Contemplate the Spectrum of Consciousness
I am best described as a post spiritual cynic. After reading books about the struggle to expose the excesses of the Spiritualist movement & obsession with medium-led seances in the late nineteenth & early twentieth centuries, I took a much more skeptical view of those claiming a clear link with the dearly departed.(1) I also did some reading of the materialist scientists who reject anything beyond Richard Dawkins’s ‘blind watchmaker’ of evolution.
What inevitably happened was I had to confound my own experiences & deny them if I wanted to take such a position. One of my earliest experiences of remote viewing happened during my early days at Ananda Cooperative Community in California. There was a group meditation early in the morning each day. During one of these, I became aware during my deeply relaxed state of a beautiful view of the earth with the space shuttle arcing up & away from it. To my great surprise, when I went to the mail room afterwards to check for messages, I was greeted by the sight of a stack of periodicals that featured on the cover the very thing I had seen while meditating! I hadn’t been to the mail room before the group practice & I was unaware of having seen that illustration at any time in the past, yet there it was in every detail just as I’d experienced it recently!
If you & I can agree to accept that what is often described as rare or para-normal is not that unusual, then we can begin an open-minded look at some of the anecdotes that speak of the grand scale of consciousness & its diminutive offspring, human experience.
An eye-opening interview I recently enjoyed was Cheryl Lee Black’s insights into her RSPK (recurrent spontaneous psycho-kinesis). At age eleven, following a near-death experience at age ten, she had what some would describe as a poltergeist experience. Cheryl Lee found her classroom too noisy with too many people, just an over-stimulating environment. The school counselor recommended that if she got upset, Cheryl should try to calm herself by drawing in a little sketch pad. Her teacher, though, really didn’t agree with that & found her lack of attention infuriating. During class one day, Cheryl was trying to calm herself with sketching when her teacher slapped her across the face! Then she snatched up her sketch pad & flung it across the room. To Cheryl’s astonishment, the drawing pad launched itself into the air across the room & smashed into the teacher’s face! What was really daunting about that situation was she wasn’t sure what to say about it & no one wanted to talk about what had happened even though her reputation as a student took a nose-dive!(2)
She said that slamming doors & opening & closing drawers occurred later in her life. At one point, she hid terrified under the kitchen table as the lights flashed on & off, door whipped open & shut & other ‘unnatural events’ raged on around her. (3) What gradually became obvious to her was that these events were often related to her anger or other emotional states.
Radiologist & author Larry Burk, who does dream work counseling among many other things, said during a webinar that he had five dreams that correctly predicted five tornadoes! He was humble about this noteworthy part of his life, just as he was careful to add that these predictions came during the tumultuous divorce he had gone through. (4) Are you beginning to see the connection? Ordinary people have emotional trials that are reflected in their environment near & far.
Viewing the seemingly unrelated effects of emotional states on one’s surroundings put an entirely new spin on things like botched executions by hanging. In a Crime Beat story, Joseph Samuel was captured with some other escaped convicts from an Australian penal colony following an attempted robbery.(5) The police officer who prevented the robbery was, unfortunately, murdered in the midst of doing his duty, & Mr. Samuel was the only one of the burglars who was definitely identified by the woman they had tried to rob. The judge in the case sent him to be hanged. Let me bring something to your attention before I relate the rest of the saga. Mr. Samuel pleaded that he had not killed the policeman though he was at the crime scene. So, in effect he was being hanged for a murder he didn’t commit & for attempted robbery. I believe we can agree that he was in a seriously outraged emotional state where the punishment didn’t fit the crime!
Did he go quietly? In light of the fact that hanging at that time (1803 in the U.K.) was done by slow strangulation, not a quick neck snap, I would think that Joseph was more than a little upset. He was in a cart with other felons, & the cart was drawn away slowly, but Samuel’s rope snapped! The ropes were composed of 5 hemp cords that could sustain a 1,000 pound load, so it wasn’t a mistaken choice in material. (6) To make a long story short, the executioner attempted two more strangulations, but the second one failed by the rope slipping off & the third one ended in another rope break!
A policeman at the execution was alerted to the crowd’s uproar at what it saw as ‘divine intervention’ so he went to the governor with the story. After the governor checked that the ropes had not been tampered with, he commuted Mr. Samuel’s sentence to life in prison. Not exactly a free pass to a second chance at life like freedom would have been, but in light of the near impossible odds of THREE failed hanging attempts, it was better than a dirt nap.
Here’s another unexplained, failed execution. John Lee was accused of murdering his employer although there was nothing but circumstantial evidence. The death by hanging verdict happened in 1885 before there was a way to verify that the blood on Mr. Lee was his own, not his older, female employer. His explanation was he cut his arm breaking a window to get in to stop a fire in her bedroom.
Despite any other form of evidence, Lee was taken to be hanged by being dropped through a trap door. James Berry, the executioner, pulled a lever, but the trap door didn’t open. Mr. Berry checked the parts involved, but found nothing wrong, so he tried again. Again, the trap door hung up, so Mr. Berry widened the opening between the two doors & had the warden check the mechanism as well. After a third try & still no success, the executioner & the chief medical officer refused to attempt the hanging again. As the John Pitkin, the medical officer, recorded in his report of the incident, “…when I saw the great helpless confusion that prevailed, the great mental suffering through which the culprit had passed…I joined in an appeal to the Under Sheriff to postpone the execution for that day.” (7) It’s revealing how improbable was the multiple failures of the scaffold machinery that prison officials further examined it. There was speculation that damp wood had swelled the trap doors, but the additional check found them “dry as bones.” Following the debacle, Lee sentence was commuted to life imprisonment; in 1907, John Lee was released twenty-two years later & journeyed to the United States of America.
This case of ‘divine intervention’ shares the same whiff of emotional tumult as Joseph Campbell’s experience, as well as its righteousness. Further reading revealed that besides having an incompetent stand-in present his defense (the attorney bowed out due to ill-health & substituted his brother), Lee was on good terms with Emma Keyse, his supposed victim. She was found with her throat cut ear-to-ear & three stab wounds to her head, an attack one would expect from an enraged person, not an unassuming servant with no motive. In addition, the murder weapon was left in a bedside table drawer & her body was unsuccessfully set on fire. Why would Lee kill Ms. Keyse, set her body on fire, leave the knife behind, lock the door, & then return to try to stop the fire? How would he have benefited by her death? No stolen belongings were found in his possession as well.
The chance application of forensic science to the case fifty years later supports the idea that Lee was innocent & something protects the blameless. Evidence was found that Reginald Gwynne Templar, the lawyer who passed Lee’s defense to his unqualified brother, was at serious odds with Ms. Keyse & killed her in a fit of rage. What we have in both narratives is an emotionally charged setting involving men, innocent men, preparing to die unjustly. In both cases, simple & mechanically aided methods of hanging failed &, upon examination, were free of tampering & obvious natural defects that would have explained the multiple failures.
I have drawn on contemporary & historical sources to point out that there are sources of energy, give them what name you prefer, angelic beings, guardian angels, or spiritual entities that respond to emotional charged circumstances & are inclined to protect the deserving. Sometimes their influence or involvement is not dependent on extreme situations like an impending execution. Let me conclude this exploratory examination with another personal experience.
I had been practicing Falun Dafa in a group setting for six months when my instructor & her friends completed their graduate work in physics for the time being & returned to China. I continued to practice by myself, arising at 4:30 a.m. to do the standing & sitting exercises in a public park before going to work. I found this solitary regimen much more difficult compared to my earlier experience, so I thought about ways to interest others in joining me. I had attended meetings at the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Arlington, Texas & knew that they were open to discussions of many subjects, so I contacted them, explained what I would like to do & they consented to have me give them an introduction to Falun Dafa at a Sunday morning meeting.
I arrived as planned & took my place at a podium before a room with about fifty seated listeners. As I expected, it was a test of my public speaking ability in many years, so I was quite nervous at first. I had just completed introducing myself & my topic in a general way when a potted plant behind me & to my left toppled over. It was about a half meter tall pottery vessel with soil in it & a small plant. There was no strong wind blowing through the hall. There were no wires or other attachments that I could see on the pot when I looked at it as a man stood the pot back up & then sat down. I certainly had nothing to do with rigging a stunt to grab people’s interest! So, when I turned back to face my audience, I smiled & shrugged. However, this wasn’t quite the end of it. A woman in the back I couldn’t clearly see called out loudly, “It’s the energy, Mr. Collie, it’s the energy!!”
I really wish I had thought to ask her to explain exactly what she meant by “the energy,” but I was a bit unnerved by the whole thing & pressed on. Did I get a number of people to join me in my early morning endeavors? Not a one. What I did learn later was that my teacher, Li Hongzhi, strictly forbade lecture forms as a way to introduce people to Falun Dafa!
References:
(1) Blum, Deborah. Ghost Hunters: William James and The Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death. Penguin Press, August 2006
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZpBV3BZ1lc
(3) https://skeptiko.com/cherylee-black-laboratory-verified-pk-470/
(4) Alexander, M.D., Eben and Newell, Karen. Inner Sanctum Center: One Mind: United in Hope & Healing. Larry Burk. June 4, 2020
(5) Kageyama, Ben. How Joseph Samuel Survived His Own Execution. Crime Beat. October 21, 2020
(6) Ibid
(7) Mythili the dreamer. The Fascinating Story of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die. Lessons From History. November 16, 2020
