The Higher Self and transcendent experience, including OBEs

[TraineeHuman]

Your Higher Mind is part of you. It’s been there all along.

At first you may only reach it in your most exalted moments, but each time you do you open more doors to it. And the more you do, the stronger you feel the pull to come home.

Doesn’t everyone secretly yearn ever so strongly for “home”, though not having a clear idea of what it is or where it might be? Look inside yourself. Your body’s cells get attached to the physical space where you dwell. But there’s something much more. Doesn’t it feel like life is way too short? That somehow we deserve much better than what we seem to get? That we need to uncover some unknown veil on the other side of which what happens for us is we become everything that we were meant to be?

One way to find it is if you ardently search for “God”. You won’t find Source, though, by any means, not at first. At first the end of your search will seem to be something that you eventually discover to be you, the real, hidden you. This real you, you gradually discover, has huge powers and abilities. You’ll also find it’s very interested in finding ways to get you truly connected with the rest of the world around you, and indeed with the rest of the universe. But you’ll find it more through making whatever is inside you flower than you will by outgrowing the ego.

If all these wonderful things were only ideals, only Pollyanna fantasies, only escapist lozenges, then we wouldn’t feel the strong connection in our hearts. If they were unattainable to us, they would feel more foreign, and they would not draw us so strongly in our most aware moments.

To quote Julian of Norwich, the end of all our explorations will be to return to the place we started from, and to truly know it for the first time.

The Higher Mind is mind without limitations. It must be "mind" of some sort, because otherwise it wouldn't be able to communicate to our lower self. But please don't think of it as somehow like the ordinary mind. just raised higher. It's mind raised to infinity, even though it's just the real us.

[Finefeather]

Posted by TraineeHuman (here)

Posted by greybeard (here)
Yogananda said "The darkness comes from the same place as the light"

That statement is indeed true in several senses, and on several levels.

But one can only know for certain that it’s true at an ultimate level if one has full-on been at one with Source.

Equally, someone who has been at one with Source may have seen clearly and for certain that all darkness is ultimately an illusion. Yes, darkness is an illusion, for those with eyes to see.

The trouble is, suffering is experienced until one has reached that realization fully. That suffering – in fact, all suffering – is what happens through taking the illusion of darkness for reality.

Unfortunately, I’m not interested in exploring a discussion about life with Source at this point – which is what this inevitably leads to. Not when people are just getting their feet wet somewhat in approaching just the Higher Mind rather than Source.

Darkness is not created it is simply lack of consciousness...and at level 1..what TH may describe as 49D...there is only consciousness...no thing else exists...other than the Laws of the cosmos and the first cause (will) of the Creator...of which we know nothing. Also, consciousness is not a fixed thing...it is an expanding aspect of knowledge...intelligence...and thus wisdom...from which action (will) can cause effect...the basis of karma. Action/will/thought can only cause effect by the presence of consciousness...and without consciousness there is no effect.

From the human point of view...which is...in comparison...around levels 47-49...what TH describes as 3D, 4D and 5D we have a rather blinkered version of what light and darkness are.

We like to use words like light and darkness to describe 'good' and 'bad'...when in reality there is no 'darkness' that has been created...no evil...no bad...no good...only consciousness.

There is consciousness...and lack of consciousness...only in the lower levels or realms...and reality is what consciousness is in the highest level. So there is only ONE reality...on the other hand, many life views are possible...due to different needs and orientations, individual characters and levels.

Ignorance...darkness?...is lack of knowledge or consciousness at the level we are at...and darkness is at best an illusion...based on our lack of consciousness.

Consciousness, on our level...which ever it might be...is simply the amount of reality we are aware of in comparison to the consciousness of the highest level...and is therefore not a thing we can name...because it varies infinitely with each person. Nor is 'darkness'...ignorance...a thing we can name...each is mutually inclusive...the more we know the less we don't know...and this is why darkness is an illusion...because we cannot know what we do not know...and once we know something, it it is no longer darkness or an illusion.

I hear people say...as an example..."I know that I don't know how to bake a cake"...well is this darkness? or is this light?...it is light...because we know something about our self...but the baking part is still the unknown. Similarly...we say there is evil in the world...darkness?...all an illusion...until we are conscious of the 'evil'...'darkness?'...at which point it is no longer darkness...and 'evil' it may be...based on the darkness...ignorance...lack of consciousness...which prevents us from seeing the reality of the 'evil'.

So darkness is in the eye of the beholder and individual consciousness...once free of the constraints of the ego or human mind...recognizes this darkness as ignorance of it's self...and what is this part of us that brings this recognition?...it is the higher mind...which comes from higher level 47 or higher 5D...which ever way you prefer to count from

Take care
Ray

[TraineeHuman]

There are two pathways into the Higher Mind that I know of, when all is said and done. One -- the first of the two -- is that of joy, bliss, gladness, appreciation, feeling the aliveness. This doesn’t need to begin with anything you’d think of as an OB experience or meditation. And you can practice it almost any time in various ways. These include the following.

1. Giving

The more you give away of your inward self, the more room you create for something higher and new to replace it. If you have a genuine smile to give, maybe you can give that. The only thing to beware of is that if you smile or act generously a great deal then exploitative individuals will assume they can get away with murder and you won’t fight back because you’re too kind and forgiving. To avoid this, you’ll need to do something such as deliberately practice frowning occasionally. You’ll also need to communicate in some way to such individuals that you’re still going to assert your rights, maybe even your legal rights if it comes to that.

2. Forgiveness

Again, forgiving someone totally doesn’t mean you won’t necessarily take them to court to demand compensation for damage they have caused. What it means is cleansing yourself inwardly of any resentment or hatred. I’d like to urge you all strongly to get hold of a paperback titled Radical Forgiveness. Its author is Colin Tipping, and a few years ago it was certainly available from bookshops in my town at least. In this book you’ll find a 26-step process. If you go through all the steps in that process carefully, you should have a most extraordinary and liberating experience. (Everybody I know who has been through the 26 steps has had such an experience.) You don’t need to be at an advanced level. That experience should also bring you liberating insights into the true meaning of surrender and acceptance, in practical, specific ways in your own life. It simply moves you through changes in your point of view by asking you to answer and face certain questions in a certain sequence. I’d like to suggest that anyone under forty should go through this process in relation to their parents.

I’ll continue this list of forms of the first way, and I'll describe the second way, in my next post, in a few hours’ time or more, depending on my commitments.

But it should be clear from the above that you don’t need to have a dream or OBE or bi-location experience to experience or interact extensively with your Higher Mind. May I suggest that many kinds of trance states may be enough, for instance. I offered a definition of “trance” in an earlier post. Quite often, perhaps, properly performing a Tarot reading using your consciousness can be an example, as can any act of creativity (including producing some kind of work of art/music/literature/architecture/etc, and any more “advanced” meditation. So can any “exalted” experience with a fellow human being, including some lovemaking and parenting experiences, for example. I guess these are also part of my list, which I’ll get back to in the next post.

The point is, to engage your Higher Mind you don’t need to do something hugely exotic. You can start at the everyday level, and before you know it you’ll be operating at the Higher level as well.

Earlier I have greatly emphasized the importance of stillness as the gateway to the Higher Mind. In my next post I’ll also explain how that still applies and how it fits in.

[TraineeHuman]

The second path into the Higher Mind is that of indifference, or detachment. That means ultimately indifference to the physical world, including physical pleasure and pain. Actually, my experience is that the two paths eventually become virtually the same thing, though that’s a little hard to explain at this point.

It does seem to be necessary to practice something like meditation or OB skills in order to develop your ability to detach, to see the vastly bigger picture. It’s certainly necessary to dissolve the ego’s complexes as well, because otherwise the ego will distort the view, and it will then no longer be detachment.

I may not have made it really clear in my previous post that the first path, on the other hand, doesn’t involve initially going into a trance of any description. Here are some more items that belong on the list of branches of the first path into the Higher Mind.


3. Acceptance, being nonjudgmental, and surrender

There’s already been some significant discussion on this one at certain places in this thread. I’d like to stress that acceptance doesn’t mean saying yes to everything (or not to any offer or request of any sort). It means being nonjudgmental, but taking everything in just the way it is, without interfering – until you can really see what’s there.


4. Gratitude, and feeling the aliveness

I’ve already attempted to discuss this, and AwakeInADream at least has shared some of his experience with this.


5. Being proactive, and (as far as possible) never reactive

By “never reactive” I don’t mean never supportive or never a team player, at all, but rather I mean being free of your ego’s emotional reactions and fixed opinions.


6. Staying not-personal rather than personal; being empathic

When I say being not-personal, I don’t mean not addressing others specifically or intimately in your communication. By being empathic I mean being “at one” with them but in a sense putting your own personality into limbo, as if the only personality there and the only feelings there are those of the other person.


This list could be significantly longer. But I trust you get the point that through being “loving” or “positive” in a true and unsuperficial way puts your awareness partly into a higher level.

It feels appropriate to save the explanation of how stillness leads to the Higher Mind for a later post.

[TraineeHuman]

There are misunderstandings about “nothing”, about what that whole notion may really mean. Unfortunately, I need to tackle some of these about now. Even if it is much ado about nothing, so to speak. One of the problems is that in the West we have the nonsensical notion of nihilism, and the fact that this has strongly influenced even some of the greatest Indian gurus. The latter came from a society which had been hugely dumbed down. In issues like this it had almost completely lost touch with insights from the glorious philosophical and psychological culture from centuries mostly around two thousand years ago, or one-and-a-half thousand years ago. (This isn’t just my opinion. It’s shared by leading scholars of comparative philosophy and comparative religion.)

Let me start by saying that there is no such thing as nothing – as far as we could ever possibly know. Think about it. You would have to be able to stand outside of the entire universe – which in itself is impossible, because wherever you go you will still yourself be part of the universe. “Nothing” has to be not only unknowable to us, but beyond and outside of anything we could ever possibly say.

I’ve been talking about “nothing” first because I want to say some things about “stillness” of various kinds. Earlier I have greatly emphasized the importance of stillness as the gateway to the Higher Mind. Well, we need that stillness quite simply because it makes some space that’s free of the ego’s control.

Then, when we experience such true stillness may I suggest it quite soon takes us into a kind of “background” of a higher stillness. I prefer to call that capital-S Stillness.

That background doesn’t exist on its own, though. In the Higher Mind everything is much more integrated. The Stillness there can’t exist without there simultaneously existing Activity in the Higher Mind. In the Higher Mind, what seem like contradictory elements exits together, but they rarely cancel each other out. Rather, it’s impossible to grasp “everything” all at once. All we can ever have is a partial view. That’s why from one view the very same reality of the Higher Mind can seem to strongly contradict what we see from a different view. Also, it’s only because our normal intellect has limitations that we want to leap from one pole to another and can’t conceive of a great consciousness so strong it can overcome all polarities by including them together in a great embrace.

But there is a sense in which the Stillness always comes first. Here it’s somewhat analogous to the concept of space in the physical world. Rather as everything in the physical world needs physical space to exist in, so in the Higher Mind all the Activity needs Stillness to exist in contrast to it and with it. I suspect the Light which Ray experiences and the sounds AwakeInADream experiences and the peaceful bliss I experience are all variations of that Stillness. Find that Stillness, and along with it you automatically find the Activity of the Higher Mind as well. Out of that Stillness, something which I suspect Ray would call the Word creates all the worlds. Its seeming passivity is what gives the Word the freedom and the omnipotence to create illimitable and infinite variation of cosmoses forever. This is why the great calm that you feel from the Stillness holds all the “energies” of the universe in it, in a kind of potential form whose power you can feel. It’s the most wonderful place, if you can only manage to experience it.

That Stillness has sometimes been known as “nothingness”, or “the Void”, but it’s not nothing by any means. That’s why I probably prefer to call it “everythingness”. In my experience, that bliss-filled “Void” pervades everything and it’s so vibrant it’s certainly not passive. It’s the most basic idea or reality, the one that comes before anything else, in ancient Asian spiritual traditions. I once started a thread in which I hoped it would be discussed here:
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...f-of-illusions

[Ankle Biter]

Posted by AwakeInADream (here)
Last week I had a brief OBE experience when I woke up in the morning which quickly turned into the clearest lucid dream I've ever had.......

TH Does the fact that my thinking mind stays present within my dreams without disturbing them suggest that I am operating therein out of my higher mind?
It does seem to give me more power with which to create...

Hello All, this is my first post here, after Bill Ryan's welcome thread that is. Forgive me if my question has been answered in previous pages though i did read many of them and quite interesting it was too, but perhaps missed the answer to the question the quote above leads me to....

I've had very similar experiences as described above. For quite some years from an early age.. Initially it all begun by accident when as a kid I'd awake out of a sleeping mind state. For some time that would be the extent as fear of paralysis forced me to actively awaken.

Cut to the point I did learn to settle and overcome the fears through various meditation techniques and through reading had the realization that the experience was akin to Lucid dreaming/OBE.

At what point can we start to separate the 2. I've had experiences where there was a smokey blue etheric being and then without just pure consciousness. At some instances the "dreamscape" was to the nth degree the exact same as the where my physical self was prior to going into the awakened state... before moving to different planes. And then also the dreamscape was something totally constructed by my will. And the only element that weren't there by me appeared to be other consciousness or entities.

what I've perceived to be lucid dreams are those instances where I've been aware I was dreaming and having a mindful state of being in that dream though the "picture" of where I was would be something I didn't make and consciously would react to random events. All else (nearly) I'd take to be OBE's.

EDIT: I'm interested in hearing how others distinguish or if answered thank you in advance for linked posts.

cheers.
Andy.

[Jake]

AnkleBiter... A big thank you, and WELCOME TO AVALON!!!

My take on it is this: consciousness works in a way that allows for us to operate in different 'states' of awareness,, simultaneously!! We have our dreaming mind, we have our waking mind, we have our sleeping mind(HS), and many different living representatives of our waking selves on many other astral planes of existence! All of which are YOU!!! Robert Bruce explains it quite clearly when he talks about 'the amazing mind split'... It becomes a challenge to understand these different aspects of self with a pure linear mindset, as MOST states of conscious being do not require the earth/human belief system filters!! As long as we keep an 'in the body' perspective,,, then it will always SEEM that these different states of being are separate.

I have had OBEs where I witnessed a 'dreaming Jake' carrying on as if 'he' was a completely separate figure,,, unaware that I was watching... I could even see what 'he' was dreaming!!! All the while,, being aware of myself laying in bed vibrating out of control!!! Wow!!! 3 meees!!!!!

The strangest part is when I 'came to' on mee couch,,, the memory of the dream was all that I was able to readily recall!!! I had to struggle to hold onto the memory of the OBE!!

Physical linear thinking does not allow for different stew of memory for the same period of 'time'... And this is a real problem!!!! If you cannot remember your OBEs,,, then how do you know you are having them??

The dreaming mind (as well as the projected mind) is just another way that we are experiencing creation and manifestation!!! The physical world is the same!!! It is all about creation/manifestation/ and experience!!! Vast fields of potentials animated by consciousness!!!!

Awesome first post,, anklebiter!!!!!!!

Jake...

[TraineeHuman]

Jake’s post explains it very clearly, though this has been talked about a little in the thread already. Ankle Biter, I guess if you enter
bi-location
in the space in the Search Thread option you’ll find some of the others, or else maybe the post before each of them as well.

Yesterday I received a PM from mr. white, who writes that what has now developed for him is a life on “two levels”. There’s the level everyone “normally” considers to be where they’re living their lives, and there’s an inner, deeper level. Others don’t see what they are doing and feeling and thinking here, but it seems mr. white does see all those things about them, very often. He’s very consciously living in two worlds at once. This “hidden” level is a deeper and higher level, in the astral. It’s part of your dark side, unless you can see it easily and often.

I used to have a very clairvoyant teacher who had a favorite way of getting me to face something. She would ask me a question about the particular subject. I would answer it verbally, and she would say: “Do you know what you actually said? You said …” and what would follow would be something very different from what my words had said or implied. For instance, one time she asked me a question about the effects that had resulted from my (by then dead) mother’s influence over me. I replied with words that expressed a negative view of how my mother had been in the area in question. But my teacher claimed that what I had said was something that was almost the opposite. I don’t remember the details now, but she claimed I had said something about my mother that was extremely affectionate. Since that was indeed coming from a deeper level inside me, in this case all that was necessary to resolve the whole issue (and the chain of issues it had caused) was for me to own that the affectionate answer really was genuine and part of me.

Jake referred to the Higher Mind as “the sleeping mind”. However, I believe I spend the majority of time with both the Higher Mind and the ordinary mind in operation – as “awake” minds. I guess the intensity with which the Higher Mind operates is different at different times, and sometimes the ordinary mind takes the foreground. Even then, I’m constantly bringing back the Higher Mind into the foreground for as long as that will last, and then doing so again, and again.

A great exercise for increasing the amount of time is simply to do whatever you can to bring it in whenever you get reminded. A great way to bring it in that works quickly is to feel the aliveness, if you’ve learnt to do that – which isn’t hard.

The majority of my posts over the last three months and more have been aiming to enable as many of you as possible to bring in both the Higher Mind and the ordinary waking mind at the same time. Even though some unresolved baggage undoubtedly remains in my dark side at some astral levels, my experience has been that bringing in the Higher Mind works to get rid of it quicker than any other way I know of. Serendipitously, the overcoming of the issue relating to my mother that I described above is a good example of how the Higher Mind can do just that.

[Freed Fox]

From post #881:

Posted by TraineeHuman (here)
Doesn’t everyone secretly yearn ever so strongly for “home”, though not having a clear idea of what it is or where it might be? Look inside yourself. Your body’s cells get attached to the physical space where you dwell. But there’s something much more. Doesn’t it feel like life is way too short? That somehow we deserve much better than what we seem to get? That we need to uncover some unknown veil on the other side of which what happens for us is we become everything that we were meant to be?

TH, much of what you say really does 'speak' to me, but the quote above resonates on such an incredible level... thank you. The yearning for home is very persistent (even though, as I type this, I am in the town in which I grew up and spent most of my life). That has been a deep sensation since my childhood, even though back then I was by no means an outcast. I had great friends, and a loving family, and no major health issues... yet, despite these blessings it somehow never felt quite right. I felt out of place, and bizarrely homesick.

The sensation that there is a veil - and something magnificently greater beyond it, just out of reach - is also undeniable to me. That particular feeling actually first came to me during the 'Gaia' experience I shared earlier on. It may not be as constant, but it comes on the strongest whenever I feel most in touch with my Higher Mind. To me, that seems to be a fairly positive indication.

However, I wonder; by 'everyone' longing for home, do you mean those of us here, or everyone in general? Because I must say, if the case is the latter, that hasn't been my experience. I've tried describing this feeling and that very experience to some of my friends and family before, and didn't really find any reciprocation on the matter. They seemed to have no idea what I meant, or merely nodded along politely, so I've since been a bit more 'mum' on the matter. Does it mean that some really are at home here? Were they afraid to admit the sensation? Have they not yet reached this revelation? Or did I simply fall too short in trying to describe the nearly-indescribable? I'm honestly not sure.

As per your request in #865, I'll quickly share a dream I had last week. It was not as striking to me as the few I've described before, but it stood out from more ordinary dreams in a couple of ways.

As I once mentioned, I only seem to fly in lucid dreams (and in those, I am never in an aircraft, but rather on my own accord as per Superman or what-have-you). This dream is the first I can remember in which that was not the case. I was piloting a bi-plane, taking off initially from the middle of a large, open wheat field. As I flew, I passed over a large city. The strange thing about the city was that its interior looked very modern, but the outskirts were medieval in appearance. A large, black, stone castle wall surrounded the city, rising as high as the skyscrapers therein. I was flying almost alarmingly fast, and yet I strangely felt very much in control of the vehicle. Still I was worried, but not because of the speed or my level of control. Rather, I was concerned with my bearings/sense of direction. For some unknown reason, I had the notion that I needed to land the plane in the same general area from which I had taken off, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to find it.

[AwakeInADream]

Posted by Freed Fox (here)
However, I wonder; by 'everyone' longing for home, do you mean those of us here, or everyone in general? Because I must say, if the case is the latter, that hasn't been my experience. I've tried describing this feeling and that very experience to some of my friends and family before, and didn't really find any reciprocation on the matter. They seemed to have no idea what I meant, or merely nodded along politely, so I've since been a bit more 'mum' on the matter. Does it mean that some really are at home here? Were they afraid to admit the sensation? Have they not yet reached this revelation? Or did I simply fall too short in trying to describe the nearly-indescribable? I'm honestly not sure.

Hi FreedFox! When I was younger I often wondered how other people could just get on with they're lives like nothing was wrong with the world, and I didn't know why they couldn't see what I could see, and why they didn't feel the same strong desire I felt to return home(or at least make sense of the world/find some truth). Now I'm more in touch with Me (The Higher Self), I don't feel so homesick anymore. I feel much more at home, and I didn't have to go anywhere, home has come to me(and I expect Source will do the same eventually). So even though I'm in the same old physical space I always was, I'm getting the sense that my world is very different from how it was before, and also very different from the world(s) of the distracted who never contemplate such stuff.

So I guess I'm part way to realizing the truth of this quote(but there's still a ways to go):

Posted by TraineeHuman (here)
To quote Julian of Norwich, the end of all our explorations will be to return to the place we started from, and to truly know it for the first time.

[AwakeInADream]

I think HS is taking me through some more 'mother issues', some of which like 'not feeling wanted' may have even sparked my desire originally to 'return home'. So maybe I chose to become the child of a busy single mother in order to trigger these feelings that would later become a powerful spiritual drive towards discovering the truth.

The dream I've just had that pointed me towards this was pretty average, like watching a movie. I didn't even feature in it until the end. Also the progression of events jumped randomly through time and I can't quite remember the sequence order so I'm just going to tell it in a logical order.

Part 1: There is a little girl in a busy crowd of people who are all bouncing along from A to B on large inflatable rubber balls(like space hoppers without the handles), and this little girl decides to let some of the air out of her ball so that she can sit down motionless whilst everyone else rushes by. She seems lost.

Part 2: I see the girl as a young woman. She is a struggling Hollywood actress with a drug problem, and had been in trouble with the Law(Karma?).

Part 3: The woman is now pregnant, but she is keeping it a secret so it doesn't harm her career. She has to sneakily eat chicken for the protein.

Part 4: Now she has had the baby, but she is still keeping it a secret so she can work. She keeps the baby hidden in a locker. She still seems to care for the baby, but baby is a burden to her. This part of the dream happened before part 3, so that the next thing to happen was the 'baby in the locker' became 'the chicken in the fridge' as if these symbols were interchangeable.

Part 5: So that's when I entered the dream as myself. The smell of the chicken made me hungry(LOL), so I go into the dream and the movie has finished. I'm there with two other men (3 persons in total: Personality, Soul and Spirit?), and I'm going to make chicken sandwiches for us all, but I'm just deciding how big to make them(one or two slices of bread).

It seems lately that my dreams are starting to immediately respond to whatever it is I'm thinking about at the time. I even had a brief flash of some Tarot cards just before I woke up. They were on a chart, Tarot cards to the left, and to the right of each card was a drawing for each card made up of interlocking rectangles. At the top of the right hand column was the heading 'Vibrational Meter Card' (Meter as in the poetic meter used in hymn's). So this is causing me now to think of the cards in terms of numerology and vibration as it relates to the Hebrew Alephbet. Also 'Meter' makes me think of hymn's and thus The Bible, and there is a section in Psalms now I'm keen to look at where there are 22 verses, each one headed by a Hebrew letter/number, that I may find is related to the Tarot in some way.

Normally I can't remember any words I read in dreams, I'm mostly only able to bring back numbers, so I see this as a little progress. I hope one day to be able to bring back full pages, maybe even the gist of full books.

[TraineeHuman]

Posted by Freed Fox (here)
The yearning for home is very persistent (even though, as I type this, I am in the town in which I grew up and spent most of my life). That has been a deep sensation since my childhood, even though back then I was by no means an outcast. I had great friends, and a loving family, and no major health issues... yet, despite these blessings it somehow never felt quite right. I felt out of place, and bizarrely homesick.

The sensation that there is a veil - and something magnificently greater beyond it, just out of reach - is also undeniable to me. That particular feeling actually first came to me during the 'Gaia' experience I shared earlier on. It may not be as constant, but it comes on the strongest whenever I feel most in touch with my Higher Mind. To me, that seems to be a fairly positive indication.

However, I wonder; by 'everyone' longing for home, do you mean those of us here, or everyone in general? Because I must say, if the case is the latter, that hasn't been my experience. I've tried describing this feeling and that very experience to some of my friends and family before, and didn't really find any reciprocation on the matter. They seemed to have no idea what I meant, or merely nodded along politely, so I've since been a bit more 'mum' on the matter. Does it mean that some really are at home here? Were they afraid to admit the sensation? Have they not yet reached this revelation? Or did I simply fall too short in trying to describe the nearly-indescribable? I'm honestly not sure.

Much of what people really feel is buried in their subconscious, in most cases.

Have you ever considered why people watch movies or plays -- even though they probably have only a superficial appreciation of why they feel drawn to such things. In the world of film, the Disney Studios went from being number five most successful to number one in a few years in the late seventies or early eighties. They did this by insisting that every movie screenplay had to portray a full heroic mythic journey. Soon the other major film studios felt they had no choice but to follow suit. A heroic mythic journey is one where the central character starts off in their ordinary life, but soon they encounter problems so difficult to overcome that they must find something higher and very different in themselves, which eventually finds a way to defuse all the difficulties. Then, transformed, they return to their ordinary lives, to home, but now they are so strong they are immune from getting problems similar to those they had before -- or, at least, such things will no longer be problems to the new them.

I'll quickly share a dream I had last week. It was not as striking to me as the few I've described before, but it stood out from more ordinary dreams in a couple of ways.

As I once mentioned, I only seem to fly in lucid dreams (and in those, I am never in an aircraft, but rather on my own accord as per Superman or what-have-you). This dream is the first I can remember in which that was not the case. I was piloting a bi-plane, taking off initially from the middle of a large, open wheat field.

As far as I know, a dream where you are the pilot of a plane symbolically means you are making huge breakthroughs in breaking through the limitations in your life. It would be quite interesting to hear some time about what kinds of life changes Ron Mauer has gone through with all the "flying" he has done, if he's willing to share some of it.

As I flew, I passed over a large city. The strange thing about the city was that its interior looked very modern, but the outskirts were medieval in appearance. A large, black, stone castle wall surrounded the city, rising as high as the skyscrapers therein. I was flying almost alarmingly fast, and yet I strangely felt very much in control of the vehicle.

If we continue with fast flying as a metaphor for change and transcending your limitations, the dream says something about how you are unwittingly taking some old habits or old identities with you unchanged despite the fact that the rest of you is going through big changes for the better. The black stone wall sounds to me like your ego trying to dominate or control -- throw shadows over, "defend" -- the new you.

[Finefeather]

Posted by Freed Fox (here)
The yearning for home is very persistent (even though, as I type this, I am in the town in which I grew up and spent most of my life). That has been a deep sensation since my childhood, even though back then I was by no means an outcast. I had great friends, and a loving family, and no major health issues... yet, despite these blessings it somehow never felt quite right. I felt out of place, and bizarrely homesick.

Hi Freed Fox
This is quite an interesting thing...and I have had this most of my life. To the point that I see most of my family as 'outsiders'...I was the only one in my entire family who had any interest in esoteric/spiritual matters until my daughter came along. We are extremely close and can spend hours together talking about life and spirituality etc. She is like an old friend to me and I have always regarded her as someone I needed to look after and protect...not just as a daughter...but because I strongly felt she and I are from the same place.
This may sound a bit off topic and also a bit suspect to some...so I am not going to take too long...but I was taken to a dimensional craft some time ago OB...only once...and was shown around and also was able to watch the creation of earth, speeded up from a screen...and my daughter was there also, but I did not know who she was at the time. Years later I discovered that she was the one in the craft with me...I have not told her this but it made sense when I realized the strong bond we have.
So I am more than convinced...together with my other personal experiences OB that some of us do not come from the earth system. So I would not be at all surprised if you also are not from this system. Please I do not want to start a new Star Wars series here ...but just thought I would mention this to you.

Many young people I meet in my life are definitely not from this system...and this is in line IMO with the current wave of new young thinkers...like Indigo's etc.

Now I want to some how relate this to the Higher Mind so TH does not send me a threatening letter so here goes...and this is based on my current experience and consciousness.

I do not see the higher mind in the same way as is traditionally thought of by many. I have no problem with the way it is been presented here neither because at the level we are discussing this...I think it is ok.
To me the Higher Mind is what I call the Causal Consciousness, and the true Spiritual Being, the true Self, which I call the Monad, is at this stage, in most humans, situated there...in this Causal consciousness. We are evolving and so is the Spiritual Being (Monad). This Monad is the one which drives us towards higher consciousness. Now the Causal Consciousness...(and there are of cause higher ones also, but we have not yet achieved them)...is the one which has memory of all the lives and experiences we have had in our long evolution. As we grow and become more aware we make more and clearer contact with the Causal Consciousness (Higher Mind) and this gives us access to our past history as well.

So you are IMO in touch with your Causal Consciousness (Higher Mind) and are remembering or filtering some deep feeling through of your past. Now I am only just making this up but it can go something like this: You have had many incarnations on another system...and you have made good strides in your consciousness expansion there...and decided to come to the earth to do some work...the human body has its own set of rules in the form of the configuration of the matter it is composed of and so full remembrance for you is a challenge...but you are getting some memories through and these are the ones which are causing you to feel home sick...because you have spent a lot of time elswhere, and not on the earth system.

Of course we need to keep in mind that we are cosmic Beings and so like any other similar feeling...being homesick is just a sign of past connections which we need to just cherish and put down as experience...a new task awaits you here...seek it out and work on it dear brother.

Take care and much Love
Ray

[Ankle Biter]

Thank you Jake for the nice welcome. Being new to the site I'm already feeling a very good vibe, which is very refreshing as
much as it is integral for website that brings people together to share experiences and learning. I think its a very important
spoke in the wheel having a nurturing environment so that energy is focused on mutual development.

Also thanks TraineeHuman for the search tip because I used a bit of time to digest what Jake spoke about with regards to Linear Thinking.
Trying to apply that to go back through my memories of past OB experiences. Having done that now I'm going to see what the search result yields.

I will like to at some point share some of my OB experiences with the group too since I've never really been able to talk about it
and obtain feedback in a forum like here both in online world and offline. Happy days every body.

[soleil]

im going to attempt to post a few things - now that i have caught up on this thread.

TH and all, on friday night or saturday night i had a moment to myself as i fell asleep. i have been slowly working to bring my emotions and balance myself in relation to my mother. i meditated and the only thing that popped up (from H.M) was to embrace my mothers soul conciousness. as another poster mentioned that in between lives, they saw their brother (i think it was) and all they felt was love. even though IRL, the brother doesnt talk to them. so i meditated on my mom's soul. i hugged it, embraced it, with everything i wish i could do literally. i love(d) her in this moment and felt love in return. right now just typing this brings tears to my eyes. it was a wonderful feeling because lately all signs are pointing to moving on with my life, in a positive manner, even if that means shutting her out of it. i wish i could help take care of my mom in this life, and have a great relationship. anyways it felt really great to be able to "love" her and be ok with it. i love my moms soul, i cant stand her personality.
(by no means would/do i shut my daughter from her, AT ALL. i simply will keep interaction at minimum if possible, or have mediators, i do have support from my other family members and sympathy for this scenerio).


freedfox/awake, i want to recommend to you the new daft punk album. i know this sounds silly, but its called random access memories and its pretty great and creating or bringing up memories of my childhood/the past. it is an album, creating 50s,60s,70s,80s,90s and future. so im going on a limb to think it might get you (two) reminiscing, because i find that while listening to this album(about 20x now) i've had a lot of nice moments, and they inspire new ah'ha's on where to go from here.

TH/ray and everyone else, i want to recommend you all listen to the song 'beyond' because its pretty great (understatement). and very applicable. (i have youtube blocked here at work, but here goes an attempt to find a link to listen)....

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QbEKV9sV0Z0

TH, ive been reading about ancient (everything) FOL, runes(futhark), tree religions, oghams, ancient deities--- and would love to learn what you know on that too if you ever have time. its a huge topic, but i trust you to point me into areas that are applicable with learning whats important (truly).



love beyond love

[Joe Akulis]

Hopping back in to catch up on the the past week or so.

"The HS takes, if you like, all perspectives at once. In order to do so, though, what it needs to do is something that seems like shunning, or being intolerant of, physicality – sexuality, money, food, possessions, etc. The truth is, the HS doesn’t shun or demonize these at all, but it does downplay their significance. It does so purely to make room for a world full of more than the things physicality, of physical pleasure and physical pain. The HS is about having “both and”. Both the physical body and its personality, and also, equally, everything that lies quite beyond these. To give an example, tantric sexuality spiritualizes sex. This means that one still experiences the joys of physical and etheric sex, but a spiritualization of these as well. Tantric sex, if carried out correctly, is a totally valid form of meditation. That’s only one example. But while I’m on the subject, I would say (as also perhaps might Joe) the Tantric way is the only one that’s truly the HS’s way – but you have to truly find the HS first."

Having trouble wiping the smile off my face...


I would like to mention the way I see a lot of things coming together recently. It has to do with learning about ourselves.

I took great interest in Dolores Cannon's QHHT method when I first heard about it. Where she was teaching people how to use the hypnotherapy skills she had acquired over the years to assist people. This QHHT method to her was the most effective way of helping people she had learned. Why? Well, what she tries to do in the session with someone is regress them back to a prior life, usually to one dictated by the higer self. She does this by having someone in trance visualize being on a cloud in the sky and then slowly descending down into whatever past life the HS deems is most useful to visit at that time. Then she asks you to start describing what you see. After going through some past memory like this, she then regresses you forward to just beyond the end of that life. Where you are in between lives. This is a neat way she has discovered for tapping into a person's HS in real-time. Meaning, the therapist can then carry on a two-way converstation with that person's HS and ask questions about why the HS led them to that particular past life memory. It almost always has to do with something that this person needs to "clear" (to use a term from Bill's Hubbard thread), or something that they "need to face" (if you've been reading this thread). :-)

That's the realization I'm having by the way. It's that Avalon is helping to bring together and help us all to learn about all the different ways people have learned over the centuries for dealing with past experiences that are clogging things up here and now. Past-life regression, auditing, the list goes on. I was able to accomplish it by just meditating quietly once and saying to my physical body, "What's wrong?" That one took me about another 15 minutes to recover from. Many thanks to the people on Avalon who taught me some useful grounding techniques.

The main trouble I see with Dolores' method is that once the hypnotherapist realizes they got their hands on some supreme being that they can fire questions at and get the answers to the universe, they can be led astray. If you wander off the topic of just helping a client to work on the next best things for them to be resolving, and start asking questions about what's going to happen on December 21st, then you're gonna start pulling in stuff that you should be taking with a grain of salt, in my opinion.

The funny thing about these various methods of dealing with stuff from our past is: there is always someone who wants to know how they can do this without having to pay someone, or having to visit with anyone else, or is there an easy to read book that we can read on our own to accomplish it all. Which is why I still prefer to let those threads rest and hang out mostly on this one. Because I share the same sentiment. And what I learned a few months ago from here is that it's not that difficult to designate your HS as your own auditor/hypnotherapist/whatever. Just spend 15 minutes putting this subject matter in the forefront of your mind before you call it a night. Just whisper to the ceiling and say, "I'm ready for some more." I like to sit on the mattress just before laying down and visualize energy coming up from the Earth and spiraling up through each of the chakras, to sort of clear out the carburetor.

You will find yourself waking up with pretty vivid memory of the dreams from that night. And their meanings, thanks to the assistance being offered here, combined with the trust of your instincts which you will develop, points you right at the things you need to work on. And it didn't cost me a dime... Nice.

I've had some doozies the past couple months. And sometimes it takes a week or two of contempating them. They become clearer over time sometimes. Other times they are crystal clear the moment you wake up. Like one I had that I knew without a doubt the second I awoke was a message to me about not going around trying to hit people over the head with the truth. You have to learn how to quell your enthusiasm with all the things you learn here on Avalon. :-) It is wrong to confront people about their beliefs. Wait for the curious to come into your vicinity.

Thank you for your words, TH:
"The HS is about having “both and”. Both the physical body and its personality, and also, equally, everything that lies quite beyond these."
This is what I'm slowly beginning to realize. And it's good.

Joe

[soleil]

great post seeker. ive had the same profound moments, much like yourself and others. its not as quick as im sure it is when you pay for it. but the journey is so much better, and revealing.

[Ron Mauer Sr]

Posted by TraineeHuman (here)
As far as I know, a dream where you are the pilot of a plane symbolically means you are making huge breakthroughs in breaking through the limitations in your life. It would be quite interesting to hear some time about what kinds of life changes Ron Mauer has gone through with all the "flying" he has done, if he's willing to share some of it.

I really love the flying dreams in any form: piloting a small aircraft, riding in a small shuttle space craft as a passenger, flying a magic carpet, or flying without the need of an aircraft. Often the flying is during the night. When the experience is of flying a small plane, I have the pilot's license and the skill, but not a recent certification by a flight instructor. So I am naughty and fly anyway hoping that I do not get caught.

I do not think my life changing experiences are interestingly significant to most.

Around 15 yrs old (1957) I had an intense but brief interest in flying saucers (George Adamski's Flying Saucers Have Landed) and learning about our solar system.

Joined the Marine Corps at 17 yrs old. That was a shocking, but common experience right out of high school. (1960-1964)

After marriage #1 (1969-1975) my interest was intensely focused on metaphysical subjects, including the Rosicrucian Order. When the Rosicrucian Order suggested that I mention them in my will I realized something was wrong and quit.

During early 1977, my house sold, I quit my job and moved to Va Beach to learn from Edgar Cayce's A.R.E., psychic readings and more. At summer's end my expectations (psychic predictions) did not materialize and I thought of myself as a failure for selling the house and quitting my job. While packing up the truck to move back to Charlottesville, and thinking how foolish I had been, I heard the big booming voice say "No!". Thinking the voice was saying "No! [do not move]", I replied "You may not need a job but I do." I was offered my old job back. Later I realized the voice was saying "No! [you are not a failure]."

For a year or so a let my metaphysical interests be dormant. Then I was given a book, Carlos Castenada's The Fire Within. The switch was turned on again and I was off and running. Read all his books. But I had trouble correlating what Don Juan had to say with what I thought I already knew. My interest ebbed about the time of a dream about Jesus. In the dream, Jesus (or possibly an imposter) was lying in bed while I was standing on the edge of the bed getting ready to dive into the darkness. Jesus showed me how to grab the back of knees and pull myself back onto the bed. Rather a strange experience I thought.

In the early 90's I was introduced to conspiracy and ET information from the late William Cooper. Not believing any of it, I set out to prove the info as being incorrect and the investigation started. Soon I suspected that Cooper was more right than wrong.

Soon after, channeled information from Barbara Marciniak got my attention. Reptilans, time travel, dimensional travel, Earth's history and more. Again, I could not get enough quickly enough.

My second wife and I hosted a Monday night meditation group for a while that was really nice and well attended for a while. Sometimes the meetings would include channeling, other times it would include healing modalities, Reiki and more. I had hoped that we could establish an intentional community on the 68 acres in rural Nelson county with some of the meditators. That idea did not bear fruit, relationships changed, no one had resources to purchase part of the land. So the idea fizzled.

A few years later, marriage #2 (1982-1999) ended. Wife #2 got a boyfriend and we divorced. I cannot afford another.

I still have part of the original "Gateway Farm" where I built a tiny energy efficient earth sheltered home on Stargate Lane. Where do these names come from?

[TraineeHuman]

Posted by Finefeather (here)
I do not see the higher mind in the same way as is traditionally thought of by many. I have no problem with the way it is been presented here neither because at the level we are discussing this...I think it is ok.
To me the Higher Mind is what I call the Causal Consciousness, and the true Spiritual Being, the true Self, which I call the Monad, is at this stage, in most humans, situated there...in this Causal consciousness. We are evolving and so is the Spiritual Being (Monad). This Monad is the one which drives us towards higher consciousness. Now the Causal Consciousness...(and there are of cause higher ones also, but we have not yet achieved them)...is the one which has memory of all the lives and experiences we have had in our long evolution. As we grow and become more aware we make more and clearer contact with the Causal Consciousness (Higher Mind) and this gives us access to our past history as well.

So you are IMO in touch with your Causal Consciousness (Higher Mind) and are remembering or filtering some deep feeling through of your past. Now I am only just making this up but it can go something like this: You have had many incarnations on another system...and you have made good strides in your consciousness expansion there...and decided to come to the earth to do some work...the human body has its own set of rules in the form of the configuration of the matter it is composed of and so full remembrance for you is a challenge...but you are getting some memories through and these are the ones which are causing you to feel home sick...because you have spent a lot of time elswhere, and not on the earth system.

Of course we need to keep in mind that we are cosmic Beings and so like any other similar feeling...being homesick is just a sign of past connections which we need to just cherish and put down as experience...a new task awaits you here...seek it out and work on it dear brother.

Take care and much Love
Ray

I agree with you, Ray, that one “layer” of our Higher Mind involves the recovery and resolution of our past memories, most of which come from past lifetimes, and as a matter of fact these aren’t ever all from this planet, either, for anyone. For my own purposes I prefer to work from a higher level than that, where that’s possible. But as I’ve mentioned in the past in some other threads, it’s certainly true that in meditation and psychotherapy and self-enquiry we eventually deal with issues mostly from other lifetimes, even though many would-be advanced meditators seem to have no awareness that this is an important part of what they are actually working on when they meditate. I haven’t been talking about recovery of past-life memories in this thread because I want people to start from the “level” they are currently at in understanding their Higher Mind. Though I am throwing in hints here and there which if followed up fully enough I believe could indeed possibly help someone to reach a higher level than what you call “Causal Consciousness”.

I also agree with you that those individuals who have more recently arrived on this planet from elsewhere certainly have a strong sense that they are not “at home” and that they somehow belong in a less “fallen” race and world than this one. I went on about this very topic at length in
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...y-true-origins
, where I also talked about the fact that prior to this life I have been a guardian angel working with humans on this planet, and am due to return to continuing in that role after my current physical life ends.

I also have no doubt, though, that subconsciously all humans do have a strong yearning for a truer “inner home”, even if most of them may not be so conscious of it.

Just for interest value, I’ll now say a little more about my own “past lifetimes” of a human variety – or, rather, the closest thing I have to that. As best as I can tell – and have been told by a number of current guardian angels -- , this is my first lifetime in a human form. But it seems that to cope with coming here I “adopted” some “past life” memories of some other humans. I don’t agree with everything Dolores Cannon says, but her notion of “imprints” seems to fit with this. Also her claim that the first wave of Volunteers weren’t very well prepared for this planet, and she claims many of us even committed suicide at some ages. That also fits well with my experience (not the suicidal urges part).

Some millions of years before humans were on this planet, there had been an intelligent species genetically engineered from horses. I was a guardian angel working with these for considerably longer than I have been with humans. Some of the descendants of these are still on the planet, and today are the whales and dolphins. Somehow, most of the “imprints” I chose to bring with me into this life seem like they may have been better suited to incarnating into a society of the whales’ and dolphins’ ancestors. Those ancestors were much more interested in the fine arts and philosophy and spirituality than humans typically are.

So, I brought in a large number of “imprints” from past humans living the spiritual life. The strongest of these seems to have been a fourth century Chinese Ch’an [=Zen] Buddhist head monk, but I also have a former high priest of Shintoism, a Theravadan Buddhist from Cambodia who was eventually sent to Bangkok to supposedly be initiated into all the higher esoteric knowledge, mostly in a secret underground building that shone with a vivid bright blue color and was shaped like a giant egg, a male sadhu who spent his life traveling up and down the Ganges, a female sadhu who did much the same, a Spanish nun who was burnt at the stake during the Inquisition, and various others.

On the fine arts side I have, for example, a man from nineteenth century Kentucky called William Johnston. He used to write and perform in minstrel shows for a living, traveling around the South of the US, especially the deep South. I’m pretty sure he composed and wrote the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain”, but maybe the most significant thing he did was to invent the convention of “blackface” in minstrel shows. This made it almost impossible to tell who was black and who was white among the performers in a minstrel show. I also have a successful nineteenth century French novelist who spent much of his life also being a fur trapper in Canada, a successful German composer from the eighteenth century, and so on.

Some of my “imprint” lives were also quite ordinary and dull. But I had very few that helped me communicate in a human way one-to-one with people in everyday situations. This led me to rely heavily for many years on a very cute and intelligent and charming African boy aged eleven. One amazing thing, too, was that as I learnt to see “pictures” of what was inner, somehow many people became able to see the African boy’s face superimposed over mine. Women loved to mother him and usually couldn’t resist him, but by the time I was in my twenties there was a problem when it came to relating intimately with women my own age. Such women would after a while stop being impressed by a male who continually presented a “little boy” identity to them. They wanted someone who knew how to be adult with them as a man as well. It took a considerable while before I learnt to solve this difficulty – much longer than normal.

Another part of the frustration was that for a decade and a half I found myself in a similar position to most people, in the sense that I had only four or five identities to use in my life in this physical world. The eleven-year-old African was one of these, for me. But to me it was highly frustrating because, unlike most people, I was also highly aware of being able to take on possibly an unlimited number of different identities or even points of view in the world of consciousness, but I didn’t know how to bring them into the physical. Today I would describe that problem as not having learnt how to Descend the Higher Mind into the physical. Today this is no problem.

Believe it or not, another “imprint” I used was that of a Roman general known as Pompey. I don’t know much about Roman history, but his version goes something like this. He came from possibly the richest and most aristocratic of all Roman families. To him, the important thing was having class, and he had it in spades. He regarded, say, Julius Caesar as an upstart. He preferred to be known as “Maximus”, which I understand was a title reserved for those generals who achieved the most victories. His driving passion was to turn ancient Rome into a place of high culture and civilization that would equal if not surpass that of ancient Greece. (Note how we have one more connection to an “imprint” very interested in promoting the fine arts and philosophy and spirituality.) He considered it was a done deal that the Roman Senate would lose its control over Rome, and would be replaced by an emperor. He wanted to be that emperor, and to turn the direction of Roman civilization to a much more peaceful and refined and noble direction. He considered his biggest mistake was that he openly told the entire Roman Senate to go jump in the lake when they didn’t agree with what he wanted to do at a certain point. According to his memories, this created too many enemies for him, and it was such enemies who betrayed him in such a way that, despite his skills as a military tactician, he lost the competition for who would be emperor to Julius Caesar. Of course, Caesar was assassinated, but his chosen successor became the first emperor shortly after, and was followed by Tiberius, who was Julius Caesar’s closest surviving male relative.

So, as an ET soul trying to behave in a human way, I would come across as naïve and “little boyish”. But then my second identity would be almost the opposite – a benevolent would-be emperor, who demanded respect from everyone, no matter who they were.

Probably my third most commonly used “imprint” identity was that of the Ch’an Buddhist head monk. He made me extraordinarily peaceful on an inner level when outwardly I would be somewhat at sea or anxious at trying to cope with behaving as if I instinctively knew how to be human when I didn’t, try as I might.

One interesting point is that I don’t see much distinction between the imprints
I took on and hitchhikers. That’s because the imprints have acted much like hitchhikers, and caused me considerable grief. For instance, the Ch’an monk came from a culture and time where it would have been monstrously unethical and egoical for a “spiritual” person to invest money in anything, however ethical the investment might be. The monk had enough influence on my subconscious to sabotage all my attempts at wealth creation for decades.

My own limited research suggests that maybe fifty per cent of hitchhikers are in fact a person’s own past-life personalities. (Many Avalonians seem to very misguidedly believe that “souls” can be captured etc. No, the truth is that souls can’t at all, but personalities most certainly can. Personalities are electromagnetic fields. They are created by our (4D) emotions and our (5D) thoughts. Soul comes from 6D and higher.)

Another strange question is, I can’t tell whether or not I am now living out the lives of all my imprint lives simultaneously to this one. Since the past and future are in fact happening in the Now the same as the present is, this is quite possible.

I may not be able to post a response for a few days to some of the recent posts, but I will do so eventually.

[soleil]

i wasnt sure if this fits the thread, but i predicted two events that happened recently...now i dont feel proud about it because they werent beneficial or anything...
first one was for an hour two late last week, i kept having a weird thought about a spider in my hair. now im not sure if this thought happened the day before or the day of, but in the morning before work, i pulled all my hair to the side, and touched a lump. (ew), which flung on to the carpet. in the moment i was completely zen, (i dont know how) i turned on the light and hunted on the carpet to see what it was, and i ended up finding a *huge* spider! after having the thought one was in there/going to be in there, and i am NOT a bug person! i want to add, that after i found the spider and disposed of it i immediately turned into a girl, and squealed. again, the zen moment, not sure how i managed that. but HM was most obviously involved until i could let loose.

and the other was my fiance hurting himself - as i told him to wear gloves while moving probably a few days before (probably early last week) and i specifically said, "wear your gloves or something might happen and you'll end up slicing your wrist."... and i just want to add, this is very weird, as im not normally morbid AT ALL. i dont even THINK about these things/events. and right after saying it, i didnt know why i said that.

but it happened, last thursday he ended up having a storage locker drop on his forearm right by his wrist and he wasnt wearing his gloves. his slice could have been worse (artery), but thankfully it wasnt. its IS quite a nasty cut though; and he should have got stitches...

anyways, i received a *surprise* warning and a *serious* warning.

woah