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