Come clean at the end

“Spending time here is like movin’ in with Pandora. Maybe some stuff should just stay hidden, y’know?”
“Yup,” Charlie answered. “But comes a time when you just don’t want to screw around anymore. You can get real tired of playin’ hide-and-seek with yourself.
Getting toward the end, you wanna stop playing games. There’s no time left. You see how things have gone wrong and just want to make ’em right. At least one moment of honestly trying, before your soul rots away on ya….
… “I buried my whole life, every bit of it, in my own stinkin’ manure, and it’s high time I planted some seeds there.”
He told Harve, “But I don’t like being asked to swallow OTHER people’s shit.”
“Got you on that one, man.”
“Do you?” Charlie said. “Do you really?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You. Pretending you’re no hero. – Bull. – You don’t know what I wouldn’t have given for even a little bit of something I could feel good about.”
“You did okay for yourself, Charlie. You made the papers.”
“I made headlines; I wasn’t a star. I had a few fans, sure, but not the kind I’d ever want to meet in a dark alley.
“But that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about finding out who we are, what we’re here for, and truly steppin’ into it. I wasn’t put here to smash noses. You think you were put here to shoot ’em off?
“You save lives but then you get all ‘Gosh Golly Shucks’ about it. You step into who you are, but then you step back out of it again. That just doesn’t ring true to me is all. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
Then he had second thoughts. “Look,” he told Harvey, “I know you didn’t do it for the fame and being a star and shit, but still … I would like to have experienced what it was for people to know me and like me anyway. I’d love to have done at least a little something worth doing. It’s too late for some of that now, I know, but I just want the chance to do a little bit of good if I can. Somewhere. For somebody.
“And to do it just because it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.”

  • From “The Gardens of Ailana”

Writing Theosophically for Those Who Suffer

One of my major challenges in writing theosophical novels for readers who don’t know they’re theosophists is that so many of our “spiritual” concepts fail to stand up to the rigors of most people’s lives. It is all well and good to have a select few esotericists, knowing some Sanskrit and New Agey kinds of phrases, paying a few bucks at our lecture halls so we can remind them that everything is Mayavic illusion. That in truth they themselves are God, and ultimately unassailable. I myself believe these things, and live accordingly.

Then they go home and buzz for a while on the poetic eloquence of such a philosophy until that starts to wear off and they need another hit at another uplifting metaphysical conference.

But what of the masses who aren’t in any way ready or willing to listen to, or build their lives around that? Do we just abandon them as unenlightened fools? Where is our compassion if we take that approach?

Obama makes health care affordable, sets limits in how much our insurance companies, credit cards, and health services can milk us for. Tells big industries to stop polluting our environs.

Our child has suffered horrible, debilitating illness for so very long, but now we can finally afford treatments, and medicines. We watch him getting better. Healing. Laughing. Playing.

Then along come the Republicans. They take our insurance away from us. Raise the costs of our medicines by multiples. Lower our incomes. Take meals away from poor school children. Tell heavy-handed polluters they can dump all the poisons they want to into our food, air, and water.

So then, what do I/we tell those parents? That there are no external enemies? There are no battles to fight; no evils to stand up to? Just be at peace with watching your child returning to his long and awful pain, to that crippling he was just beginning to climb out of? And what does that parent tell his kid? That this is all an illusion? “Just suck it up kid, and keep dying. You’ll get it together one of these lifetimes, and then all this will be behind you”?

Totalitarian dictators throw us out of our homes, drive us off of lands our families had farmed for generations. They buy up all water rights in the deserts as tribal families wither up and die by the thousands, and we should just ignore this? None of this is real?

I write from the knowing that there are different levels of reality, suffering, and coping; and that most people are doing their best to hang on with what they have. I try to offer them hope that there may be some Higher meaning, and deeper access to healing and growing beyond a lot this, but I do not essentially call them numbskulls; tell them this (and their dear child’s suffering) is all their fault for believing that any of this is reality.

For most of us suffering is very, very real. And so that is where I start my stories. I welcome other readers who already know some of these things, and maybe carry them in a little deeper; but I will not slam any doors on the hearts of these others.

Fighting for What’s Real

Ericka had thought of them as her glory days when she had wanted to march on every capitol; kick down the doors of the most powerfully entrenched; when she had wanted to right every wrong, and stomp out villainy everywhere. Gene had called her the “Rebel with too many causes”.
But that had been different. It was as if all that had just been a training period, mere preparation for the way she felt now. That had been student idealism. This was the pain of a grieving mom who couldn’t watch anyone else’s kid suffer.
In her short time on the planet, their sweet daughter Madie, their little Bitsie, had taught them so much. About priorities. About courage. About how they could truly love and treasure another single human life, not just hold some general, pro-active fondness for all of humanity everywhere.
In loving that tiny child; knowing all the while that they were losing her, Ericka and Gene had suffered immensely. But they had also grown. In tending to their frail, courageous little girl, Ericka had once again unleashed her inner need to help others; an essential part of her being, but now with renewed, and focused passion.
Once, when Ericka had broken down and wept as she’d had to hand her baby off for more tests, it had been little Madie who had comforted Mommy. She’d told Ericka she was glad she could do this so they could find out what was wrong with her, and then maybe other little kids wouldn’t have to hurt this way ever again.
One way or another, her mommy now would make that little life count for something.
Ericka wanted to; she needed to cram all her pain into something she could change. Someone somewhere she could actually help, but not lose in the end. She had to find causes she could pour her almost fierce, hard-charging nature into, and actually save somebody this time.
It didn’t have to be one particular disease; it could be hunger; it could be anything, but she had to get out there and do something.
Before she had fought for causes.
But now those causes would have little faces.
– A taste of my new book, “The Soul Hides in Shadows”

Life is What We Believe

In pain and loss, we can find either meaning, or hopelessness. The choice is ours.

How we see things, how we interpret them, how we emotionally react;

these call more of the same into our lives.

We build a world for ourselves out of what we believe.

And how we choose to respond.

Whether we let it take us under,

or rise to meet it.

  • From “The Soul Hides in Shadows”, a novel by Edward Fahey

Some Things You Can’t Om Away

Joan told her, “Knock it off, Marsh; you don’t always have to be such a putz.”

Marsha, still leaning onto the sink, told them, “You guys and your always-must-make-nice crap.

“Mincing around with your damned fresh coffee, playing Little Miss Nicey-Poo alla time. The charming hostess with all her non-threatening jokes, never hurting anyone’s feelings. Sitting around trying to sort out the karmic implications of sneezing on the burglar who just shot your dog. Fuck it! Some things you just can’t Om away.”

Clarice’s smile had frozen in place, but her eyes belied her terror. She didn’t understand what was going on, but tried to calm the waters anyway. “You send out love; you get love back,” she said.

Marsha finally turned toward them all, and it wasn’t pretty. “Great. You can put that on a Hallmark card and feed it to the goats.She turned toward Paulette.

Paulette said nothing. She didn’t dare look too deeply inside this rabid anti-Christian standing before her. She was horrified that she might find herself looking back.

  • From “The Gardens of Ailana” handbook for healers & mystics

Atrocities of War

In that moment Paulette stepped outside anything that had ever hurt her before. Harve needed her more than she needed herself.

But she had nothing to say. Nothing to offer him. She came up empty.

“I may not have shot any of those babies in safety seats, but I took out my share o’ guys in a country I started thinking we had no right bein’ in. I could tell myself they’d signed up for it, knowing they might not go home, but that just didn’t cut it after a while.” …

… “Oh, they were scumbags, alright. Other guys in my unit’d be ready to just level the kids too, cause they were getting in our way, but I said, Wait. Let me try goin’ in first. Let me come at ’em from the rear.

“Other times I just lost myself in the righteous glory of cluster bombing the hell outa those bastards.

“And for that one moment, in all the cheering and explosions it’s like all was right with the world. It was John Phillip Sousa at Disneyland.

“But then you wake up a little. You just snuffed out future generations. Maybe bad guys can have good kids if you let ’em. We’ll never know now.”

He was coming close to crying.

“And then you see all those pieces; kid parts lying everywhere.

“And their little faces.

“If they even still had faces.

“Once you finish throwing up, and then toss back a few at camp pub, your next job is to find something inside you that you can bury that under.

“And then … what? Just go on living?”

– From “The Gardens of Ailana”

Still Carrying Pain from Childhood

Paulette awoke with an ache in her heart, a grinding in her gut. If there really was a God, why would He have let anyone put a child through that? …
She had survived, but at what cost? She was an itinerant professor, living in her head, not her heart. She had broken away, but abandoned her sister; hadn’t contacted her family in years.
Paulette wondered what she was looking for in these weekend workshops. Absolution wasn’t on the curriculum. What could she possibly hope to accomplish? To be a healer you need to connect with people. You need to touch, and let yourself be touched. And not just with your hands.
Watching these nurses, she envied them their friendships. Here were real buddies truly caring about each other, taking jabs, sharing private jokes and fears. She’d never had that. Even witnessing it from across a room, or a yard, only made her feel that much more lonely.
She got along with people well enough. Agreed with whatever they said, watched their pets, helped them move from one apartment to another. But no one really knew her.
Paulette had never been flush with self-confidence. People took that as humility, but humility isn’t painful and crippling. She hadn’t yet learned that humble and self-destructive aren’t the same thing at all. They’re not even on the same team.
And now here she was at a workshop for healers. Had she come here to heal; or to be healed?
It was one of those warm, charming days that write poems about themselves, and then settle these very softly into your mind. Paulette sensed what felt like a rain-laced breeze stirring her soul; sodden, and yet beautiful; laden with both the dismal, and the promising.
– From “The Gardens of Ailana”, a fiction largely based around adults still traumatized by having been abused as children, in the name of their parents’ religion.

Dark Night of the Soul

Harvey wanted to dive into his ugliness; he intentionally reached for those long hours of soul desolation. He waited. He paced, ready to face down whatever was to come.

Paulette’s, though, busted loose uninvited, catching her completely off guard when she was already hurting, feeling crumbled, and vulnerable. When all she really wanted was some quiet gentle feelings for a change. A few flowers. Some sunshine. A way out of all that inner torment for even just a moment.

Had she had brought only nastiness out of her childhood? Hadn’t there been anything sweet she could remember instead?

As she wandered back to her cabin, searching for even a single fond memory, light faded everywhere around her.

Aw, c’mon, she thought. Everyone had some happy childhood memories. She had to have at least a couple.

How about the coloring? Children enjoy coloring; how about that? She’d spent hours and days on her art. It was as close as she could remember to having her Mamma stand over her with anything even remotely resembling approval. Her books and comics could be tales of Jesus, but coloring books had to be Old Testament because “No child’s impure hand could touch a crayon to the sweet beautiful face of our beloved Lord and savior Christ Jesus.”

So the little girl had scrunched down over Daniel in the lion’s den. Samson screaming in rage, pain, and terror as they blinded him with daggers and torches. The redder she made the flowing wounds of a man of God shot full of arrows, the richer the flames around those three men being burned in an iron box, the longer Mamma let her stay out of that closet.

– From “The Gardens of Ailana”

Step into Spirit Power!

You reach a stage in your development when life floods over with minor miracles and bizarre synchronicities. You hardly notice them anymore; they’re just what your life is made of.
– Then you learn to stay in the moment, following subtle promptings. No longer needing feedback that what you’re doing is right; you trust, and stay centered in the joy of higher service.
– As you pull away from old relationships, outmoded habits and beliefs, others gather around to be part of your new team. You may have to leave folks behind who try to hold you back. Do it caringly.
– As you shed ego, you may be offered an even bigger challenge: to shed what could be thought of as your anti-ego. Allow yourself to be powerful; do great things even as you open in naked and humble vulnerability to another. This will really test your honesty and adherence to Truth. Can you admit your failures and foolishness, and just as willingly step in among the spiritual big guns working miracles?
– Everything that happens to you, everyone you meet, everything you do, starts meshing together like gears in a finely tuned motor, driving your life forward into Higher states of purpose and meaning.
– Edward Fahey

Changing the Rules

In the real world, obedience was pounded into our butts; discipline nailed each to the cross of his own days. I fought so hard to shut up and buckle under, but couldn’t confine myself to this tiny, hurting world that everyone else lived in. I was like St. Michael slaying the dragon, with me as both the saint and his dragon.
Blind obedience was both our nemesis and our inspiration. What could be more achingly beautiful, more pained by inspiring grief, than that scene in the Garden of Gethsemane? “Not my will, but Thine.” My God, that makes your heart weep. But Jesus knew what he was getting into. Life was rarely that clear for me. I was just a lonely kid with no hope for companionship, in a world where adults claimed to be following God, and God didn’t have to explain Himself. “Abraham, kill your son! I’m bored and the TV’s busted again.” …
… I couldn’t resist questioning encrusted old beliefs, though questioning was the worst of all sins. Adam and Eve had been fine wandering around nude among tigers and snakes until they’d eaten that apple and started thinking things through. We had to bet our souls on stuff that didn’t make sense; on wandering stars, wives turning to salt, and God stopping the sun so His own children, made in His image, could kill each other. Samson hadn’t cut his own hair, someone else had, but rules must be followed, so the hell with him, God said. Then our principal kicked a kid out of school for refusing to cut his. Adults kept changing “eternal truths,” and I couldn’t keep up. Everybody kept hammering away at the world like blacksmiths, each trying to beat it into something different…. – From “Entertaining Naked People”

God or no God; life still has meaning

The Gardens of Ailana” will be controversial and many will hate it.
But in reading it some have already come to new terms with their lives and a God they see as either non-existent or cruel.
In this story, adults crippled by memories from childhood; two them suffered at the hands of evil and twisted men from southern fundamentalist churches; have to come clear with every ugliness within them before they can find any meaning and purpose for their lives. In the process they learn that if there is a Heaven at all, it would not be what their churches had told them to believe, and that forgiveness may not always be the healthiest option.
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Before anything exists, there is potential

Before there is time, or form, there is Potential. All things are possible.
There is Caring before there is anyone to care about. And before we create raging and fear.
Before guilt there is the purity of true Innocence.
Before knowledge there is Knowing.
Ailana looked out into the vastness with her eyes closed. In her heart she was smiling, and that world beyond worlds smiled with her.
She was dying.
But this only mattered to her body. Her spirit was not confined much to that these days.
She had a few more people to help first, and then she could step free of it.
A few who had been fighting their ways out of their own darkness seemed so very close to breaking through.
It was time.
They were ready.
– From “The Gardens of Ailana” handbook for mystics & healers

Do NOT develop your psychic gifts! (Well; maybe sometimes you can)

When I was early on in this life’s esoteric studies, back in the 60’s, among the first things I read were books by yogis from the 1920’s admonishing us to NEVER intentionally develop our siddhis. So then I spent a whole year-plus with Dora Kunz, with her trying to give very few of us private lessons in healing; but I kept trying not to accept my budding psychic nature. – I started appearing in the dreams and hospital rooms of those in need, and I tried to shut that off. – Now I find myself answering prayers and even Sai is telling me to stop screwing around and just take on the responsibilities I was put here to honor. – I tend not to fit into one-size-fits-all categories and rules is what I’m saying. No one – HPB, Manly Hall, or anyone else- can say everyone must in every moment follow and believe the same things. Life and spiritual development are flexible.

Depression

Depression is a non-life. It just sits there, not stirring. Like you’re mired in the silence and sludge at the bottom of a stagnant sea. Now and then a dim, fuzzy wad of something hangs above, a brief distraction from your comforting gloom, but it hurts to be reminded there is still life in any form. So you snuggle back into your sludge. Snug it in like a thick, fuzzy blanket around your heart, welcoming the dull, slow non-rhythm of pain and numbness.

Depression sticks to your soul, layers around and within you, suffocating all hope.

I may have lost years to this emotional cancer after Julie pulled away. Depression is a timeless state. Each second is interminable. This hideous strangling darkness drew in ever tighter and more dank, closer than my skin because skin is only on the outside.

There was a big ugly hole in my world, and nothing to plug it with but misery.

– Excerpt from “Entertaining Naked People”

Heart pain can lead us Higher

When my arms grew long and strong enough I started pulling myself up onto the roof to lie back under the stars, praying for their vast peace to drain off some of this hurt. I ached for something higher, richer, undeniable, and there were moments when I was teased with just a glimpse. I could lose my heart in a picture of Jesus or Mary, in a rainy autumn sunset, or a field of stars, and it was like I’d gone home. Everything dissolved into pure, aching sweetness. How vast love can be when we don’t hack off a chunk and hoard it, call it ours, or chain it to someone; when it isn’t love for some thing or someone, just love.
I was only allowed brief visits to this world beyond worlds, though, and couldn’t bring the bliss back with me. Trying to hold on to that soul piercing, excruciating sweetness was like tearing my heart apart; but maybe that was exactly the point. Broken hearts show us we’ve grown out of one stage, by ripping us wide open for the next.
We’re forced to choose what we do with all that pain: turn it against ourselves, aim it at someone else, or tap all that power and reach higher.
– From “Entertaining Naked People”

Hidden spots of Mysticism and magic.

There are places on this planet not confined to the logic of men or limitations of science. Something inside a few special people draws them to these centers when they are ready.
Early man may have erected strange mounds, or circles of giant stones there. Early religions may have inspired great cathedrals or temples there. Legends may have spread about miracles and healing wonders, and for centuries pilgrims may flock in from all lands.
Or they may just have been left alone, unknown but to the few; tended by very special beings.
In our story, four deeply caring souls have been broken by their childhoods. As adults now they secretly yearn for forgiveness; their own, or to find the clarity of heart to forgive those who have hurt them so badly. They yearn, but don’t pray. If life has taught them anything it’s that no loving, caring God could have let tiny vulnerable children be treated so cruelly.
But what if all things really do have a reason?
What if everything does serve some purpose?
And what if there are places and people one is drawn to when she has finally found the courage, or the depths of desperation, to face herself down and be free?
“The Gardens of Ailana” is a tale of redemption. Of what lies beyond; what is deeper than suffering and more real than life itself. It is about finding one’s deepest truth and dearest peace. It is a story of returning to innocence.
– My next novel; due out probably in late February.

“Entertaining Naked People”

By now you might be reading “Entertaining Naked People” and noticing a definite change in style, as well as progressive development of message and teachings.

As each of my books advances beyond the scope of the previous one, my goal is not to keep digging into ever more esoteric concepts like sutratmic threads, pralayas, and manvantaras. Lynden says I am kind of explaining these things anyway, just doing so subtly and without labeling them. She said those concepts “are really quite simple; it’s just the eggheads who complicate it.”

But my goal is to help “poor orphan humanity”, and to reach for the saddest and most lost of these orphans. Those struggling with challenges and personalities they may still be caught up in when they die this time around. I want to get down in the mud with them and show how they can find glimmers of Light, meaning, and hope even there.

You can only count on God for so much.

“There’s so many folks out there thinkin’ prayer is just so’s they can tell God exactly what they want. Settin’ around waitin’ for Him to drop it in their lap. ‘I put my faith in Him, so He owes me.’
“Been figger’n on that’n a long time. All things don’t necessarily come to folks who don’t do nothin’ but wait. Even if they’re prayin’ while they’re settin’ there. You can put all the faith in God you want to, but you try crammin’ Him behind the wheel while you nap in the back seat; you’re still gonna drive into a tree.”
– Excerpt from “Entertaining Naked People”.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Entertaining-Naked-People-Edward-Fahey/dp/1501055178/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412607922&sr=1-1&keywords=Entertaining+naked+people

“Entertaining Naked People” – My new novel.

Excerpts:
I had to learn from experience that death was only temporary.
As a small boy, frail in body and spirit, I reached so far beyond the world of the living I didn’t bring all of me back. I tapped into lives that had been lived and maybe lost. They just kind of reached out and grabbed me. Other people’s pains chewed through me like lingering nostalgia for days I couldn’t quite recall. I took on the hurt of others like festering sores draining the spirit out of me.
Our family didn’t talk about what churned and ate away at us. Dad said all we needed to know was in our little catechisms or brightly colored Bible tales. For anything too deep and hurtful; that didn’t make any sense, just wasn’t fair, and we really, really needed to come to grips with; he’d just say, “Well, that’s just one of God’s glorious mysteries.” End of story.
Not for me, it wasn’t.
Blind obedience was our nemesis and inspiration.
I couldn’t resist questioning encrusted old beliefs, though questioning was the worst of all sins.

Pathologically sensitive, young Ed feels what people hide even from themselves. His world churns with matters so terribly unfair that he can’t accept them. Overwhelmed by hopelessness, he’s afraid to reach out into life.
Ed leaves for college as the Vietnam War deadens souls and riots tear cities apart. He has to deal with hippie artists trying to out-weird each other, police attacking innocents, and friends committing suicide.
In one month he drops out of school, turns twenty-one, his father dies, and he is drafted.
He refuses induction. He knows that if he ever finds himself in a paddy facing an armed enemy soldier, he wouldn’t be the one pulling the trigger.
Hitching a ride west with a strangely wise cowboy, he is pulled ever deeper into the bizarre and the impossible. He meets healers and miracle workers as he sorts through his own darkness and power.
He camps in deserts, sets out to sea, even walks out into the fury of a hurricane, trying to touch God close up and in all His power. He has given up on finding Him in any one religion. If He is out there, you may have to kill yourself to find him.
He teaches massage school in southern California, his life spilling over with unbridled passion now of a more erogenous sort. And yet for a while longer he must still taste darkness, failure, and bitterness.
Sometimes we have to be destroyed so we can be reborn. Anything that can be ground out you by another may need to be let go of anyway before you can see what you truly are. Crawling from the wreckage of his own being, Ed finds wisdom and healing one naked truth at a time.
He discovers that we don’t have to search for God, soul, magic, and truth. They have been with us, inside us, since our childhood.
In the end it is all about love, knowing that when you hug a child, or scratch a dog, you can find everything that is most magical and beautiful in your own hands and heart.

In Mystical Gardens

In my latest novel, “The Gardens of Ailana,” you may learn about:
How to do Laying on of hands healing / Finding your center of peace / Dumping toxic relationships / Out of body traveling / Life after death / What a mystic sees and experiences / Things we believe, or tell ourselves, that hold us back / Stepping free of childhood traumas / Deeper spirit vs fundamentalism / How karma works / Old souls and indigo children / Empaths / Dark nights of the mystic soul…