If youDo you want If you have the desire to find answersknowr mind has been blown by an array of unusual experiences and left you asking, "What the...?", you may want to read on. What you'll find here are musings on the need for a new paradigm and personal stories of the (as yet) unexplained, or what I call...

       In broad daylight on the sidewalk of a busy street I had a brief and overwhelming experience that forever changed the course of my life. At the time, I was torn between two impressions of the event. Either I was having a psychotic break, or I’d experienced the onset of something novel, benign, and beneficial.

       On a beautiful autumn day, I was walking down the street when suddenly, everything disappeared. I was held spellbound, suspended in soft murk, a kind of dynamic near-darkness that coiled and swirled in front of me. I watched as a picture formed.

       A split-second was the longest moment I've ever known.

       I'd taken only half a step on the sidewalk; I stumbled when I regained my vision. In the brief aftermath I was bewildered and completely confused and so utterly moved, I wept. 

       During the cold winter months, I tried to forget, with little success. I wanted to dismiss the event as random, as a one-off, and live convinced it would never happen again. I also wanted to believe a powerful hunch that nagged and haunted me - the experience felt like receiving a message from across a vast distance, or from the depths of an incomprehensible chasm, or from the subtle heights of conscious existence. The intense, intrusive, and indelible nature of the event was hinting at infinity.

       In good conscience, I could not choose one perspective over the other.  

       Then, on a warm spring afternoon six months later, I sat and watched my vision manifest in front of my wide, baffled eyes. 

       I instantly recognized the picture. I suddenly understood the fantastic truth. I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that briefly, six months beforehand, I had glimpsed the future in an unforgetable way.

       My mind raced and my heart soared. I was equally astonished, perplexed, and once again, deeply moved (without the shock and the weeping).  The first experience seemed to come out of nowhere for no reason, like a sucker-punch. The second experience was graceful and gratifying and provided me with an undeniably clear answer to a profound question.

       If you skim through some material on the principles of Adult Learning, you'll discover that we all want answers to the same three gneral questions when we encounter novelty or assimilate new information. What? So what? Now what? I had a simple answer to the first question, but I knew it was incomplete. I had no answers for the other two questions but, as you can imagine, my curiosity was piqued, with caution - I wanted more answers but I knew to find them, I would need to look in some strange places.

       And...I had conditions. I wanted practical answers, not the exaggerated, distorted, unicorn-infused platitudes of the New Age.

       Eventually, I found some of those answers by using the tried and true method of daily meditation. Like many of you, my search for answers continues. I've never been able to avoid the puzzles - they come with the territory - but I have side-stepped most of the platitudes by incorporating their wisdom in the rhythms of my daily life.

       In the same way a navigator might use dead reckoning to determine a position and set a new course, I want to share my voyage on the Mystic Sea with you to help us all get our bearings, compare our logs, and fill our sails with the new prevailing winds of higher consciousness blowing now like never before. 

       By the way...I didn't choose between thinking of myself as crazy or wondering if I'd been shown a window into other worlds. As it turns out, both are true, depending on the perspective. Like Schrodinger's cat, I live in a kind of quantuum superposition, having the potential to be one or the other to any observer. As always, what you expect determines what you see. In the highly biased atmosphere created by the body of material written on this topic that includes fringes of bitter condemnation and utter fantasy, you the reader will decide which perspective fits best. 

       Over time, I’ve been learning - and struggling with - how to encourage and manage my unusual experiences in non-ordinary realities. I confess - I'm a late bloomer. I've spent almost as much time sabotaging my dreams as I have living them and so my journey is best described as “gonzo mysticism” (Thank-you, Hunter S. Thompson). I'll be sharing with you a wealth of genuine, bizarre, and fantastic events while musing on their implications, asking questions, seeking answers, and making suggestions to help create the groundswell required to guide us into the third millenium and to the destiny of the human species.

       As a former agnostic and a guy who, like many people, scoffs at the term “paranormal”, I find myself wanting to use a different, more personal, and more appropriate vocabulary for claiming our birthright as beings of light.

       

Cheers,

 

Gord