Cat Telepathy: They don't have to

The examples of telepathic contact with cats, in my last posts, all show the richness that grows in one's life as one learns how to awaken the senses. I taught a brief class in how to do this once. When I saw one of my students a week later, he said he had tried it with his cat. I was intrigued.

What happened? I asked. He smiled a bit ruefully.

Well, I thought to her, “Why don’t we talk together like people do?”

And she answered – or at least I heard in my head – “Because I don’t have to!” And then she turned around and walked away waving her tail.

I will admit I cracked up. It was so feline.

Was it a woman’s voice? I asked him when I had stopped giggling.

Yes, he answered thoughtfully, it was.

So one of the first lessons we learn, in exercising our new-found powers of sensory awakening, is that other things are not only alive, aware and responsive, they also have their own opinions about us, which may or may not be complimentary.

This is why it is so important to approach all things with respect and kindness. Bring gifts. 

She will want to talk to you, I pointed out, if you have something interesting to talk about. Cats are very practical and self-centered creatures. I suggested that next time his cat is sitting quietly and dinner time is near, beam a big close-up image of her dinner, complete with fragrance. After a moment, ask her mentally,

"Do you want some food?"

If she bounces to her feet and starts meowing hungrily, ask her mentally which flavor of food she would like. See if you can get some input from her that is in her own interest.Then, of course, bring her the food she asked for.

He said he would try it, but I have not seen him since. So I do not know if he followed up, or he and his cat lapsed back into companionable silence.

Cat Telepath: Blackie

The last posts have told the stories of my telepathic moments with cats named Lilith, Twinkle and Tigger. After Twinkle and Tigger went their ways I got Bootsie and Blackie as tiny kittens, so small at first that I could hold one in the palm of each hand. Bootsie was Twinkle all over again, neutered male version – fluffy, white, affectionate, dumb as a post but you had to love him. Whatever came up he would charge into it and get mixed up in it somehow.

Blackie, on the other hand, from the very first developed the habit of waiting quietly underneath something while Bootsie got himself dirty or scolded or wet or whatever the outcome was of his latest rampage into the unknown. Bootsie was the kind of cat that curiosity kills, but Blackie was a Witness. The things Bootsie did that worked out well, Blackie would also begin to do. The things that got Bootsie into a mess, Blackie would not imitate. Why should he get his paws dirty? Like Tigger, he was the smart one.

And I communicated with him telepathically from the very first. Bootsie had the same opportunities, but like Twinkle he wasn’t that much of a talker – he was more a kinaesthetic learner. Bootsie didn’t need to talk about things to figure them out, he needed to fall over them and get them stuck in his fur. But Blackie took to telepathy like a natural. As a result I have had casual conversations with him all his life. He has heard me tell the Tigger story, and has his own inscrutable plans about how he will handle it when he finally leaves his own cat-body for the Next Step.

They were all my teachers – four wise souls in furry little bodies, that snuggled with me, and ate my food, and in exchange gave me the gift of sensory awakening as they understood it. Blackie sleeps on the front porch as I write these words.

Cat Telepathy: Tigger

The last post told about my cat Twinkle’s communications breakthrough, and the good use she made of it. Tigger, who as I have said was a lot more alert mentally than Twinkle, watched all this taking place. I saw him watching Twinkle ask me directly if she could go out, and watching me as I responded. Then one day, some weeks after Twinkle had established this as a family tradition, I heard,

Can I go out, please?

But it was a young man’s voice, quite different from Twinkle, who always sounded like a party girl. I went to the door and Tigger shot between my legs and outside. Not Twinkle.

I thought that was impressive, and went off to work without much more thought about it. But when I got home I lay on the sofa to rest. Tigger came up and sat on my stomach, his furry, orange-striped face looking right into my own. He was usually a bit more standoff-ish, so I thought that was friendly. I should have known he had an agenda. For as soon as he got himself settled, I heard,

Can we talk about other things? I stared into his golden eyes for a moment while I processed that my cat had just asked me a question. He looked away. It was so natural that I responded as I might to any attempt at conversation.

Do you mean besides going out? I wondered.

Yes, besides that.

You see that we can. Did you want to talk about something? He paused a moment, still looking down.

I heard you talking the other day, Matthew, about how people live a lot longer than cats. Is that true?

It occurred to me far too late that I should not have talked about that in front of Tigger. But – I didn’t think it mattered! Now I realized it did. He was upset. I had to help him to a better place with it.

Yes, I admitted reluctantly, cats live fifteen or twenty human years – people maybe four times as much.

Four times -- ?

We live as long as four cats.

Oh! Look, if we can talk – aren’t we – I mean – aren’t we the same?

Yes, we are both souls, but in different bodies.

Why are you in a human body and I am in a cat body?

Have you been wondering about that?

I have. I don’t understand it.

Well, I don’t know how these things are determined. But what I am sure about is that our bodies are temporary.

Temp –uh – what?

They don’t last forever. But we do. We go on. We get other bodies. Or we have no body at all. The body dies, the soul lives on.

And I have a – soul – even though I am in a cat body?

Surely if we can communicate like this, we both must have souls to communicate with.

Oh! Another long pause. What do souls do when they die?

I thought of Spiritualism, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and modern accounts of the Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) of people who have flat-lined or legally died on the operating table, but recovered. 

They leave their body. They can see it lying dead below them. They see darkness all around, but in one direction there is a light. The light is God. The souls go to that Light and by following it they find their way home.

Home?

Where God is.

Oh! Who is God?

The conversation went on for the better part of an hour. I don’t think we resolved the last question too clearly, but Tigger grasped the concept.

From then on he often came and sat on my stomach when I lay on the couch, and at his instigation we would pursue philosophical questions, which seemed to interest him greatly. He also had met My Lady and was deeply impressed by Her, so he was interested in what I was learning about Her.

The day came when he was an old cat, too sick to go on any more. We took him to the vet, who would give him the death shot to end his discomfort. First she gave him an intravenous to revive him so we could say goodbye. Even so, he was pretty logy. Then she connected the poison syringe to the intravenous.

Suddenly I heard Tigger’s voice, familiar to me by now. But it was circling in the air over our heads! My wife was completely dissolved in tears. The vet looked sick and unhappy. There was a dead cat on the table. And this same crazy cat was dancing round and round above our heads, crying out happily,

Matthew! I’m not a cat any more! I’m not in that body! I’m not a cat! What should I do?

He sounded so joyous to be freed of that heavy, hurting, dying cat-body! Gathering my scattered wits (I was pretty upset myself), I thought to him

Do you see a Light anywhere, Tigger? Look all around you.

A pause, then wonderingly, No, I see no light. It is all gray.

Look again! Look harder, Tigger! Look for the Light!

Oh! Yes, it is lighter over there.

God is in the light, Tigger. Go to the Light. Go to God!

And I heard his voice for the last time, saying

I’m going to the Light, Matthew! I’m going to God! Goodbye!

Then my wife and I were both crying, but my tears were tears of joy. I felt profoundly honored at having been allowed to show him the way to God in that enormously important moment. It was such a strong ending for a fine cat. It gave me great strength to help my wife deal with what she could only understand as a tragic loss.

Cat Telepathy: Twinkle Starr

In the last post, I told about a moment of contact with my cat Lilith. She didn’t have many other conversations with me – she was content with petting and food and a warm place to sleep. But her successors were a white, long-haired, feather-brained sweetie named Twinkle Starr, and a long-legged tiger tom (fixed) named Tigger, with a Siamese meow and a very quick understanding. 

Twinkle didn’t ask for much – being the family beauty and treated accordingly was enough for her. But she did have one problem. This was that I persisted in shutting the screen door, when she wanted it left open so she could go in and out as she pleased. It didn’t matter which side of the door she was on – when I shut it she began to wish she were on the other side.

This persistent failure to communicate led to her meowing forlornly before the screen door until I got up from my seat again, and let her pass through the same door she just went through in the other direction. Since what she really wanted was to have the door left open, she was never satisfied and there was a lot of forlorn meowing.

Then one day, as Twinkle was sitting with reluctant patience beside the closed screen door, I heard a girlish voice in my mind. It said,

Can I go out please?

I stared at her. She had told me what she wanted telepathically! I was so thrilled I stood up right away and let her out.

After that she knew she had me. I was so excited about hearing her wishes in that way, that she got what she wanted instantly. From Twinkle’s perspective, that was more like it! The next time Twinkle ambled over to the screen door and found it closed again, she looked over at me and again I heard

Can I go out please?

I complied promptly and she went out like a shot, obviously pleased. She had finally trained me!

Like Lilith, Twinkle saw no reason to expand her repertoire beyond that one practical application. But she used her one human trick for the rest of her life, and we all had to endure a lot less meowing. I found it much harder to blandly ignore her when she spoke to me in the voice of my own kind.

Cat Telepathy: Lilith

Aloha once more, gentle readers!

The next few posts will relate examples of the use of sensory awakening for animal contact.

It is natural that I should turn to cat stories for this, having been close to cats all my life. I don’t suppose cats are particularly telepathic – there are plenty of books in print and out of it about telepathy with horses, dogs, and other domesticated species, as well as moments of contact in the wild. But we did not have horses, or dogs or accessible wilderness when I was growing up, because we were in the city. So I got used to cats.

Still, it was only when I was an adult with a cat of my own that the first real event happened. I was home alone. Notice that this means there were no other people in the apartment.  But I did have a cat, named Lilith. I was not as alone as I thought.

It was the end of a hard day’s work, after dinner, and I had been resting in my favorite armchair for some time. I had placed a glass of water on the floor next to the armchair, where if I reached down gently my hand would come straight to the glass so I could lift it up and have a drink. Without realizing it, I was in the state of passive attention in which telepathic contact moments occur.

My tabby cat Lilith strolled around from behind me, gazing fixedly at my glass of water. When she came in front of me so we could see each other’s faces, I heard a woman’s voice in my mind, interrupting my thoughts like one radio transmission cutting across another. It said,

There’s a bug in your water dish.

She stared at me solemnly and walked on. I picked up my water glass carefully.

A Daddy Longlegs spider had fallen into the water. I took glass, water and spider to the door and set it free unharmed. I did not try to contact it, but the simple piece of advice from Lilith had given me the eerie feeling that if I addressed the spider mentally, I might get an answer.

What was apparently Lilith’s voice had referred to my water glass as a “water dish” – the word that I used for her drinking vessels, but not my own. And while Lilith had plainly seen the spider in the water as she walked past it before addressing me, there was no way for me to know there was a spider in my water glass until, at Lilith’s suggestion, I picked the glass up and looked.

It was a vivid piece of verifiable paranormal contact, happening in such an off-hand (or off-paw) way that it would have been easy to miss it completely.

Two Young Men on a Motorcycle

            Sorry for the long silence – my wife has been suffering with a bad back. It is exquisitely painful for her. I can help by laying my hands on her and drawing out the toxins, passing them up through my chakra system and out the crown chakra to “give it to the goddess.” To some extent I can stop her pain, just as I can stop my own. I can see the energy patterns inside her,  determine where they are blocked (easy – that’s where it hurts) and bring the energy around the block to relieve the pressure.

            This is one application of sensory awakening, which is the direct result of my spiritual practice. Over the seventeen years of this practice, since my initial spiritual awakening in 1994, my senses have awakened to the presence of spirits in many things with whom I can converse. I have learned to detect energy patterns in the earth, and in people’s bodies. I met the Holy Spirit deep in the forest and we have worked together ever since. I cannot see Her, but I can hear Her Voice, and feel Her Hand when She touches me. All this was pretty alarming at first, and I spent a year with a psychotherapist trying to find out if I had gone crazy. She applied every known test for mental illness to me and found no problems at all. She concluded that in fact I am unusually stable, since I was handling a divorce with child, working 60 hours a week and having these wild spiritual encounters in the mountains every weekend, but it wasn’t making me crazy. She also said that she herself was not a religious person, but if what was happening to me had been happening to her, she would be. My conclusion: my senses are awakening to things that were there all the time – but we could not see them.

            I had a good example of the practical benefits of sensory awakening today. I was driving down Kahuna Road. I came over a ridge. I could see the road went down from the ridge into a valley, where it curved sharply and headed back up to the next ridge, about a city block away across the valley. I saw a motorbike topping the other ridge and heading down the road into the valley towards me. I saw it was a small motorbike, and two people were riding it. Kids having fun. Then it went out of sight behind some trees, as I also came down the hill into the valley

            Suddenly in my mind’s eye as I came down the hill, I saw very clearly the motorbike smashed on the roadway at the sharp curve below, the two kids scattered over the road, bleeding and possible dying, my own car twisted crooked across the road and myself getting out of the car with frozen horror in my heart. Instinctively, I slowed down – the impression was so sharp it was as if I had actually seen it, and my natural response was to hit the brakes. I came on down the hill cautiously, wondering why I had seen that dreadful picture in my mind.

            Just before I got to the sharp curve at the bottom of the valley, which I saw now was an entirely blind corner, the bike came shooting around the curve at high speed. It was leaning way over like a racing bike, far over on my side of the road and moving like lightning.

            If I had proceeded down the hill at normal speed, I would have been in that curve when they came around the corner, and they would have smashed right into me. The timing was just right. We would have had no choice but to collide. They both would probably have been killed.

            I had not even had time to process that possibility. My awakened senses saw what was coming and showed it to me. Those kids will never know how lucky they were. They did look a bit alarmed to find a car was coming, but they had time to move back onto their side of the road, and we simply went past each other like nothing happened. Thank God – nothing happened.

The Parting of the Veil

The parting of the veil first happened for me in 1964, when I was eleven years old. I was coming home from school. It was a long walk for me, but I was old enough to walk it alone. Often I stopped at the library, and I had done so today. I was holding my new library books and practicing whistling. The sky overhead was a magnificent red and orange sunset of ragged clouds and torn gaps full of dark and light. An unearthly glow hung over all. I watched it unfold as I walked, drinking it in.

            Suddenly the whole skyscape looked like a movie being projected onto a veil. I saw the curtain it was shining onto quivering as if in a breeze. Then the veil parted, and a beautiful Lady looked through it at me. Our eyes met, and I felt she loved me more than I had ever thought possible – more than anyone could, more even than my mother. I realized that I loved her too. And then quite suddenly I was just a small boy staring at a sunset. The veil closed, its swaying folds stilled and vanished, and I saw only the familiar solid forms of my own world again. But I remembered afterwards that this world is like a movie projected onto a veil, and there are Other People who live on the other side of the veil, who know us and watch us with love shining in their eyes.

            In this blog I will tell many stories of my strange encounters with love at the heart of the Natural world. But I will finish this post with a tale from 2011, now I am 58, of watching my wife Peggy have such an encounter. No doubt hers was nothing like mine, but in each case we went into Nature deeply and there Something or Somebody touched us. My first blog story, of a stone in an abbey wall that showed me its memories, is another variant on that same moment of direct contact within the physical world. Peggy's story illustrates what happiness can lie in these encounters.

            Peggy’s feet don’t like to twist, or come down hard on rocky ground. Sounds like no big deal in the city, where the earth has been artificially flattened for your convenience. But that means she can’t enjoy mountain trails. And she’s a gardener! No fair, especially when you live on the “Garden Island” of Kauai and can’t get out into the great lush tropical garden that flourishes everywhere on the island, where people do not interfere with it. It’s all twisty, uneven ground! 

            So she went to the shoe store the other day and got some great shoes – they are fairly rigid and lace up tight round her ankles. We took them out for a spin the other day – their maiden flight. We went to the trailhead at the far end of Olohena and hiked up it. It is a gentle grade but certainly “rocky ground,” since it is also a watercourse. For once, no trucks are to blame; the water alone carves deep ruts in the mud. The shrewd traveler follows the footprints of those who have gone before, sometimes still soft and sometimes frozen like little concreted way-signs.

After her first cautious steps, Peggy was transformed! She could walk the trail! Her feet were fine inside their safe high-tech armor. And the joy of it was that she simply forgot about her feet. She was deep in the little flowers that make wedges and scarves of color over the green hedge – the erosion patterns that shape old fence posts into works of art – the shape of a stone by the trail – the winged clouds that flighted overhead in bunches and the deep sweet long-eyed view to the sea. Over us and between us and through us played a music too lovely to name or even hear, felt and known by feeling, like blind souls in the dark, who come to the Feeling and follow it like children. Aloha ‘aina, the locals call it. And I loved her in that land-love, and we walked hand in hand up the path of wonders and were, for a little while, children ourselves.

At the top of the hill she kissed me and we looked down the long canyon to the tiny village, houses shining in the sun like a train set lodged in papier-mache mountains, and beyond the blue triangle of the metal sea. It was like being giants above the world of men.

All the way down the mountain side Peggy’s eyes shone like she carried the sun within her. Her step was completely different. She was almost dancing from rock to rock. And I realized my life-wise wife was gone, and a beautiful young woman walked beside me. There was no wrinkle on her face, and her eyes were the clear eyes of a young adult seeing the world for the first time. I would have said she was in her early twenties.

Feeling my almost 60 years, I walked in her light and felt her freedom. I was afraid the first time I saw her do this, coming home from Ke’e Beach years ago. But now I know we are Protected and she will be allowed this joy. As we neared the trailhead and the car her years seemed to return to her. And I was reminded once more that I live with a white magician, a kitchen witch – someone whose magic is strongest, because it is of the heart. I am a lucky man. 

Watch the next post for another story of magic contact with Nature! In that one the heroes and heroines are named Lilith, Twinkle, Tigger and Blackie. 

The Monks on the Stair

I was raised to believe “community” meant myself, my friends and family, and our domestic animals. All other living things were outsiders. And of course, you can’t be in community with inanimate objects.

But very rarely something would happen that suggested to me that there was a much larger community which I could be entering into if I only knew how. This community included things so different that it was many years before I saw they all belonged to the same community – a community, it seems, of all things. My first revelation about this community, in 1960 when I was seven years old, was that it also included things that I had been taught were “dead” and so could not communicate.

My family spent that year in Europe. We visited an abbey whose name I have forgotten. After going down into the crypt to see the tombstones, we climbed up a long shallow flight of stone steps, with stone walls on each side, to a distant door that opened into the cathedral of that abbey.

I had been feeling very strange in the crypt – not physically strange, exactly, and yet it was physical, too.  Something compelled me to linger behind. I wanted to feel that strangeness alone. I lagged back, and my parents and sister went up without noticing I was no longer right behind them. They passed into the upper church, a bright rectangle of sunshine – and the door closed. I was alone in the semi-gloom of the cold stone staircase. The strange feeling closed around me. But I was not afraid.

I reached out a small hand to steady myself against the damp stone wall. When my fingers touched the stone, I suddenly saw a line of hooded men walking slowly up the stairs in single file. They were singing, all together on one note, a lugubrious tune in an unknown tongue. They were so close I could have touched them.

Startled, I removed my hand from the stone. Immediately I was alone in the echoing stone stairwell. I did not run. I understood it was not necessary. But I did not linger either, and I was very careful not to touch the stones of that wall again. I moved quickly up the steps and into the lighted church. There I stood with my family, but very much alone, remembering. I said nothing of what I had seen.

I knew they would think it was a ghost. I would not be able to explain how I knew those hooded men were not ghosts. But I understood clearly that the stone of the wall I touched had shown me something it remembered from long ago. And it stayed in my mind that the stone was alive, and could think and remember just like me.

Coming soon!  Blog 3: The Parting of the Veil

The Dragon Flies

Aloha!

I am Dr. Matt Miller. I have two lives. The people around me know me as an English teacher, sometimes fully employed. A few know I play guitar and carve wood. Most people who know me at all, know me as my wife's husband. She is a far more visible person than me. None of them know why my business is called The Hidden Dragon.

But when I am alone I enter into dialogue with spirits. I have kept it more or less a secret most of my life, because people get so strange about it. They have seen too many Hollywood movies. These are quiet, undramatic moments of contact. I am apparently clairaudient and clairsentient -- that is, I hear their voices and I feel it when one of them touches me. There is no clash of cymbals, no explosion of light. Just a knowledge that someone is there although I see no-one, and in my head a voice that is not my own, often telling me things I had no way of knowing before.

I have the habit of research, from my years gaining a BA, MA and PhD in Medieval English Literature at UCLA. So I would promptly go research what spirits tell me, in the spiritual writings of many different lands and times, to find verification. This has led to the unfolding of a profound and beautiful philosophy about how to live so you do not suffer, and do not cause suffering to those around you. It is quite simple, once you get the hang of it.

But there has been one source of extreme drama. Almost all my contacts are with the Holy Spirit, who seems to me to wait behind and within any other spirit I contact. These contacts are dramatic emotionally, because I have fallen in love with Her. If you have read Mira Bai, Rumi, Hildegarde of Bingen, Teresa de Avila, John of the Cross, Mechthilde of Magdeburg or Gertrude of Helfta, you will know what I mean.

Just before the millenium, things got really dramatic emotionally when She awakened within me as Kundalini and I began experiencing spontaneous states of bliss which have recurred ever since. As far as I am concerned, She has taken me as Her lover. I am profoundly grateful, and seek eagerly the opportunity to serve Her in return, since She serves me so well.

People struggling with awakened Kundalini in one of Her difficult moods may be able to learn from my story why She has been so sweet with me. Since She pervades the material world, existing as an immanent Godhead within all material objects and the space between them, people struggling with the world in one of its difficult moods may be able to learn from my story how the world can be more sweet for them. The books provide the theory -- this blog will describe the practice.

The mystical love for God has nothing to do with love for one's spouse or significant other -- both loves can co-exist happily. In fact Father Thomas Keating writes, in his book on Centering Prayer (Open Mind, Open Heart), that the mystics he has known with the most active spiritual lives are all married. The Kabbalah says the Shekinah or female form of God will not take a man as a lover unless he is married. Then when he must be away from his wife, She is his wife so he will not stray, until he gets home again. Thus She serves both wife and husband, and protects their bond. So it has been for me.

This has been my secret life, the hidden dragon that guards my treasure of wisdom. Like many secrets, it is where the real interest lies in my life. My outward life is completely unexceptional. What happens within is transcendent, astonishing. And it makes a really good story. 

Since I am seeking publication with 3 books about what She has taught me (which I hope will be called The Process, The Mechanism and Reversing the Pain Machine), I have decided to start this blog to tell the story behind the books. Watch for the next post -- I will begin with something extremely strange that happened to me when I was six. That will be our springboard into the Transcendent ...

Dr. Matt