My Adventures With the Green Man

It’s been just a little over a year since October 16, 2004, when an aneurysm suddenly burst inside my head and I was rushed to the hospital. Whitley and my son Andrew, who were constantly by my side, were told that I would be fully healed in a year. I am writing this on October 20, 2006, 4 days after my one-year "anniversary."

Physically, I am healed. I have a little glitch in my peripheral vision, but even that is healing up. I’m very lucky. But there’s another problem, a psychic problem, that I rarely spoke of, but now that’s finally healed as well, and I want to tell you how it happened. It all has to do with the incredible saga of the Green Man.

First of all, who is the Green Man? He was named that by archeologists who noticed carvings in medieval churches of a strange man with sticks and leaves in his hair. They were surprised to see what was obviously a Celtic (pagan) symbol in Christian churches.

Next, I need to explain a little about the way I learn things. I never learn them through direct experience, I always learn them vicariously, through the experiences of others. This has sometimes frustrated me, but as I’ve grown older I’ve realized its value. Whitley has Visitor experiences and symbolic dreams; I interpret them. People write us hundreds of thousands of letters about their own experiences; I read them all and collect the best ones into a book.

After I got out of the hospital, I was left with a deep, visceral fear of death. It almost seemed to me that life wasn’t worth living, because I was going to die someday, so what was the point? I didn’t see any evidence of life after death.

Then a few weeks ago, we were contacted by the author Graham Hancock, whose home in the UK we visited years ago, when Whitley was on his "Communion" tour. Graham has written a spectacular book called "Supernatural," which will be published in the US on September 1st, 2006. In it, he describes taking the mind-expanding drug iboga and the visions it brought. He did this at a time when he was bereft at the recent death of his father. He saw a tall, light-skinned man with blond hair and green moldy splotches on his forehead. I immediately realized he had seen the Green Man.

I recognized this being for two reasons. First, I had recently been at a dinner where a person confided in me that she had met a man who really puzzled her. She called him the "Jolly Green Giant" because he was huge and dressed all in green. He hugged her and pressed her forehead against some crystals he had hanging around his neck and she felt as if her brain had emptied. I knew, from listening to Dreamland interviews, that green is the color of magic, so I told her he was trying to communicate to her that he was a magician.

The second reason I recognized him takes a little more explanation. When we lived in Texas, I was appalled by all the religious fundamentalists I met. These people had been indoctrinated by a certain preacher, but they seemed to have little Christian love in their hearts. What was even more puzzling was they had amazingly little knowledge of what is actually in the Bible. In order to fend them off, I created a "Christian Quiz," with two questions?one from the Old Testament (or Torah) and one from the New Testament. I told people they couldn’t talk to me about religion unless they could answer these questions.

The Old Testament question comes from Genesis 21: What does the word "Isaac" mean? (Not who was he, but what does the word mean). It means "He laughs," because Sarah was in her 90s when God told her she was finally going to have a baby, after being barren all her life, and she thought it was one of the funniest things she had ever heard.

The New Testament question was: When Mary Magdalene went to the cemetery and saw the risen Jesus, who did she think he was? (The answer, from the gospel of John, is she thought he was the gardener). When I asked William Henry, who is an expert on legends and myths, to tell me more about the Green Man, he pointed out that this was who she met there.

The Green Man is the symbol of resurrection, the man who defies death and reforms as a living being, and in so doing overcomes evil. His story comes to us from earliest times. It forms the center of the tale of Isis and her brother Osiris, who after being murdered by the jealous Set, was put back together by Isis and became a resurrected being. Of course, the great "green man" of our era is Jesus, and that’s why he is portrayed in medieval churches, where worshippers were seeking to identify him as a link between ancient and what were, in those days, modern Christian ideas of resurrection.

In John 20:15, Magdalene was asked by the risen Jesus, "Madam, why are you crying? Who are you looking for?" Her reaction was predictable. She did not recognize him. Of course not, he was dead! I would have done exactly the same, I just know it. "She, supposing him to be the gardener, said to him, ‘Sir, if you carried him someplace, tell me where you put him and I?ll go get him.’" (I am quoting from my favorite version of the Bible, The Unvarnished New Testament, translated by Andy Gaus).

As William Henry pointed out to me when I wrote him about my Green Man experience, that reference to the gardener in John is a veiled symbol of the Green Man?Jesus, who overcame death (by the way, William is the only person I have met so far who could answer both of my quiz questions).

In my case, it is literally true: I died last year, but I’m still here. I have overcome death. But it goes deeper than that. The Green Man has told me a greater story, the message that has traveled with us from Osiris to Jesus and down to our own era: there is more to life, death is not final, and we can overcome even the great death that waits for us all.

When the Green Man embraced my friend, he emptied her mind of life’s concerns and pointed her toward a new and greater life. When Graham Hancock saw him, he saw him on behalf of me and on behalf of us all. I am the Green Man. So are you. So are we all.

And I have been given a message, in the usual, round-about way that I always receive wisdom. I have been contacted by the Green Man and shown that there is life after death.

I have finally healed.

NOTE: This Diary entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.