Evolver Retreats present:

The Supernatural

Exploring Other Dimensions

For this four-day journey, Reality Sandwich invites you to join some of today’s top theorists and practitioners in the emergent field of inter-dimensional exploration. Our second RS Retreat features Graham Hancock, world-renowned author of Supernatural and Fingerprints of the Gods, Daniel Pinchbeck, bestselling author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and Evolver co-founder, and Lisa Renee a “quantum therapist” and psychic channel. Join us October 7-11, as we explore transformational terrain such as dimensional shifts, veiled realms accessed through altered states of consciousness, the unraveling of ancient myths and sacred sites, and intergalactic communication.

The Retreat Will Include:

Talks Workshops Petroglyph and pictograph explorations Slot canyon adventures Energetic Self-Mastery “Galactivations” Interactive sacred geometry Yoga Music Meditation And more…

Come connect and collaborate with the Reality Sandwich crew in an intimate four-day gathering on ancient Anasazi land. Experience the community and engage in the conversation as we explore the mysteries and potentialities of other dimensions. Retreat starts Wednesday evening and runs until noon on Sunday. Click here for a complete schedule Tickets are limited so grab them early. All tickets include lodging and healthy meals.

With Special Guests:

GRAHAM HANCOCK

Graham Hancock is the author of the international bestsellers The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, and Heavens Mirror. His books have sold more than five million copies worldwide and have been translated into 27 languages. His public lectures and TV appearances, including the three-hour series Quest For The Lost Civilisation, have put his ideas before audiences of tens of millions. www.grahamhancock.com

DANIEL PINCHBECK

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. He is the editorial director of Reality Sandwich and Evolver.net.

LISA RENEE

Lisa Renee is an intuitive, spiritual mentor, writer, quantum therapist and etheric surgeon. Several years ago, she experienced a “Starseed Awakening” enabling her to perceive multidimensional realities and communication with the evolutionary forces of light. Since then, she has become a spiritual guide and multidimensional energetic healer for the “planet’s ascension cycle.” www.energeticsynthesis.com

Chupacabra?

The Chupacabra Caught? by Mike Krumboltz

It really does exist! Maybe! The famed chupacabra has apparently been found, and it’s a Texan.

Or at least it was. The beast is now dead, but news of its capture near Blanco, Texas, inspired Bigfoot-sized searches. Lookups on “chupacabra” surged a whopping 571%, and related queries on “what does chupacabra mean” also roared. (For the record, its rough translation is “goat sucker.”) The find also inspired renewed interest in the equally notorious Montauk Monster.

Jerry Ayer, owner of Blanco Taxidermy School, has possession of the mythical beast’s body. According to CNN, the animal was discovered by one of Ayer’s students. The student had “placed poison…to catch an unidentified animal that had gotten into a family member’s barn.” Little did the student know the animal in question was (maybe) the chupacabra.

In the video from CNN (which is pretty gross, so beware), Ayer shows off some of the unusual features of the animal, including abnormally long legs and teeth. It looks a bit like the world’s ugliest (and meanest) dog.

Of course, this is hardly the first time someone has claimed to have captured the chupacabra. In years past, brave souls have spotted it in places ranging from Russia to Maine to the Philippines. Often the animal is spotted by folks who conveniently forget to snap a photo.

Not so this time. Ayer says he plans to preserve the animal and then donate it to a local museum so it can be enjoyed by others. As the taxidermist puts it, the beast is “a tremendous conversation piece.” Sort of like the Mona Lisa or a really stellar collection of garden gnomes.

The Highgate Vampire

originally posted at The Occult Detective

Children of the 70s most likely recall very well the much publicized account of the Vampire of London’s Highgate Cemetery, as well as the subsequent feud between “paranormal investigators” Sean Manchester and David Farrant, a feud that, it seems, continues to this day.

The above trailer is promoting a movie on the subject from filmmaker Asa Bailey. Highgate Vampire is reported to have a 2010 release in mind. While I’ll admit the trailer is enticing, it also bears little resemblance to the supposed accounts of the goings on there some thirty odd years ago.

It is an interesting case, more from a sociological standpoint than from that of an actual paranormal investigation. I was fascinated then, as a young boy, easily enthralled by the mysteries of the world and the promise of those things that go bump in the night being altogether real and dangerous… and I am fascinated now, for different reasons, of course.

Have a quick look into the history of the infamous case of the Highgate Vampire. Wikipedia touches on the subject nicely. Visit by way of the link here. If you’ve a mind to search deeper, both Farrant and Manchester have written books on their adventures at Highgate, and there are plenty more places on the web to ferret out even more.

Happy hunting… Just be sure to arm yourself appropriately. Garlic and a cross of silver should suffice.

Screen Memory? Unlikely.

Hi, Folks!

I just wanted to tell everyone that I’ll be on a few weeks’ hiatus, because I’m getting ready for Wizard World Chicago next week.  (For those who don’t know, I co-write and do all the art on Johnny Saturn, a webcomic that you may find at http://johnnysaturn.com.)  Don’t be concerned that I won’t come back, though!  I’ve got a powerful lot of stuff to talk about and examine, and doing so here, in this arena, has been very therapeutic for me.

I’ll leave you with an interesting story about memory.  I recently examined screen memories, a term I believe coined by Bud Hopkins.  Sometimes, however, a memory is not a memory at all, as I can relate in the following anecdote.

When I was about eight or nine years old, a truck parked in the field next to our house and set up tethered hot hair balloon rides.  Kids from all over came and took rides on the balloon as it went up and down, tethered to its moorings.  I could see all this from my second story bedroom window, and I determined to go out and ride the balloon too.  I don’t know if I ever did, because the memory ceases there.

I remember all this in vivid detail, yet when I told this story to my wife, I immediately sensed that this never happened.  I felt sure it was a fake memory, but was it a screen memory?  The symbolism would be clear to any abductee researcher that this was some sort of screen memory for an “alien” abduction.

First up, I know my Grandfather, who tended those fields, would never allow such a thing on his ground.  He wouldn’t want his earth compacted, and he wouldn’t want to bear any potential indemnities that could have happened from accidents.  There were no crops out, because it was autumn and the field had already been disked over.

Unable to prove all this one way or another, I called my mother.  She told me that when I was about five a balloon came down in that field.  The truck that follows the balloon swooped in, and they packed up the balloon and drove away.  This is not all that uncommon in this area, and we’ve had two balloons come down on our property in the last twenty years.

So, there you have it.  Something did happen, something that I don’t remember, and in my mind it apparently transformed over the next few years into something else entirely.  It was no screen memory, but a real one that had been mangled by time.

Scott.

The Art of Magic

Like an arrow shot into the Sun…

In 1990, as a part of an anthropology team from Ball State University, I visited with the Hopi, experiencing their culture first hand. I spent a lot of time with a Mesa Shaman named Alo, which is the Hopi word for “spiritual guide”. One night he and the Chief of a visiting tribe of natives from Vancouver Island sat with me outside of a kiva on the Oriabi Mesa. It had been constructed in the 11th century. We smoked and within that smoke Alo said danced the spirits of his ancestors and that my ancestors would call to me as well from “within that sacred place which is but a short walk for the soul.” The visiting chieftain said that I was like an arrow drawn back by a bow and shot into the sun.

Below is from Frank Waters’ Book of the Hopi, which many of the Hopi today see as a type of Bible. It is a prophecy of what is to come, much of which has already come to pass…

Continue reading HERE

For more on the Hopi and their connection to Tibet, I might suggest the following HERE

~Bob Freeman
The Occult Detective

A Transformative Event, Part 2

Part II, The Aftermath

One the earliest and most unnerving changes I experienced was a massive increase in empathy for other people.  It was extremely uncomfortable, because it seemed as if I had lost the interpersonal barriers between me and other people.  All the tension, frustration, joy, and exhaustion of other people were now mine too, and I couldn’t shield it out.  Group dynamics affected me directly, and people grew more and more uncomfortable for me to be around.  I had to stop listening to news radio, because I could no longer separate myself from the anxiety of the times.

Every Sunday, I go to Open Studio at the local Art Center.  There, I draw models and work on my art skills.  I almost had to quit, and came very close to doing so, because I suddenly started drawing in the style of whatever artist I sat next to, and this without actually looking at the artist’s work.  When people with mental illness sat near me, as happened all too often, my work would become abstract, troubled, and “off.”  I usually had to excuse myself and leave early.

This empathy-run-amok also made me aware of energy present in different environments, and different flows of energy in the land, buildings, and the like.  Sometimes places would make me light-headed, sometimes I would avoid locations for this reason alone.  Too much energy in the air, such as an entity might generate, or an oncoming thunderstorm, would make me feel as if I thrown my brain in the rinse cycle.

I’m part Scottish, and part Irish, with a pinch of German thrown in, so the Second Sight is nothing new to me, really.  Still, I had to get a handle on what was happening to me, so I took up meditation with real determination.  I discovered that I was actually pretty good at it, and that I could reinforce my personal shields and regulate my own energy to a degree.  Nowadays I don’t practice meditation as often as I should, but at the time it really helped me wall myself off from unwanted psychic bleed-over and intrusion.

The strange psychic effects of my transformative experience didn’t end at empathy.  On two separate occasions I experienced unwanted out-of-body experiences.  The first time, for example, my wife and I were in a Super Target in Noblesville, Indiana, and I tried to look over a shelf of goods and see beyond.  In a moment of disorientation, my vantage point rose several feet above my head, and I could easily see what lied beyond that shelf and well beyond.  This scared me, to be honest.

I’ve never been someone who can see auras, and I didn’t get that ability, per se’, but something similar did happen.  I started to see people in an alternate, sort of symbolic way.  One friend appeared to me as a cloud of unruly bees, wildly buzzing all over, the cloud of bees supporting his clothes as he threatened to disperse.  Another person I know with deep-seated psychological problems I saw as sort of a layer-cake human, but with all the layers un-aligned, and some big parts missing.  Another person I perceived as an ‘alien’ or non-human of some sort, someone who walks among us disguised as a person.  I’m not claiming that this person is not physically human, yet I’ve also come to trust my perceptions in most of these matters.

In the early days of this transformation, I experienced several instances of random telepathy while at restaurants or in crowds.  These often came through as voices, sounding like the people they originated from, but heard only by me.  I never bothered anyone to confirm what I heard, and I was happy when this effect faded away.  Maybe my strengthened psychic shields filtered these out.

During this time, my freelance art career took a sharp swing upwards, and I made more money and did more projects in that time than I have ever done during a comparable period.  I also developed a spontaneous interest in the paranormal.  I had always been interested in magic, but I had not believed in UFOs, and I had little patience for what I considered New Age thought.  Yet, within a few weeks’ time, I was listening to the Paracast, the Paranormal Café, and about six other paranormal based blogcasts.  My reading came to consist solely of paranormal subjects, and I attacked my knowledge deficit with passion, moving up the steep side of the paranormal knowledge bell curve rapidly.

Now, almost a year after this transformational event, my life has returned to more or less normal.  I’m fine with that.

Scott.

From the heavens…

As I prepare an essay on an odd occurrence from my formative college years, I thought I would give you something to ponder… a discovery on youtube that you may find illuminating.

~BF
The Occult Detective

A Transformative Event, Part I

Part I, Strange Bedfellows

On August 9th through 12th of 2006, I attended Wizard World Chicago, a large comic and pop culture convention held every year at the Donald E Stephen’s Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois, on the edge of the Chicago O’Hare International Airport.  It was Friday evening, following the second day of the show, and first full day of the show, and I was in my 6th floor room at the Embassy Suites across the street.  I slept deeply, because these shows can wear your out.

I’m a large, middle-aged man with severe sleep apnea, so I sleep alone and wear a breathing apparatus attached by a hose to a Respironics CPAP machine.  This was nothing new, and I had been assisted by this machine for two-and-a-half years at this point.  Even with the room’s air conditioner turned to max, it was still uncomfortably warm for me, and I slept with only a sheet over me.

At approximately 2:00 a.m., after having been asleep for at least four hours, I awoke to witness three beings standing by the edge of my bed.  My first impression was that these people (?) were literally downloading information into me.

For whatever reason, I was neither alarmed nor puzzled.  I don’t know if I suffered from sleep paralysis or not, because I made no attempt to move, but likewise didn’t feel constrained in any way.  I can’t say if it was because I didn’t want to upset the process, or what, but I was calm and at peace with what was happening.

The beings were somewhat indistinct.  They were, I believe, physical, or perhaps very realized on an astral level.  They were all three identical, in form-fitting white garments that lacked seams or folds.  Either they were nearly human sized, or they floated high enough off the floor to appear human height.  I could not see their hands from my vantage, which were at their sides.  The oddest thing about them was that their heads far outsized their bodies, or, more likely, the radiance/aura they emitted did, and the light of their heads hid their actual features away.  It was as if they had large light bulbs for heads.

For an indeterminate amount of time, I observed these three.  I knew there was an exchange or downloading of information going on, but what it was I didn’t know.  Unconcerned, I drifted back to sleep.  It sounds outlandish to go to sleep when confronted with something so blatantly paranormal, but part of the experience was a feeling of safety and calmness.

The next morning, I awoke with a crystal clear memory of what had transpired, and the memory became set as something of a signpost in my mind.  I didn’t tell anyone about it for weeks, and I didn’t want to.  To be honest with myself, I almost felt lucky to have been treated to this.

If you came to the conclusion that perhaps I had had a particularly vivid lucid dream, I wouldn’t blame you.  Nor could I categorically deny it.  I’ve had many lucid dreams over the years, as have most people, but this felt completely different.  Perhaps you might say that what I encountered was founded not in our four-dimensional consensual reality, but in some subjective reality of my own.  Again, maybe.  There were no physical trace effects in the room or on my body that I could see, and absolutely no evidence that anyone or any entity had made an outside entry through the rooms sealed windows.  Consequently, despite these people’s feeling of mass and physical presence, I can only think that they were astral, or materialized there, or some such.

Am I particularly reliable witness?  As far as I’m concerned, yes: I’m educated, traveled, and reasonably well respected.  But, as a cartoonist and writer, I make a meager living off my imagination, so I doubt that makes me unimpeachable.

At first I felt that this was some sort of astral initiation rite, that perhaps the so-called Secret Chiefs of 19th century occultism had singled me out for some sort of elevation.  (That idea was courtesy of Bob Freeman, who I consulted early on in the process.)  Later, I became concerned that these people were aliens, and perhaps I had been abducted.  I’m glad to say that I don’t believe the latter is the case.  There was nothing ‘alien’ or unduly ominous about these three, and I don’t believe I was taken from my room or marked, tagged, etc., in any way.

In any case, despite the singular nature of this encounter for me, I suppose it could have been written off as some sort of bizarre dream state if nothing else happened.  Things did happen, though, and this event led into a particular odd period of my life laced with high strangeness.  I’ll cover that in another post to this thread.  I’ll also post a drawing I made of this event.

In the six months that followed what I now refer to as a Transformative Event, a great deal of change and synchronicity entered my life.  While I wouldn’t call most of this High Strangeness, it was still all quite strange for me.

As soon as I got home from Chicago, I began to fill a journal book with ideas.  Information was cascading in at me from every direction, and I made a point of trying to get my thoughts down.  I had always been interested in cosmology, but now I was being assaulted by rather complete and coherent ideas about consciousness, reality, space and time, psychic ability, and magic.  As I filled page after page of my notebook, I kept suddenly coming across interesting idea synchronicities, where I discovered that lead thinkers in their fields were coming up concepts similar to what I had written down.

I’ll cover these ideas in the next installment.  I also will make it clear that I am not trying to put myself on a level with the great thinkers of our time when they arrived at similar conclusions.  I won’t even claim that that I haven’t come across some of these ideas in singular forms in my past readings, conveniently storing them away in my subconscious.  I will say, however, that all these ideas had reached a critical mass, assumed a coherent and workable form, and piled into my mental queue waiting to be written out.  Where these ideas part of the “download” I had experienced in that hotel room?  I believe so.

An Arctic Mystery?

By WESLEY LOY / ANCHORAGE / Sat Jul 18, 3:30 pm ET

A group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called “the blob.” It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska’s northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black.

But what was it? An oil slick? Some sort of immense, amorphous organism adrift in some of the planet’s most remote waters? Maybe a worrisome sign of global climate change? Or was it something insidious and, perhaps, even carnivorous like the man-eating jello from the old Steve McQueen movie that inspired the Alaskan phenomenon’s nickname? (Read Richard Corliss’ review of The Thing, a sci-fi film set in the Arctic.)

The hunters got word to the U.S. Coast Guard, which immediately sent two spill response experts to fly over the mass, which looked sort of rusty from the air. They also approached it by boat. The North Slope Borough, the local government for the vast and sparsely populated cap of Alaska, sent its own people out the main village of Barrow to have a look. They scooped up jars of the stuff for analysis in a state lab in Anchorage.

“We responded as if it were an oil product,” says Coast Guard Petty Officer Terry Hasenauer. “It was described to us as an oil-like substance, thick and lingering below the surface of the water. Those characteristics can indicate heavy, degraded oil, maybe crude oil, or possibly an intermediate fuel oil.” Meanwhile, the story spread over the internet like an oil-spill, giving lots of people a queasy feeling. (Check out a story about the coming battle for the resources of the Arctic.)

Test results released Thursday showed the blob wasn’t oil, but a plant – a massive bloom of algae. While that may seem less dangerous, a lot of people are still uneasy. It’s something the mostly Inupiat Eskimo residents along Alaska’s northern coast say they could never remember seeing before. (See pictures of the Arctic.)

Algal blooms are a common and often menacing event along many U.S. coastlines. Some strains are toxic and can close beaches and poison seafood, posing a hazard to consumers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains a forecasting system for the Gulf of Mexico to warn of harmful Florida blooms. On Thursday, on the other side of the continent, U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, urged NOAA to direct at least $500,000 to assess a disastrous red tide – a form of algal bloom. “The state of Maine is currently besieged by the most virulent red tide event ever recorded in the region,” Snowe wrote. “As a result of this outbreak, virtually the entire coast of our state has been closed to the harvest of clams, mussels, ocean quahogs, and other shellfish.”

While Alaskans may find the algal blob unusual if not frightening, scientists say that algal blooms are nothing new in Arctic Ocean waters, though the blob itself might be a little weird. Brenda Konar, a marine biology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said algal outbreaks can and do occur even in icy Arctic waters. It just takes the right combination of nutrients, light and water temperature, she said. “Algae blooms,” she says. “It’s sort of like a swimming pool that hasn’t been cleaned in a while.” The blob, Konar said, is a microalgae made up of “billions and billions of individuals.” “We’ve observed large blooms in the past off Barrow although none of them at all like this,” Barry Sherr, an Oregon State University professor of oceanography, said in an e-mail. “The fact that the locals say they’ve never seen anything like it suggests that it might represent some exotic species which has drifted into the region, perhaps as a result of global change. For the moment that’s just a guess.”

So far in Alaska, nothing suggests the Chukchi Sea blob is toxic, although the Coast Guard’s Hasenauer said toxicity tests were planned. In any case, virtually no commercial seafood production comes from the waters along Alaska’s northern coast, but residents do fish, hunt whales and harvest other animals as part of a traditional subsistence lifestyle. In the meantime, the blob for the most part is staying away from the shoreline and slowly drifting farther and farther away.