Illinois central, Monday morning rail

Been on trains, planes and automobiles. Nearly home now. In a few hours I get up and catch a plane for home.

I like the train, with a couple exceptions; in general, it's neat. Below is what I was blogging earlier, but couldn't get online to post until now.

o0o

just after dark, 3rd December 2006, somewhere in Illinois

I am nearly alone in the dark. A few minutes ago it was light, and the train was rocking and rolling along, and everything seemed normal. Then all the lights went off, and in a sudden eerie silence, we slid to a stop.

Not a planned stop. It's dark outside, yet somehow the trees are recognizeably black-on-black as figures in the night. A very odd, muted wailing-whine has begun, two strands of anti-harmony that made the other few people in my small train car giggle nervously. They say now that the power has gone out and the engineers are working to restore it. The world outside seems like a lonely planet, with not even a moon to reflect on the featureless snow.

My novel is no fun in the dark, so I turned on my computer to blog.

I'm feeling a bit entranced today, maybe following on my attempt to seriously meditate last night in my sleeper car. Today I feel as if I am a halfling, caught between two worlds. One world is Mundania, as Piers called it, where all things are logical, the 'real' world as we pretend to know it so we'll feel better thinking reality is really that small. The other world is something else, something filled with shapes and shadows, with astronomically improbable convenience of circumstance showing up just on time and then receding into the unmanifest like that is normal. It feels as if there are vague but living energies reaching right into my body, yet somehow a few steps toward the astral part of it, tugging on me, calling like a destiny I recognize as part of me but can't seem to remember its name.

All day today, thinking about returning to my 'normal' life at home, it has felt like something in a dream. I have the oddest sense, as if all of reality is a total illusion, a game that we are all playing, supporting each others' delusions, psychically arranging to only meet or talk about the points of reality we think we have in common for the most part. It feels as if there are two very distinct worlds: one on the surface, that we think is the normal one, but is actually an interesting veneer, woven like a group dream out of the strings of time. The other, the 'real' world, a vastly deeper, infinitely more complex world, is what is really 'real', but which the liliputians on the surface of my reality dismiss as dream and fantasy. I try not to pay too much attention to it. I don't want the Lilliputians to know just how different I am from most of them. I don't want them to know I am not a character on their safe surface world. My deeper roots only frighten people. My adulthood is a testament to my dedicated attempt to learn how--and successfully--convince the people around me that we share an agreement about reality.

I felt the pull today. I haven't felt that since... 1993-5, my Bewilderness phase. I felt the pull of "coincidence I can count on." It was pitch black. "Give me light while I type the password," I thought, only to instantly have a light from some engineer outside flash in my window on my keyboard. The moment I finished typing it was past. Are those precognition... the arrangement of the present to fit the impending... or? I wasn't surprised somehow. I have been talking with my body today. My beautiful friend. My earth elemental that has been so unrecognized and unthanked most of my life. It is indeed the ultimate Warder: the strength that carries me, defends me, anchors me in this world. My body has been my best friend lately. Ever since I nearly poisoned it by taking that medicine I was allergic to... I have been suddenly more aware of it, aware that maybe I am a selfish shallow brat not to have realized that my body has its own destiny, its own life, its own joy in living, and my ignoring it and abuse of it is so unfair. Body and I have become much closer the last day or so in particular.

Today I'm distracted. I want to know truth. Back in that bewilderness era, I knew it. I could feel it, because it was so strongly inside me that I could recognize the distortions, distractions, confusions and evasions that stripped truth of its natural beauty. Nobody would believe. It doesn't matter. I could feel 'the red thread of truth' as I called it, in what people said, in anything I read. I could separate truth from intent, another subtlety. It occurs to me to wonder why it is that the moment I launched into remote viewing well over a decade ago, the massive conscious psi that I had accepted as simply novel and inexplicable, actually went away almost entirely. It is as if a person who dreamed throughout their entire daily experience, suddenly was told, "Look here, how fascinating--you can dream when you sleep!"--and suddenly, something about the mental model of that, caused dreams to cease except during sleep.

Did it wake my ego left brain up to protect me? How did I go from being impossibly psychic as thoroughly as I breathed, to studying psi yet having almost none of it manifest anymore, except in occasional dreams or experiences?

I think... I think that is what I need to make a decision about. It is my focus, as the Narrator made clear to me years ago. You get what you focus upon, as Seth said. I always do. I am always intense. But I let my focus get distracted and diffused and join the drama-queen of surface reality. I've used "doing" things to cloak awareness of "being".

Until now, I haven't felt like I had the energy to live the degree of self-integrity that I maintained in those years, that allowed me that kind of awareness. The effort to maintain awareness of every thought, to pull back from every tempting daydream, and from all the small sarcasms of daily life, was huge. It was a bliss of awareness, with the exhilaration of courage, and the unbelievable exhaustion of constant internal change. I was so happy, and yet, I recognized the sheer amount of work that it took to hold that state of mind, state of being, state of grace, was so much more work than most anybody would be willing to invest.

I miss that, for the first time in a long time.

[later]

So, as usual the power was out in our train car. Nobody woke us to tell us we were at the kansas city train station. I woke up just in time to see the lights, realize where we were, get my stuff and get out the door before the train drove off with me to somewhere else.

The Kansas City "Union Station" is apparently the biggest in the country except New York. I feel about it rather like I do the Atlanta airport. On one hand, you have to admit that it's gigantic and it's got tons of stuff and so on. On the other hand, if you make the mistake of feeling like the important thing is getting on a train or a plane, then your feelings maybe different. In Atlanta, even with trams and moving sidewalks the place is so huge you need to wear running shoes and just ship your luggage UPS to your destination instead. At the KC union station, once you finally get around the big area with the little train and all the shops and diners and such, and get yourself into where the actual train ticket counter etc. is, once you have done everything and there's nothing more to do than get on or off a train, THEN you get to go outside, in like -2F degree weather, and walk about a city block down this sidewalk, and then this lonnnnnnng flight of steps (there is an elevator fortunately), and then down this lonnnng sidewalk beside the train. Should your nose fall off from the freezing cold prior to that, there is nobody to help you. Train cars, like hotel rooms, are always the farthest possible distance they can be from wherever you start. It's like some kind of cosmic law. I found myself blessing myself for having shipped my luggage home, all but my personal laptop and a small carryon. It was still hard work!

I was waiting to see if my kid or my friend came online. After insisting I couldn't leave her, the kid has disappeared for half an hour now. My friend is probably working or busy or something. I should go take a shower but I'm freezing here. I think I'll see if the radiator in this cheap motel room is capable of anything more interesting than what I feel. At this rate I'm going to put my coat and scarves back on and just sleep in my clothes.

Meanwhile... being away from home, although not a huge thing as I worked during it, was at least 'away from home' which was a nice break. If I could just get enough sleep now, to feel human and strong, I can begin the priority shift I came to while away.

Must sleep now.