TicToc: Far Shore, Book Three of the After Series by Traci Slatton
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TicToc: Far Shore, Book Three of the After Series by Traci Slatton

TicToc: Far Shore, Book Three of the After Series by Traci…: Posted First on Blog Critics as Book Review: ‘Far Shore’ by Traci L. Slatton.

 ‘The heart wants what the heart wants’ seems like such a redundancy. Yet there is that simple truth to the adage where there often seems to be no real choice in the matter….

READ the rest of Leslie Ann Wright’s delicious review at TicToc Book Reviews and General Observations or at Blogcritics.org

 

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Revelations

I love conspiracy theorists. They tell the best stories. Think about it. Here are my rules for writing novels:
1. Story is how your protagonist does NOT get what he or she wants.
2. Every story is an argument for a specific value.
3. Know the stakes.

Actually, I have a few other rules, too, but those are harder to explain.

So, conspiracy theorists. Why are they telling the best stories? Partly because “enlightened liberalism” has made people afraid to have any values at all. “Everything is ok and everyone is ok” is the hogwash they’re selling–and so many people have unabashedly drunk that kool-aid. “Enlightened liberalism,” egged on by the sanctimonious liberal media, has confused discernment with discrimination and the baby has been thrown out with the scummy bath water.

However, conspiracy theorists have values. One of them is: we have the right to know. Another value: we have the right to independent agency, to freely determine our own lives.

These are good values. These are juicy values.

So the stories conspiracy theorists tell are arguments for those values, and arguments against the secret government-within-a-government who high-handedly decide our lives for us.

We the people are the protagonists and we aren’t getting the freedom we want, to which we are entitled, because of the secret government-within-a-government, the hidden ultra-elite puppet-masters.

The stakes are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are high stakes, indeed.

One of the most fascinating and tenacious theories has to do with UFO’s. With ET’s.

I am conflicted about this theory. In my mind, UFO’s and ET’s exist in the astral plane–which is real. It’s just a different layer of reality than ordinary physical reality.

But do UFO’s exist in the concrete physical world? I’m unsure. I was acquainted with the late, rather wonderful Budd Hopkins and I posed this very question to him.

“They’re real. They’re here,” he assured me, grimly.

Some part of me still needs a UFO to land in Central Park so I can kick a tire.

Another part of me knows they’re real and they’re here–in the astral plane, if no where else.

And here we have former Canadian Minister Paul Hellyer openly affirming extraterrestrial beings and their contact with human governments. He’s also openly discussing the government-within-a-government.

Worth thinking about.

With respect for Budd Hopkins, June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011
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With respect for Budd Hopkins, June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011

Missing Time

I met Budd Hopkins only a handful of times. We had a mutual friend who knew of my interest in UFOlogy and who grudgingly–and with noted mockery of me–made the introduction. My friend quoted a line he’d heard at a dinner party where Budd had spoken about UFO’s, and one of the other guests had rolled his eyes. “I’ll believe when I can kick a tire.”
Budd was a brilliant man. He was unfailingly polite and soft-spoken, with the current of intelligence and thought bubbling through his conversation. He was both passionate and restrained about his work in the UFO field. I have a personal interest in UFO’s and am somewhat private about the origins of this interest, despite my outspoken support for reincarnation, energy healing, and the paranormal in general. I didn’t quite work up the nerve to ask Budd some of the real questions I wanted to ask. But I could have.
Budd showed my husband Sabin and me around his house in Cape Cod, where he had a studio. Budd was very much working with sacred geometry. I liked his current work though his earlier abstract expressionism didn’t do much for me. That’s a matter of taste. Regardless, Budd was a talented artist with a fabulous eye for line and color. A world-class artist, in fact.
His UFO work was seminal. It inspired some of the greatest researchers into the field, including Dr. John Mack, the Harvard professor who worked with UFO abductees and who came to believe that something real was happening. Something that must be studied because so many people were affected. “An extraordinary phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation,” Budd proclaimed. Rightly so.
I know that UFOs are real. I am here to witness: They are here. By UFOs I mean non-terrestrial biological entities. I do not know if they are real in the physical sense or if they are confined to the bandwidth of the astral planes. This question I did pose to Budd, who told me flatly, “They’re real in the physical.”
For sure they are present in the astral planes. The thing is, the astral planes are real. They are, in fact, as real as the physical planes. They’re just different bandwidths.
Budd once mentioned to me the phenomenon of invisible beings. The moment he brought that up, I could feel, tangibly and powerfully, the being standing near Budd. Ten feet away, as present and watchful as if a stalker were standing there.
The universe is bigger than many people like to acknowledge. This, I think, is about safety. Many people (especially educated folks) feel safer clinging to the Newtonian box, the grand machine, which is predictable. To hell with quantum physics, that spooky action at a distance that made Einstein shudder. To hell with infinite dimensions in the multiverse, which the many worlds theory espouses. These people have blinders on which only allow them to see a tire which they can kick.
Fortunately great souls like Budd Hopkins aren’t wearing blinders. To Budd: it was great to meet you, and I wish you peace and joy in your journey.
Core Energetics by John Pierrakos, and Paranormal Perception
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Core Energetics by John Pierrakos, and Paranormal Perception

I know a woman who lives in the bell-jar of analysis. She’s a fine person, brilliant, successful, and lovingly committed to her children, though she seems not to like other women all that much. I have a few foibles of my own and I like her, snarkiness and all. It’s just that having dinner with her is a marathon of hearing about her feelings, her feelings about her feelings, her thoughts about her feelings about her feelings, her analyst, her feelings about her analyst, her thoughts about her feelings about her analyst… It’s a closed and airless world, fundamentally solipsistic. Masturbatory.
 
I have serious qualms about contemporary psychotherapy as it is generally practiced. There’s a lot of horse manure that’s taken as gospel by therapists and by people influenced by therapists. In fact, psychotherapy is one of the current sacrosanct priesthoods, along with “hard science.” Some months ago, I told a few psychotherapists that I didn’t believe in group therapy. Boy oh boy, did they get unpleasant. They wouldn’t admit it, of course. The most self-unaware people in the world are psychotherapists. But it was a lot like admitting to an Inquisitor that the Holy Trinity is bunk. Be careful when you poke someone’s sacred cow!!
 
Ultimately, I don’t think talk psychotherapy works. It’s brought general silliness and brainlessness into the culture. It’s an exercise in narcissism, self-indulgence, and inanity. People are afraid to think for themselves, and they are afraid to use their discernment–because “everyone is ok” and all that drivel. Values have been discarded in favor of bland lack of judgement that masquerades as tolerance. Personal accountability has been sloughed off.
 
So what does work? Because people need help: we are all suffering, to some degree. Orgone boxes work. Everyone should build one and install it in their living room. Sit in it for an hour a day and open the flow in the body-mind-spirit-psyche unit that we call our human self.
 
Orgone boxes work because of, as John Pierrakos writes, “Three main theses… the first is that the human person is a psychosomatic unity. The second is that the source of healing lies within the self, not with an outside agency, whether a physician, God, or the powers of the cosmos. The third is that all of existence forms a unity that moves toward creative evolutions, both of the whole and of the countless components. … The basic substance of the person is energy. The movement of that energy is life. The freer the energy movement…the more intense the life..”
 
Sitting in an orgone box is like charging a battery, the battery being the human being. As the person is filled with energy, blocks to free energy movement start to shift and dissolve. Those blocks are multidimensional: they affect the body, the mind, the emotions, and the spirit. They have to affect all those dimensions because those dimensions are yoked together, inseparably. There is no possible way to change the mind without also affecting the body, spirit, and psyche. And so forth. On the psychological level, a block is a neurosis or phobia, etc. With the free flow of energy movement restored, those can melt away like ice in hot water.
 
Orgone, as Wilhelm Reich defined it, is primordial cosmic energy. The Chinese call it Chi. The Hindus call it Prana. The Japanese call it Ki. George Lucas called it ‘The Force.’ Physicist William Tiller calls it the Quantum Domain. Everything is energy, and orgone is the fundamental, root energy substrata.
 
There are a lot of implications to this axiom. If you posit that everything is energy and start to pursue that into the realms of human consciousness, a multitude of seeming paradoxes, puzzles, oddities, and anomalies arise. One of those strange consequences of energy and consciousness is paranormal perception. Patanjali called them siddhis and warned against getting distracted by them. But everyone who meditates regularly eventually, whether after 20 years or 20 minutes, stumbles onto clairvoyance, clairaudience, precognition, telepathy–past life recall.
 
I read with some amusement an article in The New York Times (Jan 6, 2011) that described the angry furor over a paper that gives strong evidence for extrasensory perception. These kinds of papers are published all the time, attracting little notice. This time, however, it’s the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which is publishing the study. Some traditionalist psychologists are just outraged that a study that passed a stringent peer review would be published–when the study shows evidence for ESP. Remember what I said about poking people’s sacred cows?
 
So what to do if you’re not up for parking an orgone box in your den, in front of the treadmill that holds your dirty clothes? We are relational creatures, after all. It is human to want to move your energy in concert with another person. Then find a core energetic therapist. Go to a Barbara Brennan School of Healing trained healer, someone who is in supervision.
 
I was lucky enough to have a session with John Pierrakos before he died. He was a sparkly, gray-haired elf of a man, radiating both kindness and genius. I worked in my underwear and never before or since have I felt so safe, and so understood. But he teased me a little, too. “Traci has to know,” he told me, in a voice that was both amused and compassionate. I think of that often, especially in regards to foibles and personal bell jars.

Species of real & unreal
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Species of real & unreal

Here’s the thing about being a healer: we have a different geometry of reality than many people do. It’s partly a siddhi thing, as described by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras; if you start meditating regularly, trying to “cease the fluctuations of the mind,” you automatically begin to experience paradigm-busting phenomena. Sooner or later, you just do. It just happens. Some meditators see stuff, blobs of light, or colorful radiance around folks, or forms of energy-consciousness that used to be living people–or not. Meditators who aren’t particularly visual hear things, or sense things, or simply have wordless understandings that things are other than they seem.
Patanjali cautions against the siddhis, but I think they’re useful. What we experience for ourselves has a deeper impact than what we take on faith. But Patanjali has a a point, and caution is imperative. If you’re not grounded, extraordinary perception can quickly morph into delusion. Think Heaven’s Gate and Jim Jones and all those prophets who wafted astray, and sadly carried others with them.
Over the last several months I’ve become acquainted with noted UFOlogist Budd Hopkins, who is a celebrated artist as well as a researcher into something that a lot of people want to put down to fantasy and mass hysteria, swamp gas and reflection, urban myth and attention-seeking. One or two of his paintings hang in the MOMA. His UFO books are carefully, thoughtfully written and researched. He believes extraterrestrials are here, observing and abducting and experimenting. I’ve told him that I know they’re here in the astral plane, which is as real as the physical plane. But I haven’t verified for myself that ET’s are here in 3-d flesh, if flesh is what they have.
But the astral plane is a reality. Specifically, it’s a resonance of love and spirit, of relationship and dreams. And it’s a wide spectrum resonance. It drops into demonic curses and rises up into the blissful, transcendent songs of angels. It isn’t as dense and concrete as physical reality, but it affects people in the physical plane. It affects bodies and minds and emotions. Medical journals have published studies about the efficacy of prayer, the very stuff of astral beingness, on long distance subjects. The astral plane is palpable. It’s perceptible.
Which brings up another kind of reality I’ve experienced a lot of recently: teenage reality. It’s its own universe of perception and axiom, based on teenagers’ absolute certainty of their own invulnerability, infallible wisdom, and rectitude. They know everything. Based on 13 or 17 years on the planet, and what their friends tell them is so. Negotiating this fanaticism is treacherous, heart-aching, often simply impossible. Reason, decades of experience, logic, concern, love, etc. don’t make a dent in the monolithic dogmatism. A friend of mine said she’d read that the unhappiest people are those with teenage children. It’s at this point that I’m glad that the astral plane is real. The prayers that I constantly utter for my daughters have a chance of reaching them, of helping and protecting them.