Over the years, I've met enlightened beings who seemed to
be able to appear or disappear, much as UFOs do. I've also
witnessed the phenomenon of mysterious entities showing up
just when I seem to need them, such as the angel who
visited us in the Kinko's Copy Shop who had some firm words
for Whitley.
In his extraordinary book Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor E.
Frankl tells about working in a concentration camp, breaking
ice with an axe. He was thinking of his wife and having an
imaginary dialog with her in his head. At that point, he didn't
know if she was alive or dead. Suddenly a bird landed on the
pile of ice and dirt he had dug, cocked its head and looked at
him, as if he was listening.
Some people would say this was a mere coincidence and
others would assert that his wife's spirit had somehow
transformed itself into the bird's body and come to visit him.
I prefer to think of it as a living metaphor. Somehow (and I
can't explain the physics of it) his mind "created" a kind of
reality. He saw what he needed to see to give him hope for
the future. This image could have been created by his mind,
but it is NOT as simple as it being "just" his imagination. The
angel I
met was a real flesh-and-blood person and when my dead cat
Coe visited
me in the hospital, I could feel his soft fur. Perhaps these
apparitions are examples of what Jung called the "collective
unconscious," which he postulated as being a kind of deep
level of mind that is common to all humanity, a sort of
psychological DNA.
While we were in New York City recently, where we visited
our publishers and Whitley was interviewed for a History
Channel show on 2012, we found ourselves in the
neighborhood of the Gurdjieff Foundation on the upper east
side, a place we visited regularly for years. This is the place
where Whitley developed the meditation techniques that he
writes about in
The Path
and leads our
subscribers
in. It's a small, unprepossessing gray stone building with no
sign of any kind on it and I thought it would be pleasant to
walk by it again. Whitley was actually a group leader there
for a time, and as
such he met our late friend Dora who "woke him up" when she
came clanking into a meeting on roller skates. Dora is the
mother of the goddaughter I got the
urgent
message to get back in touch with, and she was with us
when we visited the building.
As the three of us stood in front of it, who should appear but
the lady Whitley played the
trickster
coyote joke on! She recognized Whitley immediately and
invited us inside.
We walked up the stairs and saw so many of the areas we
remembered so well, including the room where we went to our
Thursday night group meetings. The woman told us that she
had come to the Foundation to use the library, but Whitley
noticed that she didn't seem to do anything there.
We've been traveling back and forth to New York quite often
recently, which made me realize that I would like something I
always had when we lived there: A raincoat with a zip-out
liner, which is a handy item to have for the in-between
seasons in the Northeast. I had a black coat with a liner that
I'd bought online a few years earlier, but it was dowdy and I
felt fairly unsophisticated wearing it around the city streets.
But I didn't want to replace it with a dull tan coat, I wanted
a RED one! I went to several stores in California and even
visited a department store in New York, but I couldn't find
what I wanted.
Then, when we were leaving the Foundation, I realized that
we were within walking distance of a department store where
I spent many happy hours wandering around in the days
when we lived in New York, daydreaming about all the
glamorous clothes (and a more glamorous ME wearing them).
We had some spare time so we walked over there and made
our way up to the coat department, past all the people trying
to spray us with perfume, and there it was: My red raincoat!
I once found a red rose on my balcony as a kind of "message
received" and I got a red message this time as well. Whitley
has interpreted his meeting to mean he should return to his
Gurdjieff work, this time in California. I don't know if it's also a
message for me, but it's due to rain here this week (a rare
event in California) so I'm going to mull it over while wearing
my new coat.
Related Entries:
10-Nov-2009: On NOT Going to a Movie about UFOs
20-Oct-2009: The Laughing Buddha
22-Sep-2009: Four Days
07-Sep-2009: Portents, Synchronicities (and Coincidences?)
27-Aug-2009: Two Birthdays
12-Aug-2009: Held Hostage by Hummingbirds
05-Aug-2009: The Irish Milkmen of the Dog World
27-Jul-2009: Two Surprising Events
29-Jun-2009: Trickster Coyote
08-Jun-2009: Tool Users
