Ask Dr. Druid .. Day 13
Levitation R Us
This piece will grok better for you
if you read it with your mouth as if out loud.
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Yes, levitation is fun. Though the first time it happened to me, I was definitely er-uh-gulp disconcerted.
I had been asleep on a mattress on the floor of a cabin in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Ripton, Vermont, the village where Robert Frost lived late in his life. I was alone in the cabin. It was a summer afternoon about 37 years ago. I was sprawled on my stomach in a tee-shirt and shorts, barefoot. I heard a man’s voice as if deep in my head say, “Don’t worry,” as the whole darn mattress and I began to rise off the floor.
‘Don’t worry’! Yeah, well.
When I was an 8-yr-old budding epistemologist – one who studies how things work in all realms of experience — I had made this (now beastly) solemn vow with myself to honestly experience whatever happened in my life and simply observe it as clearly as I could without judgment or panic.
Fine, but this was a bit much.
Every time I began to tense with frantic fear of falling, I’d hear this helpful voice, “It’s OK.” The mattress and I rose slowly until we were about halfway between the floor and the ceiling. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I wasn’t terrified, but I was bloody wary. The first time you have a prolonged episode of the suspension of the staid and codified, putatively immutable laws of physics in broad daylight, you’ll be a tad alarmed yourself, I promise.
Me and my mattress kind of hovered there for a spell while my mind raced pinballedly for an explanation. I was neither drunk nor stoned. I could hear the expected sounds. I felt my left cheek on the pillow. I felt my weight on the mattress. Was I dreaming the most electric, immediate dream ever? Hallucinating? Crazy? Or was this simply a new experience like floating in water had been when I first learned to do that?
I lay there in midair doing a checklist of reality cues. Then the mattress and I began to slowly spin clockwise. Drat, this is too much I thought. The kind voice says again, “Don’t worry. It’s OK.” The mattress and I are turned one full revolution. Then the mattress and I are gently and very slowly tipped up just until I feel my bare feet, which happen to be over the bottom edge of the mattress, touch the cool wooden floor. I felt my feet take some weight and my ankles bend as they would if you were stood up. It was that feeling my ankles bend and take weight that flooded me with certainty. I knew where I was for sure now. In my bedroom levitating.
The mattress and I were slowly lowered back to the floor. Of course there was no one to talk to about this stuff back then. Nice people didn’t levitate on perfectly ordinary New England summer afternoons. Even now in somewhat openminded California where I dwell, you could talk about trips to Paris or Peru in idle cocktail party chatter, but not about traveling to the ceiling, a much greater journey.
Levitation in dayreal is different from flying or floating in other dreams, in remreal, though they share the unclenching of the fist of any degree of panic.
Another interesting levitation happened to me right from the different mattress on the floor right here in my room in California. I felt myself (not the mattress this time!) begin to rise towards the ceiling like a Macy’s Parade balloon. “C’mon. This isn’t funny,” think I, but ever the Faithful Observer, a kind of Sancha Panza to the dear, tho daffy, Quixote Universe, I go along. I rise until I bounce slightly against the ceiling which is rough and textured. Of course you’re afraid of falling in the first few levitations.
Another time, also in my own room, I rose until I bumped against the ceiling and then realized that I could allow myself to rise through the ceiling, and I felt the nails and joists go through me and they tickled.
I probably wouldn’t trust less rigorous an observer than me to report on episodes like this. I’m sure many of you dear readers will be incredulous, but levitating and some other strangest experiences we’ll come to along the way only made me even more amazed by and devoted to our darling masterpiece of reality engineering, Earth Vuravura Jeegoo, dayreal.
When you feel yourself start to rise, unclench your fear, and remind yourself to keep breathing gently — though I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever been quite calm enough to do deep belly breathing while levitating. I’ll remember to notice next time.
Levitating is part of the carnival of existence. If you lived through your first Ferris wheel ride, you’ll live through your first levitation. I’ve found that, like unicorns, levitations appear when you’re least expecting them.
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Note: putatively = 'supposedly,' with a wryer twist;
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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;……..……<^>………..…..
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10 The Road . Eb . Grass . Rattlesnake Tooth . South . tzol 192 05.14.07 mon
lobolobo201§9641/1367, 26d12h14m11s34.41g;
mozart..9.77g /7mb
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the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..
.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military Budget on education instead ..
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mmmm…what an uplifting post ! :}
There's a scene in Philip Kaufman's the Right Stuff (about the Mercury astronauts) where one of them meets an aboriginal man who tells them that he's been to the moon several times. The director doesn't comment on it, he just shows the man fanning a fire and then a shot of the moon.
Just a technical question Mr. PB, are we talking about the same thing as “astral projection” ?
Excellent question, cl. No, astral projection is typically moving your less-dense or astral body over significant distances as in what are dubbed out-of-body experiences.
Levitation is your ordinary day body rising from where you are sitting or lying — an in-body experience I suppose you could say. In levitation you don't look back down and see your dear slumbering body still lying on the bed.
I'll get into these differences in much more detail along the way, but thanks for getting a preliminary clarification.
If the body you walk around in were to have an injection of helium, as it were, and you therefore rose in it from where you were — it's like that. It is distinctly disconcerting to one's standard expectations. You are completely yourself –you just float in the air as you might float in water. Your body which floats in water is still considered your regular body, but somehow if you float in air that's considered wongo-bongo. I might think that myself if it hadn't happed to me numerous undeniable times.
The moon visiting is likely to be a master astral projection, though the layered-realities gifts of the Koori, the Noongar, or other indigenous Australian folk are deeply intra-realities in a way I think no Westerner can imagine, even the druids.
There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than I have dreamt of, pogblog. Coming out of the levitation closet must be a bold daring. What extraordinary experiences.
It sounds as if you were not steeped in these matters before the first time this occurred to you?
Right on both counts, ofdroll. Most Western minds are so closed to alternate experiences that one is discounted as fringe with zero examination or reflection. The (over)reaction is harsh and swift — kneejerk. (Tho in strictest privacy and confidence, many folk will confess to their own non-standard experiences. It's as if they're afraid of the Inquisition or of shunning.) The narrow order is kept by fear and scorn.
Way back in those days I was in the hands of the Universe as teacher. I had not read about these matters yet.
I'd like you to comment more on not getting hooked on the strange and perilous.
temps, An excellent & essential question. You do have to measure even your getting 'stoned' on air. You can maintain an on-going glorious quantum-leap of having a peak life; you can sustain a much greater level of internal energy than is offered in your Usual School, but reading the runes or clues as to how your own astonishing exhilaration is fitting into your daily rounds is part of the druid training. Humor & Vitamin I (irony, especially ruthless self-irony are the key druid supplements for discernment).
Do remember (rem-ember) that we normally use about 10% of our brain capacity even to be Einstein(11%). We have a lot of uninvolved and unevolved resources at hand — or at head.