The week since returning from the Ozark UFO Conference has began with brutal return to Earth. After a long weekend of dealing with the paranormal, metaphysical, the leading edge of physics and beyond, life returned to business as usual, only more so.
When I returned, it turned out that I had to intervene in a controversy involving some rather significant interpersonal issues. While I won't go into specifics, I will say that it involved politics, personalities and hurt feelings. There was a lot of drama involved. It was a a very large and unpleasant dose of business (not as usual, I hope), a stark contrast to the light I had felt the day or two before.
Moving beyond the drama, I had a wonderful weekend in Eureka Springs. I drove down there with Jerry and Carol Buchmeier - Jerry is another hypnotherapist, and Carol is a professional storyteller. We spent hours in the car in both directions, chatting and getting to know each other well. I think I found some great new friends, as well as wonderful kindred spirits.
At the conference, both Jerry and I purchased Sherry Wilde's book, Forgotten Promises. As we were driving home, we took turns reading the book aloud, the reader in the back seat, providing our organic-audio as we covered the miles from Arkansas to Minnesota. Then, yesterday (Easter Sunday), I sat down and read nearly the entire book in one sitting. It is a quick read, written in an easy conversational style. I heard her speak at the conference and her writing is just like her speaking - easy to follow and heartwarming.
What struck me most was the effect Sherry Wilde's book had on me. It brought tears to my eyes and I'm not exactly sure why. It does turn out that she grew up about twenty miles from where I did, in southern Wisconsin, close to Madison. She was having a lot of her experiences at about the time I was growing up and as I read or listened to the story, I kept marveling that these things were going on right in my back yard.
Many of her most powerful experiences occurred in the mid to late 1980s. At that time, I lived in Minneapolis, and cared little about hypnosis or about alien abduction. My life was absorbed in rock and ice climbing, as well as lots of other outdoor adventure sports. Life was all also about freedom from one marriage, meeting my new girlfriend - which a couple of years thereafter led to my present marriage. I was an engineer, a mountaineer, and having the time of my life. I had little interest in things like anomalies or close encounters. And yet it turns out that all around me, things were going on that would later capture and dominate my life.
As I read Forgotten Promises, I saw a reflection of many of the events that were going on at the time just before I crossed the event horizon. At that time, CUFOS (The J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies) was very active, and was the primary research organization involved with close encounters. At that time, I read the books Missing Time and Intruders, both by Budd Hopkins, and the book Communion, by Whitley Strieber. As I was starting grad school, these were all at the periphery my mind.
In the next few years, after finishing grad school, I took a swan dive into the anomaly world, I found myself investigating a number of close encounter cases that led me down the rabbit hole, or whatever cliche you want to use. Several of these cases appeared in my book, The Cosmic Bridge, and now, reading Forgotten Promises, I felt much of the intensity of those first cases coming back to me.
A few days after returning, moving beyond the drama, I felt the light resume. I had a number of excellent healing sessions with clients. I saw remarkable, heart-warming change in several clients I had been working with, and could only be thankful that I was allowed to be part of that change.
Now, finally, I have gotten home. I can feel both the dark and the light side of the return to Earth. And once again, the lesson returns that life is both light and dark. We have to accept both sides of business as usual. Each of us can see the healing light, but must also face the forgotten promises - all are part of the return to earth.
