THE DAEMON'S VOICE is an ongoing reveal of a thesis of the dynamic and fluid nature of "reality" and our inherent sovereignty over personal subjective experience. We are sovereign iterations of the Ultimate divine. Designed to create liberation from destructive self talk and enhance empowerment and mindful lucid benevolence, THESE CONCEPTS ARE BEST UNDERSTOOD BY SCROLLING TO THE BOTTOM AND READING FROM THERE UP. All entries are copyrighted.

Monday, April 10, 2017

Callaghan’s Cat and Schrodinger’s Dog


So, many of you know that I died and had a remarkable NDE at the age of 20, in 1978. I am soon to be 59, and the brain damage that caused the NDE has been with me ever since, resulting in very frequent 6 to 12 second partial seizures which start in the Temporal Lobes (bilaterally) move to the Parietal lobes and then to the Occipital lobes. They happen about 18 times per hour, around the clock and, although consciousness is not impaired, it is certainly different. Drugs have not proved able to control the seizures or even slow them down, and they had some terrible side effects, so I am presently unmedicated, and I am good with that.
During my NDE I dived back down into the time stream of my life and actually re-lived many experiences during my "life review". At first, it was as if I were right back in my life with no memory that I had gotten there by dying, entering a lustrous void, and then returning to revisit these vignettes as part of my "life review". But each time I ascended from the immersive experience of reliving these vignettes, returning to the eternal context of the void, I found myself in the presence of a benevolent Being I had all my life experienced as accompanying me. It was quite the surprise that it happened that way too because, although He had felt completely real to me as a child, I had relegated him, by the age of 15, to the status of chimerical. When I died and went into the void, there He was in a lustrous, timeless dimension which seemed to be full of His love. I have never since doubted His presence or reality.
The most interesting thing was that, each time I ascended from the dream of my life to be with him again in the void, it felt much like swimming up from a dive I'd taken into a murky submerged world, and I would recall, more and more, both the life I was leaving – and the presence I was ascending to be with again. I call Him simply "Michael" or, often, "Beloved". It's important to note here that "God" was not unmentioned during this NDE, but he was not the sort of God we are taught to think of through religion. All he seemed to be was love that is self aware – and all he wanted was for us to be kind to one another. Indeed, he wanted us to grow to be ever more like him, and the way to do that was by being loving to each other – even to strangers. As an aside, time has taught me that it is precisely when people appear least to deserve our kindness that being kind is the most transformative.
Memory research indicates that one cannot recall their dreams unless they experience recalling them in the transitional states between waking and dreaming because the chemical millieu changes from waking to sleeping, and memories can only be retrieved in the chemical setting in which they were initially stored or the slightly altered gradients of chemistry adjacent. Accordingly, there is created a sense of diving down from one chemical state into another and then ascending as we waken. In just this way, I dragged memories of my life up to lucid awareness of Michael's presence and, when I descended, I also carried with me, more and more each time, memory of Him into the dream of my life re-visited. In a queer way this seems to have served to work backwards through time, making the mind of the child I recalled being more permeable to His presence and His guidance. I don't know why so few others have this experience, but I am glad I did because I needed that guidance as mine was a treacherous childhood and I had mostly been very rash and very bold.
The NDE also created an impassive, mostly detached, experience of my memories and has since served to help me feel more detached from terrible things that occur to all of us at one time or another. Among the terrible things that can happen, one is the loss of a beloved pet, most often dogs or cats – but not to death, although this is certainly very painful as well. Instead, they simply disappear: We cannot find them. It's an uniquely heart breaking experience because you don't know what has become of them, and that uncertainty leaves the mind free to imagine all manner of horrific situations. This, as some know, recently happened to me. But, none of you know that, just a week before that happened, a cat I loved very very much, died in terrible suffering in my arms while I tried desperately to save him. His name was Bindu, and he was so named because he’d slept each night as a kitten over the spot on my head known as the chakra Bindu. It is purported to be our place of attachment to the divine.
It was March 28th, 2016  my favorite time of year in Florida because the oak trees are in bright spring green new leaves and Easter, my most favorite holiday, was in my heart and mind. I had been writing of my NDE – the single most defining event of my life – it was a new encounter with death. I'd had a realization while I was writing about the reality of the Presence of the Beloved “Other” in whom we are taught to believe (quite easily) as children. He leaves us shining gifts and sweets under our dazzling Christmas trees, and He leaves us magical eggs, symbolizing rebirth and renewal, hidden in the grass and reeds. While I had been writing, I had recalled how unhappy I had been to find out that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were not real  and then it suddenly occurred to me that they were real in a way I'd never suspected  until that moment. They were metaphors for the benevolent presence of God. Indeed God does leave gifts hidden in every sweet occurrence and in every “suffering,” waiting to be discovered, so that suffering may be redeemed by lessons gained thereby. I call my method of forgiving “The Way of Redemption” because I “redeem” each sadness for the beauty of the magical “eggs (seeds) of understanding” I find therein. All I need do to find them is reserve judgement and wait for them to emerge to understanding. With this renewed perspective that the “Beloved Other” does indeed exist, and that it is his greatest pleasure that we come to know ourselves as extensions of him, I rose from writing. Joyous and satisfied with the progress I'd made, I went to my bedroom where I found my Bindu dying.
Words cannot express the horror show it was, nor would I inflict it on you. I cannot yet get the sounds and images out of my mind. I shall never forget the sounds he spent his last breath to make as death separated us. He cried with me, and the sound he made was a shattered scream of "No, I don't want to leave you!" And then he was gone. He'd spent his last breath saying "Goodbye".
Afterwards, I barely cried. "Alight," I exclaimed and sighed. "So, You're dead," I asserted. And then I collapsed. Blood pressure plummeted. Heart raced. I was white as a sheet and sick, barfing, innards roiling. I have moderate, not mild, impairment of my Autonomic Nervous System on the parasympathetic side. Once keyed up, I don’t slowly return to normal. It takes a chemical "rubber mallet" to sedate me at night but, when hit hard emotionally, I crash.
I called a dear friend. She came, stayed four hours, called my sister, who started the drive up from Tampa 200 miles away, and then my friend called EMTs. Bad juju.
Detachment is important for me, given my neurological condition, and yet I am a terribly passionate soul, and “terribly” is the perfect adjective here. God rendered this heart, both beautifully and terribly passionate. This had happened to me before, when my Daddy died. It went on for five years after he passed. Three or four times a day I would feel as if I were dying and a malignant thought kept intruding into my mindspace saying, "You shall drop dead at any second, surely you will. You cannot live without your heart." This Bindu loss was going to be a hard one to redeem. Terrible and beautiful.
Stange help came on May 15th, 2016. New acquaintances came to look at a van I had for sale. Between the three of us no one noticed when Grace, my Great Pyrenees, jumped inside. We did not see her although she weighs almost 100 lbs. We closed the van. That night, she did not come to dinner call and I began searching, certain in my heart that one of these men who had come to look at the van had taken her. They were strangers, after all and, although very friendly, I am cryptically suspicious of people – even people I know well, until I have watched them operate in a range of situations and I have built a mental profile of what to expect of them. I kept feeling it had something directly to do with their visit – and it triggered the latent paranoia that my childhood had fostered in my heart and mind. Pitbull fighting and cock fighting happens in the sticks where I live and dogs, and cats can be stolen and used to bait train a pitbull to enhance aggression. The thought made the blood drain from my head and my heart raced as passion rose. Even though Gracie is a Great Pyrenees she is kind and gentle and friendly an ingenue easy to haul into a vehicle and carry away. I asked Michael and He said “She is near. She is alive. She is hidden”. Four AM found me walking the venomous snake habitat of power easements, and along roads with a head lamp, having scoured my 14 acres of woods and fields and found her nowhere.
“Why are you doing this?” Michael asked. “You are looking for what you do not want to find: a body. Have I not cautioned you about the power of fear and passion to manifest what you would not to experience?”
Yet I searched because I could not live with myself to do otherwise.
I did everything a distraught and defeated person could. I called and called, and I canvassed the neighborhood. I traveled to a city 25 miles away and handed out fliers there. I spoke with every level of law enforcement, every agency and animal shelter. No, I didn't bother the FBI, but it crossed my irrational mind once – along with the mayhem I might mete out when I met whomever had taken Gracie. I would waken, dreaming that I had heard her bark and go out into the night every night, several times each night, and look and call and call. Nothing. She was nowhere. I began to think I was hallucinating, which I do do on the rare occasion, when waking or falling asleep, because of the brain damage, so it stands to reason grief might bring it on. I asked Michael. He said, “She is near. She is alive. She is hidden.” He said it many times. I took “hidden” to mean stolen. He repeated Himself until I was annoyed that He didn't simply tell me where to find her. I kept looking, becoming passionately, terribly, resolute.
“I WILL FIND HER. I invoke The Will that is Holy.”
What do we know about Florida? Bloody hot and humid. What do we know about a dog locked in a car or van in Florida in mid May? They don’t have much time, but a strong cold front had extended the cool a couple of days for me, and put others north and west of me, under serious snow. Where I was, highs were in the mid to upper eighty degrees range. My suspicion was that she had been taken from me. Grace was taken. No small significance, that. I'd lost Bindu. I lost detachment from the dream of the world, and I'd lost my attachment to the place where my being touches the divine. I lost Grace. But I DID grow resolute – terribly resolute.
Michael has always told me “Plant the seed of desire with great passion in the dark reaches and do not look. Do not dig it up to see how it fares, nor natter, nor repeat the desire. Simply be thankful for it's reality growing into your experience. To do otherwise states your doubt and the double minded (ambivalent) get nothing.” We are not allowed to check in on Schrodinger’s cat. If we want it to emerge from the black box alive, we must determine passionately, terribly, because this opens a tiny singularity through which we step from one timeline  in which things do not seem as we would have them be  into another, where all is well.
FOUR DAYS went by – four FULL days. I came in from Live Oak, 25 miles away, where I had been handing out flyers and talking with livestock and agricultural inspectors, and I brought my other Great Pyrenees, Atman, Grace’s son, into the bird room. I went to the bedroom and got half undressed, sniffling and holding back grief when I heard Grace barking. I thought “I’m losing my mind at last. Because of Bindu and then Grace, I’m losing it.” I wept in earnest at the thought, I am losing my mind from grief. I heard her bark again – and Atman agreed. HE barked, a lot: “No, really,” he insisted, “That was Grace. I heard her too”. 
I gasped, froze and covered my mouth. My eyes bugged. Heart raced. Hope rose. I ran outside, nearly naked, Michael’s words ringing in my ears: “She is near. She is alive. She is hidden.”
“Hidden? Hidden?! By what would she be hidden if not the men who came to look at the van?” I queried, peering down the fence line, looking to see her there, snagged in the fence by her collar.
“By your expectations, mayhaps – your fears?”
“Show her to me!” I demanded – and my eyes cut right, literally turning my head as sometimes happens in one of my seizures, and landed with a queer immediacy on the van – and I knew. Schrodinger’s Dog was in my van, alive, after four days with no food or water in mid-May in Florida. Un-phucking-believable.
The Beloved Other showed me the Easter Egg of redemption: My suspicious nature and my fear that someone would take Gracie from me caused me to look everywhere but in that van. Given I would have to believe she survived for four days, with all windows closed in Florida, in mid-May, in order for this to be the scenario, I was vexed. I am a scientist, after all. What the “Laws” of this world seem to demand (that Grace should be dead) my terrible determination and Will to have her back has appeared to usurp. What a joyous reunion it was!
My Bindu, took a bit more time to redeem, but I realized he was safe, with Michael as I had been, in the lustrous void – where I am even now, having never left Him at all really. I have simply taken a short dive back into the dream of my life – but into a probable future iteration because, "Time," He tells me, "does not work as we suppose: It is loops within loops, and the experiences we call our 'lives' are but dreams within a dream of separation from infinite Love. And Love is eternal." What we love, we eternalize and we cannot lose. I found Grace. She is alive and well against all odds. I steward Schrodinger’s dog and his cats as well.
I write fiction too and often dream of my characters – of having conversations with them. On May 24th, 2016, I dreamt of one of my favorite characters. Levi, from my "Vampyre Episodes" series came to me, concerned that I was still so depressed about Bindu who had been gone since March 28th. He told me Bindu had a new body and that he would get me information so I could find him because he had been reborn.
I wakened, astounded – because it was the first time I had ever dreamt of Levi and because he told me Bindu was back. I began to search for kitten adverts. I searched them all day and posted to friends all over Facebook. On May 25th, Levi returned in a dream and said "Look for Bindu with your friend," while gesturing for me to look to the right side of my visual field. There, in a lustrous void, I saw my friend Kari who had come to rescue me the day Bindu had died, and at her feet was Bindu.
Dreams, as well know, are of quirky sensibilities, and Bindu presented as he'd look about a year old. Suddenly, I saw a closeup of his face. His gaze was unmistakeable, and I noted the white on his chin flowing down to a broad white bib. I saw then his tabby body with white booted feet and Bindu turned and stretched out his back left leg to show me his back boots, which were long and ran up his legs in a strange looking white bootstrap. I thanked Levi as my heart bounded and I began to waken. I shan't ever forget his grin: A broad smile of stark white teeth, surrounded by his nearly black auburn beard. He nodded graciously as is typical of his restrained character, and I wakened and went straight for the cell phone to text Kari. I described the dream and what Bindu would look like and that he'd be about a month old and that he would come to her through a friend and then to me. In case she didn't get the message there, I went to Facebook and repeated it all. We chatted that afternoon and three days later she texted me: "Don't cry! I don't want you to seize! Look what I found!" My heart raced. Then a picture came through. It was Kari's right hand. She was driving with her left and holding up my Bindu, exactly as Levi had shown him to me as far as markings went but just a kitten four weeks old.
On the 1st of May, 2017, we celebrate his first birthday of his new life. He is beautiful – majestic even. He slept on my pillow at the top of my head every night until he got too big, and now he sleeps on the right side of my head on my pillow with my right arm curled around him. My connection to the divine is restored. I found Grace again. The trees are again in spring green. It's Easter week. When I go out to run errands or to see the doctor, I smile at "strangers" and take the earbuds out and talk with people too. Help is all around me – if I but look and listen to find them. They are precious but they are not hidden at all – if I but rise up out of my suspicious, wounded heart and into my right mind. Each is a precious shining gift. Now, put your cell phones down and talk with those shining gifts waiting to be discovered scattered all around you. Look up from the computer screen. The world and everything in it is blessed, and Love peeps out at you from behind every leaf and tree and every blade of grass.

Loving regards,


Callaghan Grant (All rights reserved)

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