Facing the Beast, page 22
Neither of them had any idea what I was talking about.
After a beat, I could feel that my friend was confused, and that she was a bit sorry for me. There was nothing to see!
The mom turned away with a brisk motion. “Come on, let’s get home.” She was terse and annoyed. There was nothing there.
And to my amazement, I looked at the magical place and—there was indeed nothing there!
The magic had fled at the denial of perception.
What had happened? It was nothing now, it was utterly banal, it was just a tangle of grasses, a dim mess of foliage.
I was—again—horribly humiliated and embarrassed. No one saw what I saw! I was such a weirdo.
I was never invited over to play with that child again, and she never came over again to my house.
So yet again, I tried to put away my troublesome perception.
* * *
Many experiences in my life as an adult followed this theme—that the world is animated with energies, for good and evil, and embroidered all over with magic; and I sustained these experiences but did not discuss them. I also learned that lots of people suppress similar experiences along these lines.
Once in a while I would tell a story about a metaphysical experience—one that really had happened to me—and then everyone else—lawyers, editors, journalists, scientists—would rush to share their own stories of the metaphysical. So I learned that lots of us are not talking about important experiences, from which we could all surely learn important lessons.
And when I ask these folks why they don’t talk more publicly about their experiences, I get the same responses that I recognize in my own inhibitions: no one wants to be seen as hallucinating, or not credible, or unbalanced. Two-thirds of people, according to Yougov.com, say that they have had a paranormal experience.18 About half of Americans, according to Pew Research, say that they have had a mystical or metaphysical experience.19
That is a lot of Americans who are, understandably, keeping quiet.
* * *
We are awash with energies, good and evil, beyond those for which postwar science has names.
Some of these energy fields are beautiful and miraculous. Perhaps they are even healing.
When I went to visit the grave of the “Lubavitcher Rebbe”—Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, one of the most revered holy men of the twentieth century—I was directed to the Ohel, or “tent,” a gathering-place in Queens, built adjacent to the Rebbe’s gravesite. This is a destination where people from all walks of life gather to pray at this saintly person’s final resting place.20
“The Rebbe keenly understood that our every action is part of a bigger picture,” explains Chabad.org.
Every good deed we do brings humanity closer to the ultimate goal, the era of cosmic perfection and universal awareness of G-d, known in Judaism as the time of Moshiach. The Rebbe spoke tirelessly about this time, demonstrating how the world is heading closer and closer to this special era and how every person can actualize it by increasing in acts of goodness and kindness.21
I was early to my appointment. So I walked for many blocks around my destination. And the further away from the gravesite I wandered—block after block, into the peaceful Queens suburbs—the fainter grew the aura or force field of holiness.
But as the time of my appointment drew closer, and I walked toward the Ohel—the closer I drew to the sacred location—the more intensely one could feel the magnetism of great holiness. It was like a giant ziggurat of sacred energies, ascending to a peak over the quiet cemetery in Queens; and gently sloping off into all directions, like a mountain of emotional gold.
At the gravesite itself, the vibration of sanctity was so palpable I felt as if I were in the presence of an aspect of the Divine.
So many places are vortices of sacred energy.
When I visited the Scottish island of Iona, I was an ill-informed, day-tripping tourist. I had done no research on the island; and this visit was before cellphones or the internet. To my amazement, the moment my feet touched Iona’s earth, I wandered the island in a state of joy and exaltation; in a daze of glory. Was that what heaven felt like?
I did not realize—until I boarded the tourist bus again, and the bus driver explained—that Iona was a sacred island. It always had been, back to pre-Christian times, and right up to the present. The sacred presence on the island had been described and testified to, over and over, for centuries. It was believed in the traditions related to the place, that Christ had visited Iona—and would reappear again on that sacred island.22
Some people react like that, explained the bus driver—most people; most wander around in a state of exaltation and joy.
And some people simply cannot take it, he said; the energies burn them; and they need to get off the island as quickly as possible.
* * *
Some of the energies out there are simply alarming.
The leadership institute I cofounded long ago in the Hudson Valley was housed in a fine old building on 300 acres of land. I recall that the real estate broker would not get out of the car when she first showed the building to me.
She sent me in alone.
Once my colleagues and I bought it, we realized it was truly haunted.
Kitchen cabinet doors would swing open of their own accord. There was a spot in the library that was always icy cold. Lights would flicker off and on, and doors would bang shut in empty rooms. Retreatants would have troubled dreams.
It got so bad that we expected the presence in the house—everyone agreed that it was a masculine one—to act up at certain times during retreats. When we lit the Shabbat candles, the candles would flicker. Or one candle would be snuffed out.
At one point, two serious witnesses—neither prone to exaggeration—described a Shabbat candlestick dematerializing. It simply disappeared.
By now, we had learned that the long-ago owner of the home had been murdered (in the library), by his tenant, who had lived in a smaller home on the property.
The house subsequently had had so much supernatural activity, that, in the 1940s, there had been an actual old-school exorcism. This exorcism had been matter-of-factly reported in the local newspaper.
I was at a loss. The paranormal activity was taking a toll on everyone. I described this disturbing situation to my then-therapist, a spiritually oriented gentleman. He suggested that the being in the house seemed to be trying to get our attention when we lit the Shabbat candles.
He suggested that we say the Kaddish next time we lit the candles—the Jewish prayer for the dead.
We did. We said Kaddish.
The house filled with peace.
The unsettled presence seemed right away to have moved on—and nothing ever bothered anyone in that house again.
* * *
Other energy fields, I have no doubt, are just pure evil.
I visited Guantanamo, in the first six months of President Barack Obama’s administration. I could feel the presence of what one might call Satan; or of some other magisterial, high-level administrator of evil.
I felt that presence. Not in the service men and women assigned to that post, not in the housing for reporters; not in the cynical mock-up of the courtroom on the site; not in the prison yard—where I could see the men who had been penned up for years without charge or trial, and I could hear their roar of distress and outrage.
Rather, I could feel the presence of Satan—or some other adjudicator of evil on earth—standing right behind the “doctors” and the “nurse” and the “psychiatrist,” in the pristine “medical facility,” where “difficult” prisoners were housed. That facility was part of the creepy tour that the US government had arranged for reporters who were covering the prison.
These “healers” in the medical bay were showing me rather proudly how they forced tubes down the throats of the recalcitrant prisoners who went on hunger strikes. They showed me—as if this selection were a treat—the range of flavors of liquid nutrition—chocolate, strawberry, vanilla—that they pumped into the unwilling bodies of striking prisoners.
A prisoner who had been on hunger strike, and who was being force-fed, died of starvation while I was at the facility.
I could almost smell the evil of the force field that surrounded those “doctors” and “nurses” at that scene. There was something huge, and awful, and terrifying, and intelligent, and dark—just behind them; inhabiting them; all around them.
* * *
We are in a time of extraordinary change—the nature of reality itself is changing, as you now know I believe—and if we are to survive this time and indeed if we are to evolve safely to wherever we are supposed to arrive next, we need to talk honestly about good and evil energies; about healing and killing energies; and about sacred and profane energies.
This discussion is not even as metaphysical as it sounds. Brian, my husband, who very early in his military career worked in “SIGINT,” or “Signals Intelligence,” points out that everything has a vibrational signature or frequency—and that mapping those signals is how many technologies work that scan a field to gather intel through the interception of those signals.
So many technologies use various energy fields that we scarcely notice how weird they would have seemed in an era before their mechanisms were understood. Is it so weird to grapple with energies?
Sonograms send sound energies into our bodies to give our doctors intelligence. Ultrasounds also use sound waves.
Given all this, is it surprising that we “vibe” with some people and that our energy fields “clash” with others? Is it surprising that people who are happily married have heart rates that align when they sit side by side? Is it surprising that stories about relatives who know at distances of thousands of miles that something bad has happened to their loved ones, are as commonplace as stories of finding bargains at a mall?
We live in a mysterious world. Mechanics do not explain the totality of it.
We are held together human to human, by energies of love that are as strong as death. Our lives are held in the palm of the Divine, like leaves on the surface of water.
Who knows all that is around us and that animates us?
Our ancestors dealt with these mysteries by inviting and seeking and invoking blessings, and by assiduously avoiding curses.
Every culture except our own has amulets, phylacteries, prayer shawls, talismans, Yad Fatimas, invocations, prayers for protection.
Every culture except our own seeks the blessing of positive energies, and respects the miraculous nature of positive powers.
Every culture except our own fears and dreads curses and maledictions; is wary of the workings and powers of negative energies; and seeks divine protection from them.
Is our denial of powerful energies—especially in a time of great pressure and great change—a form of cultural suicide?
Are we super-enlightened?
Or just really incredibly dumb?
It is time for us, too, urgently to relearn some ancient wisdom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Not Dead Yet
As chance would have it, as I was finishing this book, I was struck with appendicitis. I checked into a peaceful little local hospital, on the advice of my wonderful friend and gifted healer, Dr. Henry Ealy. That was not a horrible experience.
But then I sustained an infection after my surgery, and was rushed to a terrifying major urban hospital, where I came very close to death. I am now home from the second hospital—the “Vortex Hospital,” as I think of it, a hospital of near-no-return—and am pleased to report that I am:
Not Dead Yet.
I suffered in ways I won’t trouble you by describing, but suffice to say that my stay at the Vortex Hospital involved the final three of what had been five days with no food or water, as I had lain, hooked up to an IV, with an acute abdominal infection, post-appendectomy.
I watched my vitals being taken again and again and saw that over time my blood oxygen levels had started sinking into the 80s; I could not get them back up into the safe 90s range, no matter how hard I inhaled and exhaled. I knew that when blood oxygen levels drop too low, people are intubated, and I knew that meant that the lungs could get damaged irrevocably. The internal infection raged on.
The morning of what was supposed to have been the day on which my procedure was to have taken place—one to treat the severe abdominal infection—we sustained a four-and-a-half-hour power outage (“Unprecedented,” the staff said wonderingly), leaving the massive brand-new hospital facility in unnerving darkness, even as the small, cozy, 1970s-era original building, right next door, trundled along with all its lights on.
By the end of my Day Five with no food or water, the staff at the Vortex Hospital told me that, due to the power outage, the procedure for which I had been transferred to that facility was being delayed further and further into the future.
“Maybe tomorrow,” said the RN vaguely. “Maybe the day after.”
When I expressed panic that that would mean seven days or more without food or water, the RN said, with no emotion, “People can live for seven days without food or water.”
The unsaid observation was: “Then, they can’t.”
And then she “reassured me”: “If you don’t get seen after Day Seven we’ll just put you on a feeding tube.” This terrified me. Finally she said, flatly: “Your vitals are stable.”
After this exchange, I truly panicked. I knew that while my vitals might look fine, I could feel that I was losing the ability to keep fighting for my life. I felt the subsiding of my will to fight, as clearly as if I were watching water swirling around an emptying drain.
I was exhausted, and had stopped caring about outcomes. I just wanted the suffering to end, in whichever way it might. In conventional nursing, I am sure that that collapse of my will to live would have been visible to a caring observer, no matter what my “vitals” had to say. But the machinery of data-based management ground on.
When I could fight no longer, I thought weakly of my loved ones; and realized that even though I no longer cared if I survived or not, they would care if this was indeed the end of my life.
So I asked God to please save my life. I also told God that if He spared my life I would write all the things I was currently scared to write—I knew He knew exactly what those things were—and then I collapsed into a feverish dream.
I found myself coming to consciousness free of pain, and feeling light and small. For good reason: I was myself, but I was now a nine-year-old version of myself, and I was all spirit. It felt good and very simple—as if I was made of light and energy. I was on a beach, and my dad (who has passed away) was there with me.
The beach was incredibly peaceful. But there were some unusual things about it. It faded into mist in both distances, so that all I could see clearly was the stretch where my father and I were present together. And it was “pearly.” So much so that I almost laughed. “Really?” The waves were edged with a bioluminescent quality, even though, as I watched a single wave break near my foot, the water itself was extraordinarily clear. The mist was edged with a silvery and lavender glow.
Then there was my dad—whom I felt completely unsurprised to see, just as he seemed to take seeing me there very much in stride. His age and mine in that scene were not in accordance with our earthly timelines. He was not the forty-plus father of my actual childhood in the 1960s; here on this beach he looked about thirty-five. He was dressed the way old photos show him to have dressed in the late 1950s, before I was born—before the crazy 1960s.
Here, he wore a pale moss-green fisherman’s sweater, and chinos with the ankles rolled up. His feet were bare. (“Mom, did Dad have a moss-green fisherman’s sweater, and did he wear chinos, in the 1950s?” Mom: “Yes.”)
He looked extremely well; his hair was fully black, not streaked with gray as it had been from my earliest memory of him. My father had had very distinctive feet, with high arches, in life; those were indeed his elegant feet on the sand. His hands were dry and warm, in life; he put his right hand gently on my hair and yes, that was his hand.
Then we had a calm, serious, direct talk. It did not matter that I was nine and he was thirty-five, or that I was alive—somewhere—and that he was dead. It seemed as if that talk was the purpose of this encounter.
After my father’s death, I had learned about certain aspects of his life that had confused me, and that had led me to struggle with my memory of him. These questions had become a barrier to my properly mourning him, and certainly they had kept me from feeling his presence. But in this chat we were having—thoughtful, father to daughter, transparent, not sentimental—I got to ask him every question that had haunted me, and he answered them one by one, and the answers set my mind entirely at ease. As that conversation unfolded, and he was accountable to me in my questions, I felt the spiritual connection I had had with him, which had been blocked, reopen like a channel; and all the love that he felt for me—and that I felt for him—sluiced through to connect us once more, undeniable, as it was intended to do, death or no death.
At one point, I asked him what God had thought about a certain issue. My dad replied, in the context of explaining that God was more forgiving than humans—“God is different from you and me.” That was another moment in which I enjoyed evidence that this really was my dad; that is just the kind of thing he would have said; he was an English literature professor; and that is a witty paraphrase of a famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote.
After all the questions had been answered, I asked, neutrally curious, if I was staying there. He gestured toward a broad silvery stream, like a runnel on an estuary, that cut off the wet sand on that strand of beach from some other place; and indicated that no, I was now to cross back over that shimmering divide.
There wasn’t a leave-taking or anything else dramatic—I simply found myself again at length lying on my bed of pain, the infection raging still.
