A Zoom Conversation at 3 pm est on Sunday August 20 for my Paid Substack Subscribers about collaborating with the other side.
On the one hand my work is very simple: the dead are real and they want to engage with us as we live our lives. On the other hand my work is impossibly hard: our materialist culture does not recognize the soul-life of most of what it is and values independence not co-creation. We set ourselves against the whole of modern life and belief when we begin to work with the dead and begin to claim the eternal return.
I am reminded of a story my husband often tells about a group of monks studied by the Western researcher, Herbert Benson. These young men and their teacher could, apparently, go out into the mountains in the middle of winter in robes sodden with cold water, and generate so much personal heat that their clothes would dry and, sitting out in the elements with no protection, they would be perfectly fine. The research team nearly died from cold on one such night studying these adepts. But then the researcher brought the monks to his university to study them. He hooked them up to electrodes and took photos of their brains and simulated an environment as close to the frigid conditions on the mountain as he possible could. And all the monks, except for the oldest among them, nearly died.
Why didn’t the magic work in the refrigerated confines of one of the most prestigious bastions of higher education? The researcher felt they needed “more money” to study this question adequately.
The old monk offered his thoughts. Their magic came not from within them but from the mountain and it was hard for anyone but him who had honored this relationship for so long to connect with her from so far away.
But what Clark, my husband, added to that animate wisdom was the knowledge, too, that they were also separated from the entire “belief-sphere.” On their mountain they were surrounded as they accomplished this feat by friends and family who believed that what they were doing was possible, they had grown up in a culture that claimed it as essential knowing and was filled with stories of those who had summoned the mountain when they found themselves alone and too cold, they were sitting inside not a skeptical laboratory but a supportive sphere of belief that emanated magic all around them…that honored their magic and cultivated it.
So that is what we do in Monthly Magic.
We try to shift the belief-sphere by offering our stories of our collaborations with the dead.
It works.
We begin to know that an entirely different world is possible and we encourage each other to claim it.
Join me and my friends on the third Sunday of every month as we TAKE BACK THE MAGIC.
Zoom information changes each month and is sent out to paid subscribers on that Sunday. Sessions are NOT recorded.
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