Ask Dr. Druid . day 39 . The Land of the Dead Is Lively

 

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 39

The Land of the Dead is Lively

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    The first one who died, my father, I was numb. The second one who died, my first husband, I screamed. By the tenth big death before I was 29, I was pissed. Furious, not drunk.

    This Heaven-and-Hell folderol is a misleading way to talk about the Land of the Dead because though the Heaven-mongering Christians, who began as a simple religion of the powerless, have had the power, the press, and the propaganda for a lot of centuries, the AfterLife Truth is much more complex, and, luckily, a ton more fun.

    I didn’t think when I was a child feeding the shiny newborn black-and-white Holstein calves their buckets of faintly pink milk that I would grow up to become an expert in death. It just happened. There’s no degree you can get in this one. The Major Universities don’t have Death 101 on the curriculum. The Major Religions Lie because they got detached from Mystery. The Other Side, the non-carnate, the less dense — of which the AfterLife is but a facet — is often too raunchy, sly, anarchic, boisterous, and fragmented to be a useful example for a solid, sequential existence. Thus the preachers and teachers, seldom lit from within, hid the truth, abridged it, sanitized it, pietized it, forgot it.

    When, to my shock, I met my disoriented father shortly after he’d died, his color was quite blue. He was swaddled in bandages and was being cared for by bustling midwife-like beings who were tending his unreconciled passage from the solid carnate world to the non-carnate realms. They were kind. He had died too young at fifty-two. The hospital had killed him with misdiagnosis. The doctors said Whoops, shrugged, looked abashed, and then down at their brilliantly-shined shoes. When I first met my father in OtherLand, of course I just thought I was crazy.

    When I met my first husband, Michael, who had died too young at twenty-eight — his car slid off an icy Vermont road into a tree — when I met Michael in an other-density garret, cooking a hamburger, the fat sizzling loudly in the frying pan, I was just utterly glad to know that he hadn’t vaporized into some black hole of nothingness. The black hole of nothingness being the most cruelly unbearable. I still thought I was probably crazy.

    Depending on who you are hearing this, you either think I’m still crazy or are holding your hand to your mouth grateful that it happened to someone else too or you’re so used to this inter-realm stuff that it’s not exactly ho-hum, not really old hat, but it isn’t molecularly shocking nor bone-marrow creepy, throat-clutchingly terrifying anymore either.

    Father, husband, brother, stepbrother, stepfather, mother, mentor, headmistress, eighteen-year-old cat, all the eight grandparents of course. By now my horror has transmogrified to raw rage. Higher realms indeed. Our dear Earth realm is so high and glorious that non-carnates, responsible and derelict alike, shove and claw to get a ticket on this most intriguing of galactic roller coaster rides. I distinctly blame Religions for grabbing power by devaluing this solid terrestrial experience.

    Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful for my non-carnate and semi-carnate experiences. Learning to fly, walking on water, floating through the ceiling. Giddy stuff. But I will not have us be a colony of heaven. We are the experts on relatively sequential time, on solid experience, on being able to actually eat a whole chocolate chip cookie, to drive where we’re going and not end up somewhere else.

    Our beloved realm is a masterpiece of reality engineering — there is no higher place to be. Different, just different. I sometimes think that if I could get that single point across, I could be at peace. Of course that single point would change the world. We would know that every daily thing is holy, radiant. Awe and delight would be our steady state, daily little explosions of radiance. We could then greet heaven with the strength of our own earth beauty and stand in the galactic councils not as slaves or puppets or children, but as tellers of our own tales, proud and various.

    I had never met my ex-husband's parents when they were alive. Mr. Martin was a high school principal in a medium-sized Iowa town. Mrs. Martin taught home economics and was a devout Christian. I was a vivid redheaded pagan. They would have disapproved of me mightily.

    When I met Mr. Martin in OtherLand, however, he was driving too fast in a bright-yellow open touring car, had on a loud black-and-white-checked sports jacket, a jaunty hat with a sprightly red feather, and a tiger lounging in the back seat with whom I sat. We got along famously to my huge and relieved surprise.

    Mrs. Martin when I met her was almost nun-like in her retreat and shyness of soul. I think Earth had been too rough and ready for her. But she loved her brilliant, vulnerable son, and could, freer of Earth's particular prejudices, honor that I loved him too.

    These pow-wows with the dead are not frequent; we don't hang out. My dead, anyway, do not hover. I think it is wicked that the veil is so impenetrable. When I get the chance to rail at heaven's haughty hierarchy, I shall.

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    The fierce skills of deft and delighted attentions you’ve been honing and honeying will serve you exquisitely as you begin your forays into the DreamLands and ReverieLands.

    Anciently we traveled between our beloved VuraEarthGoo and these other Realms, including the Land of Apples, as you might visit Paris, France or Machu Pikchu, high above the Urubamba Valley north of Cusco, Peru.

    As we amble along, we’ll have some volcanic venting about the disturbance and wreckage wrought by Formal Religions and Psychology Stiffs upon the portals to the Land of Apples.

    As weightlessness is ordinary in space travel, the laws of physics we’re used to when we travel by train, plane, or ship are different when we travel in DreamLands or New ReverieLand. The laws of physics are different, the ethics are different, the social structures are different. We’ll explore these differences.     

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Notes:

.. carnate .. in a body;

.. hamburger, other density garret .. (A garret is a kind of attic that someone lives in.) Hamburger was a kind of fond and absurd motif between my husband Michael and me. Just out of UVM and Mount Holyoke in 1966, Michael and I had gone to the NorthEast Kingdom in Vermont to teach in remote high schools in Hardwick and the tiny village of Greensboro, pop. 503. We felt it was a kind of domestic Peace Corps before there were formal programs for such things. Half of my seventh-grade English class was fanged. A class of little vampires. Apparently inbreeding leads to the elongation of the eye teeth just over the lower lip. No doubt the same phenomenon that occurred in the remote valleys of Transylvania.

    We were poor. We ate hamburger in some form 6-7 nights a week. I would walk down the single snowy street to Ernie’s, the little grocery store which catered to the posh-ish influx of summer people and hung on in the winter. I would stand in front of the meat counter most every day and look as if I might choose something else. Polly, the meat lady, never rushed me though she knew I would say, “I think I’ll have half a pound of hamburger today.”

    I had a booklet called 101 Ways to Cook Hamburger. In a spurt of invention, I even put some sliced banana pieces between two thin patties of hamburger and pinched the edges before I fried the burgers up. It’s not bad.  So cooking hamburgers was kind of ‘our song’ you might say. A tender joke. A secret handshake.

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Ask Dr. Druid, 66 Days from Lead to Gold, Secrets of  Alchemy You Can Use, a druid shaman’s playbook .. Intro; Prologue; Day 1; Days 2 & 3; Day 4; Day 5; Day 6; Day 7; Day 8; Day 9; Day 10; Day 11; Day 12; Day 13; Day 14; day 15 Review 2; Day 16; Day 17; Day 18; Day 19; Day 20; Day 21; Day 22; Day 23; Day 24; Day 25; Day 26; Day 27; Day 28; Day 29; Day 30; Day 31; Day 32; Day 33; Day 34; Day 35; Day 36; Day 37; Day 38; Day 39;

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5 thoughts on “Ask Dr. Druid . day 39 . The Land of the Dead Is Lively

  1. Dr. Druid,
    This is your best post yet! I cannot imagine dealing with so much death at such a young age but I imagine that it is like anything else, if it is all you know then it may not seem that unusual.
    I liked the story about having hamburger almost everyday while you tried to make the world a better place by teaching and doing your part of the “domestic” Peace Corps. Looking forward to the next post.
    Dustin

  2. Always grateful for your visits, Dustin. I did learn that people don't vaporize –or to put it more precisely, they do 'vaporize' but they don't vanish into a chaos. The facet of the 'Entity' that you knew persists to the degree that the 'Entity' remains interested in that face or facet of its portrayal in the cosmos. I feel increased Rage, death after death, because I think the arrangement of interweaving from one density to another is so hideously harsh on the tender hearts of us vuraearthgoolings.
    The amnesia arrangements between incarnations are simply inhumane & I rail at the Cosmic Hotshots who think it isn't torture for us fairly simple-minded and simple-hearted vuraearthgoolings. I am sick of us being a Colony of Heaven. It's too darn easy for the Dis-embodied to make declarations about what experiments are permissible with the incarnate creature — us.
    The only way we will get larger and wider spread representation in the Galactic Councils, if you will, is if we get more practised at Lucid Dreaming. Teach your kid to ride his bike at night too!

  3. For some reason the image of Mr. Martin in the car with the jacket sticks in my head.
    I also like the notion of not being a colony of heaven. It's nice to have Dr. Druid back. I remember reading Bill Clinton and Obama's musings about trying to understand something about their fathers (neither really knew his father though Obama did meet his some) It struck me that their presence even though they were physically absent played a large role in both men's lives.

  4. The meeting of “Mr. Martin” on an Other Side was one of my first clues about How different the facets of a Consciousness can be. I'd never met Mr. Martin in K1, but as an Iowa high-school principal he was constrained to be or at least appear normanrockwellianally 'normal.'
    Also, Aunt Mary, the headmistress at my eccentric tiny boarding school on the eastern Shore of Maryland was a caricature of old age–she looked as if they'd taken her out of a pyramid & unwrapped her. After she departed K1, I met her in an elanvital vivid on-location sueño. It took me quite some time in the sueño environ to recognize her because she looked about 35 — no hump, no gnarled fingers, no painful shuffle. I realized then that, duh, one would be unlikely to hang out in the bardos in a wracked and, well, pretty hideous bod.

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