it all made sense, except that is, why the Navy man insisted there was NO ego. That information was destined for later.
IT HAS BEEN SAID NO GOOD DEED GOES UNDONE, A LIBRARIAN EARNS HER DUE
(please click image)
A couple of paragraphs back I wrote the old saw no good deed goes undone. Some of you may think it refers to the merchant marine because of the errands and stuff I did for him. Actually it refers to the librarian. When I was in high school those who are in charge of such things didn't considered me college material. I came from a broken home, my dad was a carpenter, there was no known outside source to pay for college tuition, I had crooked teeth, etc., etc. Unknown to me and not realizing it I wasn't directed toward college prep courses nor was I being made aware of what one might have to do or how to go about it. When it dawned on me I wanted to go to college it was only because of pulling off exceptionally high ACT and SAT scores that I was considered. Even then it was conditional, that is, carrying a minimum of 12 semester units two semesters back-to-back 2.0 or better and all classes had to be applicable towards an accredited bachelor's degree and/or my major, i.e., no basket weaving. So said, one of the very first things I did after I got that bachelor's in my little grubbies was look up the librarian that helped me with the Freud thing, showing her my degree, telling her how much her help in those days eventually redirected me towards higher pursuits.
Wiping away tears she told me I was the first person in all her years as a librarian that came forward in such a manner. Answering her question as to what I was up to, my interest in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene came up with me telling her how little information was available for the lay person. She told me she knew a person, a woman who was a master reference librarian throughout California that had lived in Israel and Ethiopia and that if anyone could help, she could. A week or so later, after telling me she would see what she could come up with through her friend and her own inter-library network capabilities she got a bite. Actually two bites, the New Testament Apocrypha Volume I (1963) and the Catalogue of Papyri Volume III (1938). Both she thought should have some information for further research and both should be available to me within a few days.
You have to remember, during the years we are talking about here the internet didn't exist like we have now. There were no readily available computerized information storage systems, internet search engines, or PDF copies of articles, books, and manuscripts. It was also long before 2003 of which afterwards the market became excessively over inundated by the plethora of Magdalene books since The Da Vinci Code was published and brought Mary Magdalene to the unwashed masses. The two book sources the librarian provided were themselves at the time not easy to get.
The first available English version of the Nag Hammadi Library that everybody goes to now as well as initially for information on the Mary Magdalene Gospel, and the same source I suspect the defrocked priest got his because of the breadth of his knowledge, wasn't even around. The more or less officially sanctioned English translated facsimile editions in twelve volumes weren't published until 1972 although reports of closely controlled albeit having escaped from the chicken coop mimeographed copies had surfaced earlier. To wit the following from Elaine Pagels' book "The Gnostic Gospels" published in 1979, preceding The Da Vinci Code by 24 years thus unadulterated by it. Pagels writes:
I first learned of the Nag Hammadi discoveries in 1965, when I entered the graduate program at Harvard University to study the history of Christianity. I was fascinated to hear of the find, and delighted in 1968 when Professor George MacRae of Harvard received the mimeographed transcriptions from Robinson's team. Because the official publications had not yet appeared, each page was stamped with a warning:
This material is for private study by assigned individuals only. Neither the text nor its translation may be reproduced or published in any form, in whole or in part.
How, when, or where the defrocked priest got his information regarding the Gospel of Mary Magdalene or why he was so inclined to share it with me was never made clear, but as you can see, even though he was relating the information to me very early on, it's not like, as Pagels attests too, totally unavailable, at least on the academic level and of which, as a Vatican researcher, academic-wise, he seemed more than just simply qualified. Over the full length of years between the time I heard the lowlife in the garage mentioned her to the time the librarian obtained the books, Mary Magdalene didn't exactly lay fallow for me. Spread over those same years drip-by-drip there was enough of a veneer laid down that quantitatively it reached a nice enough point that when the defrocked priest shared his knowledge with me I wasn't totally a blank slate. In other words, he didn't have to go clear back to the very instant the Big Bang spawned the universe and bring me up to date minute by minute through history to the present day for me to get who Mary Magdalene was.
So, how does it all add up? Well, starting in my early to mid teens up into and still continuing in the time we were talking about here, I had established a fairly intense eastern spiritual background having had the Last American Darshan in the presence of Sri Ramana Maharshi in his ashram in Tiruvannamalai, south India as well as the Vipassana Meditation sessions for visiting monks at the Mahasi Meditation Center in Rangoon, Burma. So too by then, I had studied under Yasutani Hakunn Roshi and my spiritual mentor, which, when cumulatively added together, contributed heavily toward the point of my mind being ripe in turn resulting in the events as described in Dark Luminosity.
MULTIPLE MARY'S, FULL OF GRACE
In the sub-section above titled "Before the Before" I write that when I was eight years old I went to Catalina Island during the summer and while on an inland motor tour and with no conscious volition on my part, I was left behind over night at a then isolated onetime stage-stop high in the mountains called Eagle's Nest. While there I had what I have come to call a highly mystical or spiritual experience. I write about seeing a dark skinned older man with short-cropped white hair and beard, barefoot and wearing only what I would now call a loincloth looking all the same as an east Indian snake charmer at the remote abandoned stage stop in the middle of the night simply coming out of nowhere and disappearing just as easy.
THE EAGLES NEST, SANTA CATALINA ISLAND, CALIFORNIA
(please click image)
As for that experience, in several places of my works, after learning the man at the stage stop was the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Maharshi Ramana, I elaborate on the event, of which the following is an example from the source so cited:
"Even though the stage stop was thousands upon thousands of miles away from India, Ramana was there. What he was doing was replicating what happened considerably less than a few years before at the ashram, only now a super-concentrated effort on his part to bring about or re- instigate the Experience. On my own accord, in the darkness, I sought out and found the matches and struck the flame. The 'spark that ignited my spiritual fire' is mirrored in the spark of the match held to the light-generating properties innate to reasons of the lantern. I was holding the lantern high above my head, the lantern emitting a dim light --- or more accurately the room was so big and filled with darkness relative to that first small flame that the darkness simply absorbed the light --- giving the impression of a dimly lit room. The dimly lit room was me, the lantern and the light were one, the light intended to illuminate the room (me). With a turning sweep of dim light, at the top of the arc the light flickered and went out. I clearly saw the dark-skinned man standing in the open doorway and then, in that wafer-thin edge-on membrane of darkness he was gone. That membrane of darkness was when I entered the blackout period, and the man, Ramana, was gone --- gone from any memory. The light rekindled itself. That is, Ramana returned through the use of Siddhis to the stage stop to rekindle the lost light. Next to him was the man who was to become my mentor, there to ensure Ramana's efforts were not lost."
Moments before when I had been outside looking through the dirty glass windows I had noticed a small box of matches on the floor near the lantern, so in the dark on my hands and knees, I started fumbling around until I found them. When I finally got the lantern lit neither man was there. As I turned, still on my knees and holding the lantern high in an attempt to illuminate the room as much as I could with a turning sweep of dim light, I clearly saw the dark-skinned man standing in the open doorway no more than a few feet away, facing me and holding, although not actually leaning on, a down to the ground half-his-height bamboo staff. As though an electric current was passing through me he looked right into my eyes with an intensely piercing gaze, eyes shining with an astonishing brilliance --- and somehow time seemed to slow --- maybe even stopping altogether. From far away I felt myself losing balance, all the while trying to brace myself with one arm while trying to hold the lantern high with the other. I weighed a ton and could barely move. In ultra slow motion the light, moving now at such an overwhelmingly reduced rate I could hear it, flickered and nearly went out. Then, just as the lantern reached the top arc of its swing and stilled to start back, the light rekindled itself. In that wafer-thin edge-on membrane of darkness the man was gone.
As my ability to move flowed hurriedly back into my body and I regained a more typical sense of my surroundings I bolted out of the building, running at top speed all the way back to where my friend still lay asleep, and again tried to wake him and again to no avail. After a while my heart stopped pounding and as the night slowly slipped toward dawn my eyes began to get heavy. I tried to stay awake thinking the men might come back, but they never did. I blew out the lantern and dozed off. In the morning I told my friend what happened and he looked at me like I was crazy. We walked over to the building and just like the day before it was locked up tight. He said I must have been dreaming, but inside I could see the box of matches on the floor just where I left them, plus I still had the lantern.
Although initially I accepted the whole event at face value because as I figured it, why shouldn't I. After all, both my buddy and I saw the matches on the floor of the stage stop and physically I had carried the lantern from the night before in my own hands prior to eventually leaving it outside the stage stop door. Deep down it totally overwhelmed my eight year old ability to fully understand, and for sure nobody around me did, in turn isolating me from my family and peers any time it was brought up. Apparitions and translocation type phenomenon were way beyond my comprehension for the most part and surely not a part of my every day pre-teenage or soon to be teenage culture. Maybe in comic books, animated cartoons, movies, the truly religious versed in such things or something like that, but for me in a feet on the ground mode real life? Questionable.
Even my uncle was silent. I always considered it extremely odd that my uncle, a man that had strong interactions with Native American spiritual and tribal elders and deeply versed in such things, after learning about my experience on Catalina wasn't more interested. It took awhile, but eventually he caught up with me, mainly because, although he felt in his own mind my experience was spiritual it fell outside and beyond the parameters of his own area of spiritual understanding. After lengthy study and investigation on his part, since the experience had such a strong apparition and/or translocation ring about it, the two of us ended up coming together after I began being driven in the same direction.
Initially wary of the event, it really came together for him however because of the interaction with the Native American man involving the rosery at the mission ruin site in New Mexico that night then having read then sharing with me the contents and information as found in the chronicles and accomplishments for having done so by the nun Mary of Jesus, written in 1634 AD titled Fray Alonso de Benavides Revised Memorial of 1634 Volume IV, that the physical level translocation of the nun was so compelling that I should have no inhibitions if not fully convinced as to my experience on Catalina Island.
A MARVELOUS PATH OF APPARITIONS, TRANSLOCATIONS, AND BILOCATIONS
"Needless to say, with the trip to France interrupted years passed before I was able to comply with the Native American's request."
Although apparitions, translocations, or bilocations, call them what you will, were coming together bigtime for my uncle relative to me, at the same time at a slightly later stage, after my mentor entered the picture, they began coming together for him relative to me as well. Their efforts however, covering much of the same territory actually paralleled each other, not meeting except through me.
A few years after graduating from high school and tired of the daily grind working as a technical illustrator --- all the while being faced by Uncle Sam and the draft caused by the continuing erosion of the upcoming months --- I decided to take a leave of absence and head into Mexico with a buddy of mine. The two of us had shopped around and bought a used six-cylinder 1951 Chevy panel truck that was in pretty good shape. Then, over a period of a few months we leisurely outfitted it like a camper with fold down bunks, table, sink, stove, and portable toilet. Early one Saturday morning we crossed into Mexico at the Tijuana border with no specific plans on how long we were going to be gone except to go a far as we could and visit as many archaeological sites as we could before running out of money.
My first time for the first of the multiple Mary's at any depth relating in any fashion to apparitions and such came about while I was on the aforementioned just out of high school trip through Mexico with my buddy, and had to do with Our Lady of Guadalupe. Visiting the basilica was before I began lighting candles for the ailing mother of a friend of mine I was yet to meet, so for me going was basically a fluke. Also at the time, other than the example as described in the above quote and only to be intensified by my mentor in the below quote, it was the first time and beyond for me any solid outside example of apparitions.
"Just prior to going outside to the porch (my mentor) stopped for a few seconds and searched through a stack of books sitting parallel along the floor against the wall. There he found a small, almost pamphlet size book, well worn and crudely made, that had been published in India and handed it to me. The name of the book, which I really didn't have time to absorb because I dropped it from my hands in a sort of stunned disbelief, was titled Glimpses of the Life and Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi by Frank H. Humphreys. Although my thoughts and feelings would eventually open and morph through it's passage, at that very specific moment in time --- and for years afterwards --- I was sure I had never heard of a Bhagavan, a Sri Ramana, or a Maharshi. Even so, I immediately grasped why he thought the book should be important, and it wasn't who wrote it or what was inside, but what was outside. Outside, on the cover, was a picture of the EXACT same man I saw that night in the old stage stop atop Catalina, short-cropped white hair and beard, walking stick and all."
THE 'SO IF IT HAPPENED TO THEM IT COULD HAPPEN TO ME' CONSENSUS
Since much of what I present here seems to jump back and forth in time, for clarification I am presenting a list of the six sites in the chronological order in the years I actually visited them rather than in the order they happened like I did at the top of the page. The first site I visited was (1) Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City, Mexico in 1960. Then, several years later (2) Our Lady of Fatima, Fatima, Portugal, (3) Mary of Jesus of Agreda, Agreda, Spain, and (4) Our Lady of the Pillar, Zaragoza, Spain, with numbers 2, 3, and 4 all during my Europe on Five Dollars a Day sojourn in 1972. The last two sites were (5) Our Lady of Lourdes, Lourdes, France and (6) The Holy House of Loreto, Loreto, Italy both done during the year 2007, 35 full years after my Europe on Five Dollars a Day trip. There also a few intermittent "tie things together" side trips mentioned as the travels to the six sites unfold, which are brought into the fold when the time flow allows it.Thus then, enters the Our Lady of Guadalupe apparitions, the first of the six solid substantiating co-factors to my and Sri Ramana's encounter on Catalina Island, with the following being a brief synopsis of the Our Lady of Guadalupe apparitions:
During the pre-dawn hours of December 9, 1531, while making his way from his village to Mexico City for early morning mass, a peasant named Juan Diego, on the slopes of the Hill of Tepeyac, encountered a young woman surrounded by light. Immediately through his teachings he recognized the woman as being the Blessed Virgin Mary. Speaking to him in his native language the young woman asked that a church be built at that site in her honor.
Juan Diego sought audience with the Spanish Archbishop, Fray Juan de Zumarraga who told him to return and ask the lady for a miraculous sign to prove her identity. Doing so, even though December was very late in the growing season for flowers let alone to find them blooming, the Blessed Virgin told Juan Diego to go to the other side of Tepeyac Hill and gather flowers. There, on the usually barren hillside he found an abundance of Castilian” roses, not native to Mexico, but Spain where Bishop Zumarraga was born.
The Blessed Virgin arranged the flowers in Juan Diego’s tilma cloak and told not to open the cloak for anyone but the Bishop. When Juan Diego humbly opened the cloak in the presence of Zumarraga the flowers tumbled to the floor and in the place where the flowers had lain was the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, miraculously imprinted on the fabric of his tilma. The tilma is now displayed in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico City, Mexico.
In addition to the above sightings, when Juan Diego failed to show up for a previously designated time and place meeting with the Lady, and he explained afterwards he had to miss the meeting in order to care for a seriously sick uncle, the Lady appeared before the uncle after which he was miraculously restored to full health.
The second of the six solid substantiating "if it happened to them it could happen to me" so called co-factors as I call them regarding my encounter with Sri Ramana takes up from where I left off back up the page and my travels in Europe using the "Europe on $5 Dollars a Day" book. It was several years after my summer of 1960 Our Lady of Guadalupe experience and by then I had learned a lot on both sides of the equation. Not only had it become clear that what happened to me at Santa Catalina as actually having happened, but that the reality of apparitions, translocations, and bilocations were a phenomenon that actually do happen, having been recorded and documented throughout history, and to and by others much higher up the food chain than me.
LA VANG HOLY SITE, 1968 VIETNAM. NOTE AMERICAN GI's WITH STEEL HELMETS, RIFLES
(photo courtsy Thomas Beach)
For the record, before we move on, between the first and second of the six solid substantiating co-factors I write about here I did have an intermediate substantiation of sorts that happened unplanned and unexpected in 1968. In reality it was an eyeopener for my decisions to delve further into my later investigations. I write about it somewhat in A CIVILIAN G.I, 1968 VIETNAM: Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols, the Highlands, and Cambodia and elsewhere, but basically it revolves around a sighting-like event of Mary mother of Jesus in the year of 1798 AD in of all places, deep in the jungles of Vietnam. That year, 60 years before the Marian visitation occurrence in Lourdes, France, a group of Vietnamese religious refugees were hiding from authorities and had a visitation experience now known as Our Lady of La Vang. The problem I have with the La Vang site, and although I never went back to proove otherwise, is that unlike the six major sites I've selected as samples, La Vang is weak in that it offers no hard fact substantiations similar the others, at least as I was able to determine.
With no overt intention on my part to downplay the above Our Lady of La Vang event, of which, like I say, I've written about elsewhere, I continue now with the second of my preplanned, or at least semi-preplanned major substantiations. This trip to Europe was done with one particular goal, that being going to the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception in Agreda, Spain and return the rosary given me late one night by the Native American in the New Mexico mission ruins, a rosary he said Mary of Jesus of Agreda had given his ancestors way back in the 1620's or 30's. Along with returning the rosary I had at least one other highly related thing I wanted to accomplish in addition to a couple of others that peripherally came up along the way, all of which I was able to do.
The couple of other things that peripherally came up had to do with how and what I did as I traveled to the monastery to return the rosery. If you recall, while in Paris I ran into a professor I knew who was doing research for a book on European prehistoric cave paintings. He was on his way to a cave site complex called Altamira located along Spain's Atlantic north coast about 60 miles west of Bilbao and asked me to join him.
Assisting the professor in his field research got me into to see the paintings and parts of the cave much more freely and up close than I would otherwise normally been able to do, plus being there before the decision was made to limit access for researchers and shut down the caves to tourists altogether, has always been a plus for me. When it came time to move on, and even though I was really headed toward Agreda, I detoured a bit instead and went west along the top of Spain before turning south to Santiago de Compostela for a couple of days, after which then dropping further south into Portugal and the city of Fatima. Both Fatima and Santiago de Compostela are actually whole stories unto themselves. Athough Santiago de Compostela comes before me traveling to Fatima time-wise, as you will find soon enough down the page, even though both are inexplicably intertwined, it really has more to do with where I was going after Fatima than before Fatima.
MIRACLE OF THE SUN
I was only an eight year old boy the night I saw the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi inside the old abandoned stage stop high in the mountains of Catalina. Except for the fact that it was a highly unusual and unexpected experience, I had at the time, no reason to discount it. It wasn't until I saw the Maharshi's photograph on the cover of a publication and met the person I call the Dowager, both incidents happening some six or seven years later, did my beliefs come into question and begin to crumble.
Even as the man next door became my mentor and spritual guide in things Zen I never said a word to him about the incident nor were any needed. However, a friend of his, that I only identify as the "dowager" in my writings, mainly because to this day I am unable to recall her name, although we always called her Mrs. "somebody," told me several months later what she could remember and knew about the man next door and the man I saw on the cover of the pamphlet. When we first met I was no more than the kid that lived next door. When in conversation I told her about a letter addressed to my mentor I found that fell out of a book of his one day that had a return address from a Barbara Back she took me aside asking to see the letter. Although it didn't, I thought showing her the letter would end it. Instead, days later, without me nor my mentor knowing about it, she took it upon herself to pilfer the letter, only to ask me to put it back weeks later without my mentor's knowledge. In the meantime, having taken me into her confidence, she told me the white-bearded man I saw on the book cover as mentioned in the quote back up the page was a Spiritual Guide called a Bhagavan or Maharshi, a teacher of sorts, and that the man next door had studied under him at a place called an ashram in the south of India between the wars. She said that before the two met, the bearded man had lived alone in a cave on the side of a mountain for twenty years. She also told me that prior to buying the house next to mine the man himself had been living a semi-ascetic lifestyle on one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California for seven years, having gone to the island in September 1946 on the occasion of his holy man's Golden Anniversary.
Later research revealed that devotees of the Maharshi gathered at the Ramana ashram in September 1946 for a great celebration honoring the fiftieth anniversary of his arrival at Tiruvannamali, the same time as the experience I had that night at the stage stop. The only thing I didn't know at the time, nor did the dowager seem to express or reveal to me, was that the Maharshi had NEVER left India in his life. Matter of fact he never left Tiruvannamalai after he arrived that September morning fifty years before, and in later years, years that encompassed the exact same time as my experience at the stage stop, he never even left the ashram. It is from the above experience my fascination with apparitions, translocations, and bilocations stems.
THE QUONDOM TIME TRAVELER
In 1917, three years into World War I, in the same above previously mentioned town of Fatima, a small rual community located in mid-central Portugal, three young children, a girl age ten and her cousins, a boy age nine and a girl age seven, Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta, in the process of shepherding sheep for their respective families, were visited apparition-like in the hills one fateful day by what they described as a beautiful lady dressed in white more brilliant than the sun who told them she was from heaven. Each succeeding month for several months, on a given date after that, the lady continued to appear before them. The crowds of both faithful and disbelievers grew so large after each successive meeting the anti-religious government stepped in an attempt to shut it down. During the fifth apparition the children begged the lady for an unmistakable sign that all could witness and she ensured them there would be such a miracle on her October 13th visit. An estimated crowd uowards towards and over 70,000 people showed up, and sure enough as predicted a miracle, now known as the "Miracle of the Sun" occurred. The following is what the secular Lisbon daily newspaper O Dia reported on the event:
"At one o'clock in the afternoon, midday by the sun, the rain stopped. The sky, pearly grey in colour, illuminated the vast arid landscape with a strange light. The sun had a transparent gauzy veil so that the eyes could easily be fixed upon it. The grey mother-of-pearl tone turned into a sheet of silver which broke up as the clouds were torn apart and the silver sun, enveloped in the same gauzy grey light, was seen to whirl and turn in the circle of broken clouds. A cry went up from every mouth and people fell on their knees on the muddy ground.
"The light turned a beautiful blue, as if it had come through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral, and spread itself over the people who knelt with outstretched hands. The blue faded slowly, and then the light seemed to pass through yellow glass. Yellow stains fell against white handkerchiefs, against the dark skirts of the women. They were repeated on the trees, on the stones and on the serra. People wept and prayed with uncovered heads, in the presence of a miracle they had awaited. The seconds seemed like hours, so vivid were they."
The person I call my mentor was in Fatima on that fateful day of October 13, 1917. Between my sophomore and junior year in high school, a full thirty-seven years after the 1917 events of Fatima, my mentor entered my life. I had just turned 16, got my first drivers license, and bought my first car, becoming only the second owner to a pristine, albeit over decade old 1940's wooden Ford station wagon, affectionately known in the vernacular as a Woody. Because of the woody and my intense restoration efforts my mentor and I had our first encounter, re the following:
THE WANDERLING'S '41 FORD SUPER DELUXE WOOD STATION WAGON
(please click image)
"I noticed the man next door had stopped to look at the wagon. In a mellow, almost Shakespearean voice he told me how beautiful he thought the wood was and how he had admired for all these months both the beauty of the wood and my endeavors to keep it so. He asked if it would be alright to touch the wood and, as I nodded in approval, he ran his fingers over the surface in such a strange and exacting manner that he and the wood seemed as one.No racehorse trainer could have stroked or curried a prize thoroughbred in a more loving way. When we made eye contact for the first time I was set aback, almost stunned, by the overwhelming calmness and serenity that seemed to abide in his presence. Never had I experienced anything like it. He thanked me, smiled, and tipping his hat, nodded slightly and strode off."
My mentor had been a pilot during World War I. Although an American, he entered the war two years before the U.S. by crossing into Canada, joining the RAF and flying for the British in France against the Germans. His life, at least up to the early years just before the start of World War II, where he more-or-less disappears from the pages of history except where I pick him up, was chronicled by the noted British playwright and author William Somerset Maugham in a book he wrote titled The Razor's Edge. As Maugham lays it out, a major turning point in my mentor's life occurred when his best friend died right in front of his eyes following an attempt to save my mentor's life in a raging dogfight out over the front during the waning days of the war. However, in a totally unexpected turn of events, although he was successful in saving my mentor, he himself, after setting his plane down and being helped out of the cockpit, had lost so much blood he died on the tarmac. Below, from the page about what kind of plane Patsy and Darrell flew titled Sopwith Camel, as written by Maugham in The Razor's Edge:
"I got the blighter who was on your tail," he said.
"What's the matter, Patsy?" I asked.
"Oh, it's nothing. He winged me."
"He was looking deathly white. Suddenly a strange look came over his face. It had just come to him that he was dying, and the possibility of death had never so much as crossed his mind. Before they could stop him he sat up and gave a laugh."
"Well I'm jiggered," he said.
"He fell back dead. He was twenty-two. He was going to marry a girl in Ireland after the war.
According to Maugham, up to that time, seeing his best friend die right in front of his eyes was the most important turning point in my mentor's young life. Without question, a major turning point, but it wasn't exactly the only turning point. It was more like the straw that broke the camel's back. Maugham writes that my mentor was wounded twice. He dosen't make issue with either, simply citing them, then moving on. However, as it was told to me by my mentor, and left out of the narrative by Maugham either because he didn't know it or he didn't want to get into it, one of those two wounds was so serious that following hospitalization he was required to take two weeks mandatory leave in order to recuperate. It was what happened during those two weeks that an issue should have been raised but wasn't, a never reported issue that involved Our Lady of Fatima.
The pilot that lost his life saving my mentor's life was named Patsy. He was a fiery redheaded Irish-Catholic with a just as fiery temper. Not the squadron's most well liked person, he was without a doubt one of the best pilots around and almost every flyer owed him a debt of graditude for having gotten them out of a scrape or two against the enemy at one time or the other. There was a five year age gap between my mentor at age 17 and Patsy at 22 but for some reason Patsy and my mentor hit it off right away with Patsy taking him under his wing and teaching him everything he knew about survival in the air.
British pilots who were wounded and granted leave to recoup could just "hop over the pond" as they called it to be with family and friends. Not so with my mentor. As an American he was thousands of miles from home. About the sametime my mentor was to begin his two weeks recuperation period and at a loss of what to do Patsy was hearing rumblings of deep religious manifestations going on in Portugal and suggested he use those two weeks and go to Portugal. One of the medicos treating my mentor's wounds was a Portuguese doctor identified by my mentor only as Augusto. At the time Augusto had only a rudimentary but growing use of English. He did however overhear the word Fatima during a conversation between my mentor and Patsy one day. The doctor was able to clarify that he was from a village not far from Fatima and would be going there soon on leave. He told my mentor that general tourists just wandering around Europe during the war had become rare and often suspect, that traveling such a distance as a civilian, especially a "war-age" viable male could be tricky. He said although being a medical doctor on leave wasn't exactly a blank check he had done the trip before and learned most of the ins and outs of how to sidestep or avoid authorities telling my mentor he was most welcome to travel with him if he chose to do so, plus he could continue to monitor his wound along the way if need be. Patsy, considering the doctor's suggestion an act of Providence, did everything in his command to force my mentor to go and in the end was successfully in doing so. When they reached the doctor's village my mentor continued on his own to Fatima with neither of them, to my knowledge, ever seeing each other again.
Maugham doesn't mention or write about such a venture anywhere, and like I say, he may have not even known. However, known or not, my mentor, thanks to the doctor, that is Augusto, as well as heeding his wartime buddy Patsy's suggestion, he was in the fields of Fatima not far from the childern on October 13, 1917, the day of the Miracle of the Sun and witnessed the whole thing from start to finish. I can see why Maugham would chose to ignore it if he did know. Not to have would have opened up a veritable can of worms that would have completely distracted from his main thesis and veered the whole thing off course. Up until this page I've done mostly the same thing for the same reasons. Maugham chose to do the same thing when it came to the The Hemis Manuscripts by the way.
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(left to right first two for movies, last, illustrated version)
A couple of years before I met my mentor, actually one month before I started my freshman year in high school, a movie about Our Lady of Fatima was released. One year prior to that one of my favorite science fiction movies, When World's Collide, came out. The story line of that movie has a rogue star or sun passing through the solar system with the Earth plunging into it. When the Our Lady of Fatima movie came out the next year, theater lobby posters, in a slight exaggeration of the movie's thrust, hyped it with hugh headlines reading "the day the sun plunged into the Earth." Typically a movie such as the Fatima wouldn't interest me much, but the posters caught my attention enough to learn one of the primary actors was a man named Gilbert Roland and secondly, it was produced by Bryan Foy, both enough for me to go see it. Why would a just about to enter high school teenager care about either?
During World War II my dad worked in the shipyards building Liberty ships. When the war ended and no longer any need for Liberty ships, he along with thousands of others, was let go. With the help of a friend in the movie industry he was able to find regular work for a major Hollywood studio constructing backlot scenery and sound stage sets. In that environment, because of a startling resemblence between my dad and the actor Gilbert Roland he was often confused as being Roland, which my dad always took as a compliment. Because of that, as a kid, I always looked for movies Roland was in. As for Bryan Foy, and I write about this elsewhere, me as a young boy knowning about him may have semed a little odd, but not so much so when the facts are in.(see) When my mentor began telling me about his experience at Fatima it dawned on me, even though I hadn't thought about it much at the time, I had seen a movie about the samething just a few years before. We scrounged around and found an art-house dump of a theater in Santa Monica or West Hollywood that was having a weekend religious movie marathon of which one was the Miracle of Fatima with Gilbert Roland. So off we went, getting there just in time to see it and the movie screened just before it as well, a 1935 black and white film titled The Last Days of Pompeii that I had seen in re-release in 1949.
By the time my mentor and I got around to seeing the Our Lady of Fatima movie a couple of years had gone by since we first met. I was reaching towards the end of my high school years and would soon be going on my trip to Mexico with my buddy as well as all along facing Uncle Sam and the military draft. After the Mexico trip my mentor gave me two brand new just released hardback books. One was They All Discovered America by John Boland and the other Meet the Witnesses by John Haffert. The first book related to my trip to Mexico, especially Chapter Four on Hoei Shin of which my mentor bookmarked. Hoei Shin, also spelled Hui Shen, was a Buddhist monk said to have visited the Americas between the years 458 AD and 499 AD in search of one Quatu-zaca, a monk mentoned years later in the 1540's by the scribes of the Spanish conquistadors and of whom, Quatu-zaca, I mention back up the page in relation to the Aztec princess and the defrocked priest. The second book related to the Our Lady of Fatima and presented a huge number of personal interviews of what witness after witness reported seeing and experincing during the Miracle of the Sun. The Boland book held the most interest at the time because I had only returned from Mexico a short time when my mentor gave it to me. Haffert's book I really sort of set aside, not coming back to it with any depth for several years and by then my mentor had already told me what he himself had seen and experienced specifically.
The attendance figures for the total number of people at Fatima on October 13, 1917 for the opportunity of viewing the Miracle of the Sun varies considerably, ranging from as few as 30,000 to a high well over a 100,000, typically with the lower numbers emanating from anti-Fatima folk and the higher numbers coming from the pro-Fatima camp. Most seriously interested parties have pretty much settled on a figure of around 70,000. Everything I've seen, read, and studied on the subject seems to substantiate that number or easily surpass it. Beginning from the very first hours after the event up to the 1960's and beyond, when eyewitnesses were getting harder and harder to locate, many hundreds of those thousands have been interviewed, and what they experienced reported.
Ground zero where the event occurred was located in a shallow bowl shape land-depression called Cova da Iría, some two miles north northwest of Fátima, named after the Portuguese martyr Saint Iría or Irene, but more specifically within that land-depression, a small bush or tree known as a holm oak where the three shepards saw a most beautiful Lady almost as if standing in the air above the foliage, the Lady telling the shepards she was from Heaven. Although not deemed a physical astronomical or celestial event, the experience and visual phenomenon that was focused directly on the oak tree in the Cova that was viwed not only by those thousands in close attendance, but also witnessed by people in the surrounding area incorporating up to and over 600 square miles.
Within less than eight weeks following the events at Fatima, on December 3, 1917, a reputable eyewitness to those events, Goncalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett, professor of mathematics at Coimbra University, came forward with what he saw and experienced that day in the Cova:
- The phenomenon lasted about 8 to 10 minutes.
- The sun lost its blinding brightness, taking on a moonlike glow easy to watch.
- For three times during this event, the sun appeared gyrating in its periphery, flashing sparks of light on its edges, as the well-known firework wheels.
- This circling movement of the edges of the sun, three times manifested and interrupted, was speedy.
- The sun turned violet and then orange, spreading these colors over the earth, regaining its shine and brightness, impossible to gaze.
- These facts happened shortly after noon and near the zenith.
Then, years later, in 1961, in a broad generalization concensus sort of way of what people saw and experienced that day at the Cova John Haffert, in his book Meet the Witnesses, mentioned prevously, writes:
- The time and place of this event was predicted in advance.
- A light of extraordinary power was seen over a radius of more than twenty miles like a "Catherine wheel" of fireworks, sending off great shafts of colored light which tinted objects on the ground.
- It plummeted toward the earth after several minutes, assuming such a gigantic nearness that the tens of thousands of witnesses thought it was the end of the world.
- The great ball of fire stopped just as it was about to crash upon the earth, and returned into the sky.
- It came from and went back to the location of the sun, so that those who saw it actually thought it was the sun.
- The top of the mountain where this occurred, which had been drenched by several hours of constant rain, suddenly dried within a matter of minutes.
- Tens of thousands of witnesses of all classes and of various creeds, extended over an area of about six hundred square miles.
Skeptics have blamed the events at Fatima on everything from atmospheric lenses, plasma vortexes, refraction of light through ice crystals called sundogs, visual distortion from volcanic ash and/or dust from the Sahara, abnormal auroras, retinal phosphenes, fatigue, brain illusions, collective hallucinations, mass suggestions, hysteria, UFOs, and just plain lies.
Long before I had done any amount of study or in-depth formal research into the goings on involving the events at Fatima, before even seeing the movie with my mentor and possibly having been tainted by any of it, my mentor had already graphically told me what he himself as an eyewittness had experienced and seen personally. Although much of what he told me generally jibes with the observations of Goncalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett and John Haffert above as well as what the Lisbon daily newspaper O Dia reported on the event as seen back up the page, the what and how of his interpretations of those same events as he saw them varies considerably.
First of all, what the vast numbers of people saw and experienced that day in the cova, and initally peceived and thought of as being the sun itself, wasn't the sun as we know it that the Earth orbits around, but a full-on outward manifestation of the miracle promised by the "Lady." Secondly, the Lady wasn't God. God level miracles such as the flood of Noah or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was probably much more than what could be found in her handbag of abilities. Moving the sun is no easy task, so she did what she could do. Not a universe or solar system size manifestation, or even a world wide one, but one more intimate to her and her concerned followers, done over a 1200 or so square mile local area. Perhaps not the same as the non-religious based shenanigans of Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, but a worthy miracle nontheless.
Where some say they saw a sun-like disc spinning around a mid-point central axis like a pinwheel others saw a sun-like rotating globe with a north-south top-bottom axis, sometimes turning at a high speed, sometimes summersaulting. My mentor saw what he described as being more closely akin to a spinning silver coin standing on-edge. He showed me so by standing a silver dollar up on edge and flipping it with his finger so the edges spun around and around so fast in an upright position it gave off all the visual appearences of a globe. If the shining-spun rotating disc my mentor saw at Fatima was illuminated by its own light or depended on reflected light from an outside source, he didn't say. He did say as the leftside forward leading edge of the disc was approaching him the light wavelength, because it was approaching, contracted, shifting it to a short wavelength, thus emitting colors he saw in the blue range. On the rightside receding edge the lightwaves were stretched or lengthened emitting colors he saw as being in the red end of the spectrum. So, like the light from a lighthouse, your specific location as an observer within the sweep of the disc's light, determined what colors you saw or didn't see at any given time, an explanation of which I've heard from nowhere else.
So too, regardless of what others say, the hair, headgear, footwear, and clothing of all the people at the cova, or at least those around my mentor up to and including himself, had been completely soaked through, with many and he too as well, standing in up to ankle deep mud. Then suddenly they all found themselves and the ground around them quickly and mysteriously dry, as if there never had been a drenching rain all morning long.
My mentor underlined the drying aspect to me explicitly because of his role during the war. He was a pilot, not just any pilot, but an American who came to the war early. One-on-one air-to-air combat was new and the pilots imbued it, at least in the beginninng, with a certain knightly virtue. That went as far as how they presented themselves, with many pilots having tailored uniforms and handmade boots. When my mentor went to Fatima he went as a civilian, but wore his aviator flying boots, being the only footwear he had, covered by baggy pants. Not only the trip but the constant rain and mud at the cova that day along with the instant drying ruined his boots beyond presentable uniform repair. Probably to nobody else would it have meant much, but he went on and on how his boots were ruined, the leather just not being able to take all the soaking then as he told me, an instant drying. That late in the war he was only able to replace his boots by getting a pair from a deceased or severely injured flyer.
The insantaneous drying of the clothes and mud that morning in the cova near Fatima on October 13, 1917 is the biggist sticking point in the craw of most of the scientists that have studied the events there. Since it defies all laws of nature and unwilling to ascribe it to some divine nature they either pass over it, say it never rained that hard in the first place, was mass hallucinations, or that it never happened.
If you do any amount of serious research into Fatima you will soon find, as I have, there are reams and reams of articles, books, and materials, both pro and con, about the events that happened there. Con people debunk the whole thing citing all kinds of scienctific reasons why they could not have happened. Pro people who have found faith not enough to convince many of the multitudes cite scienctific counter arguments, many over the years convincingly so. However, one of the things I discovered was that there is a kind of "Pulling Up By the Bootstraps" time loop paradox use of facts that exists among the various writings on the subject. By that I mean, like the Bootstrap Paradox, there is a sort of circular substantiation of facts and views by using each other to verify facts until the verification comes around back on itself with no beginning to substantiate the facts. Below are the two main examples of quotes that show up over and over in relation to the sudden and miraculous drying of the people and fields after the morning long drenching rain previously cited. Although minor word variations show up here and there between the quotes depending on the author doing the quoting and maybe the two I've presented, the overall context remains the same:
"The amount of energy needed to accomplish this process of instantaneous drying, would have incinerated everyone present had it taken place in the natural order of things. This aspect of the miracle radically contradicts the laws of nature to have achieved it."
“Engineers that have studied the case reckoned that an incredible amount of energy would have been necessary to dry up those pools of water that had formed on the field in a few minutes as it was reported by witnesses.”
The first of the two quotes above, the top one, is typically atributed to Father Gregory Hesse, S.T.D., J.C.D. The second of the two, the bottom one, is usually given credit to Father John de Marchi, I.M.C. When it comes to Fatima both Hesse and de Marchi have dogs in the hunt as both are Catholic priests. Neither, however, substantiate their statements with any proof or back up. In Hesse's case, what would be the amount of energy needed? In de Marchi's case, who are the engineers or where are their case studies? While both statements have common sense and possibly the Second Law of Thermodynamics and other universal laws, to grasp both statements as understandable and true, neither of the two Fathers provide where, who, or how they arrived at their decision. Even so, both quotes continue to be offered up by others and many others continue to run with them.
Of course, what the good Fathers are pointing out is that since conventional means didn't seem to be up to the job to solve what was done at least as seen, reported, and experienced by thousands and thousands of people, then some other means must have come into play in some fashion.
FATIMA: MIRACLE OF THE SUN
RETURN OF THE ROSARY, VISITING THE PILLAR OF ZARAGOZA
We now come to two of the greatest translocations to ever have occurred, and if they don't substantiate that what happened to me at the Eagles Nest on Catalina Island could and did happen then nothing will. Both instances are deeply western motivated, seeped in our own downstream cluture and not related to any eastern-mystical based religion. Both initally involve Spain, but one, the most recent and tangible of the two relative to our interests here, moves straight into what in now our own U.S. desert southwest.
The story of the two translocations starts in earnest when I was around 14 years old and saw for the first time the rosary attributed to Mary of Jesus of Agreda, the Abbess of the monastery or convent of La Concepción in Agreda Spain. A Native American man that had the rosary in his possession handed it to my uncle saying it had been in his family for nearly 350 years after having first being given to an ancestor of his in the New Mexico desert southwest sometime around 1630 AD by the abbess herself. The second time I saw the rosary, again as in the first time, as alluded to previously further back up the page, was when it was handed to me by a Native American late one night in the parking lot of the university I was attending where I was or soon would be a graduate student, with the full understanding that it be returned to Spain and the monastery.
Having left Fatima I wended my way through Spain to Madrid. Then, following instructions before I left the U.S., on to and stopping in Zaragoza before proceeding to my ultimate destination, Agreda. I was told once reaching Zaragoza I was to find my way to the Cafe de Levante, order coffee, ask for Felix or Carlos then tell one or the other or both I was the man from Santa Fe. After having done so I was having coffee when a man stepped up and asked me if I was the man from Santa Fe. As I nodded yes he set the most beautiful hand-held crucifix I'd ever seen on the table. The cross itself, easily pushing six to possibly seven inches in length top to bottom, looked of highly polished bronze with the body of Christ being of hand carved rose marble rivaling the most intricately carved ivroy I'd ever seen. Without saying a word I looked up while he handed me a slip of paper with a line of numbers on it. I retrieved a sealed envelope given me by my uncle before I left the states and slit it open in front of the man. Inside was a brand new U.S. $100.00 dollar bill, it's serial number reading in the same order as the numbers on the slip of paper. I put the bill back in the envelope and handed it to him. Ordering coffee, he sat down, smiled broadly, putting the envelope in his inside jacket pocket saying he thought there would be two. I told him in due time.
When the man first stepped up to the table there was an air of something sinister about him. When he placed the crucifix down in front of me he did so as though there was some sort of heavy significance to it beyond it's endowed religious meaning, as though it vested him with some sort of authority or something. Although dapper and well dressed in a borderline used-to-be upscale sort of way, and I was proven quite wrong about it later on, the crucifix itself seemed way beyond a man of his means. Even the polished bronze appeared instead to be more like solid gold, and as I remembered back when he set it down it had the soft sound of gold. If so, it's weight alone would be worth a bundle, so his concern for a second hundred bucks here-or-there seemed a bit odd.
After a vague introduction on his part over coffee and the dropping of a few names and mutual acquaintences I told him what I was up to and what I thought his role was, all of which he seemed briefed on. In line with that he laid out a tentative itinerary for my approval along with several options as well as his arrangement of accomodations for me to stay the night before leaving for Agreda in the morning if I was so interested. I had been traveling using my Europe On 5 Dollars A Day book for weeks and it seemed a little upscale having it's own toilet and shower and all, but the man ensured me cost wasn't an issue. After looking the place over I told the proprietor I was thinking of staying in Zarargoza a few more days when I was done in Agreda and wondered if accomodations would be avaiable for an additional couple of nights. The proprietor, instead of responding with his own answer right away, glanced toward the man. With an almost inpreceptible eye-nod yes from the man the proprietor said no problem.
The next morning I got up early and went downstairs before the appointed time only to find the man already there. He handed me a steaming hot coffee mixed just the way I like it. Then, without hesitating even a moment we went straight outside to his car and off we went. That's when I decided I might have to slightly reevaluate his stature relative to being borderline used-to-be upscale. His car was a pristine pagoda top Mercedes Benz 280 SL. Nice crate for an errand boy.
THE MAN RESEMBLED ESTEBAN VIHAIO FROM KILL BILL 2
In little over an hour we were having breakfast in Agreda. When we were done he simply got up, walked out with me following, and got in the car with no attempt for money being exchanged between us and the owner of the cafe. Within seconds we were outside the convent. He pointed to which door to use to access the chapel telling me to go inside while he parked the car. Strolling around with my hands in my pockets while feigning an interest in what I was seeing I was tapped on the shoulder from behind. Turning, I came face-to-face with a woman who said she was a lay housekeeper and to follow her as the Mother Superior would see me now.
We went outside walking along the convent wall until we came to an unelaborate second door. Going inside I found myself in what I would call a waiting room, one of two I was told. There the housekeeper spoke into a speaker, a door opened and with a slight bow of her head, using a ballerina-like open palm arm sweep, waved me in, she herself leaving through the same door we come in by. Inside the waiting room, on my side of a counter was the man I came with. On the other side stood a nun and a woman the man identified to me as the Mother Superior. I took three mug-shot like photographs from my bag and compared them to the woman said to be the Mother Superior. She matched. Upset, the man wanted to see the photos. Smirking, he handed them back. I told him I was just following directions given me before leaving Santa Fe. The nun asked the reason for this particular meeting with the Mother Superior. Speaking to both the nun and the Mother Superior with the nun translating, I told them I was under mandate from members of the diocese of the Church in Santa Fe to personally hand deliver a sealed envelope to the Mother Superior and nobody else. I was then to watch her read the conternts in front of me and follow any directions or instructions therof she may have afterwards. I got to this point, that is, meeting the Mother Superior in a predominantely forbidden area inside the convent at Agreda as you may recall from previously above and the quote below, when I ended up with the rosary in a box and a ticket to Albuquerque in the front seat of my car. From Albuquerque to Santa Fe, along with my uncle, I met as I was told, a retired Catholic priest with the following results:
"The priest watched as the rosery from the box fell through my hands to the table top. He waved for the young man to bring a clear thick plastic bag about 5 by 7 inches to the table, putting the rosery into the bag with a little initialed slip of paper then having the young man fold over a flap and heat seal it with some kind of a device at another table, yet never out of the priest's line of sight. Once sealed the plastic bag was returned and the priest stamped a dark red melted wax seal insignia along the flap where the plastic flap had been laminated. He handed a letter to my uncle to read then folded it over in threes, put it inside a business size envelope and sealed it. He put a wax stamp seal, the same as used on the plastic bag, over the envelope flap handing everything to my uncle who gave it to me."
The Mother superior, using what I would call a very friendly pleasant tone in her voice, gently requested the envelope. However, when I held it out over the counter the nun reached for it instead. I pulled the envelope back and when I did the Mother Superior gently placed her arm out toward me palm up. Taking the envelope she handed it to the nun who then opened it by slitting the envelope along the top without breaking the folded flap seal. Removing the letter the nun, without an attempt to read it, handed it to the Mother Superior. After glancing over the letter in a meaningfull manner, as if to absorb it's full contents, the Mother Superior motioned the nun closer. The two of them stepped some distance away turning their backs in a close huddle while talking in a soft tone, looking back toward me on occasion, and pointing to the letter on and off as if discussing both. In a few minutes they returned to the counter and the nun asked to see the rosary.
The nun, apparently following directions in the letter, while taking the rosary out of the sealed package asked me to put my hands together in a cupped position over the center of the counter six or eight inches above the surface. Taking the rosary she held it at a full arms length above her head with the bottom edge of the rosary's cross dangling several inches directly above the open-top of my cupped hands. With a nod of approval from the Mother Superior the nun let the rosary drop, going from her hands straight through mine, not stopping its downward trajectory until it hit the hard wooden surface of the counter top. The Mother Superior gasped for air, the nun did the sign of the cross across her chest, and the man stepped forward grabbing both my wrists to see if my hands were still cupped together, which they were.
The nun, after a short consultation with the Mother Superior, pointed to a door across the room, motioning as if she wanted the man and I to go with them. When I first entered the waiting room I noticed a crucifix sitting on the counter, the same crucifix the man showed me when we met at the cafe in Zaragoza. When we went around the counter following the nun and Mother Superior out of the room the man picked up the crucifix, hanging it around his neck. Soon we were in another part of the convent, in a room I was told on oath was Mary of Jesus of Agreda's personal room or cell where she lived, spending most of her time there contemplating, praying, studying, and writing. As well I was told it was the same room she was always known to have been in when she reportedly had her transloction experiences to New Spain. The photograph below is of the room taken by someone other than me some years after I was there and in of which I have been ensured is of the same room. True, the room in the photograph is almost exactly as I remember it except for one thing, a window. I just don't recall the room I was in having a window. However, by clicking the photograph into a larger size then clicking the photo that comes up a second time, the window is clearly seen to have a thick solid-wood with glass swing open door like covering, operable it seems from the inside. With so many nooks and crannies in the ancient convent new doors and windows have been added and others boarded closed or bricked up. If such a solid door-like covering was closed while I was there, the darkened room could have easily passed as not having a window, or as the case may be, I could have been in a totally different room than the one in the photo, that is, one without a window. No doubt each of the nun's quarters are pretty much the same, so what matters here is not whether a given room had a window or not, but whose room I was actually taken to and then once there what happened in that room during the time I was there.
(for larger size click image then click a second time)
After navigating through a number of dark halls, corridors, and a few stairs, without seeing or passing anybody else the four of us entered a room and the door closed. Following instructions of the Mother Superior, the nun had me stand at the open corner away from the wall at the foot of the bed. The others she stood in a small semi-circular arc starting to my right. First herself, then the Mother Superior, then the man near the head of the bed and closest to the back wall. The nun, repeating almost exactly the same ritual-like actions she had done in the waiting room earlier, had me hold my arms out with my hands held together forming a cup, but instead this time, over Mary of Jesus of Agreda's bed in her room rather than over a wooden counter in a waiting room. The nun held the rosary high at arms length above my cupped hands and with the Mother Superior's nod let it drop. This time however, and for the first time since attempting to drop the rosary into my hands as a young boy on the mission grounds back in Santa Fe, the rosary didn't continue though my hands but stopped, holding fast, staying completely in my cupped hands.
Asking for the rosary, the nun handed it to the Mother Superior who kissed it and then with a near perfection laid it out neatly on the bed. Soon the four of us were back in the waiting room bidding our adieus. When we re-entered the waiting room the man removed the crucifix from around his neck putting it in his pocket. Then he took the envelope I gave him a few days before back at the cafe with the $100.00 bill in it from his inside coat pocket and barely brushing it across the tip of my nose a few times placed the envelope on the counter gently patting it twice with the palm of his hand. Having promised him a second $100.00 dollar bill "in due time" when we were at the cafe I put a second bill of the same denomination inside the envelope along with the other one already there. Then, after patting the envelope gently myself, the two of us left on our return trip to Zaragoza.
Zaragoza is about fifty miles southeast of Agreda and the convent, or about a two day walk as Mary of Jesus of Agreda use to say. When I was there, except for a few trucks now and then, the roads were basically empty of any vehicular traffic, so traveling by private car it took only a short time to get back. After we arrived the man made sure I still had accomodations, ensuring they had been paid for for a couple more nights. Satisfied everything was in order he shook my hand, got back in his car and drove away never to be seen by me again. The proprietor, feigning wiping his brow with his forearm said in broken english, "Whew, bet you're glad to get rid of that guy?" Not clear as to his remark and asking him to clarify he said, "You mean you don't know?." Turning away as if to go to another room he made the sign of the cross across his chest mumbling, " L’Entità, Santa Alleanza, Cum Cruce et Gladio," letting it drop at that.[1]
THE BASILICA OF OUR LADY OF PILLAR, ON THE EBRO RIVER ZARAGOZA, SPAIN
(click image for larger size then again for even larger size)
Zaragoza, and the reason of Mary of Jesus of Agreda's concern as well as my interest and concern with Zaragoza, is because of a basilica built there named Our Lady of the Pillar. Although it's location is in Spain, the basilica is most well known for it's connection to one of Jesus' first apostles, James the Great. So too does the first place I traveled to after leaving Altamira, the previously mentioned Santiago de Compostela. James the Great, not long after the death of Jesus in 33 AD, traveled to what is now known as Spain to preach the gospel and recruit as many of the inhabitants thereof to Christianity. Not well received and with little success James was deep in prayer one night along the Ebro River in what is now Zaragoza, when Mary the Mother of Jesus, still very much alive and living in the Holy Land, appeared before him in the flesh, that is as a living human being via translocation or bilocation rather than an apparition. Leaving little or no wiggle room Mary told James that her most Holy Son Jesus himself had commissioned her to request his return to the Holy Land.
Presenting herself before James along the Ebro River having arrived it is said on January 2, 40 AD entrusted with a stone pillar or column thought from heaven or God, Mary requested James, after securely placing it in an area selected near the river and prior to James departure, to construct a church around the column in her honor, the column not to be moved from the surrounding holy ground into perpetuity. James constructed the church as requested and although the church has since grown, been shifted around, rebuilt, modified, burnt to the ground, and reconstructed throughout the centuries the column has withstood any movement from it's original selected holy placement and can still be touched and seen to this day, even kissed by the devout, easily accomplished for doing so by a small addition around and behind the Holy Chapel of Our Lady of Pilar, a baroque-style temple built inside the basilica to house the column. The photo below is of the backside of the chapel showing the access oval in which the faithful can kiss or touch the column. Clicking the oval below will take you to a page with full history of the column.
"(E)ven though I was really headed toward Agreda, I detoured a bit instead and went west along the top of Spain before turning south to Santiago de Compostela for a couple of days, after which then dropping further south into Portugal and the city of Fatima. Both Fatima and Santiago de Compostela are actually whole stories unto themselves. Athough Santiago de Compostela comes before me traveling to Fatima time-wise, as you will find soon enough down the page, even though both are inexplicably intertwined, it really has more to do with where I was going after Fatima than before Fatima."
The quote above is found several paragraphs back up the page, presented here as a reminder that on the way to Fatima after leaving the caves at Altamira during my infamous "Europe on $5 Dollars a Day" trip, I traveled to Santiago de Compostela, staying a few days. However, as the quote suggests, that in doing so it had more to do with where I was going after Fatima than before Fatima, which was of course Zaragoza and the events that transpired there between Mary the Mother of Jesus and James the Great.
Most Christian theologians agree Jesus was crucified in 33 AD, with the majority of his apostles and closest followers spreading out across the four winds in an attempt to avoid prosecution, spread the word of the new Chriatian faith, or both. James the Great traveled to Spain and, it has been said, greeted with hostility and not much appceptance. In 40 AD Mary showed up requesting he build a church then return to the Holy Land, which he did.
In Judea James was confronted with even more hostility, eventually being beheaded by Herod Agrippa 1 in 44 AD, becoming the first of the twelve apostles to be martyred. Following his beheading by Herod, according to tradition, and this is where Santiago de Compostela comes in, James' remains were transported by ship to Spain, sailing through the Gates of Hercules and north into the Atlantic, making landfall at present day Padron known in those days as Iria Flavia, an ancient river seaport in northwest Spain. His remains were offloaded and carried a little further inland to what is now Santiago de Compostela where his followers buried him with two of his compatriots.
With all of the Roman persecutions, barbarian invasions, and feudal turmoil combined later with battles betweeen Roman Christianity, Visigoth Christianity, and paganism as well as the invasion of Spain by the Moors, the burial site was kept secret. As the centuries passed, except by the word of mouth of a few diehards, the tomb's location and history was semi-forgotten, all but lost in time. Then, as tradition has it, in the early to mid 800's AD, a hermit named Pelayo, purposely laying-low but most likely a Nicaea-aligned underground forest-monk, Christian by faith, came forward to the bishop of Iria, resulting in the following as found in a remarkable little booklet on Santiago de Compostela, Doing The Way:
"The tomb was found sometime between 820 and 830 by a hermit called Pelayo and the parishioners of the ancient church of St. Felix of Solobio, who saw light and heard angelic voices in a nearby field. Theodomir, bishop of Iria confirmed it was the burial place of St. James and took up residence nearby. He also convinced King Alfonso II the Chaste, the royal family and the court to move there too. The King then spread the word to Charlemagne and his court at Aachen."
LOURDES, THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETO, AND BEYOND
From Zaragoza and with a slight adieu combined with one last look at the holy pilar brought to Earth from heaven or God, I headed home on the last phase of my 1972 "Europe on $5 Dollars a Day" trip, returning to my daily life and college almost as though nothing had hapened. It wasn't until visiting my last two sites, Our Lady of Lourdes, Lourdes, France and The Holy House of Loreto, Loreto, Italy, both done during the year 2007 that I returned to Europe. Unlike my 1972 trip where I was more or less on a mission, this 2007 trip was much more leisurely, with a number of side trips and stops along the way.
After arriving in England and visiting Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, going to Hadrian's Wall, then straddling the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, all for the umptheenth time but done primarily because of the insistance friends, I headed across the channel to Paris. After hanging out in Paris, including lighting candles in Norte Dame, a quick look at the Mona Lisa for the umptheenth time, (see) walking some of Paris meridian line, dubbed the "Rose Line," and also for the umptheenth time having hot chocolate in the outdoor area of a little cafe across a bridge over the the river Seine within eye-shot of the backside of Notre Dame, I was on the road to Lourdes, the fifth and next to last of my major apparition sites.
Those of you who are familiar with my works know that a rather large portion of what I write circles around or back to the British author and playwright William Somerset Maugham and his book The Razor's Edge, primarily because the book's main character, who had a deep life-altering spiritual Awakening high in the mountains of India and of who Maugham calls Larry Darrell but I call my Mentor, I met in real life. Over the years I have come to learn there is a lot of misinformation and misleading facts regarding both Maugham, Larry Darrell, and the book. Two dozen or so hardback biographies or semi-biographies have been published about Maugham, some written by people that knew him personally, some researched from university collections, and some from personal interviews with family and friends. Then there are those biographies that simply used those biographies then each other as their sources, which of course, if thus done, a gradual degrading of accurate information occurs. A good example is what I discovered researching my back-up paper W. Somerset Maugham's Travels in India. Maugham was in India only one time, for three months, primarily to meet with the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, get a feel for the country, and gather up first hand insights into the culture, yet biographers have listed him as being in India at least four different years. I have seen dates for Maugham being in India ranging from as early as 1933 to as late as 1940 with Maugham himself quoting both 1936 and 1938. Wanting to know exactly what year he was there, because it was critical to much of what I write about him, I researched university collections around the country, holding in my hands actual letters personally written, typed, dated, postmarked, and sent by Maugham while he was in India. For example, one to Sir William Rothenstein, January 11, 1938 (Harvard archives) and one to Karl Pfeiffer, February 26, 1938, (U of Texas archives), research not particularly different than what anybody else could have done. While it is true I had a dog in the hunt, people can now take my dates as being accurate or, like I did, do their own research.
So, what or how does anything, if anything, written in the above paragraph relate to Our Lady of Lourdes? It has to do with the source or where I went to to get the information I use in 1) telling the Our Lady of Lourdes story generally, and 2) substantiating the story. The gist of the story was garnered by me initially in some fashion in a number of ways. For one thing, in a broad general manner I somehow just knew about it early on, having picked up the story somewhere along the way, most likely from the 1943 best picture of the year Oscar winner Song of Bernadette. Since then of course, and which I have done, I had to refine and expand my knowledge of the subject in a more substantial way, more specifically not only for my own edification but our purposes here and for any readers thereof. Within that research, to make it have standing, required evidence beyond mere faith but a reality that offered credibility of the story.
Although grown now to world wide and international fame, for all practical purposes the Our Lady of Lourdes story played out in the south of France not far from where France and Spain share a common border on the European continent, a border that runs across the Iberian peninsula from the Bay of Biscay in the west to the Mediterranean Sea in the east. About halfway between those two points and about 500 miles south of Paris, only a few miles north of the Spanish border, is Lourdes. In 1858 AD, at the time of the events we are talking about here, Lourdes was basically not much more than a small village lost in the backwash of France, so much so, a large portion of the local populace didn't even speak French, relying on a regional language called Occitan. So it was for the main person in our Lourdes story, Bernadette Soubirous, who reached her teenage years in that environment.
It is said that for many years Bernadette's father was able to eke out a small but ready income as a miller operating his own waterwheel powered mill along the river. Mainly serving locals, and with newer better mills being built along the river and the locals becoming more and more predisposed toward bartering rather than paying cash money, Bernadette's father, needing capital to both live and run the mill, with his own labor not enough to fill the gap, he wasn't able to compete. Eventually he abandoned the mill and began seeking odd jobs in the surrounding community, the familly in each passing day falling more and more into poverty. Bernadette, having been born during those trying times, had been exposed to cholora and grew up frail as a child. As well, her mother was in ill health when she became pregnant with her second child, so Bernadette was fostered out, spending most of her early years with a family other than her own, not returning until her early teens. One day, with an ever continuing need for firewood for cooking and keeping the house warm, Bernadette, who was usually restricted by her mother from going, relented, joining her sister and a friend to scavage wood from the surrounding countryside. Rules were such you couldn't cut, chop, or saw trees that weren't your own, but any wood, limbs, or branches that fell to the ground of their own volition, and/or washed up on the riverbanks were fair game. It just so happened that on that particular day, Thursday, February 11, 1858, when the three girls were out searching for firewood one of the mills upstream had slowed or blocked the flow of water for repairs, making crossing the stream much easier for the first time. Coming to a huge rock outcropping outside of town near a grotto called Massabielle and seeing a fair quantity of wood on that side, with the water low, they decided to cross over. Bernadette, thinking she might not be able to cross the stream safely, hesitated at first with the other two going on. Taking off her shoes and thinking she might still attempt a crossing she felt a strong but gentle breeze blow over her. Looking around she didn't see any leaves or plants exhibiting any movement or sign of a breeze. Then she felt the breeze a second time, only this time she saw a wild rose high up in a niche near the grotto moving.
Mesmerized by the surroundings and delicate movement of the wild rose in an otherwise oppressive stillness yet spiritual-like calm, Bernadette, in the first vision of 17 more to come, was overwhelmed by a powerful white light suddenly emanating throughout the niche, in turn silhouetting the figure of a woman from behind.
The woman, who Bernadette would later give call to as "the beautiful lady," appeared to be of middle height maybe twenty years of age, her body blocking the intensity of the backlight and glowing as if having a light of her own, described thus from the earliest known commentary of any merit:
"Her garments of an unknown texture, and doubtless woven in the mysterious loom which furnishes attire for the lilies of the valley, were white as the stainless mountain snow, and more magnificent in their simplicity than the gorgeous robe of Solomon in all his glory. Her robe, long and training, falling in chaste folds around her, suffered her feet to appear reposing on the rock, and lightly pressing the branches of the wild rose which trailed there. On each of them in their virgin nudity there expanded the mystic rose of a bright, golden color.
"In front, a girdle — blue as the heavens — was knotted half-way round her body and fell in two long bands reaching within a short distance of her feet. Behind, a white veil fixed around her head and enveloping in its ample folds, her shoulders and the upper part of her arms, descended as far as the hem of her robe."
While Bernadette was experiencing the vision, the others had continued on, gathering firewood at some distance and saw nothing of what she reported as having seen. Her companions agreed something must have happened since not only did she seem to be embraced by some degree of ecstasy, she had a vigor beyond the norm. She easily out paced them on their return home, even helping carry parts of their load when they found difficulty on some of the steeper hills, when before, empty handed, she could barely keep up. Bernadette's second visit to the grotto was on February 14, 1858 followed by a third visit a few days later on February 18th. By the time of that third visit the whole countryside was in a mild uproar with the locals split as to the truth or false of the visitations. So too, local government officials and clergy were getting caught up with inctreasing concern as the word of Bernadette's visions began to spread. It was during the third visit as well that the "beautiful lady" spoke for the first time, asking Bernadette to return to the grotto every day for 15 consecutive days.
Bernadette, following the request of the Lady, did so, with the last of the 15 days occurring on March 4, 1858. During that two week period several things happened. On February 23rd and February 26th, without explanation, the Lady did not appear. On the ninth visitation, February 25th, the Lady asked Bernadette to go and drink at the fountain and wash herself. Seeing no fountain she went toward the Gave to drink but was redirected toward the grotto. Finding no fountain Bernadette began digging in the grotto's dirt floor. As she was digging the spot began turning from a hand deep dry dusty hole to becoming moist, then muddy, eventually turning into a full sprouting fresh water spring that still flows to this day, the water itself having shown over and over for many as being embued with miraculous healing powers. Two days short of the 15 consecutive days, on March 2nd and the Lady's thirteenth visitation, the Lady told Bernadette, "Go, tell the priests to come here in procession and to build a chapel here," of which she did initially to no avail and mostly scorn.
March 4th marked the completion of the 15 consecutive days. Twenty full days would pass before, when on March 25th, the Lady appeared once again to Bernadette in the grotto, her sixteenth visitation. It was during this visitation, her sixteenth, that the Lady revealed who she was, telling Bernadette, "I am the Immaculate Conception." Those two words, "Immaculate Conception," was a game changer for everybody. The seventeenth and eighteenth visitations were the last by the Lady, the grotto having been boarded up by decree of local authorities, with all the handbuilt alters and such dismantled and taken away. A proclamation from the Emperor Louis Napoleon III himself removed all the barriers and returned public access to the grotto. His proclamation coming on the heels of his own son reportedly being cured by the spring waters of the grotto. It seems the Emperess had requested the governess of the crown prince to bring water from the grotto that was in turn implicit in rendering a cure of the child's illness. The Emperor, in so many words after hearing his son's governess had been arrested for just getting water from the spring, issued the proclamation.
(for larger size click statue image then click a second time)
The above several paragraphs pretty much summarize the young peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous and the series of events that led up to and surrounded her experiences with what has come to us known as Our Lady of Lourdes. An internet search on Bernadette Soubirous, Our Lady of Lourdes, or both will give you hundreds if not thousands of responses. Articles, books, videos, and websites, covered top to bottom with slow loading advertisements hawking themselves or their favorite product, offering the bare minimum on the subject, each vying to push the other aside and convince you they are the most accurate. The truth is, almost every bit of information regarding Our Lady of Lourdes that comes down to us today emanated from one original source, a source almost no one goes to anymore, relying instead mostly on regurgitated rewrites. The story is pretty simple however, and after reading a couple of websites it's easy to get the punchline. Determining if the story is true or not is another thing. "Being true" meaning did Bernadette actually hear and what she said she heard and saw, and was what she heard and saw real? That of course, is a different story. Was Bernadette's experiences a brain thing, that is, one whole big hallucination, or as I would call it if so, "thought vapor," or did Mary the mother of Jesus actually appear before Bernadette in the flesh? Otherwise or both, how about an undeniable physical component or revelation that wouldn't have come about or exist if not for the apparition. Anti-church, anti-Catholics spin it one way, pro-church, pro-Catholics spin it another way.
For me it falls back to one thing, my experience on Catalina Island and the fact I physically held the lantern in my hand the next day outside the stage stop. Did the playing out of the Our Lady of Lourdes event provide an equivalent happenstance? Yes, in two cases, if you agree with my second choice as a valid example. But first, where is it I'm getting my information from? That is, what is my source or sources I use to back up my thesis regarding apparitions as they apply to my own situation and how to what extent do they relate to the Our Lady of Lourdes events?
From the very beginning no single individual has come forward saying they kept or compiled a running real-time comprehensive dialog of the Our Lady of Lourdes events during the time they actually unfolded. Nor have any surfaced. Several accounts were written within a few years of the event, while most of the particpants were still alive and available to interview. Two of the major ones being L'apparition a la Grotte de Lourdes en 1858 by Jean-Gualbert Fourcade and Notre Dame de Lourdes (1868) by Henri Lasserre, both written and published in French. Lasserre's book has risen through the ranks to the top, proving itself to be the go to source for all things Lourdes, albeit taking another 20 years before an authorized English translation was published. During that period a number of essays, compilations, and books of various sizes and lengths on Lourdes and printed in English became avaiable, almost every one paying homage to Lasserre's book as their primary source. Although I used some of those early written in English books myself, it was to Lasserre's later English translated version I turned to as my primary source. In regards to the depth of his research Lasserre writes in French:
"Cette étude, j'ai voulu la faire complète. Aussi ne me suis-je contenté ni des documents ofliciels, ni des lettres, ni des procès-verbaux, ni des attestations écrites. J'ai voulu, autant que possible, tout connaître, tout voir par moi-même, tout faire revivre à mes yeux par le souvenir et le récit de ceux qui avaient vu. J'ai fait de longs voyages à travers la France pour interroger tous ceux qai avaient figuré, soit comme personnages principaux, soit comme témoins, dans les événements que j'avais à raconter, pour contrôler leurs récits les iins par les autres et parvenir de la sorte à une entière et lumineuse vérité."
Which translates into:
"This study I wished to render complete. I did not, therefore, content myself with official documents or letters, or official reports or written attestations. It was my wish, as much as possible, to know everything and see everything for myself, to have everything brought freshly before my eyes through the memory and narrative of eye-witnesses. I have made long journeys over France to interrogate all those who had figured — whether as the chief personages or as witnesses — in the events I had to recount, to check their accounts by comparing them one with another, and then arrive at entire and lucid truth."
Lasserre goes on to say:
"The deep investigation to which I devoted myself, the documents I consulted, the numerous testimonies I have heard, have allowed me to enter into circumstantial details, which were not at the disposal of those who gave a summary account of these events when they first occurred, as also to rectify sundry errors which had crept into the chronological department. 1 have been most attentive in re-establishing the exact order in which the several events occurred. This was verynecessary in order to convey a just conception of their logical consequences and their real essence."
Okay, so now what about an undeniable physical component or revelation that wouldn't have come about or exist if not for the apparition? I've said there are two. The first is the spring. Now, while the townsfolk, locals, and citizens of the nearby countryside might have known of the existence of grotto of Massabielle, it surely wasn't very high up as a destination spot or a place to go to and hang out. During inclement weather the occasional fishermen along the river were known to take shelter there sometimes as were shepards with their sheep. But one thing that was pretty much known was that the grotto did not have a spring or anything that resembled a spring prior to Bernadette getting down on her hands and knees and dug one out of the grotto floor with her bare hands per request of the Lady. At first the water was the trickle the size of a straw that got sucked up by the dry dirt. Then it became a small rivelet the size of a girl's arm, and soon it was producing 25,000 gallons a day. Lasserre from his research wrote in his book that the bottom of the grotto was always as dry as a drawingroom floor.
"As in all caverns of this nature the rock was dry in fine weather and slightly humid when it rained. This occasional humidity and imperceptible dripping of the wet season was only observable on one side, that to your right on entering. It is precisely on this side that the rain usually comes, driven by the westerly wind; and the rock being very slender and full of clefts in this place suffered in the same way as do houses with the same exposure and built with indifferent mortar. The left side and the bottom not being thus exposed were always as dry as the floor of a drawingroom. The accidental humidity of the western wall served even to set off by contrast the burning dryness of the northern, eastern and southern portions of the grotto."
My second example is the Lady revealing who she was, telling Bernadette, "I am the Immaculate Conception." Her revelation occurred March 25, 1858, the sixteenth visit by the Lady. For as much as the the words "Immaculate Conception" meant to Bernadette the Lady could have easily told her she was E=mc2, the equation for Special Relativity. Since the very dawn of the Church there has always been a low level understanding implying the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, that it was a given, even if it wasn't blatantly broadcast among the masses as formal Church policy. On December 8, 1854 all that changed when Pope Pius IX issued his Ineffabilis Deus that promulgated the dogma defining the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, meaning it became official. The Pope's promulgation was only four years before Bernadette's vision in the grotto and had yet to seep down officially into the Church's rank and file congregationists let alone to it's mid-level hierarchy and above.
Immaculate Conception is an example of a concept that is called a "revealed truth." A revealed truth is something that is implied but not explicitly stated, said, or called by such specifically at the source. The "implied revealed truth source" for Immaculate Conception stems from the gist and meanings behind the words contained in the Old and New Testament of the Holy Bible, the words therein said to be divinely inspired by God. Supporters of Immaculate Conception say although it isn't stated in the bible in those very exact same words the concept is. They then go about citing every source in the bible that in their view substantiates it. Those opposed to the idea attack the sources so cited usually as either being taken out of context and/or the source was mistranslated from the original Greek or Hebrew texts thus rendering the outcome mute. The opposition has strength on their side by saying if Immaculate Conception was intended by the authors of the bible why didn't they just say it. Pro Immaculate Conception folk say the whole bible is full of nothing but inuendos and meanings, and if you are not Imbibed with Spirituality or not astute enough to sift the truth out the chaff, like everything you have to study it to understand it. With both sides doing just that they end up providing you with answers diametricaly opposed. In the end it comes down to your own truth making decisions.
When nothing else works they start nit-picking translations of individual words found at the original bibical sources, knowing full well the typical doofus doesn't possess the wherewithal to say what's right or wrong or the ability to go to the source to proove otherwise. Detractors say the Greek word used to describe Mary as a virgin is either mistranslated, taken out of context, or both. If that doesn't work then they say it is actually "the feminine vocative present passive participle form of a Greek verb." I mean, come on, does anybody really know what a feminine vocative present passive participle is compared to one that isn't, and if so or isn't, how does it change or not change the meaning of what's really intended by the author? They just bend it their way telling you that's what it means because it's really a feminine vocative present passive participle. However, Immaculate Conception being "real" or not is not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about Bernadette being able to conjure it up. In the end, when it comes to Bernadette, in her fourteen year old backwash upbringing and education, she most likely never heard of Immaculate Conception. For her to have whipped up the whole thing out of whole cloth is questionable at best. The following four links will take you one at a time to a different site that explores and scrutinizes each of the sixteen visits Bernadette experienced with the lady : (see) (see) (see) (see)
FROM EARLY ON, AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ALTERNATE PATH
At a very young age, not long after my mother died and following at least two on-and-off failed attempts to place me with another foster couple as well as my grandmother, I was sent to live with my younger brother already placed with a family in a no sidewalk mostly dirt-street rural area some distance east of San Diego almost right on top of the Mexican border. It was in that rustic setting that I met an old man of Mexican descent known as a Curandero. The curandero, who lived next door, was sort of a root doctor, similar in stripe to a tribal spiritual elder, albeit non-tribal affiliated. Among those who claim to know about such things most would agree, although there are similarities and maybe even some overlapping, there are big differences in the roles of what a curandero can and does in the world and that of a tribal spiritual elder. However, up to the point in my life that I met the curandero I had no call to differentiate any differences because, truth be told, I didn't even know there were differences, and, at the time as things played out there was no need to know.
All day long people of all kinds would come into the curandero's yard to see him. Men and women, boys and girls. Women with babies or going to have babies. Adults with their ancient and decrepit grandparents. All seeking a remedy or cure of some ailment, create or improve a love life, and sometimes simply to totally just eliminate someone. I was told that for the old man's culture the curandero was almost thought of as being a medical doctor. He would put together some mixture or potion using different kinds of indigenous plants and weird stuff and give it to a person after hearing their problems. If they followed his directions, most of the time their ills or whatever would fade, lessen, or be cured.
One morning I went to the backyard to play as I often did, but on this particular morning I discovered a fairly large crow laying on the ground with one wing flayed out as though it was broken or damaged. As I got closer the bird began flopping and running around like the proverbial chicken with it's head cut off, but unlike said proverbial chicken, the crow, still head endowed, began squaking to high heaven. The curandero, alerted by the high pitched squealing came over to see what was going on. Grasping immediately the bird was in deep agony, yet not harmed by me, the curandero touched the bird ever so slightly on the back with his walking stick and in an instant the bird calmed. The curandero motioned me to pick up the now docile bird and when I did he montioned me to follow him. Even though I had been given strict orders by the couple I lived with to stay away from the old man I followed him anyway. We went to a little open front dirt floor lean-to shack part way across his backyard that on the inside had three walls covered floor to ceiling with shelves haphazardly stacked row after row with all sizes of dusty bottles, cans, and little jugs filled with dried leaves, powders, seeds, and insects. The old man selected two or three containers off the shelves along with a mottled, ancient looking three legged lava grinding bowl. He put a small amount of ingredients from each of the containers into the bowl, grinding it by hand with a stone tool into a fine powder. When he was done he dumped the contents of the bowl into the palm of his hand, flicking aside a couple of the larger grains.
As we stepped away from the lean-to, the curandero speaking to me for the first time, told me to hold the bird at arms length toward him and away from me and to turn my head. When I did he a took in a huge gulp of air into his lungs and exhaling hard and fast through pursed lips blew the powder into the bird's face and nostrils. The bird wiped it's beak back and forth a few times on itself then tried to wiggle free from my grip. The old man motioned as if I was to throw the bird into the air, which I did. Even in the short distance between bird and the ground, with my upward thrust the bird was able to extend it's wings and catch enough air to fly. Circling a few times at first cautiously then in an ever widening radius, the bird was soon gone. The old man clasped my shoulder in a reassuring fashion and said, "You did good, boy. The bird liked you."
KINGSTON AND KINGSTON HARBOR SEEN FROM THE BLUE MOUNTAINS JAMAICA
(please click image)
THE OBEAHMAN
Fast forward now to roughly three and a half decades later and the year 1978. That year found me sitting right on top of being age 40, in the Peace Corps, and living on the island of Jamaica high in the Blue Mountains above the island's capitol city, Kingston. One day a young girl living in a small village nearby got hit by a car on the mountain road, the vehicle taking off and leaving her laying facedown in a muddy ditch along the edge of the pavement. The girl's parents, like most of the locals, were poor, and not being able to afford a regular doctor, opted for a less expensive, local solution. That solution included me and another village member making a sling hammock suspended between two poles and carrying her high into the mountains in search of a nearly hermit man of spells called an Obeahman. Typically there would have been little or no cause for me to have come into contact with the Obeahman, especially so on the level I did. I observed the Obeah from afar for sometime, noticing his methods and the outcomes were similar in scope to the curandero. Sensing my connection and understanding of things currandero, it having started for me from an early age, and maybe even with me being one, he started allowing me closer, eventually reaching a point I began to apprentice under him. The thing is, he was probably close to being twice my age and I had already reached a halfway point in mine, curandero or not, there was no way I could catch up. One day, after months of participating in small things and seeing the results the Obeahman came to me saying it was time for me to move up.
One of the first things a person who is interested in such things MUST learn about are repercussions, or at least what I call repercussions. I've said it before and I'll say it again, in the overall scheme of things all things must return to a balance. If a person is such that they can act upon in some manner creating movements or disturbances in the normal flow of events at a level surpassing or beyond the edges of the day-to-day conventional plane, somehow somewhere and sometime there must be a return to the equilibrium. Simply put, if a person inherent in manifesting such movements acts as a medium or go-between in behest of another for the other's own behalf, the person requesting the behest is responsible for the consequences. If, on the other hand, you are the perpetrator of the behest for your own reasons on your own behalf, then YOU must accept and bear any downstream consequences. Nothing is free, invariably there is a toll to be paid. It is always worth considering both that and the vig before you start interfering with the normal flow of events. The experienced already know, newbies, not so much. Nature has Memory. Spoken from experience.
The majority of the people reading this will probably be familiar with the meaning of the word limousine. A limousine is usually considered something like a large luxurious automobile often driven by a chauffeur. The word limousine is a french word and there is really no english equivalent. That is, if you call it anything else, a town car or whatever, it is either a limousine or it isn't.
In and around the world of the supernatural, the occult, and the underground dark-eddies of things spiritual, there are mystics, shamans, tribal elders, wizards, sorcerers, spellcasters, diviners, necromancers, witches, and all other types and kinds of controllers and purveyors of occult abilities, drawing strength and operating in other dimensions along the edges of the conventional plane. In an attempt to encompass or define purveyors of such abilities or powers, words and names arise and thrown around, but none truly reach to it's core. There is a Japanese word, like many words that have come to us through other cultures such as patio, tomato, karma, carburetor, and kayak, which have no other real specific english equivalent, that has become assimulated into our language. The word of which I speak is Joriki. Joriki roughly translates into: "the power or strength which arises when the mind has been unified and brought to one-pointedness." This is more than the ability to concentrate in the usual sense of the word. It is a dynamic power which, once mobilized, enables us even in the most sudden and unexpected situations to act instantly, without pausing to collect our wits, and in a manner wholly appropriate to the circumstances. One who has developed Joriki is no longer a slave to his passions, neither is he at the mercy of his environment. Always in command of both himself and the circumstances of his life, he is able to move with perfect freedom and equanimity. The cultivation of certain supranormal powers is also made possible by Joriki, as is the state in which the mind becomes like clear, still water.
There is another word, Siddhis, from the truly ancient, ancient language Sanskrit that hasn't fallen into the everyday lexicon that carries with it a similar meaning. There are differences, however, and neither word separate or together fully encompasses the power. If you have ever focused the sun to a pinpoint on your skin using a magnifying glass and felt how quickly and powerful the burning sensation is, that is more like Joriki. Siddhi is more like the power of ocean waves. You may be able to stand against a mild wave or two, but even giant mountains are eventually turned to nothing but sand or even less by their power.
There are two other words, albeit from western culture or civilization, that show up on a regular basis relative to what we are talking about here, both are of English derivative and both, depending on where and how used have meanings that vary. Those two words being "Natural" and "Supernatural." For our purposes here however, the meaning or difference between the two, according to C.S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, and of which I agree to with some exceptions, breaks down thus:
"The Naturalist believes that a great process, or 'becoming,' exists 'on its own' in space and time, and that nothing else exists, what we call particular things and events being only the parts into which we analyse the great process or the shapes which that process takes at given moments and given points in space. This single, total reality he calls Nature. The Supernaturalist believes that one Thing exists on its own and has produced the framework of space and time and the procession of systematically connected events which fill them. This framework, and this filling, he (the Supernaturalist) calls Nature."
IN THE 1981 MOVIE TIME BANDITS THE WORLD SHATTERS REVEALING THE REAL WORLD BEHIND IT
(please click image)
IN THE SHADOW OF THE ABSOLUTE
Regarding the Supernaturalist's use of "this framework, this filling," and calling it Nature as found in the above C.S. Lewis quote, many ardent thinkers, along with myself and others, find that framework and filling of the Supernaturalist carries a strong resemblance to, if not being, the Absolute, as in capital "A" Absolute. That is, the "What Is" behind the "What Is." Those of you who are familar with my works may recall coming across my use of "the Absolute" in many places, for example, such as found in the very opening paragraph of my paper on Alfred Pulyan:
"Alfred Robert Pulyan was a man of great spiritual prowess, an 'American Zen Master' without the Zen nor the Buddhism, yet Enlightened in the Finality of the Absolute in the same tradition as in the spiritual Awakenings attributed to the ancient classical masters."
Over the last several hundred centuries, during the rise of western civilization, Christianity, pushed by Rome's official sanction from around 380 AD, has pretty much dominated most of the west's religious thought and social fabric, influencing, right or wrong, great swaths of education and science right along with it, Galileo being a prime example. Christianity's view of God and Creation spring directly from, or was heavily influenced by the Jewish view of one God and one God only who created the Universe and everything in it as found in the Old or First Testement of the Bible including any and all attributed miracles thereof. Centuries before Christianity, in the far east beyond the reaches and borders of Greece, Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, and the stamp of western culture, eastern civilizations grew, removed both in time and distance from the influences of the west, developing and giving rise to their own ideas as summed up in the following:
"The concept of the absolute, the idea that an impersonal and abstract power gave birth to everything and controls everything, including the gods themselves, became prominent in India and China and essentially predominated in those regions. The fundamental difference from the first mode of thinking is obvious: it is not gods or a single God who created the universe, but rather the supreme force beyond the phenomenal world that created everything, including the gods. The name of this power was Dao in China and Brahman in India."
In 1944 the book The Razor's Edge, written by the famed British author and playwright William Somerset Maugham, was published. I briefly mention the contents of the book back up the page, but as a refresher Maugham chronicles the life of a young American World War I fighter pilot who, after fudging about his age, crosses into Canada and joins the RAF to fight in France with the British against the Germans. As the story progresses the young American, who Maugham actually met and gave the name Larry Darrell in the book, experiences the death of his own best friend right in front of his eyes after his friend saves his life in a raging dogfight out over the front during the very last days of the war. Seeking answers to life following the death of his best friend, Darrell travels throughout Europe and the far east eventually meeting and studying in an ashram under the auspices of a venerated Indian holy man Maugham calls Shri Ganesha. Two years later, roughly adhering to the holy man's guidance, high in the mountains of India, Darrell experienced Enlightenment.
Darrell's Enlightenment experience occurred on his 31st birthday in the fall of 1930, and almost immediately thereafter he left for Europe, eventually, six months later, showing up in Paris in the spring of 1931. The novel has Darrell being in Paris about a month when he and Maugham inadvertently cross paths at a sidewalk cafe, Maugham having been in Paris only half that time himself, arriving barely two weeks before. He was sitting outdoors one evening in the front row of the Cafe Du' Dome having a drink when Darrell walked up. Maugham writes that a full year and a half after their meeting at the Dome, in the Autumn of 1932, traveling separately, at the Theatre-Francais during intermission of the play Berenice, a five-act tragedy by the French 17th-century playwright Jean Racine, they met again. After the play, in the early morning hours Darrell and Maugham have eggs and bacon at the Brasserie Graff. It was during that 1932 meeting at the Brasserie Graff that Darrell unfolded the whole story about his Enlightenment and his guru. He brings to light his teacher as found in the 1931 biography of Sri Ramana Maharshi by B.V. Narasimha Swami, SELF REALIZATION: The Life and Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi.[2] Maugham actually cites recognition of the 1931 book in his 1958 essay The Saint as found in Points of View. However, at the time of his 1932 conversation with Darrell at the Brasserie Graff he writes it as though he had not read it yet, of which he may not have, only to read it later seeking clarification for himself and the reader to understand Darrell's response. In turn, in 1943-44 when writing The Razor's Edge, Maugham inserts the following:
"But Larry, surely your idea of the Absolute forces you to believe that the world and its beauty are merely an illusion, the fabric of Maya."
Darrell, or Larry as Maugham calls him, in his definition of the Absolute, superimposes it's existence by overlaying Brahman in his reply:
"It's a mistake to think that the Indians look upon the world as an illusion; they don't; all they claim is that it's not real in the same sense as the Absolute. Maya is only a speculation devised by those ardent thinkers to explain how the Infinite could produce the Finite. Samkara, the wisest of them all, decided that it was an insoluble mystery. You see, the difficulty is to explain why Brahman, which is Being, Bliss and Intelligence, which is unalterable, which ever is and forever maintains itself in rest, which lacks nothing and needs nothing and so knows neither charge nor strife, which is perfect, should create the world. Well, if you ask that question the answer you're generally given is that the Absolute created the world in sport without reference to any purpose. But when you think of flood and famine, of earthquake and hurricane and all the ills that flesh is heir to, your moral sense is outraged at the idea that so much that is shocking can have been created in play. Shri Ganesha had too much kindliness of heart to believe that; he looked upon the world as the expression of the Absolute and as the overflow of its perfection. He taught that God cannot help creating and that the world is the manifestation of his nature. When I asked how, if the world was a manifestation of the nature of a perfect being, it should be so hateful that the only reasonable aim man can set before him is to liberate himself from its bondage, Shri Ganesha answered that the satisfaction of the world are transitory and that only the Infinite gives enduring happiness. But endless duration makes good no better, nor white any whiter. If the rose at noon has lost the beauty it had at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too."
In Chapter Six (v) of The Razor's Edge Darrell asks Maugham, "Do you know anything about Hinduism?" Maugham answers with, "Very little." A few pages later still in Chapter Six (vii), Maugham elaborates on his answer with:
"I must interrupt myself to make it plain that I am not attempting here to give anything in the nature of a description of the philosophical system known as Vedanta. I have not the knowledge to do so, but even if I had this would not be the proper place lor it. Our conversation was a long one and Larry told me a great deal more than I have felt it possible to set down in what after all purports to be a novel."
Maugham's previously mentioned book "Points of View," published in 1958, was a compilation of five essays, one of which was titled The Saint, with the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, the role model for his holy man in The Razor's Edge, being the aforementioned Saint. Twenty years earlier, in 1938 while he was still in India, immediately upon his return to Madras after having left the ashram and the Maharshi, Maugham wrote the following, which in turn ended up in The Saint:
"The story I wish to tell is strange and moving, and I should like to tell it as simply as I can, without comment or animadversion, without criticism of behaviour that to a Western reader must seem extravagant; as naively, in short, as those old monks wrote the lives of famous saints. But before setting about this, I must give the reader some account of the Maharshi's religious beliefs, for unless he knows something of them his motives and behaviour, his mode of life, will be hardly intelligible. I embark upon this undertaking with trepidation, since I am dealing with a matter with which my acquaintance is but superficial. What I know about it, I have read in books. The most important of these are Sir Charles Eliot's Hinduism and Buddhism; Radhakrishnan's History of Indian Philosophy and his translation of the Upanishads; Krisnaswami Iyer's Vedanta, or the Science of Reality; Brahma-Knowledge by Professor Barnett; and Sankara's Vivekachudamani. "
So, in Chapter six, when Darrell asks Maugham if he knows anything about Hinduism, he answers with "Very little." Then in the above, as found in his essay The Saint, after his meeting with Darrell at the Brasserie Graff but not published until twenty years later, he writes that what he does know about Hinduism he read in books, listing then what he considers as the five most important ones. All five of the books suggested by Maugham are available free and online, all easily found in click through format by going to Footnote [2].
Sometime during my sophomore and junior years in high school I bought my first car, got a driver's license, and met the person that became my spiritual mentor, who in all my works I have simply given call to as my Mentor. He had been living a solidary lifestyle on the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California for seven years when he moved to the mainland and bought a small house next to where I was staying with my grandmother in Redondo Beach. Legal problems related to the trust fund he received a stipend from each month popped up that required his attention in court with lawyers and such, and the constant trips to and from Catalina proved to be too much. He lived in Redondo for a couple of years, then after resolving his trust problems, moved back, eventually settling in the small town of Avalon on Catalina Island. It was during those couple of years he lived in Redondo Beach that he and I met. As it turned out, the man ended up being the exact same person in real life that William Somerset Maugham met and used as his role model in The Razor's Edge and named Laurence Darrell. It was through him I eventually learned about the Absolute, both in name and reality. As an introduction, a layman could read hundreds of books and research thousands of references and essays and still not come up with a more clear concise explanation of the Absolute and Brahman than what Darrell tells Maugham in the above, especially when taken in context with the whole of The Razor's Edge and it's content and/or then, especially so, used as a starting point for further research.(see)
IN THE SHADOW OF THE OBEAH
What does the Absolute, Joriki, or Siddhis, with the Absolute given credit as being "the supreme force beyond the phenomenal world that created everything, including the gods," have to do with anything? It has to do with everything. However, more specifically in the short term here, it has to do with the credibility of the Obeahman and where and how an Obeah or others of similar ilk draw or dispense their power. Most people with knowledge of such things claim the grounding source emanates from the Absolute, a non-god created, non-god dominated beyond-the-background background that everything depends on for it's existence existence and it's to-be or is'ness. However, in the end any power sought, obtained, and/or thus admistered, wherever it's drawn from, is akin to a longer reach or extension of the purveyor, focused through his or her own abilities or level of expertise. That level of expertise can vary from being very minuscule and tiny to beyond scope, with the results depending on the abilities, will, and intent of the individual purveyor.
In case you may have lost track, the theme of this page circulates around apparitions, translocations, and bilocations. Enter the Obeah wanting me to move on up with the question being could he, or I in his shadow, neither being gods, have the ability to draw from, manifest, put into place, or execute an apparition, translocation, or bilocation at any level?
Somewhat earlier I wrote how Christianity has dominated a big part of the west's religious thought and social fabric, influencing, right or wrong, great swaths of education and science right along with it. Throughout the two thousand or more years of that Christain tradition, thousands and thousands of hours and reams and reams of pages have been directed toward research and investigations into apparitions, translocations, and bilocations. Most of the originator's efforts, if pro-Christain, stem from a chance or hope to prove Jesus, mostly through Mary the mother of Jesus, and/or strengthen Christianity. If opposed the hope is to discredit Jesus and his mother and/or weaken Christianity. People in the opposition camp have a problem with pro-Christian proof because so much of it falls back on miracles, thus then, when it comes to miracles, who, what, where, and how they are generated, that is, their source. According to the British author, literary scholar, and onetime atheist turned theologian C.S. Lewis, in his book MIRACLES: A Preliminary Study (1947) previously cited and linked below, writes:
"A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law. In the forward direction (i.e. during the time which follows its occurrence) it is interlocked with all Nature just like any other event. Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. And this is just what some people find intolerable. The reason they find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent."
"If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the newcomer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested."
We have all these various kinds of words here: Naturalists, Supernaturalists, the Absolute, Brahman. God with a capital "G." We have C.S. Lewis saying that the cause of miracles is the activity of God. Whose God, what God? God with a capital "G?" If no God, no miracles? Or is it all just a bunch of terminolgy wrapped around something or nothing? Author and avowed atheist Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion (2006) writes the following in regards to terminolgy:
"A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a nonsupernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe."
There are limits however, limits such as those bound in the perpetual laws of nature such as the Law of Gravity (every particle attracts every particle in the universe with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers. Slightly modified by Einstein); the Second Law of Therodynamics (heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter, "downhill" in terms of the temperature gradient); Conservation of Energy (energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another); etc. Below, as found at the source so cited, is based on scientific discovery and most often considered far from the realm of the spiritual, albeit typical of what can be found in physics, astrophysics, cosmological, and similar circles:
"Potential Energy is the energy stored between two (or more) particles, made possible by their mutual interactions. Its magnitude depends on their separation, as well as their individual attributes like mass and electric charge. Unlike the kinetic energy, which is always positive, potential energies can be positive or negative.
"A potential acts like a bank account of energy. You can put in energy to raise the potential, and you can withdraw energy to lower the potential, all by appropriately adjusting the separation of the two particles.
"Potential energy can be turned into kinetic energy, and vice versa. Since total energy is conserved, a gain in kinetic energy must be associated with a corresponding loss of potential energy. In the bank account analogy, kinetic energy is like money in hand, and potential energy is like money in the account. A negative potential energy corresponds to a negative balance in the account, at which point you are really borrowing money from the bank.
"Potential energies are associated with forces. This comes about because there is a tendency for a potential to seek a lower value by adjusting the separation, much like water flows towards lower ground. The tendency that causes particles to change their separation is interpreted as a force. If the potential is lowered by increasing the separation, then particles appear to be pushed apart, so the force is repulsive; if the potential is lowered by reducing the separation, the force is attractive.
"The potential between two particles is usually set to be zero when they are very far apart, and hence non-interacting. In that case, an attractive force corresponds to a negative potential at finite separation, and a repulsive force corresponds to a positive potential at finite separation."
Generally, the most common manifestation of Obeah found today, although maybe not practiced on an individual basis, is blended with Orisha-worship. Orisha is a monotheistic faith brought to the Americas via the slave trade and most commonly associated with Yoruba seeping up from the Seven African Powers. The two main fractions of Orisha in the new world are Spiritual Orisha and Baptist Orisha, both of which, on the surface, carry a very heavy Christian ring or appearance about them, largely absorbed initially from forebarers through osmosis from the dominant Christian lean of the early slaveholder overseers or conversion efforts by European colonizers.
Obeah is NOT a religion in the classical sense. That is to say, there are no meeting places such as churches, mosques, synagogs or other religious buildings or shrines --- or any underlying infastructure replicating such a system. Nor is there any sort of congregation or parishioners, although there are what may be called followers, albeit scattered. Obeah is instead, a focused application of "occult power" tapping the virulent source of God's own access, employed without sanction to facilitate or induce spells, call up answers, predict the future, or garner assist or knowledge from planes other than the conventional and implemented through the individual skill, cunning, and artistry of the Obeah practitioner --- usually beyond the guidelines of traditional witchcraft, sorcery, shamanism, voodoo, or tribal magic.
Obeah is a dying breed shrouded in secrecy, with the most powerful versions known and practiced only by a select few. Even fewer ever truly enter the ranks of Obeah and able to successfully wield its will and awesome scope unscathed. An Obeahman can use ANY system and fuel it with the power of Obeah without the danger of disrespect FOR the gods, but, depending on circumstances, not necessarily without repercussions FROM the gods --- and especially so any untrained high level assult against the natural order of things. Obeah is potent, compelling and in the wrong hands, both deadly and dangerous. It's secret lies in its POWER. As you will see further down the page, even White Light Shields are vunerable. They can and do weaken, collapse, or be rendered impotent, buckling under to another's stronger power when pitted against each other in tests of strength.
All of it is and can be minipulated by skewing the perimeters and conditions in the right hands. Conditions is an english word used in context here from the Sutras for the Sanskrit word Pratyaya which roughly means "the pre-existing conditions that allow primary causes to function." Which basically means if the conditions are absent, then the causes are prevented. Conditions are the milieu, stage set, or playing field where acts or impulses unfold. They can be increased by other conditions, decreased by other conditions, or replaced by other conditions to accelerate or postpone results in the stream of events. Which means that conditions can, but not necessarily DO modify. They arise primarily on a broader scale from causes in the distant past. When conditions do manifest themselves they are for the most part not defined, that is, they are undefined or spent, meaning they cannot create or impact figuratively further downstream responses. However, even though they are spent, they are still extremely powerful in how they impose themselves on the immediate circumstances in which they are operating. It is primarily there, amongst the perimeters and conditions, that Obeahmen and those of similar ilk find a way to squeeze in. See:
SENSITIVE DEPENDENCE ON INITIAL CONDITIONS
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT PERSONIFIED
SO WHAT DOES ANY OF IT HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING?
Now we get to where I'm going with this. In the main text above regarding the last of my two trips through Europe regarding apparition sites (the first was in 1972, the second or last, in 2007), I got as far as having visited Lourdes, departing then on the way to the last of my six visitation sites, The Holy House of Loreto in Loreto, Italy. Before reaching the Holy House in the text, which will come up shorty, I suddenly veered into a whole other area. I did so for the reader to possibly gain some insight into apparitions, translocations, or bilocations, if they are real, where they come from and how. Most have been backed by miracles or a Christian God with a capital "G." But, do they really have to operate from or on that level, after all a lot of people don't believe in miracles or God with a capital "G." Even if they don't believe it doesn't make it not so. However, are there other means that don't on the surface require miracles or God with a capital "G?" For eample, relative to the Obeah, can, could, or would the old man in scruffy pants and shirt operating in his jungle lair high in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, having no more than a second grade education if that and for sure being no god or operating at the level of a god, at his behest be able to, with a few incantations and such, implement or put into motion in real life, the unfolding of apparitions, translocations, or bilocations?
I only ask the question because of my own experience as an apprentice under the auspices of the Obeah. A few paragraphs back I put forth that the Obeahman came to me saying it was time for me to move up. Between that paragraph and this one I laid out a sort of broad several paragraph overview of what I believe, and how I should conduct myself because of those beliefs, at least as they relate to the Obeahman. What I'm getting at is a clash between the Obeahman and what he thinks and what I sould do and what I think and what I should do. In "moving up" the Obeah meant for me to concoct and execute a spell in the same manner Obeahs have done historically since the dawn of time. My deployment in Jamaica was for two years. At the end of those two years I would be gone. Even if I could, and I wasn't sure if I could, I wasn't about to intercede at such a level someone would fall in love, have babies, or die because of some interaction on my behalf, however remote, real, or imagined, then just walk away from it if I did. Yet if I were to continue, I still had an obligation to satisfy the Obeah's expectations. Anything I put into place would have to carry the weight and trappings of a fully executionable spell, including it's ramifications and eventual outcome.
There is a latin term "in loco parentis," most often used in the world of education, that translates into english as "in the place of a parent." There is a slightly difference in meaning between an admistrators view of the term and that of a teacher. For me as a teacher in loco parentis means that the child or student placed in the custody of the teacher is as safe with the teacher as that same child or student would be with their own parents. I was quite young when my mother became ill and died. From my kindergarten years through to the ninth grade I lived under the auspices of a number of different foster couples, guardians, family comeback attempts, and people I chose to live with after running away from home. Not once in all those instances did any parental figure, weird uncle, or next door neighbor physically or sexually abuse me in any fashion, way, shape, or form. Me being raised in such an environment and adhering early on with the concepts found in the Cowboy Code of the West and then later incorporating it all together with "in loco parentis," I had pretty much developed an overall innate way of conducting myself accordingly.
The Obeah was somewhat more libertine in his approach relative to the above than I was. He leaned heavily toward having something happen between a woman and me, only in doing so it had to be some situation that wouldn't normally otherwise transpire unless interceded with in some fashion, i.e., a spell. When it did transpire the outcome should present a strong result, hopefully longterm. So said, with his somewhat more libertine nature than me, results being positive or not in the end didn't matter to the Obeah. It did to me. A couple of paragraphs back I wrote:
"I wasn't about to intercede at such a level someone would fall in love, have babies, or die because of some interaction on my behalf, however remote, real, or imagined, then just walk away from it if I did. Yet if I were to continue, I still had an obligation to satisfy the Obeah's expectations. Anything I put into place would have to carry the weight and trappings of a fully executionable spell, including it's eventual outcome."
The group of Peace Corps volunteers I was assigned to on the way to Jamaica, as requested, began showing up from all over the country at the airport in Miami early on the day of departure. The group numbered about a 100, all that remained from an original group of over 300 potential volunteers that met six months earlier for a three day orientation process in Chicago for what was called a PRIST, the PRIST being a sort of weeding out process, the final move by the agency before formally inviting a volunteer to join the Peace Corps. I had just arrived in Maimi and on my way to the baggage area on the down escalator when a young woman passing me on the otherside up-escalator asked, across escalators, if I was in the Peace Corps. Answering yes as we passed she wanted to know if I would watch a bag in the boarding area while she returned for a second one (we were going to be gone two years, so packed accordingly). Instead, between the two of us, we were able to handle all the luggage in one trip. Although later the two of us weren't afforded the luxury of sitting next to each other on the plane, the two of us did spend a whole lot of one-on-one time together the rest of the day, mostly in the VIP lounge (and much to my chagrin as I would learn later, way more bourgeois than she cared for), having lunch, drinking iced teas, and generally getting acquainted. However, as fate would have it, after our arrival in Jamaica, during our first few days being acclimated and receiving cultural training and such at Peace Corps Headquarters in Kingston and around the island the two of us had very little time together before we were all sent our separate ways, with the training period being the last for the two of us to really cross paths for any amount of time, impromptu or otherwise. During conversation at the airport I did learn a great deal about her and although it was clear, at least in the short term and with no real reason not too, we liked each other, most of the conversation exemplified the differences between us rather than a common bond. So too, initally we really didn't know anybody else after arrival during our first few days in Jamaica. At the airport I learned she was age 22, having just graduated from college the June before. Sharp, with a quick mind and quick wit, she was highly athletic, fairly tall and built like a runner, with most her height in her legs, having attended college on a full track scholarship. With no real post-graduate scholarship funds in her academic discipline coming her way, instead of graduate school she opted to see the world instead and thought the Peace Corps was as good a place as any to start. Me, at 40, was about twice her age and although fairly svelte, far from being anywhere near what one would call athletic with most of any physical prowess being left over residue from intensive military training like jump school from many years before. I had long been out of the military, federal reserve, and college, having landed a cushy full time job teaching at the college level in the California State University system the last few years just prior to signing up for the Peace Corps. Matter of fact, on the way between teaching classes I would stop regularly at the Peace Corps kiosk in the quad and go over their literature. One day the guy at the table talked me into filling out some paperwork and the next thing I knew I was being flown back to Chicago for the PRIST on the Peace Corps' dime. Once in Jamaica my job as a Peace Corps volunteer was similar, a cushy full time job teaching at the college level in Jamica's capitol city Kingston where the University of West Indies was located. Her assignment was an in the field non-office based veterinary-like rural position working with owners of small farms maintaining the health and care of their large animals in and around a general area centered on Discovery Bay on the north coast, clear across the island from Kingston, and of which where she took up residence. It wasn't long before the two of us began gaining new acquaintences, establishing our own new circle of friends, and soon letting a fog creep in on little cat feet over our memory of each other. Almost.
When I told the Obeahman about the young lady so described above he was overjoyed, saying in all respects she appeared the perfect candidate. There would be though, as he went on to explain, some things that would need to be done first to ensure any favorable outcome relative to how he viewed it. Clarifying, as for himself he said, he pretty much had a life-long established background repertoire in place of who, what, when, where and how in what he dealt with. Such was not the case with me. All of it, from the subject to what needed to be done to the projected outcome, including me, was all new, there was no previously established thread. So, as they say the Dormouse said, feed the hookah-smoking caterpillar's head. The Obeah then, in his own inimitable way, feeding my head, laid out a basic bottom line protocol that needed to be adhered to in order for me to obtain in my endeavors as he called them, maximum positive results. Positive for the Obeah meaning that the end results of the "endeavor" unfolded in such a fashion that all expectations of the outcome were met, not that positive aspects occurred for anybody caught up in the endeavor, anything positive in that fashion being a more-or-less sidebar byproduct.
"I do not pretend that the conversations I have recorded can be regarded as verbatim reports. I never kept notes of what was said on this or the other occasion, but I have a good memory for what concerns me, and though I have put these conversations in my own words they faithfully represent, I believe, what was said."W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM: The Razor's Edge
What follows in this paragraph not everybody warms to. Many say it harkens back to nothing more than stereotypes and clichés, as if what is being presented has been lifted straight out of some low budget 1940's black-and-white grade B voodoo or zombie movie. Be that as it may, similar as to how Somerset Maugham states it in the above quote, I'm passing on to you what the Obeah told me as best as I recall it. Where 1940"s B-movies got their information from I don't know, but I can assure you that what the Obeah told me he didn't get from any book or movie, no matter old or new. I don't know if he could even read and I'm sure he had never seen a movie in his life, or anything on television for that fact. Timing was everything and it was critical for drawing strength from nature and the environment.[3] Rituals and ingredients had their place too, but as for the single most important part the Obeah stressed only one thing, without which if not had, would imperil if not most certainly weaken any attempt from the start. Even then certain criteria levels were better than others in contributing successfully to the overall outcome. That one thing, in order to have all final aspect expectations met, required from the person a personal item. Now, this is where things got tricky. Not only what the personal item was relative to the person involved, but also how the item was obtained mattered greatly in the overall worthiness of the item's strength or viability. However, before I was actually able to proceed with any of the above at even the barest level, fate or destiny or some unknown universal function never given a name, but whose action replicated the exact same outcome anyway, sprang up out of nowhere. From the "stars" as the Obeah would say.
IF A SECOND RATE OBEAH COULD DO IT, WHAT COULD A FIRST RATE GOD DO?
Early one Saturday morning in Mr. Hall's yet-to-open for the day rum bar located along the mountain road not far from where I lived in the Blue Mountains, we were quietly sitting having coffee and chit-chatting the day away when suddenly an unsettling commotion occurred outside. Just to the left of the rum bar entrance and built into it as part of the same building, was a small store with a walk-up window facing the street, allowing people of all ages to obtain products without the need to enter the rum bar. Mr. Hall kept the store well stocked with all kinds of canned goods and small items for sale to the community so they wouldn't have to travel clear down the mountain for salt, sugar, rice, and other things. If enough people requested a given item Mr. Hall would stock it, all marketed at a reasonable cost, often times offering a needed item on the cuff and/or simply bartering for it.
On this particular morning three young women from the general area, possibly early to mid twenties or so in age, were availing themselves of some ice cold orange sodas from the store front when one of the bottles fell to the ground and broke, with one of the young women stepping on a glass shard, cutting her foot. In turn her response was what created the commotion Mr. Hall and I heard. Immediately he and I were outside and just as quickly he, seeing the problem, rushed back and returned with a first aid kit. In those few seconds I removed a Kleenex from a small travel package I carried in a pocket of my shoulder bag and handed it to the young lady to stem the flow of blood. Returning, Mr. Hall had her hold her leg up as he began cleaning the wound, applying antiseptic, and putting a bandage over the cut. In the meantime the young woman, standing on one leg and with a need to balance herself, reached for the nearest thing to hold on to, which happened to be my shoulder. In doing so she handed me the Kleenex. That day I was wearing cargo pants which have not only two regular pockets, but also outside on each upper leg, large separate pockets with snap close top flaps. I slipped the Kleenex into one of the side pockets where it was soon forgotten. Since the young woman wasn't wearing shoes, to ensure dirt wouldn't get into the cut or the bandage coming off, Mr. Hall wrapped her foot with several layers of gauze, asked her to come back in few days for him to look at it, gave all three young women new orange sodas, then we all went back to what we had been doing.
Not long afterwards found me at the lair of the Obeahman even higher in the mountains of the Blue Mountains relating to him the events that had unfolded at Mr. Hall's. The Obeah, unable to contain himself, could hardly believe what befell us. Raising his arms stretched outwards in front of himself starting waist high, elbows slightly bent, both hands open with palms facing upwards reaching higher towards the heavens, looking to the sky, relayed to me it was greater than anything meant to be in that the two of were so insignificant in the overall scheme of things, I must truly be favored and bowing his head, said he was truly humbled.
The Obeah asked if I liked the young woman. I told him I didn't anything her, I just assisted Mr. Hall in what needed to be done and that was about it. The Obeah, not particularly pleased with my answer, probed for a clearer meaning asking if I "wanted to know her." This was where I had to be careful. His "me wanting to know her" most likely fell into the biblical sense of did Joseph "know or not know" Mary prior to Jesus' birth. After he explained what his plan was I liked the idea because it was basically a dry run of our upcoming major plan, but I said, only if the aftermath of the initial results unfolded in a natural order without additional interference on our part. He agreed that would be the case which meant that the young woman as one half of our interaction, was off limits following our interaction. I, as the initiator, was of course the other half. Because of the Necklace I wore and the power vested in it the Obeah knew I was long under the protection of the Lord Buddha and wouldn't be able to make me do anything.
The most relevant sections of any Buddhist commentaries brought to my attention thus far regarding anyone or anything, including my necklace, being vested with, by, or falling "under the protection of the Lord Buddha" has been cited as coming from Invitation to Deities (Devaradhana) as translated from the original Pali and found in the appendix to "The Book of Protection," re the following:
By the power of this protection may you be free from all dangers arising from malign influences of the planets, demons, and spirits. May thy misfortunes vanish.
By the power of the Buddha may all evil omens and untoward circumstances, the ominous cry of birds, the malign conjunctions of the stars, and evil (by others) be rendered nugatory.
For more please see:
Even White Light Shields can and do weaken, collapse, or be rendered impotent, buckling under to another's stronger power when pitted against each other in tests of strength. Not so when one falls under the protection of the Lord Buddha, the protection is impenetrable as long as the rights so vested are adhered to.[4]
With all of the above settled and behind us the Obeah, assuring himself and me I was willing to continue, in preparation for our major endeavor, set about telling me my next step. Everything about everything made sense. It was amazing. So simple, I could see how it would work. All it needed was imputus, a kick in the ass so to speak, the power. The question was, was it real, and if so did I "have it." The Obeah thought so. I was sure I could feel it, or was I being duped by my own susceptibility?
THE OBEAH MAN REVEALS HIS SECRETS AND THE SPELL IS CAST
The instructions were so simple, so forthright and clear anybody could have thought of them. The Obeah told me to locate the domicile where the young woman lived. Then find the path she used daily to go back and forth to that same home. Search out a plant, a tree would be best, especially one that cast comforting shade, growing along her route that had a root extending under that same path. After the young woman left, but before she returned, without hurting the plant, carefully remove a piece of root that passed as close as possible to being directly under her footsteps. The Obeah then said to get a soda, perferably from the same place, just like the one she was drinking when she cut her foot. Saving the liquid separately, unless I was able to get a piece of the original bottle, break the bottle in the same location where the original broke, explaining to me of course, that a piece of the original would have the "strongest power." Since I had to go to Mr. Hall's to get the soda I remembered seeing him kicking pieces of the broken bottle out of the way before anyone had time to pick them up due to the need to attend to the young woman first. Searching in the weeds along the edge of the building where the incident occurred I found a whole bottom piece of a broken bottle along with several smaller pieces clearly identifying them as being from the same type orange soda. Taking them as being part of the original I proceeded to the next step.
Following instructions from the Obeah, I returned home and directly in front of the door, the door any person entering my house legally would have to use, I dug a small trench transversely across the path about a foot or two from the door. At midnight I carefully placed the piece of root lengthwise in the hole along with the tissue with the young woman's blood on it and a shard from the original broken bottle. I then poured some of the orange soda over the items and covered it all as if nothing had been done. The next morning when I left for work I did so without crossing the buried items by hopping the side yard fence. When I returned that afternoon the shutter-like doors that separated the veranda from interior had been folded back. It wasn't unusual to occasionally find a Peace Corps volunteer or two who had let themselves in, but today was different. On the veranda that day, rather than the expected volunteer or two, was instead the same young woman that had cut her foot in front of Mr. Hall's rum bar a few days before. The woman told me she had barely ever spoken to a white person. She also said I was the first white person she had ever touched when she put her hand on my shoulder and for sure never in her life had she ever entered the house of a white person, yet here she was, dressed in her best finery sitting on my veranda, the two of us chatting away the rest of the day over ice teas as though we had known each other forever. As the afternoon was slowly drifting into a long red-orange Caribbean sunset our total loss of time was shatered when out of nowhere someone outside began yelling her name. The someone was the young woman's mother and sister who had, after Mr. Hall told them the young woman had asked where I lived, went looking for her. The mother, saying she wanted her daughter home before dark took her and left. Later the young woman told me her mother told her to stay away from me, I was evil. Shades of the Curandero.
After hearing the results of my first attempt the Obeah could hardly restrain himself. Previously I had written rituals and ingredients had their place, but the single most important part was primarily only one thing, without of which if not had, would imperil or most certainly weaken any attempt from the start. Even then certain criteria levels were better than others in contributing successfully to the overall outcome. That one thing, in order to have all final expectations met, required from the person a personal item. Not only what the personal item was relative to the person involved, but also how the item was obtained matters greatly in the overall worthiness of the item's strength or viability. In the young woman's case she voluntarily handed me a tissue with her blood on it. Can you imagine, HER blood. Not only was the tissue not solicited or stolen after the fact without her knowledge, but handed to me of her own free will. There was no trickery, coercion, or intimidation involved. Except for a person having full knowledge of the whole thing beforehand and still participating there isn't much that could carry more power.
"At this point I am not willing nor comfortable discussing or revealing to a large general audience the Obeah related warpage of time episode that befell others through my auspices in that it involves people I know who to this day are not aware of the circumstances. In the overall scheme of things, even though the event transpired many years ago, it is best they still remain in the dark about it."FOOTNOTE [9] Mystic Aztec Sun God
The person I refer to in the above quote is the same Peace Corps volunteer I wrote about previously that I met at the Miami airport on our first day of deployment. Once in Jamaica I began teaching at the college level in Jamica's capitol city Kingston where the University of West Indies was located while she was sent to a rural area in and around the general area of Discovery Bay on the north coast, quite some distance both physically and culturally across the island than from where I lived.
Jamaica is a former British Commonwealth island-nation located in the Caribbean Sea roughly 600 miles south of Miami, Florida and 500 miles north of South America with a population of around 2.8 million. The island's economy is largely dominated by a generally well regulated tourist industry primarily centered around the miles of fabulous pristine north coast white sandy beaches, year around warm tropical weather, easy travel distance from the North America continent, and the many high end north coast resorts. The tourist population is predominently white, the island population is predominently black. When I was in the Peace Corps the typical PC volunteer in Jamaica was white. It was relatively easy for a volunteer to pass as a tourist in the resorts on occasion if they so chose, and sometimes some did. Typically, a volunteer would have their parents or someone stateside pay for a several day resort package for two or more, then show up carrying luggage as though they just arrived. Once registered they would invite other volunteers to join them with all taking advantage of the resort amenities and nobody ever questioning. It should noted that the official Peace Corps stance was strongly opposed to such proclivities, nor did large number of volunteers participate. However, most that did had either done so as part of their regular lifestyle prior to joining the Peace Corps and/or found themselves in much needed R&R from the rigors of their daily grind or both.
It was brought to my attention that one or two of the Peace Corps volunteers in the Kingston area were going to do just that, i.e., have someone stateside make reservations for them at one of the big resort hotels in Ocho Rios for the weekend. With no reason not too, and since we were all welcome, even me, I invited myself to join in. I did so mostly because Discovery Bay is an easy straight-on few minute travel time from Ocho Rios. I was betting the Peace Corps girl I met at the airport would be there even though she would be insisting on how the north coast resorts were way to bourgeois. The thing is, the resorts had swimming pools and hot showers. Since we had been on the island for sometime I didn't see how she could resist either, even if she stayed only for a few hours. My next step would be is how I could obtain the "strongest possible personal item" from her by her own free will, without coercion, intimidation, or stolen. If she didn't show up at all, then I would have a different set of problems.
By the time I arrived Saturday afternoon she was already there, sitting in a one piece swim suit in the shade at a table near the pool with a few other volunteers having foo-foo drinks taking turns exaggerating their adventures and misadventures. Having pretty much run the gamut between themselves, with me walking up and fresh meat, they wanted to hear any lies I might have. After a few minutes of reintroductory small talk I told them how I attempt to make what I teach as relevant as possible, relating for example Discovery Bay and St. Ann's bay with the Renaissance and Martin Luther King Jr. with Leonardo Da Vinci. Columbus landed for the first time in what has now become Jamaica's Discovery Bay in 1494 and in 1503 he, his crew, and ships were marooned in Jamaica for a year in St. Ann's Bay, exactly in same years as the Renaissance. Most of my Jamaican students were familiar with American civil rights leaders such as Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. In King's case I would bring up the Protestant reformation leader Martin Luther telling them both Martin Luther King Jr. and his father were named after Martin Luther. Then I explained the original Luther became famous when he nailed his religious manifesto to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517. Using that date I would jump to Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 – 1519), his influence in paintings during the Renaissance and his various inventions such as a Flying Machine hundred of years before airplanes were invented.
Continuing, I told the Peace Corps group that after being in Jamaica for as long as I had how naive I'd become. Discussing Jamaica, the Caribbean and hurricanes with one of my classes one day I brought up Da Vinci, saying that 500 years before, circa 1480, he had invented a divice that helped predict changes in the weather ahead of time. It took 300 years until a more refined version was developed, only this time using human hair. I told my students so simple was the design we could even build one ourselves, maybe even predict storms and hurricanes before they hit. They loved the idea. We began researching Leonardo and his version and why the 300 year later one had changes and why the need for them. Then we went about gathering the materials to build one and where my naivety came in. We needed a long straight hair to make the device work. All my students were Black and not one of them had long straight hair. I never even thought of it. Everybody in the group around the pool laughed. Even though other females sitting with me that day had long straight hair, I leaned towards the one from Discovery Bay saying my classes have moved on, but the project sits there undone. Telling her if I'd had a long straight hair like hers at my disposal there would have been no problem. Then she bit, offering not just one hair, but two, pulled by her of her own accord and handed me.
After meeting with the Obeah I waited two weeks, to the Saturday following the Saturday after Ocho Rios. That Saturday morning, not knowing what to expect, I set into motion what I hoped would end similar to what happened between the Jamaican woman and myself, only with the Peace Corps volunteer from Discovery Bay. Not many minutes later, on what was an exceptionally beautiful blue sky cloudless Saturday morning, I was standing all alone out by the back fence just beyond the veranda sipping hot homemade percolator brewed Blue Mountain coffee from my favorite cup while gazing out over the Caribbean wondering how high up I would have to go before I could see South America when unexpectantly some Peace Corps volunteers walked in. The defacto leader was a fellow volunteer and friend assigned to Catholic Relief Services in Spanish Town, and unusual for a Peace Corps volunteer, as part of his duties, had a vehicle at his disposal, in his case a practically new Ford Bronco. They had decided to get me, go over to San San Beach near Unity Cove for the day, then come back and finish the weekend at my place hanging out on the veranda wolfing-down Red Stripes and bullshitting late into the night. Before they came up, knowning most likely I wouldn't have enough provisions for everybody for the weekend they stopped in Papine at the bottom of the mountain road to pick up extra supplies and while there encountered a minor surprise.
When I walked in from the veranda I was hit face-on with their minor surprise. Standing right in front of me all bedraggled as if in a daze or drugged, was the girl from Discovery Bay. They said they found her wandering around Papine in the open air market dressed in a manner considered way out of line by the Peace Corps, besides having no idea who she was or where she was, as if she was a zombie or something [5]. As for her manner of dress, Peace Corps has a long standing but semi-unofficial policy that requests, suggests, or tells without mandate that female volunteers dress in a fashion that would lessen the possibility of being viewed as provocative by male members of the host country. Reasons vary, but mostly done to protect female volunteers who, because of their roles in deployment often travel and live alone. So, while traveling in public, no low slung tank tops with no bra, no hot pants style short shorts, etc. She always abided by the rule, but this time and totally out of character, she was found dazed wandering around the market place in Papine dressed just that way, all alone miles from home in short shorts, low cut tanktop, and no bra, the way she might dress when lounging around her house. When I stepped up and made eye contact her eyes completely rolled back in their sockets with her head at the sametime tilting backwards, she herself collapsing to the floor as if the air had been let out her body or all of her skeletal structure suddenly disappeared.
With none of us really knowing what to do next or what the matter was, or at least me not being able to say anything on pure conjecture, we carried her to the spare bedroom to make her as comfortable as possible while discussing what we should do next, like medical care or what. If it was drug related we all agreed to keep it quiet until we had the facts because self indulgent drug use was grounds for dismissal in the Peace Corps. An accidental OD from prescription meds or a mickey was a different story. However, before we could do anything, she, having laid down for only a short while and hearing our voices came out of the bedroom. Her eyes cleared and focused and now walking steadily recognized me and others asking where she was and how she got there. The last thing she remembered was waking up, brushing her teeth and making breakfast when suddenly it was now. She had no recollection of being found in the market place in Papine or being brought up the mountain to my place, although considering the circumstances and how dazed she seemed to have been, she was extremely happy it worked out the way did. Except for feeling grungy and needing a shower she soon seemed back to her old self as if nothing happened. Being unfamiliar with my place and the mountain environment, plus not knowing exactly where she was, she didn't favor the idea of being left alone, nor was she comfortable enough to head home by herself, so considering the options she decided to join us to San San Beach. On the way we picked up another female Peace Corps volunteer and she loaned a swim suit and enough clothes the Discovery Bay volunteer needed to get by. Late Sunday afternoon everybody gathered up their belongings and headed out, all that is except the Discovery Bay girl. Not only did she stay Sunday night she stayed the whole following week, not leaving until the next weekend was over. After that, for the rest of of our deployment in Jamaica, except for the time needed to accomplishing our duties as Peace Corps volunteers, we were practically inseparable.
No sooner had the Peace Corps volunteer left for Disco Bay after staying at my place for a week than I made a beeline to the Obeah's. As I saw it a huge warpage of time had occurred and I was hoping the Obeah could offer some clarification. I use the word warpage because not enough physical count-down clock time had elapsed between me setting into motion what I did and the Peace Corps girl being found wandering around in a trance-like state all by herself in the open air bazaar in Papine. The separation in time and distance in miles between Discovery Bay and Papine is just too far for her to have made it from her place to Papine only to be found at the time she was. If she hadn't left in the middle of the night dressed as she was (not likely, plus she remembered making breakfast) the only way she could have made it to Papine when she did was if she had been instantly translocated in some fashion or enveloped within the operational premisses of a highly compressed localized, thick jello-like time packet (i.e., warpage), atypically operating somehow at the moment on the conventional plane.
I told the Obeah I wanted answers, asking why the Peace Corps girl was so bedraggled when she showed up at my place, as if she had been swept up and thrust over Niagara Falls or something. I wanted to know where she "was" during the time warp like aspect of it all, could she have been trapped there forever. So too, I wanted to know why she ended up a couple miles away in Papine and not at my front door or on my veranda like the Jamaican woman? I was beginning to think no wonder everybody was afraid of Obeah, you could do anything you wanted, but even with the power unless you knew how, you couldn't control it. There was always a price to pay. I made it clear if he didn't give me answers I wanted out, the whole thing was too scary. The Obeah shrugged his shoulders saying he didn't know how things worked, only that they did. Then the Obeah, with me not knowing how he knew of such things, and of which I thoroughly addressed years later in "The Code Maker, The Zen Maker", Part V, Of Minds and Landscapes: Into Their Interior (linked below), asked if I remembered the incident when I found myself high in the fridged weather conditions of the Himalayas visiting a farm and followed a woman from the farm into a nearby lake only to find myself seconds later thousand miles away being pulled out of the waters of a temple in the hot sub-tropical weather of south India? Nodding yes, indicating I remembered, he asked where was I, meaning me, during that thousand mile few seconds trip between the lake and the temple?
Now I was the one shrugging shoulders. He said I ended up blocks away and a day before I was delivered to the holy man. Why, the Obeah asked? Then answering it himself said, "Things sometimes just work that way." Waiting a few seconds, taking a breath he added, "You weren't so afraid when it was Maharshis and Zen, why are you so afraid now when it's me and Obeah?"(see)
For several days following my semi-heated discussion between the Obeah and myself I kept going over-and-over in my mind the two events between the Peace Corps volunteer from Discovery Bay and the Jamaican young woman from my local village. In that I had set into motion both events and both events were so similar, why was the mid way into the second event so different? After all, because of me the Peace Corp young woman ended up in Papine in a daze. If fellow Peace Corps volunteers who knew her hadn't stumbled across her who knows what might have happened. You dont' fuck with the natural flow of things without repercussions. Finally it came to me. Unlike the young Jamaican woman I wasn't able to obtain a tree root from the Peace Corps young woman's path to-and-from her abode because there wasn't a suitable one available. So I improvised. On the doorstep just as you entered her house was a handmade weaved doormat made from sugar cane husks or hemp that I could easily tell was locally made because of the color, type of weave, dyes, and material. Since I knew she would most likely use it on a regular basis going in and out of her house I carefully snipped a piece slipping it out from the top of the mat and used that piece in lieu of a root found along the path. Later, in conversation I asked the Peace Corps girl, or woman as the case may be, about the door mat. Thinking the question was rather odd she still told me the story behind it which she thought was even odder:
"One day, wending her way home from my place in the Blue Mountains to her place in Discovery Bay, she stopped at the open air bazzar in Papine like she did once in a while, for no other reason than to just see if she could find anything of interest. She saw a hand weaved doormat that she couldn't get out of her mind, going back several times just to look at it. Asking about the mat the higgler told her that one day a thousand year old man came down from way high up in the mountains carrying two huge bundles of weavable material. Knowing she was a master-weaver of baskets and such the old man told her if she could weave him a water tight basket of certain dimensions with a leakproof lid he would give her all of the remaining material to weave and sell whatever she wanted. Seeing the weaving material was of good quality and plenty would be left over the higgler agreed. The doormat she said was the last remaining article from the original material and that she had only just put it out for the first time that morning."
The above scenario wherein I substituted a root from a given path with a piece of doormat the Peace Corps volunteer from Disco Bay stepped on nearly every day is a fine example in which a small change in one state can result in large differences in a later state.
In the book The Vocation of Man, the author Johann Gottlieb Fichte writes, "you could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby ... changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole".
In the book The Razor's Edge, the main character is Larry Darrell who, after World War I, goes on a search looking for the meaning of life, eventully ending up in India doing meditation study-practice under a venerated holy man. Larry, in conversation with the book's author Somerset Mugham explains that it is a mistake to think that the holy men of India sitting in meditation for hours all day lead useless lives saying "Nothing that happens is without effect. If you throw a stone in a pond the universe isn't quite the same as it was before."(see)
The above two quotes have been selected by me as examples because I am familar with them. Both quotes are part and parcel, albeit on the easy side, of what is usually given credit to as the Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly Effect discribes a phenomenon, often referred to as a theory, "in which small changes in one part of an interconnected system can cause disproportionately large outcomes elsewhere, setting off a chain of events that can lead to unpredictable results."(see) In other words, a small change in one state can result in large differences in a later state. I make reference to the Butterfly Effect because of how it falls into my attempt to minipulate the actions of the Peace Corps volunteer from Discovery Bay. Unable to find a suitable root from her path I improvised by making a minor change, in turn altering the outcome, at least the part that affected the role of the root. The doormat didn't exist in it's finished form until the higgler weaved it into existance, meaning in a sense that the doormat was "born" in Papine, which was a more powerful draw in location. A piece of root derived from a plant growing in a natural state under her path is in a scense born there, making it an even stronger draw. Under the spell, the Peace Corps girl from Discovery Bay responded accordingly, in turn underscoring my neophyte state and a lack in my level of knowledge.
Again, as a refresher on Obeah-Voodoo comparison, etc., if you haven't done so already, please see Footnote [5].
NOW, ON TO THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETO, AND HOME
"From Lourdes it was on to Pamplona for the running of the bulls then a ten or twelve hour train ride via Madrid to Tarifa after taking a little bit at the end by bus to hop on the ultra fast ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangiers for a couple of days for no other reason than to just do it. Back in Spain I skirted along the coast through Barcelona into France then on to Cannes. In Cannes I caught up with a friend I met a few years before while volunteering for hurricane duty with the Red Cross."After watching the Enterprise depart from port I doubled back west from Cannes about sixty miles to Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, sort of inland and up from the coast maybe twenty-five miles from Marseille, to pay homage to Mary Magdalene, view her skeletal remains as well as her skull, and visit the cave she dwelled in the final years of her life located about twelve miles away --- that required after arrival an approximate 45 minute walk/hike to the grotto. Having already visited Our Lady of Lourdes, Lourdes, France on this trip I was on my way to The Holy House of Loreto, in Loreto, Italy."
As the above double paragraph quote attests, as found in the main text above previously, for what happens next we leave the Obeah and the calendar year of 1978 and return to Europe and the calendar year 2007, having just left the sanctuary of Mary Magdalene in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, France, and except for a couple intervening stops, on the way to the sixth and last translocation spot, Loreto, Italy, putting all the discussions of "if a second rate Obeah using a piece of tree root and a couple of human hairs could do it, what could a first rate God do" behind us.
Several years before I was born, as when I was born, my family was living in the then small Southern California coastal community of Redondo Beach located right along the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean about twenty miles southwest of Los Angeles. Growing up in the early years after the war in Southern California one of the first things I learned about traveling was that going up and down the state, i.e., north and south, wasn't so bad. Otherwise however, immediately toward the west was the Pacific Ocean and, except for Catalina Island 26 miles away, the next chunk of land before Japan and China was Hawaii, all thousands of miles away. Traveling east by car, the typical mode of transportation in those days for a family, was another thing. Less than a hundred miles east of Redondo was a fairly significant mountain range, and on the other side of that mountain range was the Mojave Desert, a desert made up of sand, rocks, mountains, Joshua trees, tumbleweeds, horn toads, lizards, and cactus that continued east pretty much the same way until you reached the southern most states of the Great Plains and the Mississippi River some 1500 miles away. So said, traveling vast distances to get up or down or out of the Southern California by plane, train, or car was pretty much a given.
That's why traveling in Europe always amazed me. I had only just crossed into Italy on my way to Loreto and done so for only a short time when I decided to stay a couple of days in the Tuscany town of Prato after having spent the day traveling to and visiting the birthplace house of Leonardo da Vinci in Anchiano. Glancing at the map I saw Loreto was roughly 120 miles away. I had just entered the country and I was already half way there. I used to drive the 120 miles north to Santa Barbara in California from Redondo Beach sometimes twice a year just to see the road races and think nothing of it, and California's northern border was still another 600 miles away. But now, here I was in Italy a 120 miles from my final destination of Loreto and the whole country was hardly much more than twice that wide. How Rome conquered and ran the whole known world for hundreds of years is beyond me.
So, what IS the house in the Holy House of Loreto? Well, for one thing, as a site it's different than the other sites discussed thus far, but in many respects it's similar. As with the others it is a Mary Mother of Jesus site and like the others, deals with apparition, translocation, bilocation, but Mary herself doesnt't appear, not in the flesh or even in cameo. What does appear, at least to us after-the-fact, is a house, an actual full size made out of stone house that is reportedly the same house, once in Nazareth but now in Loreto, that was the family dwelling of Mary in her youth and that the Angel Gabriel entered telling her she would give birth to a child, naming him Jesus. Jesus was said to have been raised in the same house as per the following:
"Then He went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But His mother treasured up all these things in her heart.
"And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man."
Luke 2: 51-52
The above, Luke 2: 51-52, refers to Jesus returning to his home in Nazareth with his parents Joseph and Mary as a young boy of age 12 after having visited the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus then disappears from the Bible narrative until he walks up to John the Baptist to be baptized in the Jordan River as found in Luke 3: 21-22. Then in the very next verse, Luke 3: 23, it says, "Jesus Himself was about thirty years old when He began His ministry." Other than saying Jesus returned to Nazareth with his parents in Luke 2: 51-52, apparently living there with them, then saying Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in Luke 3: 21-22, eighteen years from age 12 to age 30, slipped by without mention. As far as we know Jesus didn't do anything of any special note during those missing years. However, as found above, Luke 2:52 says Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. Then, jumping to John the Baptist, no sooner had John baptized him than, as found in Luke 3:22, a voice from heaven says “You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.” God says he is well pleased with him up to that point so Jesus must have done something to please him, even though what he did didn't make it into the Bible. Some say he just laid low and stayed out of trouble. Others say that during that eighteen year period Jesus was traveling in India preaching his brand of religion and learning Hinduism and Buddhism. Interestingly enough my mentor, mentioned several times previously, but more prominently in conjunction with Our Lady of Fatima and the Miracle of the Sun, traveling throughout Europe searching for answers to the meaning of life after World War I, met a university educated Benedictine monk named Father Ensheim who, using the Hemis Manuscripts as a foil, suggested my mentor might find the answers to what he was searching for in the east. For more regarding the results of Ensheim's suggestions as well as Jesus traveling in India, see Hemis Manuscripts. However, not wanting to get too far afield here, as my focus is on the Holy House with Jesus having lived in it with his mother Mary in Nazareth up to at least twelve years of age and on and off possibly longer, and if traditionally having done so, was it the exact same building-structure house somehow now located in Loreto, Italy? Since the house was once Mary's and is nowhere close to being in Nazareth, but instead in Italy and mysteriously so, I've included it as the last of my apparition, translocation, and bilocation itinerary.
With the fall of Rome in 476 AD, and even before, the grip on their territories began disintegrating, throwing open the gate for all kinds of other occupying forces, big and small, local and distant, to move in and run things in their own image rather than Rome's. Such was the case with the huge geographical ground area that surrounds and encompasses Palestine and Jerusalem as well as Nazareth and Galilee, all typically discribed in the much bigger picture in the west as the Holy Land, with the majority if not all of the occupying forces being both anti-Jewish and anti-Christian. When Christians gained a foothold they would erect churches and basilicas and when they lost control the opposing forces would tear them down. Somehow, through it all, the Holy House remained basically unscathed.
Almost any person who has spent any amount of time researching one or the other or both of the testaments in the Holy Bible, no matter what their reason or what their lean, will soon run into the fact that everything presented therein, no matter how major, minor, or even miniscule, depends totally on who, when, and how it was translated, and then what was the motive or reason behind that specific translation. Such is the case in Luke 1 where in so many words in so many verses an angel comes to Mary telling her she will give birth to a son who is the son of God and that she will name him Jesus. Although in the end the results are the same there are several versions of how the result came about. It is the versions of those versions that tie into the Holy House.
What is meant by versions of those versions and how it ties into the Holy House is how different translations, using the same Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts as their original grounding source, interpret the Angel Grabriel's first interaction with Mary and how it went down. So too, besides the canon version within the officially accepted biblical texts there is also the non-canon apocryphal texts such as the Gospel of James that covers much of the same territory as Luke when it comes to the Annunciation. Although it isn't part of the officially accepted version of the Bible it is often used to cite any number of things, the names of Mary's mother and father being Joachim and Anne for example, of which neither of their names appear in the regular Bible.[6]
In what is now a very rare book titled Translatio miraculosa ecclesiae beate Marie virginis de Loreto written in Latin on vellum leaf around 1470 AD by Pietro di Giorgio Tolomei, called Teramano, a book that later appeared in over 30 editions translated into Italian, German and French over the next fifty years, was the first time the Holy House of Loreto had been identified and circulated in print to a much wider audience as being the same house in which Mary had been born and raised in Nazareth as well as in which she received the Annunciation and where she lived during the childhood of Jesus. The book also contained within it's text that not long after the crucifixion of Jesus the house had been converted into a church by the Apostles as well as presenting the book's readers what was and has become the traditional historical background of the Holy House, briefly summarized in the quote below. To see a copy of Tolomei's book, authenticated to have been published sometime within a few years of 1500, the University of Cambridge has one in their digital library available online. Clicking a few buttons and arrows you can move it, turn pages, enlarge it, etc. (see). Otherwise on to the quote:
"(T)he empress Helena made a pilgrimage to Nazareth and caused a basilica to be erected over it
(i.e., the Holy House, circa 326 AD), in which worship continued until the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Threatened with destruction by the Turks, the church was miraculously transferred to what is now Loreto after the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, Acre, fell to the Saracens in 1291. Flights of angels carried Mary's humble dwelling first to a hill near Fiume, now Rijeka, in Croatia, then, in 1294, across the Adriatic to a laurel forest near Recanati and eventually to the hill that is the site of the present shrine. The town that sprang up around the Holy House was known first as Villa Santa Maria and later as Loreto." (source; scroll to page 33 on the sidebar)
As the above attests, the Empress Helena, mother of Roman Emperor Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, during her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, had a basilica built over the Holy House creating a larger more luxurious place for worship and protecting the Holy House from the elements and possible outright destruction. Other than the documention of a half a dozen people, eight at the most as found below, that researchers have been able to come up with, other than it existed, not much else is known about the Holy House until it showed up in Loreto. Even then, for the first few hundred years or so no one expressed an excessive over concern with it other than just generally accepting the traditional story and letting it go at that. It is known that after Rome's demise the broader general Holy Land area was fought for over and over in a give and take having been both won and lost several times primarily by Christian armies from Europe on one side and a variety of anti-Christian military groups on the other, many done so in a series of wars given name to as the Crusades and that the general Holy Land area so fought for so often, had within it's brace the city of Nazareth and thus then what has become known as the Holy House.
The Crusades customarily have been described as eight in number, the first starting in 1095 and ending with the fall of Acre in 1291. However, for centuries, the people of Europe had made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The Anglo Saxons of Britain were making pilgrimages as early as the 8th century when St. Willibald, Bishop of Eichstadt made a journey lasting seven years. Source:
It is the last of the Cursades with the fall of Acre in 1291 that interests us here. From a short time after the crucifixion where it has been said the Apostles and the Christian faithful used the Holy House as a place of gathering and worship to their much wider dispersal because of the area being conquered on and off to that 1291 period, the Holy House is only mentioned by any sort of viable documentation as existing in it's original location probably no more than a half a dozen times, eight at the most. Even so, as sketchy as historical documents can be from that era they can be cross referenced, and when they are the Holy House comes up listed, and not only listed as existing, but also as being in it's original location by at least one eyewitness up until 1289 A.D. One of the people who mentions it is the aforementioned Willibald, Bishop of Eichstadt as found in the following:
"We learn from the Saxon monk, Willibald, who visited Nazareth in the eighth century that the Church of the Annunciation, underneath which were the house and grotto, would have been destroyed before that time by the Saracens had not the Christians redeemed it more than once, by the payment of money."
The above, referring to Willibald visiting Nazareth, was in 725 A.D. Others who have been documented as having gone to Nazareth during the same era and reporting they saw the Holy House standing in it's original location, oft times from their own hand, sometimes from their testimony to others, sometimes via investigations by biographers or historians, are regular pilgrims and monks such as the Pilgrim of Piacenza AKA Antoninus Martyr in 570, the Russian Abbot Daniel in 1107, and John Phocas a monk of Patmos in 1177. A couple of bigtime heavyweights having been recorded are Saint Francis of Assisi in 1220 and King Louis IX of France in 1251, later canonized as a Saint in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII. Two of the last visitors recorded to have seen the Holy House in it's original location before it disappeared in 1291 was the Dominican Burchard of Mount Sion in 1283 and Ricoldo of Mount de Croce in 1289, also a Dominican. After Ricoldo roughly 43 years passed before any other credible eyewitnesses show up. In 1331-36 William of Bodensel, Ludolf of Sudheim in 1336-41, and Niccolo of Poggibonsi in 1345, with all speaking of the Holy House in so many words in the past tense, i.e., gone, no longer there. The above witnesses, from Antoninus Martyr in 570 to Niccolo of Poggibonsi in 1345 are all documented in a slew of places by a slew of authors, however for our purposes here five authors in five books have combined all of the information and interwoven it into their works. In 1906 a Frenchman, Canon Ulysses Chevalier, published a book titled Notre Dame de Lorette. Étude critique sur l’authenticité de la Santa Casa (Our Lady of Loreto. Critical Study of the authenticity of the Holy House) that not only tore the living shit out of the Holy House of Loreto having been transported by angels out of it's original location in Nazareth, but that it never existed in situ enough that it could have been transported, angels or otherwise. Everybody thought Chevalier put the nail in the coffin and ended the story. Not long after his book was published than several authors and historians came out of the woodwork using all of Chevalier's own deep research against him, opening a window to turning everything he wrote upsidedown. I've selected four books in a list at the footnote, two before Chevalier's book thus then untainted by him and presenting the traditional view, and two after him thus full of attempts to refute him, then included his book inbetween the four. You can compare everything back and forth as much and as many times as you want seeking out all of their sources, proving or disproving the traditional view as you feel fit.[7]
All of the information on this page thus far and continuing has been gathered together and presented for one thing and one thing only, to help substantiate in some fashion that the apparition I as a young boy experienced on Catalina Island was real. To help in backing up that thesis, all of the information in the above paragraph previous has been gathered together and presented for the same reason by substantiating in some fashion that the Holy House of Loreto, the sixth and last of my six visitation sites, presently secured away inside the Basilica della Santa Casa in Loreto, Italy, is indeed the one and the same house that Mary, Mother of Jesus grew up in, the Angel Gabriel spoke to her in, she raised her son in, and that stood at one time butted up against the grotto in completion of their abode in Nazareth. For all or any of the tenets so presented to be construed as acceptable propositions, i.e., the truth, that is, the Holy House of Loreto actually being holy, a lot of things considered questionable by a lot of people have to be taken as axioms, Jesus being the Son of God and born of the Virgin Mary for example. If the implied prospects of things being holy because of being a byproduct of that which causes holiness to be holy is taken not as a given or existing, then the there is really no value or worth to any of it.
A couple of years out of high school, after having lost my dream job and facing the never ending threat of the draft, a buddy and I decided to travel for the summer throughout Mexico on a road trip, the same road trip that, in 1960, and totally unintended against future events, encompassed the first of my apparition visit sites, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Eventually we drove clear through to the Yucatan, and, without realizing it, crossing over the outside perimeter of the then unknown, undiscovered, and unnamed Chicxulub impact crater, into it's geologically time-masked interior, ending for me with the following results:
"After visiting those half dozen or so ruins leading up to Oxkintok we ended somewhat south of Mayapan, said to be the last of the ancient Mayan capitals, and had to turn north to get there. Two or three miles outside and south of Mayapan I was overcome by an all engulfing, continuous series of clear-to-my-bones cold chills rippling across my body, the abeyance of which really did not subside as much as they slowly melded into mild convulsions similar to dry-heaves then fading into a general lasting malaise all the time I was there."Thirty-plus years passed without ever experiencing anything remotely close to what transpired that day on the road into Mayapan. Then, on one of my travels through Europe many years later, I stopped at the World War II Nazi death camp of Mauthausen. I had been to Europe several times, but I had never gone to such a place. Since this portion of my travels took me so close I decided otherwise. A very close friend of mine who visited Mauthausen told me that immediately upon entering the former death camp she was overwhelmed by nausea and uncontrolable body tremors. My interest was in seeing if such a thing would happen to me. It did. When I crossed onto the grounds of the camp proper I was overcome with intense chills, nausea, and bodily sensations. Only once before had I experienced such a sickness, in the Yucatan."
It was then it dawned on me what happened in the Yucatan those so many years before. Just a short distance before driving into Mayapan, not known to either my buddy or me we drove into the crater's interior basin after crossing over the outer ring marking the edge of the then unknown 112 mile in diameter Chicxulub impact structure created by a giant asteroid 65 million years ago that inturn resulted in killing off entire species, including the dinosaurs and millions of other living creatures both great and small. My Chicxulub trip was in 1960 and Chicxulub wasn't discovered until 1980. I could see where I might expect what happened to have happened at Mauthausen because of what my friend told me. No such thing was even remotely considered by me in the Yucatan because not only had I not heard the Mauthausen story, no one even knew the crater existed, yet I was overwhelmed just the same.
When I first visited the Holy House of Loreto I had no reason not to give it anything other than the benefit of the doubt, albeit it must be said, leaning heavily toward, with minor reservations, the traditional view. That attitude translated into me holding a receptive outlook towards most of the spiritual assepcts associated with the Holy House, in turn placing me in a position to be on guard against the rise of any possible placebo effects.
Most of you who have got this far are probably astute enough to know what a placebo effect is. Briefly in recap for example, in the medical field a placebo usually refers to a medication or inoculation that has no real medicinal value, but once administered, the patient, thinking it carries curable attributes, recovers or feels the same as if it did. That recovery or feeling is known as the placebo effect. In a sense, the Mauthausen incident, since I was aware ahead of time of what happened to my friend, might have had a placebo effect relative to me, but there is no way the Chicxulub incident could have since nobody in the world knew it existed, giving me belief that what came over me at Mauthausen was true, in turn strengthing my belief that such things can and do actually happen.
In the fifth of the five books regarding the history of the Holy House as found in Footnote [6], the one authored by the Reverend G.E. Phillips, from page 119, and slightly edited here to stay in context, Phillips writes: "(T)he only door into the Holy House in 1531 was the one in the middle of the north side, which at Nazareth must have led into the cave. It is easy to understand the inconveniences of this arrangement, and the confusion necessarily caused by the struggles of the pilgrims all passing in and out through this one door; which was, moreover, in a special manner sacred, as having been used by the members of the Holy Family themselves. Pope Clement VII, in 1531 AD, therefore ordered this ancient doorway to be built up, with materials obtained by the opening of two new doorways for the entrance and exit of the people on the north and southern sides. At the same time he ordered the outline of the built-up doorway to be retained upon the wall, as is still to be seen."[8]
Spanish Jesuit Raphael Riera personally knew the Renaissance artist and architect Rainero Nerucci who was doing the work on the interior of the Holy House for Pope Clement VII. Riera related in his book History of the August House of Loreto, published in 1560, the following as to what occurred during the making of the two new doorways. The first quote appeared in the aforementioned Phillips book, the second quote, also from Riera as a source, is found in William Garrett's book listed in Footnote [7] as well.
"On the evening of May 11, 1531, Nerucci, with a band of workmen, came prepared to make the openings. Having traced the outline of one doorway in the place intended, he struck the wall with his hammer, calling at the same time to the workmen: 'Make the opening here.' Instantly a fit of trembling seized his arm, and his heart no longer beating he sank upon the ground; and thinking he was going to die, he recalled his order to the workmen, and was carried almost lifeless home and laid upon his bed. Having implored our Lady of Loreto's help, he received from God the restoration of his health, and when sufficiently recovered reported what had happened to the Pope."
"They relate that the workmen, out of reverence for the Holy House, were afraid to strike its sacred Walls; and so the architect himself, filled with greater confidence in his art than reverence for the place, came forward and struck impatiently the first blow. His right hand withered instantly, and he remained unconscious for eight hours. His wife, being called, came and threw herself down at Mary's feet in the Holy House, and, with many tears, besought the forgiveness and recovery of her husband. The Virgin most merciful, touched with compassion, obtained from her divine Son the healing of this man, who immediately recovered his senses and the use of his hand."
In a similar vein, aiso from Garrett's book, the following is found:
"John Suarez, Bishop of Coimbra, in 1562, wished to take a stone of the Santa Casa to Portugal, and place it in a chapel in his diocese, built in imitation of the Sanctuary at Loreto. His private chaplain, Francis Stella, who took the stone to him at Trent, where the Council was then sitting, seemed to be pursued on his journey by an avenging power, and told the Portuguese bishop what it had cost him to bring it there. But the lesson was unheeded; and the bishop was smitten with a malady that the physicians could not understand or relieve. Prayers were offered for his recovery, and the following message came from two convents: 'If the bishop wishes to recover, let him restore to the Virgin of Loreto what he has taken away.' Bishop Suarez lost no time in sending Stella back to Loreto with the stone; and his recovery was so rapid that, by the time the stone was replaced, his health was perfectly restored."
Determining if a story is true or not is another thing. Take Bernadette Soubirous and the series of events that led up to and surrounded her experiences with what has come to us known as Our Lady of Lourdes. Being true, meaning did Bernadette actually hear and see what she said she heard and saw, and was what she heard and saw real? Was Bernadette's experiences a brain thing, that is, one whole big hallucination, or as I would call it, "thought vapor," or did Mary the mother of Jesus actually appear before Bernadette in the flesh and/or in reality but not in the flesh, say some other just as real fashion? Spiritually or some such thing? Otherwise, both, or all, how about an undeniable physical component or revelation that wouldn't have come about or exist if not for the apparition. Anti-church, anti-Catholics spin it one way, pro-church, pro-Catholics spin it another way.
When visiting the Holy House of Loreto, that is, inside the actual room created by the walls, I was already familiar with the above two incidents involving Nerucci and Suarez and the adverse outcomes for those involved. Several years previously I had my personal experiences at Chicxulub and Mauthausen and recalled vividly the outomes of both bestowed on me, allowing me a clear insight I felt, into if a feeling or experience was real or not and/or a placebo effect caused by the knowledge of a predisposed position. I was told the interior of the Holy House was not very large, often packed with lots of visitors in a small space, and sometimes smelling what a small place might smell like with lots of visitors crammed into it. Such was not the case with my experience. I must have arrived during some kind of a lull as the place was viritually empty with only a few people showing any desire to enter or after having done so, they exited without lingering. My ears almost hurt because of the silence, as if the sound was being sucked out rather than entering, my ears intrinsically searching for something, anything resembling a sound. When I was a kid after my mother died I lived with a family that owned a flower shop. The place was so overwhelmed by the smell of flowers I lost my ability to distinguish smells between them, yet in the Holy House as I was moving, floating actually like I was full of helium, I could discern a beautiful faint fragrance of roses. No sooner had I entered and recorded that faint scent of roses than I ended up outside the marble encasement face down on the floor with someone shaking me asking if I was OK. Answering yes and thanking the person I got up with no lingering longterm after effects. Even though the man was traveling with his wife and a couple of kids he offered me a ride back to town. The proprietor that owned the place where the man was staying, hearing from the man what happened, almost insisting, offered me a room to rest or even stay if I liked, both of which I most graciously accepted, with the proprietor telling me he had heard experiences such as mine happen on occasion.
Earlier in the day, as I was wending my way up the hill to the basilica, semi-trapped as well as sort of squeezing my way through as smoothly as possible a slower group of people sloth stepping their way up the same trek, I overheard a man discussing with others that it was his birthday, and by coincidence ten years before, also on his birthday, he had visited the Holy House. Someone spoke up and said he should make it a tradition. In jest another piped in saying at his age he would be lucky to make it another ten years. With that the man recited his birthday day, date, year born, the year we were in and with some minor subtraction, his age. So, as it was, unconnected in any fashion, there I was only a few minutes before entering the Holy House complex than I became astutely aware of the day, date, and year. It was after I returned to town with the family and signing for a room, when the proprietor gave me the date, that I discovered, time-wise, three full days must have elapsed between the moment I stepped through the portal into the inside proper of the Holy House and the man helped me up off the floor following my exit. Although the man that assisted me getting up said I should have been just in front of him he had neither seen me enter, being inside, nor exit the Holy House, only finding me unconscious on the floor several paces beyond the exit portal. Albeit, possibly a narrative for another day, unbeknownst to me, not only had three full 24 hour back-to-back clock calendar days been totally erased, but the two doorways ordered by Pope Clement VII in 1531 to be built at the west end of the north and south walls as presently constituted, and done so to ease the entrance and exit of visitors, weren't there, with me apparently having used instead the old central north wall doorway, clearly known as being blocked since the Pope's edict in 1531 as seen in Footnote [8] and as cited in the quote below from the main text above previously.
"(T)he only door into the Holy House in 1531 was the one in the middle of the north side, which at Nazareth must have led into the cave. It is easy to understand the inconveniences of this arrangement, and the confusion necessarily caused by the struggles of the pilgrims all passing in and out through this one door; which was, moreover, in a special manner sacred, as having been used by the members of the Holy Family themselves. Pope Clement VII, in 1531 AD, therefore ordered this ancient doorway to be built up, with materials obtained by the opening of two new doorways for the entrance and exit of the people on the north and southern sides. At the same time he ordered the outline of the built-up doorway to be retained upon the wall, as is still to be seen."
THOMAS THE DOUBTER AND MARY'S BELT
Before moving on, just prior to going to Loreto during this, my trip through Europe in 2007, there was one other translocation and artifact-as-proof type event that was brought to my attention, a story that I had never heard of. After the man I met at the Cafe de Levante took me to Agreda and was satisfied everything was in order, we returned to Zaragoza. During the short trip from Agreda to Zaragoza the man, drawing an anology between the rosery being dropped into my hands, brought up a translocation experience between the Apostle Thomas the Doubter and Mary the Mother of Jesus, with Mary dropping an actual piece of her clothing she was wearing into the hands of Thomas as she rose into heaven during the Assumption. The man told me the piece from Mary's clothing was a decorative belt she was wearing and that the belt, known as the Sacro Cingolo, was still in existence.
Capsulizing the Thomas-Mary story as the man briefly related it to me, found the apostles, except for Thomas, gathered around Mary during her passing, with Thomas at the time, said to be in India. Thomas was miraculously translocated back to Mount Olive after Mary's burial and was the sole witness to her Assumption. According to the man, during her bodily rise into heaven, Mary, from the sky, dropped her belt directly into the outstretched arms and waiting hands of Thomas. None of the other apostles were witness to the event, and in a reversal of the doubt Thomas held regarding the resurrection of Jesus, he offered proof in what he saw by showing the apostles the belt Mary was wearing, which is held as a relic in the Cathedral of Prato in Tuscany, Italy to this day.
When we arrived at the hotel in Zaragoza the man told me he could arrange for me to see the artifact if I was so interesed. Drooling at the mouth at such a prospect I told him I would love to see it. As we got out of the car the man retrieved a leather briefcase from the trunk and went into the hotel with me. Asking me to wait he immediately made a phone call from the hotel's little, barely an office, office. Then, removing a bunch of writing material from his briefcase he waved me in and began writing something on embossed letterhead stationary. Folding the paper in threes he placed it in an envelope, sealing it by dampening the glue on the flap with a wet sponge. He then wrote something, possibly a name, on the outside, stamping the envelope over part of the possible name using a circular rubber stamp around two inches in diameter and an ink pad with purple ink. Initialing the ink stamp he turned the envelope over and put a circular dab of melted red wax on the sponge closed flap pushing a brass metal marking of some kind into it, then put the whole thing into a second larger brown envelope, sealing that envelope without me ever seeing any of his writing on the outside or inside nor either the ink stamped image or wax seal image.
The moment I arrived in Prato I went straight to the cathedral, and following the man's instructions turned over the envelope. After a lengthy wait then some rather intense back and forth conversations and discussions in and out of rooms that sometimes excluded me but included third parties, especially so it seemed with those who held leverage over letting it happen and them wanting to know how it was I was I connected with the man and how it was I knew him, me seeing the artifact was resolved. A time was set for the next day and although I felt it wouldn't come off my visit went off without a hitch. Around midnight of that first night in Prato however, the man who ran the place I was staying began pounding on the door telling me I had a phone call. On the other end was the man that gave me the envelope wanting to know how things went. He told me if it didn't go off as planned not to leave Prato and tell the man at the desk, otherwise just go along with my business. Like I said, me viewing the belt went off without a hitch even to the point of touching the belt.(see)
Regardles of anything the man may have told me, undoubtedly a man of knowledge when it came to the Bible, canon or otherwise, and the fact that the cathedral in Prato has the belt on prominent display as the graphic above shows, the incident between Thomas and Mary and the dropping of the belt is not from canon. Matter of fact, not one word as to Mary's passing shows up anywhere in scripture. The whole Bible is silent as to when, where, or how Mary's death occurred and/or who was there or not there, nor is her age stated anywhere in relation to anything. The last time Mary is brought up in scripture, about 50 days after the crucifiction of Jesus and well before her death it would seem, is found in what is generally known as The Upper Room Prayer Meeting starting in verse 12 of Acts 1:
"Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey. And when they had entered, they went up into the upper room where they were staying: Peter, James, John, and Andrew; Philip and Thomas; Bartholomew and Matthew; James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot; and Judas the son of James. These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers."
After the above in Acts 1 Verse 14, where "all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication," Mary disappears from the Bible. If such is the case, that Mary disappears from the Bible and nothing is mentioned about her death, then where did the story of the dropping of the belt come from? While it is clear no part of the story appears in the Bible, nor in a sideway glance is it even hinted at, for a tradition, considering the two primary sources the story is derived from, it has fairly strong legs. It goes back to when and how the books of the Bible were decided on. There was no one specific meeting where what books would be included and what ones would be excluded like many people think. The Old Testament had been around for thousands of years, but the New Testament was still in it's infancy being only a few hundred years old, although fairly solid, it varied between sects and groups with many of those sects and groups advocating inclusion of works that just weren't going to be.
The average person growing up in and around the Holy Land during the time of Christ and having the ability to read and write was not very high. People for religious reasons, the military, government, sometimes merchants, with all those groups being mostly composed of men, were pretty much able to do so up to their level of need, but after that, in the general populace, the ability to read and write thinned out quite rapidly. Even so, it didn't take long for the first four books of the new testament to go from an oral tradition to a written one. Jesus was said to have been crucified at age 33 making it year 33 AD calendar-wise. The Gospel of Mark is generally given credit as the earliest, finding it's way into written script dating from around 70 AD followed by Matthew and Luke in the 85-90 AD range. John is considered as showing up in script in the 90-110 AD range, putting all four gospels not only within the lifetimes of actual eyewitnesses, but Jesus's own family, including his mother. At the sametime all kinds of other scriptures were vying to be, if not recognized as being the real ones, at least included. So it was with the story of Thomas, Mary, and the belt and where it came from.
The First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, although it wasn't, is pretty much considered the watershed for the Bible, especially the New Testament. It is of our interest here however, because what is called the Ante Nicene Fathers. Ante Nicene Fathers were Christian theologians, writers, and thinkers who predate the Council of Nicaea and whose works or thoughts were floating around well ahead of or at the sametime the final version of the New Testament was being finalized. Their works or thoughts were banned from inclusion into the Bible for one reason or the other. Often, they themselves were banned, and even though a couple of the Ante Nicene Fathers eventually found return favor with the Church and achieved the rank of sainthood, a good portion were excommunicated, ostracized, banished, or exiled, with some even being put to death. They were however, keepers of the faith, guardians of all kinds of oral traditions that had seeped up into written text, of which one was given credit to having as it's originating source none other than Joseph of Arimathea, the wealthy follower of Jesus who gave over his own intended tomb for use by Jesus after begging Pontius Pilate for the body. The title for that oral to written work is given as The Passing of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in of which the following quote is found:
"Then the blessed Thomas told them how he was singing mass in India—he still had on his sacerdotal robes. He, not knowing the word of God, had been brought to the Mount of Olivet, and saw the most holy body of the blessed Mary going up into heaven, and prayed her to give him a blessing. She heard his prayer, and threw him her girdle which she had about her. And the apostles seeing the belt which they had put about her, glorifying God, all asked pardon of the blessed Thomas, on account of the benediction which the blessed Mary had given him, and because he had seen the most holy body going up into heaven.(source)
Besides the above quote, various writings and rewritings of the original oral tradition of Mary dropping her belt to Thomas as she rises to heaven shows up in a number of places with the very short but possibly strongest being found in an all Latin version titled Legenda Aurea compiled around 1275 AD by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa. The original Latin version can be found in Chapter CXIX De assumtione beatae Mariae virginis starting on the bottom of page 504 (518/978) sidebar (see). A complete English translation of the de Voragine Latin version was done circa 1483 by William Caxton requiring six volumes, in of which Golden Legend Volume IV repeats the Latin into English on Page 234 (246/294) sidebar with Thomas showing up on page 241 (253/294) sidebar. A full stand alone page in English can be found here. Other variations, mostly slight oral to written or rewritten modifications of the Joseph of Arimathea traditions appears in apocryphal texts as well, the Apocryphal New Testament Page 216 (242/620 ) sidebar. Thomas on page 217 Verse 17 (243/620) sidebar, and the Apocrypha of the New Testament Page 997 (378/389) sidebar. Thomas on page 1000 (381/389) sidebar, for example, all flowing into the apocryphal texts from a variety of sources, oral and traditional.
For the record, following basically the same script between the Apostle Thomas and the Virgin Mary as above, the Monastery of Vatopedi, an Eastern Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos, Greece, claims to have the actual belt, or at least pieces of it.(see)
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light;' and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day."THE HOLY BIBLE: Genesis 1
Binary star systems, double stars, are not totally uncommon in the galaxy or universe. Our solar system just happens to have one star, the Sun, but it came close to having a second one, Jupiter. Jupiter just missed the threshold of becoming a star when most of the extra material needed was sucked up before fusion in its core occurred. No fusion no star, no binary system. So, was it a God thing that Jupiter just missed out reaching star status, or simply the results of how physical laws played out? If so, how did those physical laws just happen to fall into place just at the right level to not let it happen? Einstein said something like God doesn't play dice with the Universe. Think about it. Jupiter a star, no Earth as we know it. No Garden of Eden. No Eve. No Mary. It's failure to reach nuclear fusion in its core sure wasn't because of man made interference. What about the six-mile wide extinction-level object, following the same physical laws, that slammed into the Earth sixty-five million years ago creating the 112 mile wide Chicxulub crater causing the demise of the dinosaurs, in turn smoothing the rise of mammalian creatures and man as found in The Maya Shaman and Chicxulub and elsewhere. What about man, as found in Genesis 2:7 made by God from the dust of the ground, ground that was previously star material arising originally from the accretion disc only to be, following solidification, bombarded and overlayed for centuries and centuries with the dust and additional materials from astroids and comets similar too and like Chicxulub, the same dust God used in the end to form man. What about man's beliefs, and the books of the bible? Was the final selection of what books that went into the Bible and what were discarded or banned a God thing, or did man intervene in any final decision? If divinely inspired by God what role would man have had in any of it? Would man have been an equal level maker of laws, a God-ranked final decision making partner, or simply a participant, pawn, or standby observer? After all, man was created from the dust of the ground, long after any Universal Laws of Nature were put into place, meaning he had to abide by God's own laws from the beginning. Almost every single individual person, place, event, and superimposed unfolding of time umbrellaing the whole Holy Land playing field during the era, right down to nearly the very last everything used in the sources to scratch out a substantiation for the dropping of the belt, appear in the Bible. However, none of the specific sources so cited are recognized as being canon. The Mary belt drop story seems to be substantiated from a number of seemingly reliable sources as having transpired, yet it doesn't show up in the Bible. But, so too, if you remember, there isn't anything in the Bible about Mary after the meeting in the upper room. Her role had been played, so no need. I saw the belt anyway, just like I did the six apparition sites.
RETURN TO THE STATES
Returning to the states in the Fall of 2007 ended my adventures if Europe for a few years. The months that followed were used for refamiliarizing myself back into my old haunts, the months going by quite quickly and equally uneventful. Hardly anybody knew I was gone, nobody was interested in my stories, and except for my own all good intentions of using what I had gathered for use in a PhD disseration, simply reading, amending, and writing pages from my notes over and over with no real comprehensive end in sight, almost.
My big idea was to put together all the material I had gathered on apparitions, starting with my 1960 visit to the Our Lady Of Guadalupe' up to the end of my 2007 visit to Holy House of Loreto, and coalesce it into a draft for a PhD dissertation formulating it as proof of my own, albeit non-Marian apparition experience as a young boy. Then along the way approach a few universities requesting their guidance and input, and in turn, possibly on their dime, finalize it into book form usuing their publishing and distribution arm to have it brought out like Carlos Castaneda did with his third book, Journey to Ixtlan (1972), which was in its final printed version virtually indistinguishable from the manuscript he turned in for his UCLA PhD dissertation. Even though I already had two earned graduate degrees interest was less than stellar. I thought it was a great idea to use proof from Christian based Marian apparitions as proof of an Indian sub-continent Hindu holy man's apparition, bilocation, or translocation to the United States and, like as found in THE MEETING: An Untold Story of Sri Ramana, the proof might even prove to be reciprocal.
Everything I was doing was for humantarian reasons. But, it was more than just that. A couple of universities that expressed interest were, as I viewed it relative to my pocketbook, way too cost prohibitive. Up front paper shuffling admission fees with no guarantee of acceptance, for example. Then something similar to fate, destiny, or with no name at all, happened. A man I knew had been itching at the heels to introduce me to a person that was fairly high up there in the online video gaming industry. The video gaming man had an unquenching interest in film animation as it was done in the old days, of which I had some background and have talked about at some length elsewhere. Anyway, he was married to a woman who was a full professor of theology at a major west coast university. After learning of my specific tale of woe and somehow being taken in positively with my intentions, she said she knew a person at a university other than the one she taught that might be able to help, a university I discovered that had only recently passed over any interest in my offerings.
Rather than scheduling an official meeting, an off the books gathering between the three of us was arranged and surprisingly enough the woman from the other university came prepared. There were very few marginal notes or discourse regarding any acceptance or rejection involving me from my original touching base paperwork and their response, but what was there boiled down to two basic things. One, the university we are talking about was a big time Mariology school and although my thesis was seeped in Mariology top to bottom, powers that be didn't feel what I was offering leaned pro-positive Mariology enough. Secondly, although I had a strong academic background having two earned graduate degrees, neither of which were in theology they felt the Mariology aspect of my works tipped my offerings solidly into the theology field. Thus then, me having no formal undergraduate or graduate work in theology eliminated me from consideration into their PhD program in theology.
The woman, on the otherhand, having been in the religious field almost the whole of her adult life, had never met nor crossed paths with anyone who had a similar spiritual experience anything close to what I had under the direct auspices of the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi and/or, as found focused on more directly in Dark Luminosity. So, instead of just shutting the door on me, and seemingly seeing great promise in what I had to offer, suggested a couple of viable work arounds. One, lean my paper a little more positive towards a Marion light; secondly, to ensure the university bought my seriousness towards any endeavor by me bringing my academic theology level up to a point it was acceptable as being valid enough for entrance into their doctoral program. The first was editorial, sort of paperwork shuffling. The second was more academic in nature, and time consuming, i.e., the physical need to take classes, study and such, and not in the end, necessarily directly related toward anything in my thesis.
Considering the out of pocket cost to attend graduate school, the package offered, especially the financial compensation side, was noteworthy, and difficult to bypass, with a lot of university expenses being reduced and reimbursed back to the candidate in the form of scholarships because of a requirement in the second year of study that doctoral students teach undergraduate introductory classes.
On top of that, neither of the two set asides or work arounds seemed insurmountable, depending on how the length of time any theology prerequisites would take prior to actually getting started. I felt that anything I had written that could be construed as falling into the Mariology camp was strong enough that it could be defended. However, I was also willing to accept in a positive light any valid suggestions, feeling if need be I was an astute enough wordsmith that I could rewrite almost anything into saying the samething I wrote in the first place, but was changed enough to get by their censors. The academic part was another thing. They wanted me to complete the prerequisites ordinarily required for the Masters of Theology degree then complete the M.A. core classes up into and as part of my doctoral program. The M.A. core classes being included as part of the doctoral program was more than feasible since I would have to take classes anyway. I asked if I couldn't just be tested through to the level of my competence eliminating all prior, then take any necessary courses from there forward. I have no idea what went on behind closed doors, in cloistered rooms, or sanctums of sanctums, but for whatever reason, in the end, with some restrictions, they were willing to continue forward with the idea.
I had only been back in the states about a year when in the fall of 2008 Hurricane Gustav followed by Ike hit along the U.S. gulf coast. Like previously with Katrina and Rita I deployed as a national level DSHR volunteer with the Red Cross, only this time under Red Cross National's direct request, as well as now being a big time hurricane disaster services veteran. Then, the next year, in July 2009, a person I had interviewed some years before on a totally unrelated topic, died. The woman in question was one Judith Anne Woolcott from Appleton, Wisconsin. Some months after her death her passing was brought to my attention, and because of the timing, what followed unexpectantly broke open my mind with a plethora of thoughts that flooded my memory banks with things from the past that actually led to being able to tie up most of my apparition quest into a tight little, albeit possibly to some, rambling bundle.
THE QUEEEN OF HEAVEN AND ADELE BRISE, AN ENTWINED DESTINY
Before my mind unexpectantly broke through with a plethora of thoughts flooding my memory banks I was just on the verge of refreshing my reasons for having interviewed Judith Anne Woolcott of Appleton, Wisconsin in the first place. During the leading edge of that verge, no matter how early I was in it, as well as being totally unrelated except for Appleton and my interest through Woolcott, on December 8, 2010, the 12th Bishop of the Diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin, David L. Ricken, which includes Appleton within his diocese, declared with moral certainty and in accord with the norms of the Church a Decree on the Authenticity, later confirmed with a nihil obstat by the Vatican's doctrinal office in 2022, the very first Marian apparition by the Catholic Church in the United States. That very first approval by Bishop Ricken was something that was quietly brought to my attention on the side by an even quieter not-a-student lay member of the university's Marian studies program thinking if I was accepted into the program I might like to include something about the only U.S. sanctioned Marian apparition in my dissertation as well.
The Our Lady of Good Hope in the sub-title above, now given title to as the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, refers to the only offically sanctioned Marian apparition site in the United States together with the young woman, Adele Brise, who experienced the visition, a site of which I visited sometime after my 2007 trip to Europe. Now, for those of you who have an interest, no matter what resource source you go to about Adele Brise, almost every biblography or written account on her can be traced back in one form or the other, to a booklet written by Sister M. Dominica, titled The chapel, Our Lady of Good Help: A shrine of Mary on the Green Bay Peninsula (Green Bay, WI: Sisters of St. Francis of Bay Settlement, 1955). Although I used several sources, what I present here is no different. The story circulates around Adele Brise, a very pious young woman who, in October 1859 at age 28, experienced the first of three Marian apparitions while walking through the woods on the eastside of the bay of Green Bay Wisconsin carrying a heavy load of wheat on her way to the mill. Then, after the passage of several days, only this time related to Sunday Mass and her eleven mile walk to and from church, while with her younger sister Isabelle, age 24, their neighbor and good friend Mrs Theresa Vander Niessen, and possibly joined by a man working the fields, saw Adele once again drop to her knees between the maple and the hemlock trees she had previously. Twice on that remarkable Sunday, once on the way to church and once on the way home after Mass, the lady appeared before Adele.
Prior to her leaving church for home however, Adele, after Mass, went to confession and asked the priest for counsel regarding the two encounters. The parish priest, Father William Verhoef, advised Adele that if it were a heavenly messenger, she would see the lady again, and this time she should ask, "In God's name, who are you and what do you want of me?" Adele, adhering to Father Verhoef's counsel, that the visitor might return, prepared herself with two questions. Then, on that eventful way home from Mass, Adele encountered the lady for the third and final time, describing the lady as follows through Sister Dominica:
"(T)he same beautiful woman, clothed in dazzling white, with a yellow sash around her waist. Her dress fell to her feet in graceful folds. She had a crown of stars around her head, and her long, wavy, golden hair fell loosely over her shoulders."
Continuing, again as written by Sister Dominica, Adele, still kneeling, began a conversation with the beautiful woman:
"In God's name, who are you and what do you want of me?" asked Adele, as she had been directed."I am the Queen of Heaven, who prays for the conversion of sinners, and I wish you to do the same. You received Holy Communion this morning, and that is well. But you must do more. Make a general confession, and offer Communion for the conversion of sinners. If they do not convert and do penance, my Son will be obliged to punish them.
"Adele, who is it?" said one of the women. "O' why can't we see her as you do?" said another weeping. "Kneel," said Adele, "the Lady says she is the Queen of Heaven."
Our Blessed Lady turned, looked kindly at them, and said, "Blessed are they that believe without seeing. What are you doing here in idleness while your companions are working in the vineyard of my Son?"
"What more can I do, dear Lady?" said Adele, weeping.
"Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation."
"But how shall I teach them who know so little myself?" replied Adele.
"Teach them," replied her radiant visitor, "their catechism, how to sign themselves with the sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments; that is what I wish you to do. Go and fear nothing. I will help you."
Me visiting places similar to or like the Our Lady of Good Hope site, shown above, especially for the reasons I did, typically would have and should have elicited much more indepth research on my part. Instead, I fell short barely scratching the surface, approaching my visit half heartedly, lackadaisically not giving the site much upfront credibility such as automatically befalls heavyweight places like Lourdes and Fatima. Boy, was I wrong, in more ways than one. The site had everything. Fires that reached conflagration levels, comets and meteors, Ignatius Donnelly of Lost Continent of Atlantis fame, and according to Sister Dominica, the fervent prayers by the faithful to Mary, the Mother of God being heard, preventing the fire from entering and desroying chapel grounds or harming the people who took refuge there. It even had a lantern, both metaphorically and in reality, falling back to my experience on Catalina Island and the fact I physically held the lantern in my hand the next day outside the stage stop after seeing the apparition inside the night before. The two quotes below exemplify what I've written:
"Fire had for some days been raging in the woods on both sides of the bay, and coming nearer and nearer. The people were in great alarm; scores of city people would go out, days together, to assist the settlers in fighting the destroyer, but apparently with little or no effect. Finally, on the afternoon of October 8, the atmosphere became unbearable; clouds of smoke and tongues of flame seemed to spring up everywhere; the whole heavens were ablaze, the atmosphere itself seemed to be on fire, many people believed the end of the world had come, for none had ever before heard or read of such a conflagration.Xavier Martin, The Belgians of northeast Wisconsin (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1895), 112.
"After hours of horror and suspense, the heavens sent relief in the form of a downpour. The fervent prayers to the Mother of God were heard. The fire was extinguished, but dawn revealed the ravages wrought by the conflagration. Everything about them was destroyed; miles of desolation everywhere. But the convent school, chapel and the five acres of land consecrated to the Virgin Mary shone like an emerald isle in a sea of ashes ... tongues of fire had reached the Chapel fence ... but the fire had not entered Chapel grounds."Sister M. Dominica, The chapel, Our Lady of Good Help: A shrine of Mary on the Green Bay Peninsula (Green Bay, WI: Sisters of St. Francis of Bay Settlement, 1955)
Ignatius Donnelly, mentioned a few paragraphs back as well as previously in the main text above, played a fairly large role in my early teen life while I was in high school and working for my Merchant Marine friend. Donnelly's role in my Merchant Marine friend's life was much greater and he passed it along to me, albeit on a somewhat less intense level, primarily because of the passage of time and he having developed a myriad of other interests. Donnelly wrote the "go to" book on Atlantis and my friend had been hit hard by it, becoming totally enmeshed in his early life with the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu, with the side-by-side two becoming the reason he joined the Merchant Marines in the first place. He left his home at an early age to travel the seven seas as he said, searching the world over looking for clues to proove the existence of one or the other or both continents. Was he surprised.[9]
The quote below clarifies how Ignatius Donnelly fits into the Our Lady of Good Hope story, a story that doesn't involve anything close to Atlantis, but a periodic comet named Biela:
"On the evening of October 8, 1871 devastating fires erupted at virtually the same moment in three different states in the region of the Great Lakes - Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. The outbursts included the notorious 'Chicago fire', but also an even more devastating fire in Wisconsin, the worst in U.S. history, covering some 400 square miles. At the same time, wildfires also erupted across much of Michigan. In his book Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, published in 1883, Ignatius Donnelly proposed that the simultaneous outbursts were no coincidence; they were the effect of our Earth meeting up with a fragment, or fragments, of comet Biela, a body that had disintegrated a few years earlier while on an Earth-threatening path."
Biela wouldn't be much more than a garden variety comet lost among thousands except for what's mentioned briefy in the above quote and three other things. First of the three that makes Biela standout after what's said in the above quote, Biela was one of only three comets known to be periodic at the time, having an orbit around the sun to Jupiter and back of 6.6 years, with Halley and Encke being the other two periodic comets. Secondly, unlike the other two, Biela's orbit crossed directly right into and through Earth's orbit. However, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. On one of Biela's return trips towards the sun it began dividing or breaking up into two distinct parts, the parts being referred to sometimes as Biela Major and Biela Minor, or 1 and 2. With the ever continuing widening separation between the two during the early stages a visually luminous bridge crossing over the space between them connected the two comet heads like a dumbbell made from glowing debris. As the gap continued to widen the bridge began to thin and the luminousity dimnished. Not long after the bridge had all but totally dissipated, unexpeceptionly, out of nowhere both of the now two comet parts just up and disappeared. Third and finally, and of which is of our interest here, Biela is often considered the prime suspect by a growing number of people for causing all of the great fires that broke out at the exact sametime in the midwest at the end of summer of 1871, fires that encompassed thousands upon thousands of acres over an area that included Champion and the fire that burned right up to the edge of the fence surrounding the grounds of the Our Lady of Good Hope chapel but didn't cross.
The chart below depicts, in red, Beila's orbit around the Sun to Jupiter and back, graphically showing the comet crossing Earth's orbit on the way in and out. What the chart doesn't show is the comet's 12.5 degree tip from the plane of the ecliptic, meaning Baila spent some of it's time, relatively speaking, above and some of it's time below the orbital plane of the planets. Biela's crossing of Earth's orbit, unlike the other planets, meshed perfectly being neither above it or below it, but plowed directly right through it, not once but twice in one trip. If you remember, when Biela broke into two separate enities it had what appeared to be a bridge of luminous debris, most likely made of the same composition, but not necessarily so, since the materials had been cast off from the host comets. What would a bridge of debris mean or what would be, if any, repercussions. For one thing, a head of the comet is more like a dot, passing in and out through Earth's orbit perpendicular to it, marking a space not wider than the comet's diameter, but with a lengthy tail. A bridge of debris stretched between the two would more closely parallel the orbit meaning, since the bridge was long but narrow, it's debris would most likely enter the Earth's atmosphere much differntly than the host comets, possibly with a much differnt make up of materials, but for sure because of being narrow, a one shot deal, gone quickly with no continuing after effects such as a trailing edge of material as left by a typical comet. So too, because of the speed of Earth's rotation it would't necessarily pull in the whole length of the remaining debris bridge but only the most susceptible, with the debris coming in like a backward arrowhead thining towards the trailing edge. Pieces or debris from Biela following it's disintegration is also thought to be the cause for the huge 7000 per hour meteor shower called Andromedids one year following the fires as seen in November 1872. As the larger comets broke up due to tidal forces and gravitation the much smaller bridge debris material slipped through arriving earlier and closer not because of being ahead but because of phyiscally dropping behind during previous passes.
Like I've said, the Our Lady of Good Hope site had everything. Comets and meteors matching my interest in the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona and the asteroid that slammed into Chicxulub said to have led to the demise of the dinosaurs. Ignatius Donnelly of my Merchant Marine friend and Lost Continent of Atlantis fame, and even had a lantern both metaphorically and in reality. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the massive conflagration that raged throughout the same general midwest area is often attributed to Mrs O'Learys Cow knocking over a lantern, and lastly, falling back to my experience on Catalina Island and the fact I physically held the lantern in my hand the next day outside the stage stop after seeing the apparition inside the night before, which having done so, I use as a metaphore as proof. For the Our Lady of Good Hope apparition I use as a lantern what was seen and experienced by many witnesses as well as documented by Sister Dominica and others, that she says hails back to the Adele Brise connection to the Virgin Mary, thus preventing the fire from entering and destroying chapel grounds or harming the people who took refuge there, the fire, after already having burnt thousands and thousands of acres, raced across the countryside right up to the fence surrounding the chapel, but having reached it, stopped but wouldn't cross. Re the following from the source cited:
"When the tornado of fire approached Robinsonville (Champion), Sister Adele and her companions were determined not to abandon the Chapel. Encircled by the inferno, the Sisters, the children, area farmers and their families fled to the Shrine for protection. The statue of Mary was raised reverently and was processed around the sanctuary. When wind and fire threatened suffocation, they turned in another direction to hope and pray, saying the rosary. Hours later, rains came in a downpour, extinguishing the fiery fury outside the Chapel. The Robinsonville area was destroyed and desolate…except for the convent, the school, the Chapel, and the five acres of land consecrated to the Virgin Mary. Though the fire singed the Chapel fence, it had not entered the Chapel grounds."
Ignatius Donnelly's contention that the Great Chicago Fire and the other major general area midwestern fires that erupted all at the sametime were caused by Beila's comet, showed up for the first time in a book written by Donnelly titled Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel published in 1883, more specifically in Chapter IV Section V, Beila's Comet. Twelve years before in 1871, and only four months after the fires, a book was published titled The Great Conflagration dealing mostly the Chicago aspect of the fires, but getting into the surrounding area fires and cause. The following is a paragraph from that book, again written in 1871 and years before Donnelly came up with his hypothesis regarding comets as a cause:
"As we were standing upon the roof of the Exchange, looking down upon the scene when in midprogress, buildings far beyond the line of fire, and in no contact with it, burst into fiames from the interior. The same thing, I observe, happened in Chicago, and was attributed to incendiaries; but there was no incendiaries suspected in our great fire. What latent power enkindled the inside of these advanced buildings, while externally they were untouched. A scientific writer at the time contended, I think in the old Daily Advertiser, that at a certain period there is what he called an 'inflammable vacuum' in the air, which is self-igniting and irresistible. Perhaps a hundred years or so from now, some safeguard against this mysterious element, now lying latent and sleeping in nature, may be discovered."
Notice the author, an eyewitness and in no way being able to have been influenced by Donnelly because his ideas were still twelve years in the future and probably nowhere close to being thought of let alone being published, writes about buildings far beyond the line of fire, and in no contact with it, suddenly bursting into fiames, then goes on to say the fires were attributed to incendiaries and an inflammable vacuum in the air, which is self-igniting and irresistible. Sounds an awful lot like something raining down from the sky, maybe even a comet.(source)
AND NOW THIS: TYING UP THE LOOSE ENDS
As much as I have presented reams and reams of undeniable facts above that when taken together proove that my experience as an eight year old boy and seeing the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi on Catalina Island actually happened in real life, but still thought by many it didn't or couldn't, me notwithstanding, Ramana himself being in the Americas at least two other occasions besides mine, and possibly more, is not without precedent.
Even though the masses are told over-and-over that the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi never left Tiruvannamalai South India after he arrived at age seventeen nor the ashram itself in later years, it has been substantiated from a long verbal history of followers and eyewitnesses that he has. However, a number of highly valid and respected writers and authors such as Sri Ramana adherent David Godman, state that in the last 54 years of his life Ramana NEVER traveled more than a mile and a half away from the base of his holy hill, Arunachala, the caveat being, traveling via what most would consider "in the traditional sense," or as my uncle might say, "as presently constituted." Even so, Ramana still had several fully conscious and fully recorded bilocation experiences he or his high ranking circles of devotees or handelers rarely discussed, wherein he was translocated from his ashram to devotees many, many miles away.[10]
Translocation or bilocation, again notwithstanding, throughout his life, especially so to outsiders, the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi never exhibited the slightest interest in the instrument or method of use behind such experiences, namely Siddhis, occult abilities, or psychic powers. His personal belief was that a Realized person may not necessarily have Siddhis initially, but may later seek or acquire them after realization (i.e., Queen Chudala in the Yoga Vasishtha). He also said that some Realized persons need not have any siddhis.
Although I propose that Sri Ramana translocated to the Americas on more than one occasion, the following two examples have been selected by me specifically because both occasions have been mentioned in offically sanctioned Ramana publications. The first example involves a Peruvian couple that traveled to Ramana's ashram in Tiruvannamalai, of which I cite a couple of times in my works, but sourced from a book written by Sri T. K. Sundaresa Iyer titled At the Feet of Bhagavan. Sri T. K. Sundaresa Iyer became a devotee of Ramana Maharshi in 1908. As his secretary and English interpreter, he became uniquely well-versed in Ramana's teachings. The following is from Sundaresa's book (page 44, 50 on the sidebar):
Abiding in the Self There is No Space-Time
Mr. and Mrs. S. were visitors from Peru to the Ashram. The couple narrated all their story to Bhagavan, all the privations they had undergone to have a look at
Sri Ramana Maharshi. Bhagavan was all kindness to them; He heard their story with great concern, and then remarked: "You need not have taken all this trouble. You could well have thought of me from where you were, and so could have had all the consolation of a personal visit." This remark of Sri Bhagavan they could not easily understand, nor did it give them any consolation as they sat at His feet like Mary. Sri Maharshi did not want to disturb their pleasure in being in His immediate vicinity, and so He left them at that.Later in the evening Sri Maharshi was enquiring about their day-to-day life, and incidentally their talk turned to Peru. The couple began picturing the landscape of Peru and were describing the sea-coast and the beach of their own town. Just then Maharshi remarked: "Is not the beach of your town paved with marble slabs, and are not coconut palms planted in between? Are there not marble benches in rows facing the sea there and did you not often sit on the fifth of those with your wife?" This remarks of Sri Maharshi created astonishment in the couple. How could Sri Bhagavan, who had never gone out of Tiruvannamalai, know so intimately such minute details about their own place? Sri Maharshi only smiled and remarked:
"It does not matter how I can tell. Enough if you know that in the Self there is no Space-Time."
My second choice for Ramana's transloction experience to the America's, more specifically the United States, comes from a source titled Pulyan's Teacher, only after having being compiled and sourced from a number of offical Ramana publications.
Pulyan's teacher experience happened out of the blue and long before she ever bacame Pulyan's teacher when Ramana appeared before her via what could be nothing other than translocation. That event is recorded as actually happening in several places in Ramana lore, most notedly in the extensive three volume set titled Nothing Ever Happened by David Godman on the life of Sri H. W. L. Poonja (1910-1997), AKA Poonjaji or Papaji. The same episode appears a second time in Poonja's somewhat abbreviated biography under the chapter titled Meeting Ramana Maharshi as sourced below. Poonja has been said to have been one of the foremost disciples, devotees, followers or advocates of the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi and his principles. So said, Poonja, who became a respected spiritual teacher in his own right, is considered to have been the real thing. So too, he was not some mystic saint in some far off place masked in ancient lore either, but a modern day personage that forthrightly reported his own 1944 personal experience involving translocation between himself and Sri Ramana, an experience so recorded by the scribes that leads directly to the mention of Pulyan's teacher and the translocation event she experienced. Poonja says:
"(A) sadhu appeared at our door, asking for food. I invited him in, offered him some food and asked him the question that was uppermost in my mind. "Can you show me God? If not, do you know of anyone who can? "
"Much to my surprise, he gave me a positive answer. 'Yes, I know a person who can show you God. If you go and see that man, everything will be all right for you. His name is Ramana Maharshi.'"
The sadhu went on to give Poonja detailed directions on how to get to the Ramana ashram clear across the country in the south of India, such as what trains to take, where to change trains, what stations to go to, etc., which, when Poonja followed them, they were accurate down to the letter.
As soon as he arrived at the ashram and settled in he took off across the compound to look for the man who could show him God. When he got to the meditation hall and looked in he saw, sitting on a sofa, the SAME man who had visited his house in the Punjab. Poonja again:
"I was disgusted. 'This man is a fraud,' I said to myself. 'He appears in my house in the Punjab, tells me to go to Tiruvannamalai, then hops on the train so that he can get there before me.' I was so annoyed with him I decided that I wouldn't even go into the hall where he was sitting. Mentally adding him to the long list of frauds I had met on my first pilgrimage round India, I turned on my heels and went off to collect my bags."
A long time Ramana devotee interceded in Poonja's potential departure, telling him, in an effort to convince him to stay:
"No, no, you are mistaken. He has not moved out of this town in the last forty-eight years. It is either a case of mistaken identity or somehow, through his power, he managed to manifest himself in the Punjab while his physical body was still here. Some girl from America came here once and told a similar story. These things do happen occasionally." Of course, as it turned out, Poonja was right in his ability to discern that the man in his house that evening and the man on the sofa in the meditation hall WAS Sri Ramana. The long time devotee turned out to be one Framji Dorabji whose devotion to Ramana and life at the ashram can be found by using the sidebar page of 677 in The Human Gospel of Ramana Maharshi. BUT, what is important to us here is that the 'Some girl from America came here once and told a similar story' as told by Dorabji to Poonja, that is, translocation to America being involved, was the SAME GIRL that turned out to be Pulyan's teacher. I know because after arrival at the Pulyan compound I spent a good portion of the aforementioned summer almost entirely in the presence of either Pulyan or his teacher, although it must be said I was most fortunate to be personally afforded a great deal of individual time by Pulyan's teacher. During one of our discussions late one night when I brought up my experience at the stage stop she responded by telling me of her own translocation experience between herself and Ramana, describing it so closely that it was easily recognizable as being the same translocation experience mentioned by Framji Dorabji.
"It is my belief that it was sometime in that 1928-1929 period, albeit well BEFORE the October 29th crash, that the translocation experienced by the one-day-to-be Pulyan's teacher occurred. Most likely the same instructions given to Poonja were given to her and, like Poonja, having no clue she was being confronted by a full on translocation experience, was deeply inspired to follow the instructions and go to India and eventually the Ramana ashram."
The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe
Even though I visited Santa Catalina Island for the first time many, many years ago as an eight year old boy and have visited and written about Catalina Island numerous times since including this dissertation that involves the apparition experience that happened to me on the island as that same eight year old boy, it only came to me recently that the island was named after a saint, Saint Catherine of Alexandria to be exact. I began to wonder if there was any kind of connection between Catherine as a saint and my apparition experience happening on a tiny area of land specifically named after her. In that I didn't recall hearing of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, I started to research both her and the reason why the island was named after her.
On the eve of St. Catherine's Day, November 24, 1602 Spanish explorer, Sebastian Viscaino, sighted the island and named it Santa Catalina in honor of Saint Catherine. Although it had been visted by Spanish explorers before and named by them as well, Viscaino's Santa Catalina name is the one that stuck.
Saint Catherine of Alexandria is the patron saint of students, philosophers, scholars, teachers, and librarians. Although she isn't in the bible she is said to be a martyred saint in the early 4th century, beheaded under orders of the emperor Maxentius, a Roman emperor from 306 until his death in 312. The earliest reference to Katherine is usually considered to be found in a litany written in an Eastern Middle Aramaic dialect called syriac after 620 AD. It was re-published accompanied by a latin translation by Anton Baumstark (1872-1948). Almost everything we have come to know about Saint Catherine comes from The Passio of Saint Katherine, the above litany, mixed with tradition and legend, all of which were combined in the source below:
"(B)orn to aristocratic parents in the city of Alexandria shortly before the year 300. Her father was the pagan governor of the city, and her mother a secret Christian. Given the name Dorothea, she was educated in Greek philosophy and literature, rhetoric, music, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.
"Dorothea learned the mysteries of the Faith (Christianity) and was baptized with the name Catherine, or in Greek, Aikaterina. Once again, in a vision she saw the Heavenly Queen with her Divine Child, who this time praised the newly-baptized Catherine's beauty of soul, saying, 'Now she has become brilliant and glorious, noble and wise!'
"Taking her hand, the Holy Theotokos said, 'Give her a ring, my Child, to make her worthy of Your kingdom,' at which the Christ held out a beautiful ring to Catherine."(source)
SAINT CATHERINE OF ALEXANDRIA
"Cults of Saint's play a much less sigificant part in twenty-first century life than they did in the Middle Ages and St Katherine is unknown to many people today."
So said, with all of the above about Saint Katherine, if there is any connection between she as a saint, the island of Catalina, the naming of the island after her, and me experiencing an apparition there, other than a ton of coincidences, it has remained a secret to me.
Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.
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Footnote [1] L'ENTITA, SANTA ALLEANZA, CUM CRUCE ET GLADIO
The terms L’Entità, Santa Alleanza, Cum Cruce et Gladio are linked to what is said to be a secret clandestine Vatican intelligence service. They gained significant attention through the writings of author Eric Frattini, particularly his 2004 book L'Entità. La clamorosa scoperta del servizio segreto vaticano (English: The Entity: The Clandestine History of the Vatican's Secret Intelligence Service). L'Entità (The Entity) According to Frattini, L'Entità is the name of a clandestine Vatican intelligence service established in 1556 by Pope Pius V. Mission: Its alleged purpose was to counter espionage by foreign powers within the Vatican. Frattini claims its initial task was to help replace Protestant Queen Elizabeth I with Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. Activities: Frattini's book depicts L'Entità as a powerful, centuries-old organization involved in numerous historical and political conflicts, including assassinations, the manipulation of financial markets, and arms sales.(see) Santa Alleanza (The Holy Alliance) Santa Alleanza is a related, but distinct, concept in Frattini's narrative, referring to a counterintelligence component of L'Entità. Origin: It is described as a successor to the historical Holy Alliance, a political coalition of monarchies formed in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon. Purpose: Frattini claims the Vatican adopted the name for its counterespionage wing. In spy novels, it is often portrayed as the covert Vatican service, similar to the American CIA or British MI6, that influences geopolitical events. Cum Cruce et Gladio (With Cross--- and Sword) Cum Cruce et Gladio is the Latin motto allegedly associated with the Vatican secret service. Meaning: The phrase, which means "With Cross and Sword," symbolizes the supposed dual nature of the organization, which acts in the name of God ("the cross") but with coercive force ("the sword"). Representation: In the context of Frattini's narrative, it highlights the contradiction between Christian ideals and the ruthless, clandestine methods allegedly used to achieve the Vatican's goals. Footnote [2] Like Maugham, I also do some rather indepth research as needed. Often it is for myself in a quest to expand or clarify my own understanding, sometimes to ensure what I write is on the right track, other times it is to ensure my readers can expand their own knowledge around or about the subjects I write. Below are online PDF click through versions of the five books Maugham cited as being important in his research, linked here by me for your own edification to do with as you so will:
During the 1932 late-night early-morning meeting between Darrell and Maugham at the Brasserie Graff in Paris, Darrell lays out to Maugham the whole story behind his Enlightenment and about his guru. Darrell brings to light his teacher basically as found in the 1931 biography of Sri Ramana Maharshi by B.V. Narasimha Swami titled SELF REALIZATION: The Life and Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi. Although Maugham was in India for a total time of three months he was at the Maharshi ashram only about three days so he uses Narasimha's book for research for deeper background information into the Maharshi, again, who Maugham calls Shri Ganesha in his book.
At one point in The Razor's Edge Maugham brings up a book by William James titled "The Principles of Psychology" as one of the books Darrell is reading. In Footnote [1} of Ulysses, James Joyce and the Wanderling, again, as another example of how I provide all I can for the edification of my readers, I have put click through links to online PDF versions of both volumes, re the following:
I would like to bring to the attention of the reader that the footnote I've presented here has been presented almost verbatim from Footnote [5] of the following:
Footnote [3] Moon phases, planetary positions, and the sun's location along the plane of the ecliptic for a solstice or an equinox, et al, was always taken into consideration as to who, what, when, where, and how something was done, something I became aware of very early, especially as a young boy with my on-and-off interactions dealing with the Curandero. It took a trip with my uncle several years later to the ancient Sun Dagger site located on the top of Fajada Butte in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon before any real understanding began to take root. For millions of people and cultures all over the world moon phases have power, with different powers attributed to different phases by different clutures. The full moon's power is, but not always so, usually seen as positive while new moon's power is, if not always, usually falls into the negative or dark side. For the occult with ties to western traditions having two new moons occur in a one month period, especially when one falls on All Hallow's Eve, Halloween night, it can carry a major significance. It means power in the hands to those who can channel it, Cosmic Power. Any event perpetrated during such a narrow band or limited time period carries a destiny with it that similar events at another time won't or can't. An example can be seen in the paragraph below as found in The Medicine Wheel and how it involves a Native American spiritual elder by seemingly combining ancient and modern traditions, even leaning towards having astronomy-like scientific knowledge, garnered however, more innately: I bring it up because of my own experience in the above, one of two such incidents occurring to me personally on similar occasions, that is, both happening on the second of two new moons in a one month period with the second of the new moons falling on Halloween night October 31st. The first, cited above, occurred under a tribal spiritual elder as described in The Medicine Wheel and the other occurring under the auspices of the Obeah as found in The Wanderling's Journey and elsewhere. To illustrate the timeing of such events and the rarity in one's lifetime, if I were to live to be 100 years old, starting from the very day I was born to the very day I died, having two new moons in one month with the second of the new moons falling on Halloween night October 31st would happen only four times, two of which being the 1959 and 1978 occurrences already cited and the last one not until October 31st, 2035 AD, three years short of me being 100. Footnote [4] Many people take umbrage with the saying: "under the protection of the Lord Buddha" --- especially so in how it relates back to the Buddha and Buddhism --- and then in turn, how it relates back to me specifically. However, implications or no --- or related to me specifically or not --- the quote is NOT of my own making. Although I have since heard it unsolicited a couple of times under varying circumstances, it first came to me from an apparent underlying belief held by the KMT Buddhist upon seeing the small Chinese character around my neck. Accurate assessment or not, it is what he believed. So too, in his own way, it is what the notorious Southeast Asian drug warlord Khun Sa believed as well. I have since run into people seeped in Buddhism that upon seeing the tiny medallion said the same thing. The problem people have with the term "being under the protection of the Lord Buddha" is mostly because of a large scale misinterpretation of what that or any protection entails. Many think it means a person with such protection could, for example, step in front of an onrushing train and come out of it unscathed. Not much could be further from the truth. Under nearly 100% of all circumstances larger universal laws dominate and seldom if ever violated, complying within the natural spectrum and order of things. As found in White Light Shields, linked previously, the more pure and spiritually developed a person is (especially if they are actively working towards real spiritual advancement) the more attention they will attract from the negatives to pull them down. In other words, the potential of any aspirant generates their level of negative opposition, plus their level of positive assistance, as set by Karmic Law. This is the natural way of things, and is part of the reason why real long-term spiritual development is so difficult. And this is also why those that achieve any significant level of spiritual / psychic development usually live fairly difficult lives, or have a painful past. Even though those veiled by White Light Shields have been known to buckle or the shield to collapse, it is not so when one falls under the protection of the Lord Buddha, the protection is impenetrable as long as the rights so vested are adhered to. Trickery abounds at every corner. As to the necklace itself and where it came from, my Merchant Marine Friend told me when he was around my age (i.e., my age then, the first two years of high school) he had become driven, actually obsessed with the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu. As soon as he could he began traveling the world to find or substantiate both places. But, the more and more ancient places he visited and more and more educated he became the more and more he became convinced neither place ever existed. In his quest, both pro and con, besides all the Atlantis and Mu books in his library, he had collected reams and reams of books, material, research and explanations that debunked nearly every single aspect of either continent or their civilizations that anybody could ever pose. So said, even though I heard him say many times that he had long since lost faith in the existence of either of the lost continents, through inference he often related the origin of the necklace back to one or the other or both. However, the grounding source for the origin of the necklace usually falls back to Gyanganj, AKA Shambhala or Shangri-La, and most particularly so, above all else, Mt. Meru. How the necklace itself fell into his hands in the first place is still not known with any amount of certainty, although there are those who seemed to think he got it after being picked up by a German U-boat. He attributes it more to what is found in the story High Barbaree and The Shipwrecked Sailor. See also: Footnote [5]
Jessica! Jessica! She won't obey me.
It's the houmfort... they're trying to get her back.
But how can they? How could they make her understand? How would she know?
They know how. They have charms that can draw a man halfway around the world. Obeah tricks, magic... everybody knows that.
We may have believed all that when we were boys, Wes, but we're grown men now. We know it's all nonsense.
Do we? You've forgotten... I have not forgotten.
The above discourse is from the script of the 1943 black and white Val Lewton movie "I Walked with a Zombie." In an in-depth research of the movie for her degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Caribbean Studies, Louise Fenton discovered that Lewton meticulously created the sets and employed (i.e., hired) Voodoo experts such as LeRoy Antoine to advise on authenticity. Fenton states in the movie Voodoo is treated sensitively in the most part without human sacrifice or over zealous dancers; it is shown as a religion integral to the lives of the inhabitants on this island in the Caribbean. Joel Siegel writes about all of the research Lewton had undertaken for I Walked with a Zombie, and that Lewton found every book he could get his hands on about the subject to ensure the cast and crew had a basic knowledge of Voodoo. Below is a synopsis of that same movie from the source so cited (Joel Siegel) as found on page 107. A more in-depth synopsis can be found on page 220 of Fenton's PhD thesis Representations of Voodoo. In the opening of the above discourse the Canadian nurse Betsy is calling out to Jessica Holland the invalid wife of the plantation owner per the following: Betsy, a Canadian nurse, comes to St Sebastian in the West Indies to care for Jessica Holland, an invalid who seems to be suffering from a rare form of mental paralysis. She falls in love with Paul, Jessica's husband, although she is courted by Wesley Rand, his half-brother. Believing Paul to be still in love with his wife, Betsy selflessly takes Jessica to a voodoo ceremony in the hope of restoring her to him. Her effort fails but forces Mrs Rand, a missionary's widow and mother of Paul and Wesley, to reveal that she had employed voodoo to turn Jessica into a zombie when she announced that she was going to leave St Sebastian with Wesley. Wesley kills Jessica in order to free her from the curse of death-in-life, and then dies in the sea himself.(see)
What is important for us here is not only the high level of research that went into making the movie, but also the accuracy and depth of that research which in turn allowed the plantation owner's brother to pass on to the audience the following:
"They know how. They have charms that can draw a man halfway around the world."
My personl experience has shown the above to be true. In a quick clarification however, do not confuse Obeah with Voodoo and vice versa. Although the execution and outcome of their abilities are similar, Obeahmen are more-or-less independent operatives, like a curandero might be. Voodoo has kind of a religious ring about it. In the main text above, as stated as coming from Seven African Powers, I write that Obeah is NOT a religion in the classical sense. That is to say, there are no meeting places such as churches, mosques, synagogs or other religious buildings or shrines --- or any underlying infastructure replicating such a system. Nor is there any sort of congregation or parishioners, although there are what may be called followers, albeit scattered. Obeah is instead, a focused application of "occult power" tapping the virulent source of God's own access --- employed without sanction to facilitate or induce spells, call up answers, predict the future, or garner assist or knowledge from planes other than the conventional and implemented through the individual skill, cunning, and artistry of the Obeah practitioner --- usually beyond the guidelines of traditional witchcraft, sorcery, shamanism, voodoo (voudon), or tribal magic. FOR COMPLETE MOVIE PLEASE CLICK IMAGE FOR SYNOPISIS OF STORY CLICK HERE. FOR COMPLETE COMIC CLICK HERE THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETO: In Light of the Archives and Archaeology
Arthur Stanley, dedicates a whole chapter/section of his book SINAI AND PALESTINE: In Connection With Their History (1856), to the Holy House both being in or not being in Nazareth as well as being in or not being in Loreto, becoming one of the earliest known English language authors to have done so. On page 443 Stanley interjects almost nonchalantly "The west wall has one square window, through which it is said the Angel flew," then moves on with basically no further comment.(see) Monsignor Bartolini, later Cardinal Bartolini (1875), wrote a book titled Sopra la Santa Casa di Loreto in Nazarreth di Galilea 1861 (see), wherein he expresses surprise to Stanley saying that the angel, i.e., Grabriel, flew through the window, meaning of course having done so to set into motion the next portion of the story wherein he informs Mary she would bear and give birth to the son of God. Bartoloni wonders where Stanley heard such a tale regarding the angel and the window. In the book LORETO AND NAZARETH, 1863, by William Antony Hutchison on page 84, Hutchison relates without going into where his examples got their story, that it is an old story, providing the following: Castillo's book, full title El devoto peregrino y viage de la Tierra Santa, in English "The Devoted Pilgrim and Voyage to the Holy Land," was first published in 1654. There is a copy of the 1654 book online available HERE although a much clearer copy dated 1705 is also available HERE. Neither of the two copies are in English, being as they are, digital copies of the originals. However, a synopsis of del Castillo's travels in the Holy Land is pretty much covered in English in The Travels of El devoto peregrino: A Franciscan Holy Land comes to New Spain and, because of the intensity of his travels, should clarify where and how he got his information. The problem with Gabriel entering the house, actually going inside into the interior of the house, no matter what method let alone through the window, is laid at the feet of any translation. Not all are clear as to if Gabriel was even in the house. Some translations, like the King James Version, use phrasing such as "the angel came in unto her" which semi-ambiguously implies Gabriel physically entered the house. The New King James Version uses the somewhat more direct less ambiguous, "and having come in, the angel said," for the exact same verse. The original Greek text of Luke 1:28 relies on the use of one verb, "eiserchomai," in Greek εισέρχομαι, which, depending on the context, can mean "to come in," "to enter," or "to go in." For me, all three meanings when it comes to Gabriel in context, clearly indicate he went inside. Only a few bibical translators see it that way. Some sort of fudge it from the already mentioned "the angel came in unto her," only implying Gabriel physically entered the house. Others water it down even more saying "the angel came to her" or "appeared to her" centering on the encounter itself not necessarily where it happened. Bible Hub has 46 translation versions of Luke 1:28 while the Bible Gateway offers 60 versions. Only a couple state specifically that Grabriel actually went inside Mary's house by saying outright "the angel entered her room." Then of course, there remains the prevoiusly mentioned apocryphal texts such as the Gospel of James. The Luke 1:28 equivalent of The Gospel of James' is XI: 1-2 and although not an acceptable part of the bibical cannon and/or whether anybody likes it or not, it is still where the oft repeated story of Mary's first encounter with the Angel Gabriel happeninng at the community well in the city of Nazareth came from:
"And she looked about her upon the right hand and upon the left, to see whence this voice should be: and being filled with trembling she went to her house and set down the pitcher, and took the purple and sat down upon her seat and drew out the thread.
2: "And behold an angel of the Lord stood before her saying: 'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace before the Lord of all things, and thou shalt conceive of his word.'" Even though a striking difference in the location occurs between Mary and her first encounter with the angel when comparing texts, please notice that in the Gospel of James version, after the initial encounter, Mary trembling, leaves the well only to return to her house. When she does, the angel of the Lord follows her in and "stood before her." So, in both cases, whether they first meet at the well or not, Mary and the angel still end up in the house together. The top graphic below, by artist John Scott, shows the Angel Gabriel outside at the time of the Annunciation speaking to Mary "after she took the pitcher and went forth to fill it with water." The second graphic, from a painting by Henry Tanner (1898), depicts Mary inside her house with a much more spritual, ethereal-looking Gabriel at the time of the Annunciation. FYI, I don't think anything is trying to be said by either artist in their depiction of Gabriel. Right or wrong, in real life it may be easier for an Angel of the Lord to manifest themselves in a more ethereal form initially before transforming into a more recognizable human form, transforming back then, before departure. People who have been involved in similar experiences often report seeing a glowing light first. THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETO: In Light of the Archives and Archaeology
Footnote [9] My Merchant Marine friend told me that when he was in his first two years of high school he had become driven, actually obsessed with the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu. As soon as he could he joined the Merchant Marines and began traveling the world to find or substantiate both places. But, the more and more ancient places he visited said to be related to Atlantis and Mu in some fashion, and the more and more educated he became the more and more he became convinced neither place ever existed. In his quest, both pro and con, besides all the Atlantis and Mu books in his library he could find and read by Ignatius Donnelly, L. Sprague de Camp, and James Churchward, he had collected reams and reams of books, material, research and explanations that debunked nearly every single aspect of either continent or their civilizations that anybody could ever pose. In later years, I was reminded of my Merchant Marine friend's obsession with prooving the existance of the Lost Continent of Atlantis and how strongly just reading a book could affect a person's life when I read that Mercedes De Acosta, after reading a book about the venerated holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, became so obsessed she dropped everything and went non-stop to India to see him: The Merchant Marine told me he had been all over the world. He had seen the pyramids in Egypt, the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec ruins in Mexico and Central America. Easter Island all by itself in the Pacific and Angkor Wat in jungles of Cambodia. He had been to Machu Picchu high in the Andes of Peru by climbing the Inca Trail and explored Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in England. Machu Picchu and Peru always seemed to be in the forefront of his thoughts, speaking fondly of both quite often. One reason was because he knew Hiram Bingham, the explorer that discovered Machu Picchu. He claimed they were more than just passing acquaintances, but actually friends. During WWII Bingham gave lectures on the south sea islands to members of the Navy. My merchant marine friend had traveled extensively throughout the South Pacific, including, as mentioned, Easter Island. Somehow the two met along the way and Bingham used him as a source for some of his lecture materials. My friend even had a signed first edition copy --- with a rather lengthy handwritten personal acknowledgement --- of Bingham's book, LOST CITY OF THE INCAS: The Story of Machu Picchu and Its Builders (1948), that Bingham sent him a few years into my friend's recuperation period. Bingham even wrote in the acknowledgement that he hoped the merchant marine would have "a quick and full recovery." Every day I came by we would talk about some place he had been to, Peru or otherwise. Our discussions on any one place could run over a period of weeks or sometimes just last the few hours I was there. Sometimes we would pick up where we left off and other times we would go off on some tangent discussing someplace else right in the middle of what we were talking about and not come back to the first topic for weeks. Each time we talked he would have me get down any number of books related to the subject or place we were discussing and we would look at pictures and go over the differences and the similarities of what different authors had written compared to what he had seen and experienced. If he didn't have a book at his command he would make a list and send me to the library, except for Atlantis or Mu. With that he had had almost every book ever published in English. Even though I heard him say many times that he had long since lost faith in the existence of either of the lost continents, through inference he often related the origin of his necklace back to one or the other or both. However, for the merchant marine, Mu or Atlantis notwithstanding, it was just a quick jump for the Necklace that came through him to me to have sprung from Gyanganj, AKA Shambhala or Shangri-La, through to him from it's original grounding source of Mt. Meru. Vested as it was with ancient powers of the past.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME
FLAG OF VATICAN CITY
THE HOLY MAN, LARRY DARRELL, INDIA, AND THE RAZOR'S EDGE
"He told me we would be on the open prairie for several days and since it was the end of October going into November to wear warm clothes and bring a really good cold weather sleeping bag. He picked me up right at the end of the month when the waning crescent moon was nothing but a thin curved sliver of sliver in the east just before dawn staying at the rock ring a few nights until a slight thin curved sliver of crescent moon appeared just above the western horizon at sunset. In between those two crescent moon phases was the new moon and why we were there. Of all the new moons in a year, this specific new moon was chosen because of something known as the cross quarter alignment. Cross quarter alignments occur four times a year, marking the halfway point between the the solstices and equinoxes. Starting from the one between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, which is considered the start of new growth, they move on through the fourth and last, falling halfway between the Autumnal Equinox and Winter Solstice, the time when plants and animals begin shutting down. So, to cut to the quick, the spiritual elder, for his ritual to be successful, required the use of the closest new moon phase that fell nearest the last cross quarter alingment only a few days away. That new moon phase just so happening to fall on the second of two new moons in the month of October 1959 on Halloween eve. Halfway in the passage of time between the last of the lunar month waning crescent moon as seen in the east just at dawn or shortly thereafter and first crescent as sighted in west just after sunset marks the point the moon reaches it's halfway point traveling through the underworld. The ritual the spiritual elder performed was to ensure the moon would exit the underworld unscathed and return to it's rightful place in the heavens."
THE SKY IS MAGICAL?
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"In and around the world of the supernatural, the occult, and the underground dark-eddies of things spiritual, there are mystics, shamans, tribal elders, wizards, sorcerers, spellcasters, diviners, necromancers, witches, hungry ghosts, inorganic beings and all other types and kinds of controllers and purveyors of occult abilities, drawing strength and operating in other dimensions along the edges of the conventional plane."
UNDER THE PROTECTION OF
THE LORD BUDDHA
HIGH BARBAREE
SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
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DONALD DUCK COMICS VOODOO HOODOO #238 AUGUST 1949
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"'El Devoto Peregaino' written by Fra Antonio del Castillo who visited the holy land in the first half of the seventeeth century, also F.M. Benvenuti, a Sylvestrian monk, in 'Historic Relation,' printed at Perugia in 1634, speaks of 'The window by which many believe the angel entered to salute the Blessed Virgin.'"
1: "And she took the pitcher and went forth to fill it with water: and lo a voice saying: 'Hail, thou that art highly favoured; the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.'
Apocryphal New Testament Page 43
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It should be noted that Chevalier's book Notre Dame de Lorette. Étude critique sur l’authenticité de la Santa Casa (Our Lady of Loreto. Critical Study of the authenticity of the Holy House), linked above, is the original written in French version. An English version does not seem to be readily available online. However, for a simple, quick easy to do English translation click HERE then in the box on the right click "FULL TEXT." When the page comes up request a French to English translation. Please be advised the translation is not 100% perfect and difficult to read mostly because of the footnotes being translated right along as if they were part of the main text. If you locate a viable online English version or have a better solution I can pass onto my readers please feel free to contact me.
THE WANDERLING
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"It is an anomaly that the access door in Loreto should face north, not admitting the light of the sun, while in Nazareth it faced – much more felicitously - west. The window which in Loreto faces west, in Nazareth was positioned exposed to the sun, that is to say, facing south."
THE MERCHANT MARINE'S SHIP WAS TORPEDOED OFF THE COAST OF FLORIDA, BUT HE
WAS NOT FOUND UNTIL WEEKS LATER STRAPPED TO DEBRIS IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC.
"A SEARCH IN SECRET INDIA [a book by Paul Brunton] had a profound influence on me. In it I learned for the first time about Ramana Maharshi, a great Indian saint and sage. It was as though some emanation of this saint was projected out of the book to me. For days and nights after reading about him I could not think of anything else. I became, as it were, possessed by him. I could not even talk of anything else. Nothing could distract me from the idea that I must go and meet this saint. From this time on, although I ceased to speak too much about it, the whole direction of my life turned toward India and away from Hollywood. I felt that I would surely go there, although there was nothing at this time to indicate that I would. Nevertheless, I felt I would meet the Maharshi and that this meeting would be the greatest experience of my life."
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JAMES HILTON-------------------------------------ANDREW TOMAS--------------------------------NICOLAS ROERICH
EDWIN BERNBAUM
ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD
MY MERCHANT MARINE FRIEND
SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
HIGH BARBAREE
GUNNER'S MATE U.S. NAVY
SANTA ROSALIA "From Ensenada we headed south on some pretty crummy roads eventually turning eastward across the peninsula to the little town of Santa Rosalia, taking a ferry across the Sea of Cortez to Guaymas. On the road south just before it turns more eastward across the peninsula to Santa Rosalia we turned on Highway 18 not far from Guerrero Negro as I wanted to catch up with a man I hoped to meet who was said to live at a place called El Arco. The man was Col. Harvey Greenlaw, the onetime second in command of the infamous Flying Tigers of World War II fame. I had read his wife's book CARLOS CASTANEDA: Don Juan Matus and the Bus Station Meeting Below are two maps. The map on the left shows the location of the Baja Peninsula relative to Mexico and North America generally. The map on the right shows the southern half of the Baja Peninsula along with some of the Mexican mainland. Clicking the graphic on your right, then clicking it a second time, will enlarge it to nearly screen size. At the very, very top right, as shown on the Mexico mainland, almost off the top edge and marked by a yellow arrow, is a city by the name of Guaymas. Notice a series of dashes creating a curved line from Guaymas across the Sea of Cortez to the Baja Peninsula. That curved line reprsents the ferry route across the Sea of Cortez from Guaymas to Santa Rosalia and back, easily identifying the location of Santa Rosalia in Mexico and on the peninsula for those who may be so interested. The ferry between the two cities was used by me and my Mexico travel buddy on our way to see Our Lady Of Guadalupe', the first of my major apparition sites as found in the main text above.
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THE LADY AND THE TIGERS
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Rufus Van Zandt was sworn in as a Texas Ranger in 1921, being promoted to rank of Captain in July of 1922. Sometime after a woman by the name of Miriam 'Ma' Wallace became governor of Texas in 1925 Van Zandt resigned his position for reasons undisclosed, but most likely because of differences of opinion (it has been said Ferguson used the Rangers as a political tool for dispensing patronage. On February 20, 1925, she reduced the five companies of Rangers, limiting the remaining Ranger authority to the counties along the southern border. If Van Zandt, with the rank of Captain, was caught up in that reduction or resigned because of the reduction is not known).
In 1926, within months of leaving the Rangers, Van Zandt became a Special Agent for the U.S. Treasury Department. The Special Agent position carried the full credentials and powers of a federal law enforcement officer including the right to carry a badge, gun, and arrest authority --- duties of which were loosely bracketed around the area of border enforcement. Van Zandt did not resign his position as a federal agent until sometime in 1928, making him effectively in play as a law enforcement officer in Texas from 1921 to 1928.
Van Zandt, using long established credentials as a guide for hunters and fishermen in Mexico as a cover, was assigned by the U.S. government to keep his eyes and ears open for Japanese or German activity south of the border. News began filtering down through his network of informers, especially from those that ran sportfishers or fishing boats, that Japanese submarines were being spotted in the Pacific off the coast of Baja and some had even holed up and possibly taken on fuel in Magdalena Bay. After sorting through the hearsay that submarines were in fact refueling in the bay, and convinced by what he heard was valid, Van Zandt and his Yaqui cohorts launched a raid. Hard evidence gathered from that raid ended up in Van Zandt's hands and in turn passed on during a veiled public meeting in a busy train station with movie actress and fellow spy Rochelle Hudson, also working undercover on and off in Mexico and South America for the Naval Intelligence Service. He covertly slipped fairly solid information to Hudson that Japanese officers had gone ashore to make some sort of contact with operatives and a few low ranking shore-launch crew members without Mexican currency unwittingly traded items with local establishments for goods and services.
As found in the main text above my dad, on his death bed, asked me to deliver a trunk he had stashed away in a secret storage unit, to his brother, my uncle, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and for me to do so without anyone else knowing about it, not even my brothers. Re the following that shows up in various forms in several places as I have written:
"Adhering to my father's request to deliver to my uncle the trunk post haste (my dad's words), put me in Santa Fe unexpectedly on a quick couple of days turn around during late June early July of 1972. I say unexpectedly because as soon as I walked out of the hospital I went straight to the storage unit, picked up the trunk, and drove all night right to Santa Fe. Doing so put me into my uncle's schedule of doing things instead of the two of us designing time around me being there.
During that couple of days stay my uncle had to meet up with, for some undisclosed reason, beat poet The three-photo strip below was taken at the meeting in Santa Fe which occurred during the summer of 1972. The first photo show Alan Ginsberg. The center photo has Bhagavan Das and Ram Dass shown together. The third photo shows him with Ram Dass and Ginsberg. Ram Dass, again, IS Dr. Richard Alpert, the author of Be Here Now, the 1971 book that shot Bhagavan Das to fame.
"(S)omehow out of nowhere, I was being pulled out of the water of a pool in the oppressive humidity and hot sun of the tropics. As the men helped me to my feet, seeing I was dazed as to where I was, told me I was at the Arunachaleswarar Temple in Tiruvannamalai, south India. They had just dragged me from out of the Brahma Theertham tank located in the Fourth Prakaram of the temple."
The graphic below depicts a seen from above grounds-plan or map of the Arunachaleswarar Temple. Due east is to the right, due west on the left. South is at the bottom. Devotees entering through the south wall use the Thirumanjana Gopuram entrance, immediately passing through the smaller Kattai Gopuram just inside and in front of it, coming upon the Brahma Teertham Tank located in the Fourth Prakaram of the temple on the right (shown in the grounds-plan as a double outlined green square). Clicking that square will take you to a page with additional history and information regarding the Brahma Teertham Tank and the temple.
ON THE FATE OF SIGMUND FREUD AND GUY HAGUE On June 4, 1938, Sigmund Freud and his family, escaping the oncoming grip of the Nazis, left Vienna on the Orient Express. They stayed overnight in Paris at the apartment of his friend Marie Bonaparte, a princess, then continued on to London. A few months later Freud had surgery to remove a cancerous growth. By February 1939 the cancer had returned, only this time the tumor was considered inoperable. Over the next eight months Freud became weaker and weaker and by September the cancer had eaten a through to the outside of his cheek. Guy Hague, on his return trip to the states after having left the Ramana ashram in India, came within a hair's breadth of meeting Freud. He said while he was in Paris he hand delivered some letters from Sri Ramana to a woman named Mercedes De Acosta he had met at the ashram. While in Paris he also met a woman who was a princess that knew Freud, Freud having stayed at her house one year before on his way to London. Hague told the princess he would like to meet Freud, so in turn, the princess wrote Hague a letter of introduction. When Hague went to London to see Freud, even though he had the letter of introduction in hand, he was unable to meet with him because Freud was too sick to take visitors. The princess told Hague that Freud had stayed at her house one year before, which would make Hague and his meeting with the princess sometime at least during or after June 1939. Freud died in September of the same year. If all the information is correct, that would put Hague out of India but still in Paris sometime during or after June 1939, but in London, apparently on the way back to the United States, possibly before the German Army invaded Poland, but for sure before Freud's death, Freud passing away on September 23, 1939. THE BEST OF THE MAUGHAM BIOGRAPHIES:
SPIRITUAL GUIDES, GURUS, AND TEACHERS INFLUENTIAL IN THE RAZOR'S EDGE: All Red Cross disaster volunteers are encouraged to become part of the Disaster Services Human Resources (DSHR) System. Through this system, which is coordinated at the National level and using bar-coded photo IDs, the American Red Cross can quickly and efficiently move highly trained and experienced Red Cross disaster volunteers into affected areas at home and all across the Nation. The DSHR System also provides both new and veteran Red Cross disaster volunteers with career-development paths within Disaster Services. A DSHR volunteer is usually classified as ready to serve in one or more group functions such as Mass Care, Individual Client Services, Disaster Health Services, Disaster Mental Health, Partner Services, Material Support (Logistics), or Organizational Support. In addition, a DSHR volunteer is likely to specialize in a specific activity within one of the major functions, such as Sheltering, Feeding, Warehousing, Staff Support, Welfare Inquiry, etc.
To Participate in the DSHR Program a Volunteer Must: Below, cover image to Sister M. Dominica's, pamphlet/book The chapel, Our Lady of Good Help: A shrine of Mary on the Green Bay Peninsula (Green Bay, WI: Sisters of St. Francis of Bay Settlement, 1955) Another example of the Obeah seemingly knowing insights never discussed, but being able to talk about them anyway, is in the quote below as found in Zen, the Buddha, and Shamanism. The discussion occurred way early in our relationship, just as we were getting to know each other and way before I apprenticed under him. MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES: What I have chosen to call or given the name Mitigating Circumstances, as presented below, can be found fully in context in The Last American Darshan, linked further down. The mitigating circumstances are the primary focus and cause of the lengthy blackout period experienced by me shortly after my return from India. That blackout period pretty much wiped clean all traces of my memory over a period of several years at one of the most crucial times of my life --- taken together, most definitely, a wide ranging series of almost unsurmountable Mara induced impediments. To wit:
Upon my return from India, with my mother dead, my two brothers dispersed across the country living with separate families and my father long gone, my grandmother, before the chance arose for me to be placed into a foster home, took me. I was with her but a few months when we went to see her only remaining child, a daughter, my mother's younger sister. Her husband, unrelated to any of the events surrounding the death of my mother or the falling apart of my side of the family, had swirled, somewhat quickly, into a relentless state of deep depression. My grandmother went to lend support to her daughter, taking me with her. One day, after going shopping all day long in town with my grandmother and her daughter and her two children, we returned and pulled up in front of the garage. I got out of the car and opened the two side-by-side wooden garage doors. There right in front of me on the floor of the garage only a few feet away in the glare of the headlights, in a slowly expanding pool of blood, was what was left of the husband of my mother's sister. The whole back of his head blown out from the blast of a double barrel shotgun he stuck in his mouth. His body laying there apparently falling off a still upright straight-back wooden chair with his once onetime skull full of brain now empty. Gone were all the synapses and neurons and everything that went with them, turned now into nothing but bloody silver-gray yellowish meat splattered all over the upper reaches of the nearby open-studded walls and exposed rafters.
There I was, a little kid barely even closing down on six or seven years of age, not long returned from India, without a mother, having missed both her final days and her funeral as well, standing with my mouth open, staring down on what only minutes before was someone else dear to me, not just gone, but excruciatingly gone. My aunt, stunned into disbelief at what she saw, with the car still in gear and engine running let her foot slip from the clutch as she apparently tried to step out of the car and run toward her husband. The vehicle lurched forward in one huge leap, crashing into the swung open garage door knocking it and me down and rendering me unconscious. It took months and months and reasons unknown before I suddenly came out of a nearly amnesia-like walking coma --- and even then, not fully so until years later. Everything that I knew and should have remembered about my mother's sickness, India, the time leading up to that moment in the garage, and being with my grandmother, either evaporated or was deeply covered over. Days, weeks, months, all gone. In closing that gap I remembered only up to one side, a side well before my mother ever got sick. A happy loving childhood with a mother and father and playing with my brothers and kids in the neighborhood. A house full of toys and my older brother learning to ride a bicycle. Then suddenly out of nowhere finding myself months later on the other side, getting out of a car clutching a tiny suitcase with nothing but a handful of crummy belongings and sack full of dirty underwear and not knowing how I got there. Standing on the sidewalk not much more than a simple beleaguered young boy with no mother and a father long gone, being taken by a stranger to live with a couple that owned a flower shop, a couple I was sure I had never seen or heard of in my life --- followed by a period of time which encompassed the failure of me to stay with the flower shop people for very long before running away --- on more than one occasion --- and because of same, ending up with living with my grandmother and uncle, with everything else in-between those two moments of my short childhood gone.
As for my uncle coming close by pure intuition taking me to see the movie The Razor's Edge a few years before, you can watch it yourself complete, free, and with no sign in by clicking the below:
The graphic or "map" you clicked through from the main text and the one seen immediately above, depicts Atzlan, the initial homeland of the Aztecs, with the "original" map as we know it having been done on European paper a little more than a hundred years after the Cortez invasion. It shows the seven caves with their singular entrance, while at the top the curved mountian where the caves are said to be located. It is thought the originating source of the "map" was from either strong Azetc verbal tradition or copied from a now lost Aztec codex. The peoples or tribes that would eventually become what we now call Aztecs were one of seven tribes that lived over a thousand miles north of present day Mexico City, of which on their arrival wasn't much more than an empty island surrounded by a swamp-like lake or marsh. Their original homeland, a place they called Atzlan, home of the seven caves in the north has never been pinpointed, but for a variety of strongly associated reasons, including Aztec historical descriptions of their lands on one side and their language on the other, it has for many historians and others, been narrowed down. Classical Nahuatl, the Aztec language, belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family of languages found throughout the Southwestern United States, that is, an area what is now comprised of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico Please note the map or codex that depicts Atzlan, the original homeland of the Aztecs shown back up the page, at the top of the codex the distinctive shape of the saguaro cactus is clearly shown. Saguaro cactus, in their recent post ice age past to their current natural habitat, grow only within a very limited range, as shown in green in the graphic below and well worth having been remembered by the map's artist because saguaro's would never be seen again anywhere along their march to or in their new homeland. Notice also, two other things. One, how the range of the saguaro cactus matches perfectly with the area the Aztecs cite as their originating homeland and two, how the saguaro's north west edge runs right along the southern reaches of the Colorado River, the same area the Aztec princess explored: Why the future Aztecs left their homeland and migrated south is not clear, but it may have been caused by two initially unconnected events and supported by a third --- all three carrying cosmic significance. According to Aztec legend, when correlated against our present day calendar, their southward migration began on May 24, 1064 AD. Ten years before that there had been a rare celestial event, the appearance of a "guest star" that was so bright it could be seen even during daylight hours, which unknown at the time was the super nova explosion that created the Crab Nebula. For most in the ancient world, the heavenly sky, except for the sun, moon and planets, was fixed and unchanging. Then suddenly in 1054 a brand new star appeared that outshone all others, only to dim and disappear a few months later. That event may have been seen as a precursor to events. Then, in 1064 a volcanic explosion that created the Sunset Crater in Arizona occurred, wiping out hundreds and hundreds of square miles of arable crop land right in the same general area the Aztecs were said to have come from, reducing the ability of the indigenous peoples for miles around to grow sufficient quantities food. With little or no other choice except to migrate out they headed south. Just when things seemed to have reached the worse, two years into their trek the third sign occurred, Halley's Comet of 1066. Ethnohistorical records state that the Mexica, i.e.,Aztecs, and other Nahua groups left Aztlan, in the year "One Flint" or. 1069 AD or 1168 AD (cf. Tira de la Peregrinacion Mexica 1944: pi. 1; Tezozdmoc 1992: 14; Codice Boturini 1952). A 2004 translation of the Anales de Tlatelolco gives the only date known related to the exit from Aztlan; day-sign "4 Cuauhtli" (Four Eagle) of the year "1 Tecpatl" (Knife) or 1064 - 1065. For more on the potential possiblity of the Aztec homeland caves prior to their departue see:
TIME TRAVEL, THE CURANDERO, AND MEETING QUATU-ZACA
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SECRET JAPANESE SUBMARINE BASES
ON THE PACIFIC WEST COAST
THIRUMANJANA GOPURAM TOWER
SMALLER KATTAI GOPURAM TOWER JUST ABOVE ITARUNACHALESWARAR TEMPLE
MAP AND HISTORY OF THE RAMANA ASHRAM
THE FORBIDDEN PLANET'S MONSTER FROM THE ID 1956.
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DEATH OF THE EGO: A BUDDHIST VIEW
THE LIFE AND WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD
MERCEDES DE ACOSTA AND ANDY WARHOL
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THE RAZOR'S EDGE: TRUE OR FALSE?
Good biography. Lots of Maugham graphics, from early childhood to late adult.
Everybody knows Hemingway drove an ambulance during WWI, nobody knows Maugham did.
Includes a section on the missing years of the Razor's Edge
THE HOLY MAN, LARRY DARRELL, AND THE RAZOR'S EDGE
Disaster Services Human Resources (DSHR)
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"He asked me what I liked about Jamaica. I told him things like the weather and the people. Then he asked again what I liked about Jamaica. But now I wasn't able to answer. It was like my mind had grown so huge that trying to focus on something as minuscule as a few words to string together into a sentence had become an impossible hardship. As I struggled to form something at least semi-comprehensible the Obeah asked, "What about the old man in a far away place a long time ago that constructed bird-like contraptions in order to fly even as you did as a child?" Da Vinci was the answer, but I couldn't form the words. Finally I told him about my Totem Animal, the huge wingspan condor-like vultures the Jamaicans call John Crows, that glide and soar for hours, riding the thermals and never flapping their wings."
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ARIZONA CALVACADE: THE TURBULENT TIMES
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(for complete movie please click above image)
(for complete movie please click above image)
