First: I am a traveler on this Earth Tour just like you and all the rest of us.  My reflections here come about because I've had an array of experiences over the course of this life that have not quite jibed with the expected contents of an "ordinary middle-class American girl" file.  I've had my own X Files all along;  have been a closet "experiencer," and the experiences have evolved all along... but the past 10-15 or so years have brought on things that are quantum leaps from what I was used to -- being, primarily, OBEs.  For ages I kept these experiences to myself, save one particular confidante (my poor mother, who'd listen and just sort of sigh in response ;-).  (I must add though... eventually she offered to pop for me to go to The Monroe Institute to really explore this "gift" in a big way. I declined her gracious offer, eventually getting to Monroe via my own resources.  I know that, from whatever plane she is observing current events and my trajectory, she "gets" me much more now than she did on earth!)

Now, OBEs have taken my energetic self (or soul, astral body, energy body... I use these terms interchangeably)  into scenes and situations my physical form simply would never "normally" experience.  So, these experiences sent me searching for information re: what they meant.  I've sought to understand a greater context for my experiences; this is a great galactic puzzle full of interdimensional holographic pieces to grapple with; no one I'm aware of has received the Big Book of Answers to Everything.  Anyway, what began as simple OBEs opened up into much more, although there is an OBE-related theme being:  explorations of the beyond-mundane.  At this point I believe I have a rudimentary understanding of a very very vast, multi-dimensional, multi-phasic, multiversal orchestration now playing out on our planet, in our solar system, and far beyond.  The vastness of it makes it difficult to express in 'bytes' here, as I've mentioned before. 

I'm clear that millions of "mere humans" are waking up from a profound trance of limitation -- such as having been "encouraged" to engage only 8 or 9% of our brain's capacity, and the same for our "mysterious" DNA, which of course has no JUNK at all, just highly maleable, magnificent elements coming online at intermittent points determined by the greater context (ie, how The Program is assimilating into mass human reality) combined with a more personal level of evolutionary awareness and readiness to inch (or leap) forward another step. 

AND:

What I share here is *not* intended to be interpreted as gospel, or that I KNOW everything; rather, my missives are based on my subjective experiences combined with many years of sleuthing for clues re: the whys and wherefores re: this rabbit hole.  If you are way ahead of me (or at least believe you are), then what I say here may seem flawed or lacking.  If you are on a parallel trail, or a step or two behind me, then what I say here may help you open up a bit to get a sense of how this Big Picture is playing out through all us Human Cameras -- which depends so much on how we are focusing our lenses and developing our findings! 

The bottom line being -- use your discernment re: anything I or anyone else imparts.  "Question authority, including your own" and all that.  There IS a great story unfolding in our midst, in the very air we breathe and earth we walk upon and grids we pulse along... and, everyone is unique.  So while in some ways we are sharing commonalities, in other ways we have our own cocktails of ingredients to deal with -- our own histories of lifetimes and their consequences on and off this planet; our own 'human' lineage of physical and psycho-emotional karmas that influence our trajectory (ie, ancestral stuff passed down through the physical plane), and our own dreams and desires about the future.  (And all of this in a system in which time and physicality are actually illusions for our 3D educational benefit; another whole kettle of fish!)  We are each staggeringly unique. 

This is exciting and affirming and also a little scary, depending on how comfortable you are with sovereignty.  Having support during this great passage is wonderful (and why I'm stepping up here, to the extent I can given the medium, which I envision expanding considerably), but ultimately self-sovereignty is an important quality to cultivate.  We are each ultimately responsible for our own experience, and how we manage it.  If it helps you to embrace the idea, maybe look at it this way:  the world does not need another cookie-cutter copy of someone else glomming up the grids; it needs an authentic version of YOU and your own personal, radiant, essential contribution.

One more thing before hitting "publish" here -- given the conflicting neurotic issues I have about putting anything out for anyone else's consumption before it's PERFECT (being a writer/editor), combined with the nagging sense of having a logjam of things to impart that I just can't get out fast enough considering the first 'challenge' mentioned above, what I'm going for is this:  I'm working on swallowing my desire for perfection in favor of speaking my truth (ha, see right there-- I typo'd "turht").  What I'm saying is, I will try to post more often, less perfectly, with the caveat being that I will be revisiting my posts and editing them, adding to them, etc, as I am so moved.  So if you read something of interest, you  might consider revisiting it later because it probably has morphed/expanded a bit (or even considerably) in the interim.

Onward ho,

Whitehawk

In preparation, her daughters Laurie and Lesley went through her collection of photos and selected a great number of them, and asked me to put them onto display boards so that those who came to the ceremony could see the scope and breadth, not merely the length, of her life. This is what the four panels looked like in one wide shot. Beneath, a shot of the first two panels, then the final two, more or less in chronological order.

It took a while to arrange and glue that many photos! As I did so, I realized that most of the photos showed versions of Rita unknown to me. She was, among other things, a distinguished professor of criminal justice, the inventor of the I-Level system of classifying juvenile offenders, a non-governmental observer of the United Nations, and a member of the Presidential Commission on Violence.

Then, of course, came the years with The Monroe Institute, after her Gateway had turned her life and her self-definition upside down.

A remarkable life, filled with memorable events, significant achievement, and close and enduring friendships.

Prologue

March 24, 1995

Friday night

It was about six when I walked into the newsroom, a typical Friday night in progress. Joe Lampman looked up from his keyboard, saw me, and said, “Well! Back from the dead! How’d it go, Ace?” I grinned at him and made a waffling motion with my hand, and didn’t even slow down. A couple of other reporters and I exchanged nods, and then there I was at Charlie Reilly’s desk. I’d seen him glance up and register my presence and then go back to whoever’s copy he was editing. By the time I sat myself in the chair next to his desk, he had already saved the copy and was giving me the usual – the piercing appraisal, the challenging grin with the sparkle in his eye, the indefinable attitude that made him look like reporters must have looked 50 years earlier. He should have been wearing a battered fedora, cocked back and to one side, maybe with a little feather in the hatband.

“So, Angelo,” he said. “We friends again?”

I was biting down on my own grin. “Yeah, you’re forgiven, maybe.”

“Do we have a story?”

“I do believe we do.”

“Do we have a good story?”

“Affirmative.”

He pursed his lips in that funny way of his, thinking. “Maybe a six-part series? Enough material for that?”

“Ohhh yeah, plenty of material -- if I can get it out.”

He shrugged. “If you’ve got the material, you’ll get it out. That, I’m not worried about.”

I looked at him, startled. I started to say something like, “since when the compliments?” Then I thought, Charlie’s tough, but he’s never torn you down. Maybe this is something else you’ve been missing right along.

“Can you tell me something about it, or would you lose the steam do you think?”

I shrugged. “I been doing this a long time, Charlie.”

He swiveled around to Jack Henderson. “Hey Jack, take over for a few minutes, okay? I’ll be down in the cafeteria if you need me.” He swiveled back to me, getting to his feet. “Let’s go get some coffee, Ace. You do still drink coffee, right? Haven’t given it up and gone natural-foods on us?”

I grinned, mostly at a memory. (“C.T. smokes?”) “Still with you, Charlie. You’re buying, I presume.”

“I’m buying? After I send you on a full week’s junket?” We set off down the hall back toward the elevators. “But, Angelo, you got the scoop on Bowen? Is he the real deal, do you think? And what about Merriman? Did you ever talk to him as a reporter, or did you just go through the program like anybody else?” He made an impatient motion with his hand. “Forget all that, I’ll read your story when you file it. What I want to know is,” – pressing the elevator button – “what did it do to you? Because I’ll tell you one thing for free, Ace, whatever happened down there, I saw it the minute you came in.”

The doors opened and we got in. Charlie hit the button for the second floor. “Well?”

I was still hesitating. “It isn’t that I mind telling you, Charlie, but there’s a lot of threads to it. I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to separate them all out.”

“Start somewhere and see what happens.”

“Charlie – last week, what’d you mean when you said this could be my ticket? Why did you say that?”

The doors opened and we walked down to the cafeteria. “You want it straight, I take it?”

“As usual.”

“Yeah, as usual. Well – you were going stale, Angelo. You’d started settling for just going through the motions.” He waved me off. “And don’t tell me it’s because you been doing this a long time, and you’re in your fifties and that’s what happens to old firehouse horses, or whatever it is you’ve been saying lately. The fact of the matter is, I figured, if there was a chance of knocking you out of your rut, I was going to take it.”

I thought, He thinks of me as a friend. How could I miss that all this time?

“So what happened? You fall in love or something?” Then, startled: “You did! Man, and on the paper’s dime, that’s got to be a first.” Cautiously, “Not going to make the home life any easier.”

I sighed. “No, it’s not.”

“Any future in it?”

I shook my head. (“We’re not alone, even when we feel alone. I’m going to hold on to that.”)

“Makes it hard.”

I nodded. But, I thought, better at least to know it. (“Angelo, This is your real life. What’s so real about being unable to feel?”)

“Anything else important happen?”

“Charlie, you’re entitled to rub it in for a while, I suppose. You want to let me know when you’re done, or should I give you hints?”

He made a conciliatory motion with his hands, as if he were Italian instead of Irish. We got our coffees and sat down.

“I will say this, though,” I said. “I’m well aware that the only reason I did the program was because you pushed me. Thanks for doing that.”

Again I’d startled Charlie. (It’s going to be a shock for everybody I deal with. How have I gone so many years without telling people thank you?) “So tell me about the program,” he said. “How’d it go?”

I didn't expect this novel to proceed so straightforwardly and well. At 115,000  words, it's considerably longer than my previous novel, Messenger, and considerably more complex. Yet it was a very easy novel to write in certain respects. I knew the people, I knew the situation, and I really knew what I had to say.

So now I'll give myself a little rest and perhaps I will post the first chapter here after a while.

Now I need to let it sit for a few days, then re-read it making notes of what it needs to be a finished product. But I'm really happy with how it came out.

What really happens inside a mystey school? Or, to put it into contemporary terms, what happens when two dozen people spend a week together intending to learn how to access altered states at will? They bring their eccentricities, their weaknesses and their splendid humanity with them -- it isn't all love and light, and it isn't all seriousness either. It's fun, it's frustrating, it's enlightening, it's exhilarating, it's -- a lot of things!

So, center on one participant, a middle-aged news reporter named Angelo Chiari who thinks maybe he's there to do an expose. He doesn't even believe in what they're doing, but he's fair enough to make an honest effort. Along the way he interacts with these people, and with altered states, and he winds up a long way from where he started.

The exhilarating thing to me is that I didn't need to "imagine" any of the things that could happen. Many of the things related did happen, in one form or another -- many of them recorded in my non-fiction book Muddy Tracks -- and much, much stranger and weirder and wilder and more wonderful  stuff happened in real life than I have dared to write here!

Ever wonder what it would be like to learn to go beyond everyday life? Here it is. And eventually it'll be in print and you can read it then. Meanwhile, I'm purring.

This is by far the best writing I've done. Where Messenger was a pretty straightforward tale with only a few major characters, Babe in the Woods is intricate and far-ranging, with more than two dozen characters. It's the fictionalized story of my Gateway at The Monroe Institute, the week that I often describe as the beginning of my conscious life.

That said, I should point out, there IS a difference between fiction and fact! While I work to keep it emotionally and intellectually and spiritually accurate, I change all manner of incidentals according to need. Nor is Angelo Chiari  the same person as Frank DeMarco, despite the many similarities I built in, as I did with his brother George in Messenger.

The interesting and satisfying thing to me is that I know the scenes, the people, the altered-state exercises, the visions, the limitations, the hesitations, the personal "stuff", the interactions that come from more than one level of personality. All of it. And the more I visualize scenes and feel my way to the dialogue and various developments, the closer I find the analogy between writing and channeling. I don't mean that "somebody else" is writing the book. I mean, in creative activity we draw upon other levels of awareness.

Soon enough, I should be finished, and when I am it will be a relief to have finished so big a job, and it will be a pang, to leave this very interesting place I have been living since before Thanksgiving.

I'll keep you posted.

Currently I am 80,000 words into "Babe in the Woods," which looks likely to become my first completed novel since Messenger. I am very tempted to post it, a bit at a time, but really I should at least try to find a conventional publisher first.

"Babe in the Woods" is the story of my week at the Monroe Institute's Gateway Voyage, 15 years ago this month. I tell people, that week in December, 1992, was the beginning of my life as a conscious being. Everything in my life changed after that, slowly or quickly, but thoroughly.

As I write it, I am repeatedly awe-struck, for I am not souping up the story but, if anything, toning it down. I wrote up one set of visions and reminded myself, "that really happened!" Indeed most of what I include in the novel really happened, and nothing in it is exaggerated for "woo-woo" effect. If anything, just the reverse.

The narrator is a large part of me, but not me. There is, after all, a difference between fiction and journalism! So, Angelo Chiari (George's brother) is Italian, a reporter, middle-aged, discontented with his life, and afflicted with asthma. His experiences are roughly mine, though simplified in some directions. He meets a woman and finds that his inexplicable feelings for her are rooted in what are called past-life experiences. He leaves the program utterly (but still largely potentially) transformed. Et cetera.

The odd thing is, my experiences in real life were more complex, more far-reaching, than I can plausibly write in the novel, mostly because some of the side-trails would stretch it beyond manageable boundaries.

In any case I have been enjoying myself hugely, but it has taken its toll on the amount of blogging I have been doing!

I had an odd experience vis a vis an e-mail and a blog entry of Frank DeMarco (Moonstruck flock to Arizona light collector- check it out).The same morning of the blog entry (Friday) I woke very early and decided that instead of getting up, I’d stay abed using my new Remote Viewing take home CD from the Monroe Institute. I was having an interview with a Japanese newspaper about things that might happen in 2008. So my RV goal was to foresee some big or major news events for the coming year. I got my earphones on and my paper and pencil next to me for notes and proceeded to listen. I remember jotting down a few images I saw and then dropping out (like dozing off but with a qualitative difference) for about 90% of the CD time. During the dropout period I had the coolest body sensations of rippling and rocking. The rocking I’ve had several times before but the rippling was all new and really cool like my body was made of water.I had a breakfast appointment that I was nearly late for when I woke up and did not check my notes as I climbed down from my loft bed and into my clothes. I later checked my email and saw Frank’s post and sent off an e-mail response about how interesting I thought it was.Later in the afternoon before the Japanese newspaper guys stopped by, I went up the ladder to fetch my notes and collect my thoughts. As I read through them I saw scrawled there amongst 5-6 items. Arizona. Lots sm. solar cells… white… brigtht… blue… on dish. Then it hit me. Was this a future oriented event or did I just “see” the picture from Frank’s post? Reading my notes jarred my memory (and I will try to keep better notes in the future because of this experience). The significant difference between the photos of the actual moonbeam array and what I “saw” was the shape of the array. I saw a dish, not a rectangular array, but interestingly the small round cells glowed a bright bluish white like moonbeams.These adventures just get more interesting all the time!

I traveled very early that foggy morning to Newark Airport. Due to the fog-in at both Dulles and Newark my first plane was delayed by three hours. I was worried about making my connection at Dulles to Charlottesville, there to be picked up by Monroe shuttle and brought to the beautiful campus of the Monroe Institute in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The fog lifted in Newark first and my plane boarded.

I sat at the back of the aircraft on the left side looking absently out the window at the tarmac willing the plane to take off so I would not be late for my black box session at TMI that afternoon. Then I saw a butterfly flit around my window. Odd, I thought. Especially odd since it was all black. In my many years wandering around the New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania countryside, I can't recall ever seeing a black butterfly. This creature was 2 to 3 inches tall and 3 to 4 inches wide, larger than the little white butterflies I often see but smaller than the biggest monarchs I've seen. It had no dots or other perceptible markings. My thoughts during that brief encounter were mostly distracted by my fears of late arrivals and connections missed. But I tried to telepathically communicate with the little creature, thinking, "Fly away, little one, the back of a jet plane is not a safe place for you. Fly away to someone's nice garden with beautiful flowers".

Then I was further distracted by a stewardess reviewing the flight safety information and was shortly whisked aloft. I arrived at Dulles and took off in a sprint to catch my connecting flight. Thankfully it too had been delayed and with a call to the ever helpful Monroe staff I knew I'd make my connections. Happily gazing out of the plane, again in the back left side, I was looking at another airplane at the gate one down from the gate from which my plane was leaving. It too was facing away from the gate queuing perhaps, to take off. My eyes glanced upon something fluttering and flying near the tail of the plane. I have occasionally seen a pigeon or seagull at the airport, but this creature was all black. Could it be a crow, a grackle or a starling? NO! It had no noticeable head. It fluttered and hovered by the rear of that plane much bigger than any butterfly of my experience. What was this creature? I had a sudden fear. Was this a bad omen for my flight or my trip? Should I stop the plane and insist on getting off?

I checked with inner guidance and could find no reason to leave, so off I flew to Charlottesville and shuttled with the van to TMI. I became immersed in finding Dr. Darlene Miller and then experiencing my 4th ever black box session. Later that afternoon, I was sitting outside in back of a friend's home, chatting happily when I peered upward and next to the building we both saw another black butterfly. It was midway in size between the first two and somehow fluffier. It was no bird as it again had no perceivable head and it was not a bat because it did not have a bat's body and it was still full daylight. I am really glad my friend saw it too or I'd wonder for my sanity. He could not recall ever having seen a large black butterfly in Virginia.

I am still not sure the meaning of all this. If anyone reading this has any ideas please post them here. Farasha is an Arabic word for moth or butterfly.

I have posted this session in its entirety, in several parts, under Black Box session 08-03-01, but as things tend to get lost when the entire transcript is given, I thought I'd pull this segment out.

All right my friends, it’s your show, it’s – we’ll go where you want to go. [pause]

Immediate sense of a vast night sky, and I immediately want to say, in the tropics. [long pause]  

A sense of lying in the sand, how one would scoop out places for shoulders and hips and stuff, and just lying on my back in the sand that’s been shaped to fit me. [pause]

With a – I want to say a blanket, but I don’t think it’s a blanket. It’s some kind of covering, because I guess in the desert the night must be cool. [pause] It’s more like a reed kind of a thing; that doesn’t make sense. It’s almost like somebody spread a hammock out on top of me, rather than under me. [pause]

 There’s something under me too, though, it’s like a – I don’t know, some – well, it’s – soft – it’s flexible and – it’s not a sheet, it’s not clothing, but it’s something like that, just to keep the sand off – or the dirt off, I guess. [pause] It’s like, this is not a moment’s whim, this is something that’s done repeatedly, or – well, it’s done. In other words there’s a ritual to it. Not a ritual with a capital R, it’s just you know, if you go to a picnic you have a picnic basket. Well this way, you have something to lie on after you’ve shaped it out and something to put on top of you just to stop you from getting cold. It’s a comfortable way to look at the stars, I guess. [pause]

There’s a sense that being that firmly connected to the earth is an important part of what’s going on here. It’s not looking at the stars at all, it’s experiencing unity with the stars, and with the earth. [pause]

It’s a kind of mildly altered state like we’re doing, but – not so altered because the ordinary reality is more like it than our ordinary reality would be. [pause]

In fact, there’s a relaxed quality to it, as opposed to a sort of a keyed-up anticipatory quality—it’s almost like visiting with relatives, it’s – oh! I bet they were – well, let’s see. [pause] 

Well, I think it’s a way of just being part of all that is. [pause] Ha ha! Oh, okay! It’s, it is in fact, just what I asked for. It is their way of – it’s one way – it is an example of a way of opening channels. [pause]

It’s like, we wake and sleep and wake and sleep, and when we sleep we connect to other parts? This is a way of connecting without sleeping. Sort of. [pause]  

S: You’ve been choosing language filled with similes and metaphors. You might turn directly to Guidance and just say, “describe this experience.”

F: And they’re saying, “what do you think we’ve BEEN doing?” [chuckle.] You mean, you mean, um, actually, tell me what you mean. 

S: I there a way to not use simile and metaphor, telling me, you’re saying, “it’s like this, it’s like this”; if Guidance were to speak directly, how would it be described?

F: The example given is one in which physical relaxation combines with a mental extension in order to remind the particular focus that is the conscious mind of that individual, of its extension outward into other dimensions and other – um, um, – you would say time or space; to us it’s like a radiation in 360 degrees, only without the implied limitation of circumference, so that -–by relaxing the body and relaxing the mind in a certain way, coming to it with the intent to extend – the de facto barriers that are created by the individual’s day-to-day existence, that is the necessities of living, those barriers are sort of eased out of the picture, so that the individual can remember that it is, at one point, an individual and at the same time a reticulation – whatever that is – of a larger um – 

[chuckle] That threw me out, I have no idea what reticulation is and the word just came through. Anyway, it’s saying we’re part of them and – wait a while. [pause]

The important part has been given. It’s the – it’s the – One doesn’t need to lie down in the sand and look at the tropical skies to do the same thing, it can be done anywhere, that’s the advantage of it. It’s a matter of relaxing and extending. All else follows. [long pause]

[etc.]