Ancient philosophers were explorers and wanted us to be. They wanted us to understand this physical world, but not get stuck here. They didn’t share their insights so we’d over-analyze and repeat their words in endless loops through forever ad nauseum. Their goals never included being quoted and re-translated until they lost all meaning. They sought to be jumping off points, not stalling out points. They wanted to be doorways, not doorstops.

A trained, logical mind can be like a door with well-oiled hinges. But it is not the doorway itself, just a slab pivoting within set parameters.

The doorway can be reached by stepping beyond the door, by turning away from the strictly physical. But you are still merely standing on the threshold.

Freedom, Bliss, and True Knowing can only consume you once you leap through the threshold and fly.

I had cancers on my shoulder and back for years. Just kept piling more layers of ever-bigger bandages on them to sop the blood. They hurt. As they spread, I couldn’t find comfortable positions to sleep in, couldn’t use a seat belt, or wear heavy clothes in cold weather.

So I just made my peace and prepared for the end times.

My niece invited me up to spend Christmas with family. Hugging kids, chasing dogs, laughing, and eating way too much, was immensely healing. Transformational.  As snowstorm after snowstorm hit, family members told me I shouldn’t drive back up into the mountains. I stayed there for months.

Then I got a gal pal. Girlfriends won’t let you get away with that shit. I finally followed through on many lapsed promises to her and went to a clinic. First time I’d been to a doctor in maybe 10 years. He expressed concern. Said I could either spend major bucks on surgery, or hundreds of dollars on some expensive cream. I got home and found a tube of the stuff in my medicine cabinet. Don’t know where it had come from. Tried it for a while to eat away at the buggers, but it dug deeper, wider, and more painful holes until I just stopped using it.

So my lady friend in England (it was a Facebook relationship; we hadn’t actually met yet) told me that since I already sent healing to others around the planet and beyond; why not zap some through myself while I’m at it? She had to keep nagging me. This whole “Healer heal thyself” thing seemed unnatural to me. But every once in a while I did give it a shot.

Then I headed off to Europe. Spent six months touring ancient monasteries, and spooky sites generally. Saw pieces of the True Cross, one of the thorns, bones of apostles, the robe and belt of St. Francis, touched a column Jesus may have leaned against while preaching.

Some sites throbbed with power. I felt every part of me changing.

I’m back in the states now, but I’m not the person, and this is not the body, that left here.

Where the cancer had been there are tiny white spaces. Like somebody erased them.

I’m a romantic, but a realist. When I heard stories of Jesus, or at least his great uncle (Mary’s uncle, Joseph of Aramathea), having set up a church in Glastonbury where King Arthur was later buried, I blew it off and made sarcastic jokes. – But then – when I experienced that site itself- it was like being smacked in the soul with a rock! – The same with Tintagel and the caves of Merlin. – I came away with the feeling that legends are sometimes born, and churches built, on special places where people feel, and are moved by, forces they cannot explain. Arthur and Merlin may never have existed; some Bible stories are completely fictitious. But when you feel some of these places, these artifacts of saints, and come away stunned, you may want to explain that experience to someone. This might be how many of our most endearing and enduring myths have been born. The ones we suspect hold some truth.

Take each myth entirely out of the equation, and you still have the need to open yourself to wonder. To fall away overwhelmed by vast magnificence. Physicists could never cram that into equations; scriptures can only point and fall short; legends live and breathe though the people in them may never have. And still there is wonder; and the need to touch it, to share it, in words that could never quite do.

I’d seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel for so many years I’d grown tired of them. Critical of Michelangelo’s painting style. The fat forearms, pudgy toes, slapping boobs onto guys so he could call them gals … I knew if I was going to be in Rome & the Vatican anyway, I couldn’t just ignore the place, but I really wasn’t expecting much.

But then I am inside. An Italian guard is calling for silence. Reverential organ music is thundering quietly (you would have to experience that to know what I mean). It is one huge, open room. Botticelli figures dance and flow along the walls.

And there – everywhere above you; like the Milky Way over farm country on a clear summer night – is the Creation, and Judgment Day; a plethora of great spiritual beings and moments as envisioned and expressed by Buonarroti himself.

And tears come.

And joy flows.

I spent a long time with St. Francis’s robe and belt.  I stood there meeting him heart to heart and spirit to spirit, examining the textures of the cloth, hand-stitched seams he had probably sewn himself. And then, I kept coming back. It was so far beyond merely beautiful.

We were in that church for hours. Santa Croce is a deeply moving spiritual and heart center. Lovely tree-lined cloisters. The tombs of Michelangelo, Dante, Rossini, Galileo, Ghiberti, Machiavelli, Marconi, Fermi, Florence Nightingale, and many others. With paintings of the assumptions by Giotto, Cimabue, and the like. Art by della Robbia, Donatello, Venezianno.

I felt myself not just lifted up, but driven hard to my highest. I prayed for inspiration, and soon after published my novel.

But most moving and powerful of all was the time spent with St. Francis. We came away together; one shared heart; fused in spirit.

At our favorite spiritual haunts, we could feel the sacredness, the power and spirit of the land itself. Christians built churches there centuries ago on land pagans had already venerated, and consecrated. You can feel the Nature spirit, and the Christ love, empowering and clarifying each other. It is a wonder of the heart to share and participate in that.

All great world teachers teach basically the same things. It’s when self-lauding followers come along after they’re dead and start beating others with claims that Our guy is the only guy, and our way is the only way that the stink of danger and abuse arise.

Seeing science as the true and only source for understanding the universe, or holding spiritual teachings similarly, does not take everything in. Seeing Jesus as the only way and the only true teacher, or Mohammed, or whomever, leaves us locking our doors against the light, but then searching for it through the peephole. All paths can lead ultimately toward the deepest and Highest Truths. Maybe we only get there by treading, and falling short, on one heckuva lot of them.

Those who let their religion confine them to what church leaders tell them about God don’t really know God. Those who believe Science can tell them what the universe is all about confine themselves to what can be theorized, mathematically tested, and cross-checked. Each group is confining itself to different fenced-in areas along the thin outer shell of things. Anyone who relies exclusively on what mind or faith can reveal is seeing only what his own limited awareness can grasp. He is not touching the eternal; only looking toward it, from a distance.

In Holy Cross Abbey, outside, Tipperary, I stood between relics of The True Cross. Wearing my bag of talismans, I lifted my arms and felt immense power flooding in from on High. – Then I felt intensely blessed and profoundly at peace in the tiny chapel St. Margaret used in the Castle of Edinburgh. She had been a true spirit of Christian charity despite being successor to Lady Macbeth. She had owned a piece of the cross as well. – Lynden and I felt early Christian passions mingling with ancient Nature faiths in Rosslyn Chapel, where all sorts of relics might have been hidden. – I’ve felt the surging; sometimes joyous, sometimes agonized and desperate, faith of churchgoers from ancient centuries, and of masons who had built those holy sites. I wore or carried special jewelry, medals blessed by the church, relics of saints, vibhutti from Sai Baba. At some point I will pass these along to those in need, but for now I am sharing our highest moments, pouring this magic into them, creating talismans of my own.

I’m trying to work up how to tell you about the spirit of the tiny child we felt, and who seemed to feel us, in Mary King’s Close, under Edinburgh, but it still feels very raw, and sensitive to me. We abandoned a hurting child who wanted us to stay. She could feel that Lyndie and I knew she was there, loved her, and wanted to stay with her. She didn’t understand why we left. Just like her parents had abandoned her to die in that room, victims of the plague so many long centuries ago. She hurt when we too turned away from her, but she is used to hurting.

The guides take groups into her cold, cold room, with its pile of dolls, where they treat her like she is just a ghost tale to be sported with, and then rush everyone out. I don’t think she understands the words, but she sees and feels people coming and going. She can sense when someone connects with her and truly cares. But then they, too, walk away. She doesn’t know why they are leaving her. Everyone moves on to the next room, turning their backs to her, listening to the guide’s next stories.

But this time, Lynden & I turned from him, calling to her through the underground streets, as the distance between us stretched, and our contact became more vague. The little girl stayed stuck in that tiny, icy room.

Lynden chatted outside with the ticket taker afterward, who told her that at least once a week somebody comes back up to the surface, saying they’d felt someone in that room. Sometimes tugging on their coats.

We spent much of our first day in Edinburgh exploring St. Giles Cathedral, spellbound. As we joined others in wandering reverence, or sat in quiet contemplation, the choir held forth in moving glory.

In the castle we visited the room where Mary Queen of Scots gave birth, and another where the Black Dinner took place. Our hearts sank and stayed there as we moved through the cold cramped corners where hundreds of soldiers starved and froze to death during a siege of the fort that lasted months.

At the very top of the castle, though, St. Margaret’s tiny private chapel opened its sacred aura for all. Just standing in it I felt to be in one of the earth’s radiating centers of love, enfolding all and everywhere in compassion. A tiny, simple place, but so intense with gentle caring. She must have been a beautiful soul.

We took a nighttime tour of haunted sites. It turned out to be so disrespectful of the dead that we stayed behind after midnight when the group broke up, just to apologize to the interred inhabitants of one of its haunted graveyards.

The little dog buried just inside the entrance was the only thing sweet about Greyfriers Churchyard. Lynden and I separated and headed off through graves on opposite sides of the church. She was lost in a sad, desolate feeling. I felt the lingering agony of the spirits there, still wrenching and clawing the atmosphere with pain through the centuries. Turns out more than 1200 men, women, and children, had been had been imprisoned there for signing a letter to the new captor king, telling him they’d cooperate in every other way, but please don’t mess with their religion. He’d taken it as an act of treason; caged them outside through harsh winters, feeding them only four ounces of bread a day. They were tried, tortured, and executed there. Very few escaped. Some were shipped to America, chained below deck as slaves, but their ship sank in icy waters and no one survived. You can still feel their intense and hopeless agony.

Their main torturer is buried there, too. Hundreds have been bitten, scratched, or burned near his mausoleum; day and night. In Greyfriers Churchyard an evil presence slashes through an atmosphere thick with ancient agony. Up to ten percent of people buried in the 1800’s or earlier were unintentionally buried alive. They broke their nails off clawing to get out. You can feel this there, too. The whole cemetery writhed and clawed at you. So many stones from the 14- to 1600’s crawl with skulls, skeletons, scenes showing the horrific triumph of death.

In more recent graveyards; say from the 1800’s; I can still feel the pain of mothers aching for their babies laid out around them. Cemeteries & tombs from perhaps the 1600’s and earlier, though, generally feel empty. There is no connection. There are exceptions, of course. Greyfriers Churchyard in Edinburgh is horrific. But most feel emptied out, like the spirits there have moved on. There may be lifelike effigies atop some of the tombs, but nothing inside them.

I’ve seen a lot of tombs of popes and bishops from long ago. In a few I’ve sensed the passion they’d poured into their work. Sometimes with a hard edge of pompous cruelty.

But on spiritual planes and in the afterlife, all that really matters is the motivation. If they lost themselves in service, with no thought of self, they set themselves free. Any taint of superiority though; toward their followers, or toward other religions; could lock them into their own dark bile and smallness of spirit through the centuries. Feeling the need to lord it over those who have long ago forgotten them may be one expression of limbo.

A place of worship is much more than moments, memorials, and men. More than those who have led, or perhaps MISled it. – It is passion left behind in the stones by masons as they chipped it together. – It’s babies lost in fields by poor farmers and grieving parents who couldn’t make it in for services. – It is need, it’s fulfillment, and it’s an unquenchable quest. – It is unknowable mysteries; and a deep silent knowing. A building is only sacred to the degree that it taps into something that could never be contained within its structure. – Church leaders can only lead by humbly following. They can only offer hope by getting down in the mud with the hopeless. They offer strength to the weak through their own vulnerabilities; their compassion comes from deep resonant empathy. – In ancient abbes, monasteries, and churches I have felt all this pouring through the walls, through the centuries. As these walls of time and structure crumble away, I swim in that vast, uncontainable glory. I become that vastness, the Hope, and the Knowing; and carry it with me everywhere.

I don’t believe it! They just set them down right in front of you and you just carry them off to your reading desk. Seven huge volumes. The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett. Not even in bulletproof sleeves or anything. You can feel them; you can smell them. Letters by HPB, Olcott, Damodar, Subba Rowe, all of them. Sinnett, Hume, Countess Wachmeister, Judge. Everybody. Right in your hands. The Pillow Dak is there. The note someone wanted to find pinned to a branch high up in a tree. So, from far away in Tibet, that’s where KH materialized it. He’d written, “I was told you wanted me to put this here. What can I do for you?”

Someone wrote a letter to him in India, had it postmarked and mailed. Within minutes he read it, still in its envelope, while he was on a train in another country. He stopped to telegraph a reply. The letter and the telegraph are there along with all sorts of sworn eye witness accounts. Everything. It’s all there, and they just plunk the letters down in your lap. Sealed letters that when opened had been edited and commented on in the margins. The whole amazing story of those first few years of the TS. You feel them tingling all through you.

I’ve seen pieces of The True Cross, body parts of saints and apostles, the robe of St. Francis. Charlemagne’s vestments. I’ve seen Joan of Arc’s helmet. And now this.

I can feel my little molecules just giggling, high-fiving each other, and dancing themselves like little squirming tadpoles into being something infinitely Higher & Brighter.

I don’t know, don’t really care how much longer I have to live, or how much longer my money will hold out, but while I am here I will do what I was put on this planet to do. I have been given many lifetimes of special gifts and experiences all in one. I’ve lived with and been taught by miracle workers and have worked some minor miracles of my own. But then I kept saying No to life and shutting it all back down again.

Well, no more. I am stepping way beyond this tiny, drab, confining world of the physical, into what I am meant to be; what I was put here to do. Wherever it takes me. I am High and getting ever Higher!

So – here we are, just hanging out in our favorite sidewalk cafe in Rome. Really getting into our two liter beers, and the freshest seafood and pasta in the world.

Horns start blaring and a column of cops on motorcycles go by.

That’s normal in this city. But this time the cop on the front bike is standing and waving violently from side to side.

This is not.

The limo drives past. and folks on the street are applauding. The new Pope leans up against his window and waves as he goes by, but I really don’t think he actually recognized me; I think he was just being polite.

Dating from around 3,500 BC, Castlerigg may be the oldest, most atmospheric stone circle in England. Perhaps all of Europe.

In 1919, witnesses watched white light-balls moving slowly over the stones, just as they do nowadays over crop circles beside Stonehenge. Such lights have been observed at ancient sites throughout the world since at least the 1700’s, and may have been among the reasons ancient man built monuments there in the first place.

Castlerigg’s stones seem to relate in eerie ways to Nature around them.

I figured these folks must have been about half my size, so I squatted down to see things from their level. Found what struck me as a story telling rock. Gazing at it long enough, one could see images, and scenes, some moving.

The hill is encircled by mountains – a cozy place of magic and peace. Somehow the lives there seem lively and inviting; not at all somber as I had expected.

Saw a gigantic hillside chalk carving in the distance and decided to drive closer for photos. Passed through the most exquisitely sweet little village. Seemed like hardly twenty homes there. Charming and magical. Fairy tale cottages with thatched roofs, walls laced by wandering wisteria. Just lovely. So I couldn’t let it go. I went home and researched it. Turns out it was the childhood village of Mick Jagger. Keith Richards went to school there.

So many special centers I feel connected to now. Like a spider weaves its web with many links, and as he moves around he feels vibrations from every point. As with karma, every ripple feeds through every other. I carry these spirits within me; just as a part of me lives within them.

There are special beings I move through the world with, as well; but their names I tend to hold much more privately.

There are dark places I carry, like Gettysburg, and Greyfriers Churchyard.

Wherever I wander, they are.

When you touch me, you touch them.

I had cancer spots for years until Lynden suggested I zap them. So I drew down the healing forces, pulling them through me. The cancer went away and I headed for England. I touched lingering spirits in ancient monasteries; stone circles and centers of magic. Merlin told me where to dig to find a special crystal…. And it was like my molecules were changing. I was losing my sense of physical presence. Lynden and I were sick for months and I stayed home. The winter broke records and I stayed inside. I got a devastating earache and deafness in Italy, and could hardly have felt more isolated.

As I healed from this, though, it was like I was building a new body. In recent weeks I’ve been constantly buzzing in some other-worldly kinda way. If I just make the slightest shift from paying attention to my surroundings, I feel the flow of healing pouring through me for all beings everywhere. – I am a part of that flow.

As Lyndie and I were driving home from Scotland yesterday after visiting Roslyn Chapel again (I lingered longer in the crypt this time), I felt like I was just some non-specific force of Nature; pouring benign energy out into the hills. Until then I’d always felt I was directing my zaps. To help those I knew needed it. I had some say in where the healing flowed, and who could benefit.

I pondered over what this new wrinkle might indicate. A tree in the forest is a center of peace, but doesn’t get all anxiety-ridden over where he should be sending that peace. He is just doing what he is. Winds are forces of Nature, but don’t question whom they should be blowing on, and where they should be blowing him.

Now I can offer my help to unseen spiritual beings generally, without specifically addressing Jesus, or Sai, or some other great Master. I don’t have to know whom I’m praying to. If I want to be of service, my ego should not set terms and limitations on that. I want to be there if needed, as needed, in every moment – Period.

The very best, most real, most powerful part of this world is definitely not the physical and temporal. I fought for so long to deny the strange spooky things that happen to me; the things I can do; all those seeming miracles and miracle workers. I wanted logical, acceptable, scientific explanations. – Or, failing that, at least to believe it was only my imagination. I fought my Higher Self back for decades that way!

I finally let go of those levels of denial. I opened more fully to what truly is.

So then I thrilled to all those people re-assuring me that they had indeed seen me, quite clearly, materialize and disappear when I’d traveled out of body to their hospital rooms. I’d ache, and fall back into self-doubt if they didn’t write or call right away, unsolicited, or if I had to prompt it out of them.

I no longer need to hear these long distance pats on the back.

In the end, it is all about letting go. About trusting in the caring guidance of powers and wisdom infinitely beyond the reaches of your own. So why not let myself be that force of nature without asking questions?

When we feel ourselves radiating as healers; as powerful Centers of Light; is there still a part of us that wants to hold back? Telling ourselves that Spiritual Brilliance is for other Beings; much Greater Beings?  That we’re nobody, and we’re just fooling ourselves? Could that just be buckling under to old, outmoded paradigms; thinking we are still that little kid, hanging onto the coattails of bigger, more significant folks? When is it finally time to let go? To stand up and be, and to do, what we were put here for?

As one of those transcended beings once told me, if we hide behind walls we’re ready to break free of, we may be hurting more than ourselves. There are people out there praying for help. Why deny them what we’re able to share?

There must always be those of a nature to doubt. There must also be gullible folk, believing too much and too readily. Ranged between are the true seekers, pilgrims heading homeward into the heart of that Infinite Other.

These would do well to feed both their doubts, and their wonder.

The very best questions don’t lead to answers. They lead to deeper questions.

The joy of learning never fades. It is only the schools that fall behind us.

I have traveled far, and seen many things; in spirit, or merely in body.

Now, wherever I am feels foreign to me, but everywhere I go, I am home.