Here's what's news, read all about it!

Here's what's news, read all about it!

Hi... Welcome to Musings From A Rare Medium...
Here, you'll find essays on everything from current affairs to what's happening in the spirit world.
In addition, if you're a reader, you'll discover some wonderful stories, all with a mystic twist, from my upcoming book: Medium Rare, Memoir Of A Slightly Mad Mystic.
Written as e mails sent to my son, now a thirty six year old man that I've been separated from since he was a toddler, Medium Rare, through a collection of true stories, informs him about the mystic life his father led.

Medium Rare… Memoir of a Slightly Mad Mystic

An Overview

The boundary between mysticism and outright madness is fascinating territory. I know; I’ve walked that razors edge.
The madness came calling at around eight years old. In the way black ink spilled over parchment spreads inexorably through each fiber of the paper, a terrible darkness began oozing through my mind. Thoroughly saturated and consumed by the competing voices of sub-personalities and obsessive-compulsive behavior, at the age of fourteen, when my mother came home from work one evening, she found my exhausted body under the bathroom sink dying.
Unable to distinguish if I was dreaming or awake, I sought resolution by slashing my wrists.
With my head wedged between the sink trap and the wall, I listened to my mother phoning for help, while my sister—needing to do something—tried to wrench my head loose from the pipe. She couldn’t, so until the medics arrived, I languished there, upright, my life’s blood emptying onto the bathroom floor.
But there would be no death in our small house in Columbus Ohio that day. My soul had other plans.
Thus began my spiritual journey: a strange mystical adventure that led first into the wildly strange world I discovered as a teenager incarcerated in a mid-western mental asylum.
Despite their good intentions, brandishing treatments that felt more like punishments, all the good doctors succeeded in doing was to convince me that I was really crazy. After stuffing me with drugs and rattling my brain with electro-shock, instead of better, I became professional, a professional mental patient.
But a strange twist of fate cast me onto a path of healing. The prescription that helped more than any of the drugs or remedies they offered, came as a result of my dying—three times!
Each journey to the 'other side' left a deep impression on my psyche. After dying for the second time, my 'wall of forgetfulness,' the buffer our minds use to focus our attention completely into this current incarnation, melted away. The complete memory of having died many times before washed over me like a powerful deja'vu. And after my third encounter, I knew that as spirits cast into a confusing world of powerful symbols and ideas, I wasn't facing them alone. None of us do. We have help from the unseen spirit realms, a world I now know exists.
So while the age of Flower Power bloomed in San Francisco, back in Ohio, even in the sterile halls of the hospital, I suddenly found myself reveling as well, in newfound lucidity!
When the time was right, with the help of a spirit that manifested right before me one day on the ward, I escaped. Terrified but determined, ignorant but committed to self-discovery, I left the whole mid-western way of life behind and headed west, searching for the Grail.
The road trip out of Ohio—a feast for the senses—served as my initiation into a new world... meaning that the old one, the insane life I had come to believe in, began to melt like ice cream in summer, and my mind was ushered into an entirely different reality. Each day, one miracle after the next catapulted me into an upward spiral of spiritual awakening. Rather than drugs that numbed my mind and shock treatments that shook my brain into senselessness, it took the shocking reality of everlasting life to replant my shriveled soul in fertile soil.
And there was more to come.
I landed in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, a place brimming with nature, new thought, and an amazing array of colorful people. Showering in the freedom, creativity, and love I found there, I scrubbed myself clean of Ohio's small mindedness. The sunny open-mindedness that characterized the rugged landscape of Northern California turned my old etched-in-vinyl reality to its flip side. Discovering an Eastern spiritual teacher in a most astounding and mystical way, I adapted a spiritual lifestyle and learned to meditate.
As I began the practice of turning my attention inward, my outer world blossomed with excitement and fun. I apprenticed myself to a magician, and it wasn’t long before I too was supporting myself via the art of conjuring. Joining a troop of actors, I traveled across the country and around the world, performing in front of thousands of people and in some marvelous venues.
Along the way, my obvious fascination with death led to its opposite. I investigated the American way of birth. Not happy with what I found, with the help of some very brave and dedicated people, I explored procedures and practices in which babies could feel more welcomed into the world. Over time, I developed a spiritually oriented practice of Midwifery.
But regardless of the excitement, growth, and beauty that prevailed in my life, by the summer of ‘92’, I once more sank into existential malaise. Instead of speeding into the future, once again, I found myself stuck in the mud.
Accepting the offer of a friend, both my girlfriend and I sought solace with him on the nurturing island of Kauai, in Hawaii.
Not long after we arrived, while camped in a secluded lagoon near a cool sparkling waterfall, I fell to my knees for some heartfelt prayer. Within minutes, I fell into a deep, hypnotic-like trance.
If God were a realtor, then for the next ten days, my body became God’s open house. Countless numbers of disembodied Spirits, one after another, began dropping into me. The procession of extremely wise and friendly high-level off planet beings channeling through just didn’t stop; they came and went day and night (I caught some sleep just a few hours at a time), and these were nobody’s dead relatives! Some had lived out a number of Earthly lifetimes and some hadn’t; but each of them had enough experience under their belts to be Teachers and Guides for those of us still here.
Many of my otherworldly visitors weren’t human at all. Some were the quirky and unimaginably unique entities that occupy realms unfamiliar to us. I communed with the spirits of plants and trees, wind and water, as well as a fair number of fairies, elves, and gnomes (yes, there really are fairies, elves, and gnomes!). I also hosted members of the hierarchy of Angels and some creatures I could only describe as extraterrestrials: beings who are definitely not from this planet.
Whatever kind of person or creature showed up, they all opened doorways in my psyche to facilitate their return, and so before leaving, they each left an imprint, and energetic signature. This tag—spiritual graffiti if you will—allows me to recognize them and makes it easier for them to enter the next time.
When the whole event blew over, the angst that had delivered me to Hawaii was gone, cured by an inoculation of astonishment, awe, and wonder.
I soon realized that the experience of having so many varied types of living vibrations pass through my mind was an initiation, a kind of ceremony in which the lingering residue of their other worldly perceptions endowed me with mystic vision.
How mysterious are the ways of God…
The adventure on Kauai led me through some extremely peculiar situations and some interestingly bizarre altered states. I climbed out of a snake pit in Ohio, a place full of degrading experiences, but on Kauai, I was catapulted into realms of exalted spiritual rapture. I spent the next few months stateside integrating the mind-stretching aspects of it all, grateful to be easing my way back into the quiet day-to-day joy found in ‘chopping wood and carrying water.’