16 December 2020
MY PSYCHOPOMP JOURNEY WITH MY FATHER
So much has been happening in the past three weeks that for now I have to just type out what I can remember piece by piece. As a result of the trauma of my father’s death ten days ago, I am experiencing a recrudescence of the vision difficulties I had originally experienced with my stroke in 2017. I now have something akin to double vision, with various visual artifacts such as floating figures that are not physically present, along with windows from time to time into what I can only describe as another dimension or world. So you could say that the stress of my grief has placed me in a multidimensional field of vision. As a result, I am composing this text primarily with the voice-to-text dictation features of my Mac, so I will likely need to go back later and edit some of the typos and such. Beyond this, all of the strands that are flowing together into this story I am about to tell cannot be pictured as a single narrative stream, at least not at first, so the strands of the story will range far and wide, and yet they are all part of a larger tapestry of revelation that I am experiencing at this moment.
The major event that I’m dealing with at the moment is the death of my father on 6 December 2020. We had known for a couple months that this was coming, but the moment of his actual death was still quite a bit for me to deal with.
In relation to the other things I need to speak about here, for now I’ll just say that on the day he died I found myself in meditation leading him on a journey to the land of the dead. In other words, I was involved in a shamanic psychopomp function that I had never participated in before. In that vision, I found myself in the same desert-like canyon that I’ve been traveling through astrally since 2009. Since that initial journey through this space, I have discovered that this particular canyon exists in northern Australia, although I have never been there in person in this lifetime. An identical canyon exists on the surface of Mars, but again I don’t believe I have been there during this lifetime. Nevertheless, this became the landscape yet again for one of my shamanic journeys.
I realized immediately as I was flying through the air down this long canyon channel of some sort that I was accompanying the spirit of my father. I believe we were flying hand in hand, but some of that detail is a little murky. But I quickly realized that I was leading him to the after life, to the land of the dead. I have never imagined doing such a thing before, but this function as the psychopomp seemed to come completely naturally. While a part of my consciousness felt self-conscious and awkward been doing such a thing, the overwhelming sensation was one of joy and communion. My father seemed overjoyed to find me accompanying him on this journey, and we experienced a sense of togetherness in this moment that was rare in our actual lives.
He had always been a skeptic when it came to my spiritual adventures, even my journeys into Buddhism, but he was now ecstatic and kept saying, “Now I see what you were talking about! Now it all makes sense to me.” We flew through the canyon until it opened out onto a sea, which we both understood to be a stage in his crossing to the Other World. It reminded me of the moment in the movie Dead Man when the character William Blake (played by Johhny Depp) was sent off by boat across the Pacific Ocean at the moment of his death. I helped my father get into his boat and he sailed off into the distance, waving to me, beaming with joy. I felt so thankful for this experience. It brought me a sense of relief and completion that I thought I might never feel together with him.
As I was coming out of this journeying consciousness, I was told that this was a very important stage in my own spiritual development and marked a major rite of passage for me—in this case, a very literal one. I was also told that this experienced opened me up to a significant number of other portals into innumerable other worlds and parallel lives. I had entered into a truly multidimensional state of being in this moment that would last for a long time.
My father died roughly twelve hours later at 6:30 A.M. Finland time and 11:30 P.M. Vermont time.
THE LAKE OF AVALON
In the midst of my attempts to come to terms with the traumatic death of my father, Anna and I continued hard journeys into the forest outside our house here in Fiskars. Sometime recently, probably on the 11th of December, we took our usual hike along the bike path up to the nearby cliff, Riddarmansberget, that looks out over the forest of the area, and I reconnected to intense sense of that spot being multidimensional, of involving some kind of connection with the landscape between Taos, New Mexico and San Cristóbal—specifically, at the D.H. Lawrence Ranch. (In fact, at this moment in 2022 I am working up an extensive essay-podcast on the connection between Riddarmansberget and the D.H. Lawrence Ranch. Stay tuned for that!)
We continued down along the red bike path and then out across the stone ridges to the dirt road and then followed the old swamp (we’re not sure if it is named) up to the higher ridge—Skurudalsberget—that looks out over the Fiskars River valley and out to the Baltic Sea. We’ve been feeling an especially strong connection to the spot lately, a deepening of our awareness if some kind of spirit energy, some kind of earth energy calling to us there.
As Anna was taking some photographs, I walked out across the bike path to the area East of there and noticed for the first time a bridge on another part of the red bike path that we had never seen before. (The paths are colored according to difficulty and hazard, with red being the most difficult for mountain biking except for a few short black trails.) The bridge seemed significant, especially given that we had never seen it before, so we decided to follow that path and see where it ended.
As we wound around up on top of more of the stony cliffs, we eventually came to another swamp that we had come to for the first time just a few months ago from the opposite direction. At that time back then, both Anna and I had felt a very intense energetic spirit connection emanating from the swamp, and I could hear the fairies’ song that I had first heard almost ten years before. This is the first time I had heard it again since that moment back in Kansas a decade earlier. In this return to the swamp, the energy was just as strong as it had been before. I would say that it was actually quite a bit stronger, as the song of the fairies was echoing throughout the place. The opening up of our heart chakras was pretty dramatic.
Two days later, I believe, on Sunday, the 13th of December, I hiked out by myself to return to the swamp to gather more information. Again, the power of the energy of the spot was intense and the singing of the fairies was beautiful and chanting. I slowly, ceremoniously walked in a counterclockwise direction around the edge of the swamp to the stony ridge to the south and climbed up on there to connect better to the spirit of the place. As I was grounding myself in the energy of the swamp, I was experiencing what I referred to as the mist of Avalon, the experience I have had for eight years now since our first trip to Cahokia, an experience in which I see with my actual eyes mist fill up the space of the air surrounding me as I enter into this etheric spatial dimension.
This mist always presages my encounter with some spirit being of some sort. So as I was sinking deeper into the mist, I saw a large bear on the northern shore of the swamp walking up to the swamp’s edge and engaging my spirit energy. I was reminded that I had seen this bear spirit during our Experience Week at Findhorn when Anna and I had first met. We were in a group on the hilltop on the spiral path behind Cluny Hall when this large bear poked up above some bushes in my spirit landscape. At that point, I had told the group that our spirit animal was the Kodiak bear, but now I see that it was actually the Finnish brown bear, which is, I’m sure, related to the same bears in Alaska, another extension of the Arctic bear species.
I immediately remembered the passage in the Joseph Campbell movie Sukhavati in which he talks about the connections between King Arthur and his etymological relation to Artehe, to the Arctic, to Arcturus, and the bear energy. (See the section below on this segment of the film.)
I was then drawn to look upwards from the swamp and realized that there was an Arcturian ship hovering above, a companion to the one that hovers above the field outside our house over the meadow called Peckarhagen (as I have written in my entry on Nanuq). I was quickly seeing how all of these dimensions of my experience over the last eight years or so were now coming together as they are revealing a pattern of significance. Upon my recognition of these Arthur-Bear-Arcturus connections here, I was advised to refer to the swamp as the Lake of Avalon.
At this point I was drawn to remember that when I was with Anna at one of the ring mounds in Newark Ohio, I had been drawn through a portal to Glastonbury England. I returned to this portal later and had the same experience, so I’m confident that there is that actual portal connection between Newark and Glastonbury. Glastonbury is especially significant for me because that is where I was when, as I was standing on top of the Tor, I was told that on the following day at Findhorn I would meet the woman of my dreams—who turned out to be Anna.
Back to the Future
Let’s return now to this moment in December 2022. One thing I could not have anticipated when I had posted the message above was that—due to the stresses of the death of my father, combined with financial difficulties and my inability to see my son August in Kansas since July 2019, and all of those stressers combined with the overwhelming power of this psychopomp experience—on Christmas Eve in 2020 I had to go to the emergency room in Espoo northwest of Helsinki due to symptoms of another stroke like the one I had suffered in August 2017. As I mentioned above, as I was writing the psychopomp story I was usffering from the severe kaleidoscopic visual symptoms that had signalled my first stroke.
Luckily, I did not have another stroke at that moment in 2020, but I did discover that my blood pressure was insanely high—roughly 200 over 120. The doctor on call said that he wasn’t sure how I was still walking. Here was another sign that I tend to channel stress—mine as well as the planet’s—through my body. Dealing with that fact is clearly the next stage in my spiritual journey if I hope to continue this work into the next forty years that I see before me.
POSTSCRIPT: Joseph Campbell on Arthur, Merlin, and the Bear in Native European Tradition
As I mentioned earlier, my visionary experience with the bear at our local “Lake of Avalon” is heavy with implications evoked by Joseph Campbell’s comments on Arthur and the bear. For now I will simply quote the transcript of his lecture as it appears in the documentary entitled Sukhavati. I also include a link to this segment of the video in the newsletter-blog version of this podcast. Check it out!
Text of the Sukhavati Clip
Time: 45:17 — But here we have the two traditions in Europe, one, you might say the heroic one, which is the native one of Europe, going back to the old Germanic, Celtic spirit, and then the applied Christian one which is brought in from the near East.
By the 11th and 12th century Europe is beginning to assimilate this material and the Grail story, the Arthurian romances, represent this assimilation. The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as the wasteland. The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. What is the sense of the wasteland? It’s the world of people living inauthentic lives. If there is a path, it is someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path.
Now who can see and enter the castle of the Grail? Not everybody, only those with a spiritual readiness for the experience. The sword represents the virtue; the sword represents the energy it has come to Arthur from the abyss. This is the world of the unconscious, the world of the Gods, the Goddess who informs all things. Arthur or Arthehe was revered as a God. He is originally a Celtic God. And the name Artus, Arthur, is related to Artemis, Arcturus: all of these are related to the deity the bear. And the bear is the oldest worshiped deity in the world. We have bear shrines going back to Neanderthal times, in just this part of the world, from perhaps 100,000 BC.
48:09 — The fantastic tradition and the levels and levels of culture that have piled up in Europe, which is not the youngest but the oldest culture in the world.
The Celts come into Europe in the 1st millennium BC. They come from Bavaria across France, Switzerland, and into the British Isles. Now the people who had been in Europe before were pre-Celtic, pre-Indo-European, and their tradition may go all the way back to the caves. But the great period of their flowering is that of Stonehenge.
Now Merlin, he’s associated with Druid mysteries. The Druids were the priests and spiritual guardians of the Celts.
There are certain places geographically when you go to them you can see why these have magic mystery traditions associated with them. There is something in the land.
49:57 — So the tradition of Glastonbury, which is associated with the Grail castle, is associated also way way back with this 1500 BC period. This is a magical place.
50:33 — Here you have a statement right on earth that illustrates and allows you to experience the relationship of lunar cycles to solar cycles, so it becomes a sacred place. And every sacred place is the place where eternity shines through time. The whole mystery of mythology, which is that of seeing through the forms of time the radiance of eternity in your own life and in the forms around you, the whole mystery is that you might say of the metaphor.
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