Talking Boards: Part 2

So I've already covered some of the basics of talking boards, but WAIT! There's more! For just five easy payments of $19.95, you, too can have -

Nevermind. 

Very Superstitious

Let me just jump right in and pontificate on a subject that is the basis for much bitching and moaning on my part: Ghosts. Demons, evil spirits. You name it, there's a bullshit movie about it. Think of almost any haunting movie: The Exorcist, Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, Paranormal Activity... What are your standard plot elements? Sweet innocent family moves into a creepy house with a horrible past and a GHOST who wants them out. Or, the ever-popular someone-is-doing-something-dumb-with-some-sort-of-stereotypical-ritual-or-occult-accoutrements (Ouija board, spell casting, ancient burial grounds, the Necronomicon) and they UNLEASH THE KRAKEN!!  

Sorry, I don't have the ability to say the word 'unleash' and not mentally follow it up with 'the Kraken.' Anyway, they unwittingly unleash some demon or ghost or evil entity who wants to do BAD THINGS to everyone involved. I would like to be on record as saying to all of these plot devices: Why don't you go outside and play hide-and-go-f**k-yourself?

From my experience, and from questioning The Collective on this matter, there seems to be infinitesimally small grounds for the reality of any such occurrences happening in real life. I'm not saying there aren't locations in this wide world that have a greater amount of spiritual "activity" than normal, I'm just saying that there are no spirits trying to maliciously levitate your baby for no apparent reason, no matter how much cyan tint you put on your security cam footage. No one dead is trying to "possess" anyone alive, or steal your soul for any so-called demonic ends. So let's everybody just calm down with the superstitious nonsense, OK?

The bulk of the Collective is actually out there trying to help us, and I would say most of those that aren't actively helping with the affairs of the living are just on their own, indifferent and possibly wanting to be left alone for a time.  So please rest assured that no one is going to "come through" your talking board and start haunting your house or trying to harm you. Probably the worst you're going to get is some gibberish series of letters that doesn't make sense or maybe some swear words. And if you were offended by a few profanities you would have stopped reading this post a long time ago.

I ain't afraid of no ghost.

Party Foul

I have learned that talking boards seem to get a lot of use at parties and events. Everyone gets slightly tipsy and wants to see if they can summon the ghost of a celebrity and ask them stupid questions. All my personal derision for other people's ideas about the dead aside, I would like to explain why this is not the most productive idea.

You can do it, of course. As long as you have at least two people, preferably a Speaker and a Battery. The leaf will start moving around and coherent words may or may not be spelled out.  You can start asking questions of your friendly neighborhood dead person, and they should begin to try to answer you. 

Here's where it gets tricky: remember how I talked about the Collective? And how a lot of them are involved in our affairs? Well wrap your head around this, my spiritually curious friends: each one of us living, fleshy beings has, on average, two to three "invisible" buddies hanging around us at any given time. Some people have more. During one board session my inquiries about this revealed that one of my relatives had a whopping thirty-two souls gathered 'round her at all times, mostly due to her very receptive nature. They're trying to help us keep our lives on track and in line with the Great Plan. Hoping to nudge us into making decisions that will benefit us on our path to spiritual growth. They're the movers and shakers, working to make circumstances unfold properly so that we can continue down the right path for each of us. That little voice in your head that sometimes warns, "I wouldn't do that if I were you," when you're about to do something dangerous? Yeah, that's probably not you. It's more likely someone else trying to help you out. More on that in a future post. 

The point is this: if each of us is walking around with an entourage of at least a couple disembodied spirits, think of the crowded spiritual party scene that ensues when even a modest group of eight or ten living people is in the same place at one time. Now imagine getting on a talking board and trying to ask questions. I know that the vast majority of my personal board sessions are done with only two people (me and my husband), and with even a quorum of participants, there are always specific messages for each of us, and usually more than one apiece. Once you start adding additional participants to the mix, the number of messages in total that the other side of the Collective would like to relay increases exponentially. Now there is, essentially, a cacophony of voices trying to be heard. 

"WHAT? I'M GONNA HAFTA CALL YOU BACK!"

Imagine you're on the phone with someone, and that person is at a noisy party. They're trying to talk to you, but you can barely hear them because of all the noise that other people are making. Maybe you even mistake someone else's voice for your friend because so many people are speaking at once. Or maybe you have a few friends at this party, and several of them are jostling to get on the phone and have their turn to talk to you. This is the type of confusion you can have when you try to use a talking board at a crowded event. There are a lot of crossed lines and mixed messages, and chaos ensues. This has happened to me a few times, where we thought a particular message was for one person, and later we discovered that it was meant for someone else entirely, but because there were too many spirits competing for a chance to get their message across, information got muddled and was directed at the wrong recipient. This is not only confusing for the people asking the questions, but it also does a disservice to the reputation of talking boards in general, making the whole affair seem like none of the information delivered was worthwhile or relevant.

Because of this phenomenon of too many voices, I have found that my most productive sessions are those that have anywhere from two to four live participants. Other than the two-person minimum needed to operate the board, this is not a hard and fast rule, just an idea of what seems to be the most useful from personal experience. It is also worth noting, that if you can, it's a good idea to have an equal portion of Speakers versus Batteries with their hands on the leaf. I recently had a session with three Speakers and only one Battery, and the poor Battery person was pretty drained and tired by the end of it, because they were providing the bulk of the energy fuel for four people's worth of questions.

Silent Oracle

It's also worth noting that there are some questions that They won't answer for you at all. Even when we ask questions that They will answer, the responses run the gamut from the pretty cut-and-dried yes or no variety all the way to vague, enigmatic responses consisting of initials or clue-like buzzwords on which They won't elaborate any further as to the meaning. So while even normal questions can elicit sometimes frustratingly confusing answers that no amount of disambiguation seems to clarify (I've found myself many a session pulling my hair going, "What the hell are you telling me? That doesn't make any sense!"), there are in fact some types of inquiries that will cause your spiritual messenger to clam up altogether. Let have some examples, shall we?

Q: When/how/am I going to die?

A: Listen, cubby, they're not going to tell you that, so don't bother asking. This is probably the poster-child for the types of questions, the answers to which provide you with information that would cause you to make a bunch of bad decisions and/or stray from the path that you're supposed to be on in life. How would you change your way of life if you knew you were going to die next week? Next year? Not until you were 97 years old? This is information that will cause you to act in a way that would be out of character for yourself, as it were, and this is not The Plan.  And consider this: what if They're wrong?  It's happened. Events don't always unfold in the most likely manner. You may ask questions about your future when you're on the board, but the answers they give you usually are based on your life taking the path that looks like the strongest probability at the moment for The Collective. But things change, so They are not going to burden you with information about death (your own or that of others), especially when that information might not be 100% guaranteed - not a good basis for decision making, to say the least.

Q: What are the winning lottery numbers?

"Woohoo! Live-in pizza chef, here I come!"

A: The Collective is not going to allow itself to be used for purely selfish material gains. Read up on some of the history of the original Ouija board marketing from the early 1900s if you would like to see how They deal with people trying to make money from this gift of communication. The gentlemen attempting to run a business selling talking boards found themselves in not-so-fortunate circumstances before too long. Yes, They will answer questions you have about your search for a better job, or help you make decisions on buying a house, starting a business, or having a baby. All of these are factors that contribute to your quality of life, and while they are not the sole keys to happiness, they are perfectly reasonable topics of inquiry. I mean, even if you get a better job, it's still you that's earning your living. The Collective is not simply going to hand you sudden, independent wealth - if it was part of the plan for your personal spiritual growth for you to experience a sudden windfall and then deal with the aftermath of such an event, this would occur regardless. So don't be silly and ask for the keys to the mansion when you are only a weekend guest, OK?

Q:  Is my boss sleeping with his admin?

A: This is just one example of an entire category of questions that you probably won't get an answer to - not necessarily because the information is sacred, but because They believe that if you had the information, you would likely do something destructive with it. A participant in a board session once asked if the company they worked for was preparing to let them go. They were told that this was not the case, and to stop worrying about it. Shortly thereafter, however, they were let go, just as they had originally suspected. Now why did the spirit answering questions that day basically lie to this person? They knew that this person would be let go, but they proceeded to give reassurances that this was not the case. My suspicions were confirmed when we consulted Them a few days after the event, and They admitted that although They knew that events were about to take a turn for the worse, They did not give the querent the heads-up this time, because They knew that given this information, the employee would have probably taken some sort or rash, preemptive "revenge" action against their employer, for even daring to terminate them. The Collective knew that such an impulsive and likely bout of temper would have consequences that would probably hurt this person's chances at future employment, which they would be needing post haste in light of the upcoming break with their employer. As you can see from this example, an honest answer from The Collective would have probably cost this person dearly, if only due to an inability to overcome human emotions in such a heated situation. And much as they will not give you information that they think will cause you to do harm to your own chances for success, they will also not tell you things that they think you will use, intentionally or not, to do harm to others or their circumstances.

To sum up: the other side of the Collective is here to help us, not to harm us. They are eager to talk and are pleased when we can both hear them, and are willing to listen. If you are polite and respectful, as you would be when asking advice from any person you look up to, they will provide you with the information that you can use to steer yourself along the most spiritually beneficial path for you, without harming anyone else in the process.

Synchronicity for The Day: Music No. 1

First thing this morning, which seems to be a common time for me to experience synchronicities, I was treated to a musical "coincidence." I was lying in bed with a serious headache, an ice pack on my temple, silently cursing every noise in the house at the time. Because it was the normal getting-up time, my oldest (and fattest) cat initiated his usual routine of walking all over me and stepping in my hair on the pillow, pulling it (which is great when you have a headache) and generally using the annoyance of his bulky presence to encourage me to get the hell out of bed and put some kibble in his dish. Despite my annoyance, one of my go-to personal song parodies came into my head: a play on Ram Jam's Black Betty - Fat Kitty. Whoa Fat Kitty, blam-a-lam, Whoa Fat Kitty, blam-a-lam...  I know, that's dumb, but what can I say? I thought of it once, and now with my ever present fatty catty, it comes up all the time. So once I admitted defeat and accepted that the thumping of blood in my left temple wasn't going away, and I got up and moving, I ended up in front of the mirror to put on makeup. Sometimes I like to have some music while I get ready for work in the morning, and today was one of those days. First song up when I put my iPod on shuffle? You guessed it.

What do I take this synchronicity to mean? Well, I am rarely certain what these mean, but I think this morning as I was wallowing in bed, bemoaning my headache, I remembered the Mars transit I'm having right now (let's just leave it at that, and have some mercy on non-astrologers) and I decided that I needed to use that burst of energy I am enjoying thanks to the red planet to muscle through this bullcrap. That I needed to conquer this pain and not let it get in the way of the things I needed to get done. I'd like to think the synchronicity was an affirmation that this was the correct tactic to take. Maybe it meant something else, but it was enough that I noticed Their message if nothing else.

Worth Your Weight in Mustard

Riddle me this: Why is it when you go to a fast food joint it's so hard to get some mustard?

Mustard's a normal burger/hot dog topping, right? Ketchup and Mustard, the ever-together condiment twins. Am I nuts here?

Hey man, I'll sell you this '87 Iroc Z for 2700 packets.

The chick at the counter hands me my tray of food. I ask, "Can I get a packet of mustard?" Rather than just grabbing a couple mustard packets and handing them to me, I usually get one of three responses:  I might get, "You want honey mustard?" with a facial expression and tone that conveys skepticism and confusion. Did I f**king say honey mustard? No I did not. "No, just regular mustard, thanks," I respond. Which can sometimes bring me to the next response, which I sometimes actually arrive at first, bypassing the honey mustard litmus test altogether: the person helping me has to say, "Just a second," and is forced to consult another employee. An entire Mustard Committee must be formed in order to discuss, vote on, and accommodate my apparently freak request. "Do you know where we have any mustard?" they will ask their coworker in a baffled manner like I just asked them for a potted cactus and a can of shaving cream. I'm at a burger joint right? Mustard should not be that weird of a thing to ask for. I get so annoyed at the predictability of this scene that I end sentences like that last one with prepositions. The third type of response I get is the suspicious, "How many do you want?" They have the mustard back there, oh yes they do. But unlike the ketchup, which they will foist upon you in double fistfuls, like they can't give the stuff away, the mustard they guard jealously and mete out like there's a global shortage, or an impending apocalypse and the Wall Street bean counters have predicted that the vinegary yellow stuff will be the new world currency after we fight off all the zombies.

Seriously, am I effing crazy? I see other people putting mustard on things. I'm not the only one. Why are they holding out on me? I had a McDonald's employee tell me that they didn't have any mustard. At all. You're a burger joint for f**k's sakes! Is my family going to have to have an intervention on me and break the news that I am the last living person who wants some mustard on their burger, like they had to explain to that one lady on The View that the world isn't really flat? Is that what's going on here?

Is this important in the grand scheme of life? No it is not. I just don't understand this phenomenon at all. But I think I'm going to start hoarding mustard packets just in case. The first sign of zombies and I'm the next Bill Gates, muthaf**ka.

Synchronicity for The Day: Numbers No. 1

So I wanted to start formally taking note of when I see these various synchronicities happening in my daily life, which is all the time. I promise I will make a longer entry about the concept of synchronicity, but let's just say for now that these are the little coincidences-that-are-not-really-coincidences that pop up from time to time. They are The Collective's way of telling you, "Hey! Pay attention! Take note of what is going on right now!" Or also, "Things are right on track for your Life Path right now, everything is humming along on schedule/as planned." Déjà vu is also something like this, but that is a topic for another day.

So this one happened to me yesterday when I was driving home from work (I'm continually amazed at the amount of spiritual experiences and thoughts I have while driving). I wanted to post it last night, and I got all crafty thinking that I would just get the Blogger app for my phone and do it on the fly while it was still fresh in my mind. But of course, like any time I think I'm gonna do something "simple," everything went to hell in a hand-basket and technology thwarted my will once again. Curses!!!  So after installing/uninstalling/re-installing the app and going in circles with it wanting me to use a gmail address and not recognizing my account for my actual blog, I gave up and decided to troubleshoot it (like that will come to any avail) later, on the desktop instead of the phone.

Let's get to the actual synchronicity event again, which will probably be a shorter paragraph than all my complaining above. So I'm driving home listening to a talk show on Sirius, and like many call-in type shows they gave their phone number for listeners to call as they went to a break. The phone number ended in 6766. And right as the show's host was telling us what the number was, and I mean literally as the words were coming out of the speakers, I was looking at the license plate of the driver ahead of me and their plate was 6XXX766. The Xs were actually three other letters, but I decided I probably shouldn't list someone's actual plate number online. But yeah, that was a good one. Very precise. And very simultaneous. Sometimes I see these a few hours apart, but this one was immediate. So that made me feel good. I knew that things were going along as intended, which always makes me happy.

The Collective Breakdown

I use this term all the time: The Collective. It sounds creepy and ominous, like the Borg. Actually, it's something as natural and universally present as air. It is all-pervading, infusing every aspect of life, the workforce and intelligence that is moving behind the scenes to keep the Grand Plan on track, and most people don't even know it's there, or that they are even a part of it. 

I was driving home from work a couple weeks ago when the thought came to me (I wonder from where? Heh) that I would like to have some sort of official written-down definition of what The Collective is. And almost immediately, it began forming in my mind. I mean, I already feel like I generally know what it is, but putting it concisely is another story altogether. How do you sum up something so big in only a few words?  Well here's my initial crack at it:

The Collective is the combined energy, knowledge, and consciousness of every spirit, incarnate and incorporeal.

OK, so to me, that means something, but to others it may mean absolutely nothing. What exactly is a spirit? What do you mean, incarnate and incorporeal? How can consciousness be collective at all? Well, those are all good questions, so I think just to have some structure to break this subject down, I'm going to work through the good old five Ws and see what I come up with:

Who is The Collective?

As I tried to say in my attempt at a definition above, The Collective is you and me. And by "you and me" I mean our spirits or souls or whatever name you would like to put on the unique essence/energy that is the You that is animating your body, thinking your thoughts, and feeling your emotions. This is the energy that while conjoined with your body, enables the body to have a life, but is not dependent upon the body for its own existence in turn. This is why people have "out of body" and near death experiences and that sort of thing; these are some common examples showing how impermanently attached our souls actually are to their vessels. 

The Collective is also Them.  And who are They? Well (and come on the journey with me here for a minute), from what I have learned, when the human body where your spirit is currently residing ceases to function, your soul will detach from the flesh, but it will not simply disappear and become nothing. It's still around, existing, without a physical vessel. It has moved from the material side of The Collective to the immaterial side. Everyone's unique energy, both during its time in a body and its time not in a body, make up The Collective.  My personal search for truth has lead me to agree with the concept of reincarnation, and while many spirits do participate in a repeated cycle of lives in physical bodies, I have also learned that there are entities within The Collective that have never inhabited a body. But they are just as fully-formed of souls as you or me.

What is the Collective?

Hah! This may be the most difficult concept of all to wrap words around. I may try for some metaphors, because I know that makes abstract concepts easier for me to understand. The Collective in fact, often likes to convey messages to me in metaphors as well for this reason. I've already said that The Collective is comprised of both the Dead and the Living (as I've mentioned in earlier posts, I may just use those terms for simplicity's sake, despite the fact that I don't really care for their connotations.), but for the most part, us living folk do not seem to have much awareness of the Dead, or even our own connections with everyone else in this massive tapestry.  But we're all part of it, all connected, to each other, to the Dead, to everything. It's an entire spiritual ecosystem, all parts affecting one another. Unlike most of us live people, The Dead do not have the limitations imposed by a physical body, and they, in fact, are aware of each other, and of us. This is where it gets interesting. They have access to near boundless information because not only are they aware of each other, and able to communicate, but they are able to do so almost instantly because they do not have to wait for one person to open their mouth and say something and have sound waves travel into the ear canal of the other person, or wait for an email to be sent and read for the other party to receive the information. If one entity has a thought, another can know it. And that's it. There is no necessary medium for the communication. The knowledge of One is the knowledge of All. This is why you can use a talking board and speak to an entity you don't know from Adam, and ask him about your grandmother who passed away. Even if you don't directly speak to her, he can know what she knows and relay it to you fairly reliably. If the living side of The Collective (you and me) has snail mail as a means of communicating, the dead side has the internet with Wikipedia. The mind-blowing part of all of this is that because the dead are all constantly aware of each other, they become, in essence, one consciousness. A single unit comprised of many. My term The Collective is actually short for The Collective Consciousness. Due to its generally unified nature, The Collective much better than more spiritually isolated fleshy creatures like us to act with concerted effort to carry out actions and plans. Which they have. A Grand Plan as a matter of fact. They can see the big picture while you and I are bogged down in what's-for-dinner and doesn't-that-bastard-understand-that-if-he-takes-two-parking-spaces-like-that-his-car's-gonna-get-keyed?

Where is The Collective?

Well... everywhere. The living side is accounted for: see a person - they have a soul. There is a part of The Collective.  As for the dead side? Everywhere we are, they are. Honestly, they do a lot of hanging around us, because a sizable chunk of their activities involve meddling (in a good way) in our affairs. They're trying to get us to do the right thing, follow the path we're supposed to take to learn whatever lessons have been proscribed for us to learn in this life. I always think it's funny that movies and TV imply that graveyards and abandoned creepy houses are full of "ghosts." Sure, there are some of the dead who have their own issues to work out and are shunning the living, but from what I understand, most of them are near where we are. And not a lot of us are chillin' in cemeteries, aside from funeral parties and the people who work there. Why go to a grave to "visit" a loved one who has passed? They are not with that body anymore. Just talk anywhere you happen to be and they will hear you. And if your loved one doesn't personally hear you, rest assured one of Them will be around to hear you and convey the message. From what They have told me in the past, the average living person has about 2 - 3 dead people hanging out near them at any given time. Think about it. Right now, they are there with you. In your living room. At the KFC. At the dentist's office. At the cube farm where you work. They may be "assigned" to you (more on that later) or maybe they are just passing through the area and have stopped to take an interest in you much like we would stop to watch a street performer on our way walking to another errand.

When is the Collective?

That was an awkward paragraph header. Do I go with consistency between the headers or reasonable grammar? Meh. 

Questions of "when", of course, pertain to time, so let's explore Time and The Collective briefly. You and I generally experience time in a linear fashion if our brains are in good working order, free from neurological issues and intoxicants. We can see a clear progression from past to present to future. I have learned that the spirits on the Other Side of The Collective do not exist in a linear timeline, so to speak. One of them once said to me that they are like the point on a three-sided pyramid; they exist in a place where the lines of past-present-future all come together in one place. On a practical level, this explains why when we communicate with them, they are able to discuss past events and even past lives, and also give us their thoughts on what is likely to happen in tomorrow: all of these realities exist at once for them. Quite mind-boggling when you try to wrap your head around it, but there's that flesh container again limiting our avenues of perception.

How is The Collective?

This question could mean many things. How is it's nature? Is it benevolent or malicious? My positive nature makes me want to say benevolent, but I don't know if there is even that much bias. It wants us to succeed in learning our life lessons so that we move along on the path of spiritual evolution, but it also encompasses the universal need for balance. And some of our lives have some unpleasant learning in store for us. By that I mean that even though none of us wants anything bad to ever happen, there is nevertheless a need for both heroes and villains in the world. It is sad, but there are going to be murders as a counter-balance to acts of selflessness. For every nice person there will be a jerk somewhere to even things out. There will always be filthy rich people as well as homeless people, geniuses have to be balanced by dumbasses. That's the duality of everything, and it has to be that way. It cannot be unbalanced. As much as we want everything to be sunshine and rainbows, or things will get seriously out of whack, if I may bandy about some professional jargon.

Or maybe the "how" refers to organization. Does this Collective have any sort of structure or is it total chaos, every spirit out for himself? Yes, so far as I have seen there is some sort of structure. Do I know the full blueprint of the entire building? No. I have only been down a couple of hallways so far. The parts I have explored have taught me about a variety of duties/jobs/positions that different spirits have on the other side, and that some are more "in charge" of affairs, if you will, than others. One thing I have asked in the past was whether there was a single entity at the top of any sort of hierarchy and they responded clearly that this was not the case. That there was a type of hierarchy but that no single person was in charge. I will probably explore this again, but it's one of those Big Questions that is really involved and difficult for them to explain to me in a way that I will understand, and those seem to take a lot of time and energy on the board, not to mention that there are some things we have discovered that they are "not supposed" to tell us.

Have I covered it all? Not hardly. But I'm sure I have elaborated long enough that if you have made it this far you deserve some sort of internet medal for Blog Perseverance or something. Thanks for hanging in there. These won't always be so verbose, but at the beginning here I am getting a lot of background information out of the way.

Until next time!
Love and Peace.