Soul Mate Search Day #20: More Things I Learned from Damien Echols

Another thing I learned from Damien Echols since I last posted:  “égrégore”, even though I don’t think he ever used the word.  This occurred to me while I was working (and by “working”, I mean “trying every single time I lay down and tried to sleep and failing miserably”) at creating the dream walking space.  It was frustrating.  I kept thinking, “What the hell??  The man managed to meditate for hours in the bowels of hell – (and by “hell” I mean the State of Arkansas) – why can’t I do this???” 

But so far at least – I couldn’t.  A few times I wanted to grab my cell phone, hit the icon for “Dial A Complete Stranger With A Working Brain Currently Hanging Out in New Zealand” and demand, “Give me some pointers, here!  Lessons!  Lessons!  Snap to it, bucko!”  Unfortunately … well, let’s start out the long list of complications snagging that scenario with, as I said two posts ago, he’s already more technologically advanced than I am – I’m the one who doesn’t have a cell phone, and he’s already probably calling half the planet and chatting away cheerfully, darn him.  Instead, I continued with the mental construction of the Dream Space.

My dream walking space has its origins in a vacation, and a weird spooky story, but here goes:

Okay, so I’m in Venice, Italy, the first time I’d ever been there.  This was basically a vacation – I’d already been to Rome, Florence, Milan and the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua.  I walk into a market area near the Ponte Rialto (Rialto Bridge), which had been created there fairly recently.  I should say that from the moment we arrived by train from Milano into Venice, I loved the city.   Fell madly and passionately in love with it.  Felt very comfortable and at home in it.  Looking back on it, it does seem odd since I’d never been there before, but at the time it didn’t even seem odd that I felt that way.

So here’s the part where I scare the [bleep!] out of the person I was traveling with.

I walk into this small piazza and am immediately extremely dizzy.  I feel I’m going to lose my balance and lean against a building.  Then I enter an odd state where I’m seeing one scene (the “present day scene”) with my right eye, and another scene (“the old scene”) with my left eye.  And my perspective keeps shifting, which is why I’m getting so dizzy.  There are points of similarity, but there are differences as well, between the two scenes.  And I’m so freaked out by this, I assume I’m having some sort of stroke or something, and am trying to hold myself upright against the building  and wondering if my medical coverage actually covers anything in Italy.

I start describing what I’m seeing to the person I’m with, although some of the sights are outside of my current field of vision.  (i.e., “There’s a fountain over there, it has a scene of women at a fountain on it, there’s a church around that wall, there’s a staircase behind that pillar, you can’t see it from here; if you look you’ll see a lion’s head on the balustrade, it’s marble, the steps are marble too, the lion’s head has an indent in the stone where I can put my thumb …”  And I’m going on and on, even describing a canal that doesn’t exist anymore.

And what’s even more strange?  In my head I’m saying all this in English.  To my friend, I’m speaking some of it in an unintelligible language (which turned out to be Venetian).  Tuscan Italian I know; Venetian I don’t.  But I was partially babbling away in it, because a resident nearby understood some of what I was saying.

I end up describing my husband and children – and I should clarify at this point that in this lifetime, I don’t have a husband or children.  I babbled a back story about this former husband of mine.  He used to be a fisherman, now he was off fighting the Turks and was killed fighting the Turks.  He came back once from battle, and I ran all the way across the city to the Arsenale to meet him the first moment he returned on shore.  I washed and scrubbed him at that fountain I mentioned when he came home the first time because he was so filthy from being at sea for so long.  The second time he didn’t come home, and I lost my will to live and stopped eating and died.  I left our two children orphaned although both survived.  And while I can’t remember what year it was now, I do remember the year was  correct – when I came back home to New York, I looked it up and during the year I named, Venice had been engaged in sea battles with the Ottoman Empire. 

I kept spitting out the phrase, “Filthy Turks!” throughout the narrative (or other comparable epithet we won’t repeat here) , although, goodness knows, I have no reason NOW to be annoyed at people from Turkey, as I’m sure they’re all very nice, and present day people of Turkish descent can stop spluttering in outrage, thank you very much and have a nice day.

You have to understand, I was babbling this entire story in a weird mixture of Venetian and English while backed up against a wall, and when I got to the part about abandoning my children by dying (basically by starvation/suicide), I started bawling!  The person I was traveling with had very little idea about anything I’d just said, but this was when the resident – a very nice woman – came over and repeated some of it back to me for clarification.  She also couldn’t figure out how I spoke such perfect Venetian a second ago, and couldn’t understand her when I came out of that “fugue” state.  Because after I’d burst into tears and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” (about the children) – I came out of it, and started seeing the current state out of both eyes again.

In an effort to help, the woman told me to visit the priest at San Marco, the magnificent Venetian cathedral at the center of the city, because she seemed to think I had abandoned children in this lifetime and was consumed with guilt about it.  She thought I would feel much better after going to confession.

Needless to say, after this experience, I didn’t have too much trouble believing in recincarnation, but that’s another story for another day.  It does lead towards the location of the dream scape I was creating:  it’s  constructed out of an imaginary second floor of a building in Venice, overlooking a peaceful canal and the laguna itself.  I was mentally creating this space, adding details like floors, paintings on the walls, tapestries, the reflection of dancing water on the walls and ceilings … also thinking, “I’ll bet other people would like it here …”  Really, it was so beautiful and peaceful, I just loved it.

Me, during that same trip.  The person  was actually trying to take a photo of the gondoliere (guy in the foreground), who she thought was cute; I just happened to appear in the photo behind him; I'm the small blob in the back.  There had been a pretty significant flood that year, and we’re all watching the recovery efforts.  (That also explains why I’m wearing high-water boots!)  This was not the piazza where the shift in perception happened – this is near Saint Mark’s. 

Anyway, this was when the word “égrégore” popped up.    The psychic and astral entity of a group; a group's meeting place, so to speak.  I’d just finished thinking, “Other people might like it here, too,” and just then envisioned the room I’d created morphing into something of an old world classroom.  We – that is the students – are all lounging on soft pillows; the instructor is … well, instructing.  I think the lesson that day was, “How To Meditate when You’re In  the Bowels of Hell” or something.  Now I REALLY wanted to hit that “speed dial” and “send” button.  “Hey, you know what you should do next?  You need to create a …”  Well, he’ll figure it out; he’s pretty smart.  It’s still me that has to catch up.  Back to practicing.

Still working on my Daybook.  Anyway, as I come across an herb, I also add it to my recently found daybook.  I have begun adding more recipes, information, beliefs, pictures, etc.  Today it was yarrow, because the Real Witches Year (Kate West) discussed Yarrow for today’s entry, and I was thinking that maybe I should start up a Book of Shadows, and not just a daybook.  Googled “yarrow” and came up with all sorts of interesting stuff.  Finally!  Some decent spells, recipes and associations.  Obviously, I wasn’t quite this inspired when I was in Wicca 101.

Then I had to go back and teach myself how to create an outlined index of multiple chapters of books, with a working index and a table of contents, all with clickable links.  Brunhilda never had it so good.

Learning is something like skittering across the face of a spiderweb – you start off in one direction, veer off into another, slide off gracefully into a third, not so gracefully into a fourth, and then can’t remember how it is you ended up reading something about  … whatever it is you’re now reading about.  In my case, Sacred Geometery. 

Well, it began with  Damien’s recommendation that his readers check out the Llewelyn Catalog.  Did so.  Was reading Shirley Andrews’ rehashed Lemuria and Atlantis, which (a) he did NOT recommend, which is fortunate or I would have regarded him with one eyebrow lifted skeptically, and (b) the author mostly lifted from Churchward and Cayce, both of which we could have read on our own.  No one asked for a re-hash of them.  I keep hoping there is some new discovery from the Bimini or Pacific Rim areas that are interesting enough to take notice of, but alas … apparently not, or at least not since the last time I looked into it.

She mentions the discoveries of the Advanced Digital Communications Company, supposedly Canadian but working out of Havana, Cuba.  Paul Weinzweig and Paulina Zelitsky were apparently scanning the area around Cuba, and found some interesting things under water … no one knows what those things are yet, though.  Unfortunately, the last recorded information about anything they were doing dates from 2000 to 2005, more or less, and the photographs are nearly impossible to decipher.  Rumor has it they abandoned the site along with National Geographic over money issues, so it’s just sitting there under water, decaying.  The Cayce foundation was also nosing around, but there is nothing current from them, either.  This is how we’re entertained, in a book last printed in 2010?  How … timely.

I’m one of those annoying people who prefers to have statements annotated and footnoted – and prefers to have her footnotes from a variety of respected sources.  I don’t care if the author hands me a theory or a supposition or a best guess – as long as she identifies them.  In this case, Andrews’ footnotes were so random, sporatic and so poor, I had to start researching things she brought up to find out the REAL story behind them. 

Children of the Law of One.  Starseed Children.  Both of which she mentioned as though they had actual relevance and substance; neither of which I’d heard of, and neither of which did have actual relevance and substance, when I looked them up.  Everything I found on either subject sounded as though it was a self-aggrandizing pile of steaming hoo-haa invented by women who no longer had working brain cells.  They’re behind the times.  Science has moved much closer to spirituality as of late.  The broads promoting this stuff might want to take that into account and try proving things they claim scientifically.  Or at least logically.  If they can.  I ended up rolling my eyeballls in disbelief throughout most of her seriousness on these topics.

However, scanning a reference to Children of the Law of One, I found reference to Sacred Geometry … the reference being something idiotic, like:  “if you don’t know Sacred Geometry, you will never know enlightenment!”  Uh-huh.  Really?  You’re sure about that?  Why does he or she  sound like those evil Southern Baptist Church Ladies of West Memphis, Arkansas?  In any event, I disputed that assertion loudly, without even knowing what Sacred Geometry was, just because those nasty black and white comments are so like those delusional demons who protest at veteran’s funerals and think they’re saints.  Bottom line:  when you split things into black and white, you are bound to be wrong.

In other words, back up historical comments with other historians and not authors who have written previous articles or books on Atlantis.  That’s like silly Christians who back up their “proof” of Noah’s ark with quotes from the Bible and are such pinheads they have no idea how useless, unimpressive and silly that is.

Pausing here ... will continue later.