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Hi Ms Flight,
We’ve corresponded before and you were extremely patient with the glitches you encounteres when registering. I’m delighted that you’re still checking in on us and it would be great if you introduced yourself and gave a bit of background to your interest in questing over on the “Introduce yourself” forum.
Things don’t always go to plan and it was a real shame that we didn’t secure the green stone…but maybe it chose its own destination…and I do have empathy for Gaynor who had just lost her Mum after a horrible illness and I could see how she probably just wanted rid of the whole affair as quickly as possible. Maybe I’m overly-optimistic or just plain naive.
But let’s channel the positive energy that we have built up on this site and look to more exciting times in the future. There may be another stone out there waiting to be found…
Peace,
Simon
Hi Guys,
This thread raises a few interesting points and I would be grateful of feedback from both buyers and sellers to help guide the overall policy on this website.
Firstly, when I created this forum it was explicitly set aside as the “Questing Marketplace” and as such is the exact right place to come and sell your wares. Also I have made it clear up front that the name of the game here is “caveat emptor” – and I think that the users are big enough and ugly enough to work out what they want to buy and what they don’t.
From this point of view, I’d far rather that vendors advertised their wares here first, as opposed to say eBay, as this ensures that the Questing community (or at least the part of it that has registered on this site) has the first chance to acquire what they want. Also this more direct approach is hopefully cheaper for the vendors.
A number of the posters on this site regularly trade in questing-related items (most particularly “hernesSon” and “james”) and I want to encourage them and others to use this forum where appropriate as I think this will result in a better deal all round.
So, specifically with Andy/Meugher selling a silver dagger, I have no problem with this and expect that it will be of interest to some folk and absolutely no interest to others. I think that it’s up to anyone who’s interested to test the evidence/provenance relating to the item for themselves.
As another example of this, I’ve been trying to persuade my brother (unsuccessfully so far) to make me a magic wand that I can put up for sale on this forum. I believe that he has a “sensitivity” with wood and stones (this expresses itself on one level through his work as a professional landscape gardner) which he could use to craft a pretty effective “energy amplifier”. Now I would never make any claim to what such an item could do and so much about it is subjective and relates to your particular beliefs. So some (indeed most) would believe that this was complete snake oil – but is that a reason not to post it for sale? What if someone is happy to pay the asking price because they believed it would be useful for a particular questing sketch or ritual? Am I taking advantage of them or is this just the free market economy?
Moving on to slightly murkier ground, I know a man whom I believe to be totally sincere in his beliefs and even highly scientific in his approach who designs devices to turn ordinary water into “high energy” water. Again he makes no claims for what this water could do – but the implication is clear. So if such a device ever came up for sale, should it be censored on the basis that it was preying on the hopes and fears of the unwell, or should it be allowed into the quirky mix of items in the marketplace where it was up to the buyers to decide what they wished to purchase?
My own personal stance is that Andy/Meugher’s sale of the silver dagger (or indeed old copies of questing magazines – I meant to bid for these myself but was away at the time) certainly doesn’t offend me – indeed I would encourage more of the same from other potential vendors. But I’m open to to what others think and welcome any comments/suggestions to make this forum ever better…
Thanks,
Simon
Friday Synchronicity (2). When I came back home last night my mother (who is staying with us for the weekend) had rented “Finding Neverland” from the video shop. I hadn’t had any conversation with her (or my wife) about the BBC podcast prior to this.
(By the way it’s not a bad film at all – quite sad – and certainly highlights the theme of death that is covered in the podcast.)
Friday Synchronicity (1). Yesterday morning as I walked to the train station, I was mulling over the name “egretes” and wondered if it might have a link to the egret bird (and was reminded of the “Swan vs Pelican” post elsewhere on these forums). As I thought this, I stepped on a flier for a local Tai Chi class that must have blown off the nearby noticeboard. On it was some kind of bird (heron?) that looked very like an egret.
Excellent photos, Yuri. I particularly like the first one which is realy clear apart from the one orb hovering over the path. Very unlikely that this could the the result of the flash reflecting off water particles in the air (did it even flash for this first one?)
It reminds me of the Newgrange photos that I took. I took two within about ten seconds of each other and one had orbs in it and the other didn’t (the orb one remains here [url:16m431ih]http://www.psychicquesting.com/ftopict-58.html[/url] but the other, orb-less one perished in the hacker attack).
I wonder if there’s a connection between the two sites? Does anyone else have some “orb photos”?
Picking up on the fairy theme, this week’s In Our Time (BBC Radio 4) podcast is on that very subject. Not a bad little chat though quite rushed, you can download it here: [url:1ovjafb9]http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/inourtime/inourtime_20060511-1000_40_pc.mp3[/url]
Hey Yuri,
Great drawing. My immediate impression was a rather obvious “gateway to another world” with the river acting as the connector between the two worlds. However, I would like to do meditate on it properly and see if anything further occurs. When my wife saw the picture (she didn’t see the words) she immediately honed in on the yonic aspect of the gap in the rocks – so maybe this partially explains your sense of the feminine.
- Simon
Thanks for that, Michael.
And just to up the ante, Geraldine Cummins also claims that:
(i) John2 (aka Lazarus) died in the siege of Jerusalem; and
(ii) that John3 was John2′s son.Not sure how provable either of these two claims are but it would be interesting to see if anyone can point to evidence either for or against these views.
While back at my parents’ house last month, I saw a book in a bookshelf on mystics and psychics that I hadn’t seen before (unusual in itself!). Leafing through it I came across a medium called Geraldine Cummins who had been something of a sesnation back at the middle of the last century. She channeled early christian entities (Philip the Evangelist and Cleophas) and published the result of this automatic writing in a number of volumes. It caught my eye that one was called "The Great Days of Ephesus". Although this is usually not my kind of thing at all, I decided to see if there was any material in the book that could help me with the Ephesus side of the quest.
I tracked down a secondhand copy on Amazon and when it arrived, I was initially dismayed to see that it was all about Paul in Ephesus – not John. However I later realised that the very last entry in the book (Appendix II) was about John and here she distinguished between three Johns: John the Apostle who had died in Jerusalem; John the elder who had written John’s Gospel in Ephesus; and John of Patmos who wrote the Book of Revelations.
I must admit that I hadn’t heard this theory before and it seemed obviously incorrect. I decided to consult Raymond Brown’s very sober and conservative book on New Testament Studies (it bears the imprimatur of the Catholic Church, so is dogmatically sanctioned and acts as a good yardstick against to measure some of the freakier theories that abound). Much to my surprise, in a footnote on the chapter on the authorship of the fourth Gospel, Brown cites ME Boismard as having recently collated evidence to suggest that the original John stayed in Judea and was distinct from the John in Ephesus.
Michael (Supernaturalist) then did some amazing research and found translations/book reviews of Boismard’s work which fleshed this out – and contained the additional fact that Boismard was convinced that the original John was Lazarus!
This brings the story full circle in an amazing way. The information produced by the two psychics (Joa Bolendas and Geraldine Cummins) thus appears to check out 100% against the latest (yet conservative) research.
From the point of view of the above quest, if Joa Bolendas is correct in saying that John was Lazarus then we may start to trust her more when she says that there is a cahe of as yet undiscovered material in Ephesus (presumably source material written by John/Lazarus but brought to Ephesus by the second John).
Certain clues have already emerged which might point the way to the next stage in discovering these writings but these will have to wait for a little while longer…
Hey Yuri,
That sounds quite wild. I’ve had two dreams that share some of the same experiences. In the first dream I had a flash of insight that if you took a sideways schematic of the Giza pyramids (like this one [url:9pz54tz9]http://www.eyelid.co.uk/pics/giza3.gif[/url] but with all the extra false chambers, passages, etc.) and overlaid it on the correct hieroglyphic text, then the chambers would highlight words and the passages would show the order in which the words must be read. Thus effectively they form some kind of massive decoding system!
The second (which was some years earlier) was another dream fragment in which I am sitting in my mother’s family’s holiday house and looking out the window when my perception undergoes a sudden and dramatic shift and the grass and bushes that I am looking at outside suddenly turn into something out of a radical impressionist painting. But nastier and more like shards of broken glass than, say, Van Gogh’s paintings. I suddenly think to myself “Oh God, I’ve become schizophrenic.” This left a residual perceptual blip and even still sometimes if I’m looking at a large field with grass blowing gently and the spiders’ webs catching the sunlight, I get that weird, overwhelming shift in perception when the slashes of silver leap out and the whole scene becomes “jagged”.
Your description also makes me think of similar depictions by psychonauts such as McKenna and Pinchbeck. Here is Pinchbeck on DMT: “When I smoked DMT, I found that I completely lost contact with this reality, and entered another dimension or realm that seemed fully convincing, yet almost overwhelming in its otherness. The best I could describe this other realm was “Tibetan mandalas meets Disney World in the Twenty-Fifth Century” – it seemed simultaneously geometric, hyper-organic, hyperreal.”
Try searching on “DMT Elves” or “Fractal Elves”!
Yuri – article on MD added to Encyclopaedia as well as some others.
Link is here: [url:e0bv6eas]http://www.psychicquesting.com/modules.php?name=Guiki&MODE=SHOW&PAGE=Myles%20Dillon[/url]
France was great – very rustic and mellow but unfortunately I didn’t get close to St Clare sur Epte. The nearest I got to anything like that was William the Conqueror’s castle in Falaise. If there was any “inkling” at all it was when I got back to the UK and a particulat coincidence pointed to the Templar presence in Limoges. However, I haven’t had a chance to check out what kind of presence they had there or what it might connect to. (By the way Acts X was also part of that little sequence but I haven’t looked that up either.)
…and here’s a link to new Philip K. Dick entry in the Questing Encyclopaedia which tells the story again from a different slant (courtesy of Wikipedia):
[url:23vlfncr]http://www.psychicquesting.com/modules.php?name=Guiki&MODE=SHOW&PAGE=Philip%20K.%20Dick,%20Mystic%20Experiences%20Of[/url]
Hi Yuri,
More on the head front. Whilst searching today for something completely unrelated (templars and altered states of consciousness) I came across the following odd trail.
Firstly on a web page about Templars and Cannabis:
“The Mahavira Vessel, like the Templars mysterious idol, is referred to as a head. To the ancient worshipper the Mahavira vessel represented the decapitated head of Makha, from whose wound flowed forth the Elixir of Life. “
Thinking of you, I tried to follow that up and find the original Indian/Sufi (?) myth to which this referred. Instead I found a reference to an article suggesting that the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight was based on an old Vedic story. Again I haven’t been able to find a direct link to this text but here is a link to a pay-per-view site: [url:1o3pky3l]http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-7134(194401)19%3A1%3C104%3ASGATGK%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N[/url]. As mentioned previously, the Gawain tales have fairly well acknowledged Celtic antecedents – so could there be a Celtic/Indian link?
What makes this all more than a little curious is that my great-uncle was a Celtic scholar who studied the possible linguistic links between ancient Gaelic and Sanskrit. I only discovered this about four days ago when my parents were telling me how they had just returned from a lecture on Gaelic/Sanskrit links which was given to commerate him. It’s almost as if my great-uncle was aware that I had just realised what he had been about and then said “alright then let me throw this your way”.
OK I’m off. See y’all in a week.
Hi Mad Dan and welcome back.
Plenty to discuss.
“By what stretch of the imagination, exactly, does this constitute a “danger of psychic questing”? Sounds more like a “danger of taking psychoactive drugs” to me!”
I think that both Psychic Questing and psychoactive drugs can take you to the same place. Note that “psyche” is the root of both terms. I have little experience with drugs but (as I think I posted elsewhere) I did once have a very scary experience where one member of the party apparently got possessed and then straight afterwards I felt that “evil entities” were pulling my etheric(?) self out of my body. The first half of this was triggered by a guided meditation/past life regression (absolutely no drugs were involved not even alcohol), the second which came maybe thirty minutes later happened after smoking a joint which may or may not have been dipped in something stronger. Two paths, the same destination.
I accept that the immediate threat to one’s sanity is greater with drugs but for that very reason I think that a knowledge of their effects can help should you should stray into the same territory on a quest.
As far as demons go, if you consider them to be flesh and blood creatures living permanently in our world then clearly I would be very sceptical. However, if you put it that they exist in other “dimensions” (for want of a better word) and if we find ourselves in those dimensions (or bring them into ours) then we are susceptible to attack from them, then I am less sceptical. If you further put it that through psyche-intensive activity of whatever sort (dreams, divination, active imagination, magickal rituals, psychic intuition) you can unleash unhealthy energies which can have a detrimental impact on either ourselves or those around us then call me a believer.
My starting point on all of this was that, in another thread, it was suggested by many posters that you could blithely quest all you wanted without danger and I felt that this was perhaps missing the darker aspects to it all and that, particularly, if novice questers were reading this they should be alerted to the fact that there are real risks associated with it. My question was whether these risks can be mitigated (because I do want to cross the road and I guess others do too). Obviously you can never make anything 100% safe (like your story of the entombed rich man) but I wondered if there are “tricks for younger players” which might protect them from some of the worst pitfalls?
My starter for 10 (from the personal experience mentioned above) would be: unless you really, really know what you are doing, don’t mix questing and psychoactive drugs. Anyone got any others?
As to your other points: re the fried buddy. I do have some experince with schizophrenia and everything I know about it makes me feel hugely sorry for the person suffering. Do I take what they say as literally true? Probably not. However, in their predicament might they “tune into” some worthwhile information (be it symbolic or mystical) that isn’t available to ordinary consciousness? I think yes. Jung also took their hallucinations seriously and Terence McKenna (whose brother I believe suffered from it) considered it a process which was actually helping the self reach a better state of being and which should be left alone as much as was possible.
This merges into your last point which I think relates back to my theory of ambiguity. I’m not proposing a completely relativistic universe. I do believe that there is some kind of material reality out there which we can all see and touch. But the laws of Quantum Physics tell us that when it’s not being observed a wavicle exists as a smear of probabilities – only when we observe it do we force it to collapse into a particular location. Amit Goswami describes it as follows: “Suppose we ask. Is the moon there when we are not looking at it? To the extent that the moon is ultimately a quantum object (being composed entirely of quantum objects), we must say no…When we are not looking, the moon’s possibility wave spreads albeit by a miniscule amount.”
My take on this is that, when observed, the object must collapse into a particular position/state but what if we muddied the observation (introduce ambiguity)? Could we (a) collapse the object into a novel state, one which although not impossible was not heretofore likely; and leading on from this (b) like nudging a pinball table to get the ball to bounce a little more in your favour, can we influence which state the object will fall into? If yes to either of the above then we are entering a very interesting world indeed. And the nature of psychic questing makes it more likely that such effects will be seen in this area then in many others.
So that’s all clear then?
