Virgil Wander by Leif Enger: a Short Book Review

When I go to see a movie or read a book, I am hypercritical of obvious emotional manipulation. Like most people I do want to have an emotional experience maybe even a catharsis of sorts, but I feel like walking out if the creator’s manipulation is heavy handed.

Virgil Wander was not overtly manipulative. It kept me guessing as to what exactly was going on. Were it a painting I’d say it belonged to the genre of magical realism. I’m not sure if that genre exists in fiction. Enger is a very talented and evocative author. The eponymous main character is often vertiginous and I was a bit dizzy trying to determine what was “real” from what was imagined.

Set in Minnesota on Lake Superior, oddly in Bob Dylan’s home town, it is a cold and rather inhospitable place, but the damnedest things keep happening. The people are poor and the place is run down, like much of America’s Rust Belt. Strange tragedies and equally strange synchronicity and visions occur. The people of the town are grittily resilient and many are heroic. There is an underlying belief in many of them that they can make something good happen in spite of all the adversity they face.

In short, it reflects much of today’s America in an allegorical way. If we Americans believe in the good in most people and embrace it, we will succeed as a diverse people. There are broken families made whole, and magical kites, one of the pervasive symbols in the book. By the time the good stuff starts to happen, I am thoroughly invested in the characters, which for me is a real feat.

Two small criticisms, the sort of post script at the end is a little sappy and in the early stages of the book I tended to get the names and identities of some of the characters confused. The latter is probably my own weakness and I had to do a bit of backtracking.

Overall, I thoroughly recommend this book, especially to readers in the US and Canada, to whom it should be very pertinent.

 

The Measure: A Book Review

Nikki Erlick is the author of The Measure. It might be considered science fiction or fantasy. She is certainly an able writer. Her prose moves along smoothly and the 352 pages are a quick read.

At first I had some confusion over the identities of the characters, but I soon mastered that. I needed to go back a chapter or two to straighten out who was who.

Initially it was fun. Every adult on Earth magically out of nowhere received a box containing a string. The string represented how long the recipient would live. Inscribed on the box was The measure of your life lies within. Some people opened their boxes and some didn’t. Turns out that the strings within were a true measure of how much time each person had left to live. So much for the concept of free will.

The tale was no longer fun. Events in this bizarre new reality got very dark. As a reader I started to feel somewhat emotionally manipulated. I often feel that way when I see a trite movie. The author wanted me to feel sad about the fate of the short stringed characters, sad about the grief of those left behind. And I did, a bit.

Towards the end, the book turned preachy. Short stringers deserved the same rights as everyone else (the long stringers). Rah, rah!

In summary, this is a first novel by a very talented writer. The creativity of thinking of such an ingenious and involved idea is praiseworthy. I hope Nikki Erlick writes more and better books. I think she can.

Note as to why I chose to write a book report: I had to stop doing my podcast because our marvelous and acclaimed audio engineer died. Over time podcasts became vlogs. They are now video. I find that distracting to the meat of the podcast. Podcasters seem self conscious about being seen.

On ”Shattered Reality Podcast” we primarily interviewed people in the paranormal world who wrote books about UFOs, near death experiences, remote viewing and the like. A couple of months ago I got the idea to write book reports on my blog about such books. The Universe heard me though I had said nothing to anyone about it at the time. I began to get notices about manuscripts and published works. Life interfered and I didn’t get the time to write until now. I hope this won’t be the last report.

 

Drone or UAP?

In the middle of December 2021, approximately a month ago, I witnessed a very strange sight It was about 9 pm . I was looking for Geminids meteor shower. It was a bit late to see it since it peaked on the 13th and it was likely the 15th. There was a very wispy partial cloud cover but I could see through it for the most part.

I was about to go back inside when my eyes were drawn to a single very bright light that was zigzagging erratically around a small area (about the size of a softball held at arms length) of the sky. It was NNW about one third way down from the zenith. I stared in amazement. For a couple of seconds my brain was not even working. It was reasonably high up because the wispy clouds were below it.

When my reasoning mind started working again, I thought, this is very unusual indeed, look at this carefully. Imprint it on your memory. When I did that, I’d estimate that 15 seconds had gone by. I decided to take 4 steps into the building to get my late model iPhone which has an excellent camera with a night vision setting. My intuition told me it would be gone by the time I got back outside. And it was – GONE.

My thoughts were that it was either a UAP or a military drone. A few miles north west of where I was located lies the Picatinny Arsenal so whatever this was, was flying over that or very near there. I don’t think civilian drones fly that high. And this was high enough to be near the flightpath of the many jets coming into Newark airport on an initial descent. So a civilian drone operator could be facing multiple charges for being where this light was originating, if such a drone could even get that high.

The erratic almost jumping behavior of the light seemed to have no purpose, much more erratic than any drones I’ve seen. Plus it was roughly over the Picatinny Arsenal Army facility. And what is an arsenal for? Storing weapons! What kind of weapons? Well, the folks that have that answer don’t confide in me, but occasionally they detonate some ordinance and a boom is heard. Furthermore citizens such as myself live in hope that military drone operators have more control over their drones than that baby was exhibiting.

So I do not know what that was. I have no rational explanation. If it was a UAP, it wanted to be seen. By me. Why? My guess is that the beings or entities that share the Earth unseen do not want humans to damage the time space continuum any further than they already have. These entities may operate on a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum than life as we know it. I am reminded of the late Stanton Friedman, nuclear physicist and UFO investigator, who often referred to humans as ”angry apes with guns” and I can’t help imagining that that is how any higher intelligence would see homo sapiens.

A day or two later I read a report of several people seeing some unidentified lights over Bergen County but recently when I tried to find this report again it was gone.

When I was a child about 11, I saw a UFO with about 20 other people including two policemen about six or fewer miles northwest of Picatinny. But that’s a story for another day.

Since that sighting in December, my dreams have really revved up. I’ve had a number of precognitive and psychic dreams and even took part in a dream study during the past month. People I randomly thought about and hadn’t heard from in years called me up. One of my dreams involved a young man who had been arrested in Florida in 4D reality, and appeared in my dream with many similarities to the real person including his appearance and details of the case. I knew nothing about him or his case before my dream.

Yes, I am a multiple experiencer and no, I have no apologies about that.

Fahrusha is metropolitan NY based professional intuitive.

 

A Warning from a Personal Inspiration

Many individuals are concerned about a variety of potential natural catastrophes that may transpire here on Earth. I’ve been debating on whether or not to write about this particular one but the very recent coronal mass ejection from the Sun pushed me ever forward.

Ostensibly there was a time when human ancestors had not yet begun to speak. Wikipedia proclaims that “modern” humans emerged from Africa 300,000 years ago. There were proto humans prior to that date in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia/Oceana.

After speech evolved, objects were signified by an associated sound. This happens in other mammals as well. Domestic cats, for example, often make one sound if they see birds out the window and another when asking their humans for food. Chances are very great that human ancestors made associative sounds more than 300,000 years ago.

Then came writing which was a huge development for humans. The first writing was pictographs, a small somewhat standardized drawing of the object being communicated. This is commonly estimated to have happened around 9000 BC around the inhabited world but especially in Mesopotamia. I am persuaded that it actually happened somewhat earlier than that, before the end of the last Ice Age, but that is a story for a different day, fascinating though it is. Terence McKenna opined that pictographic writing is superior to phonic writing because it comes more directly from nature, while phonic writing associates a letter with a sound. Eckhart Tolle often uses the phase that this word or that merely points to the concept. It is important to remember that the word is not the object or idea itself, it just suggests or points to it.

During ancient times and the Middle Ages, countless hours were spent copying manuscripts by hand and were sometimes beautifully “illuminated” or illustrated with careful drawings. Many of these manuscripts were religious or devotional in nature. Prior to widespread writing people like Homer in ancient times, and today aboriginal singers in places like Australia and the Dogon people in East Africa have preserved knowledge and stories through memorized songs and chants that have changed little in millennia .

Everything began to change with Gutenberg’s perfection of moveable type in 1450. Moveable type was also developed in China and Korea perhaps 100 years earlier but not popularized nor as automated. Mostly Gutenberg printed Bibles. But soon other things were printed as well. In the mid 19th Century totally automated printing was developed in New York City by Richard M. Hoe and then the average American could afford to buy a book or a newspaper. Things were really changing. There were fewer illiterate people in developed countries. (This short narrative is not meant to be a definitive history of printing, but rather it is meant to establish a time line.)

Fast forward to around 1990 and personal computers have become affordable for the masses in industrialized countries. This was followed quickly by the Internet, which really revolutionized human interaction and socialization and it was followed quickly by cellphones which are owned by people all over the world in many disparate cultures. Now a rancher in Oklahoma can call or text an imam in Egypt who can call a factory worker in Thailand who can call a Saami reindeer herder in Northern Lapland who can call her stockbroker in London who can call me for an intuitive reading. :-D!

Up until at least 2000 many scholars and erudite people had large libraries of books some of which were rare and on arcane subjects not of interest to many, such as pastoral Bulgarian poetry of the 17th Century or Blood types present in Ecuadorian red parrots. 

I received an article from my friend Rox, about how people who were downsizing their book collections were not able to sell the books to used bookstores or donate them to libraries. Most of these books were unwanted due to “THE CLOUD”!!! Most of us know that the cloud is a place in cyberspace where one can store digital copies of books and archives. One can also store bunches of books and photos from one’s digital device (cell phone or computer). The cloud in cyberspace is a network of servers. To understand the cloud better, I recommend an article in Medium.

East Village Books owner Donald Davis pointed out that books bought from Amazon and similar sellers and stored on Kindle are only leased and not owned by you, the “buyer”, or more accurately the renter.

So what I have hoped to do above is to establish an ever quickening pace of collection, sharing and storage of human knowledge.

Language 300,000 years ago, symbolic writing more than 11,000 years ago, first printing perfected 600 years ago, mass printing 170 years ago, computerization of communication about 30 years ago and human knowledge stored in the cloud for about the last 10 years. Can you see the quickening?

So back to the idea that books are being discarded in favor of the cloud. This may not be best practice because on September 1, 1859 the Sun sent out coronal mass ejections from sunspots that fried much of the world’s telegraph systems. Telegraph was cutting edge technology at that time and a British astronomer named Richard Carrington saw the eruptions happen through his telescope and so the disaster bears his name, the Carrington Event. 

Since that time the world has depended more heavily on electromagnetic media in the cloud and nearly every home is on the electric grid of its country or state. Should that grid massively fail as it is very likely in a huge geomagnetic storm or an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack by a global adversary, civilization would be taken back to the Dark Ages or worse. A geomagnetic storm can fry the large transformers that carry electricity across a nation’s electrical grid. There is not a huge supply of new transformers out there to reinstall an entire nation’s grid and all information stored in the cloud would evaporate faster than a puff of smoke. It seems like a foregone conclusion that this will happen. The only question is when.

When it does happen much of human knowledge would be eradicated forever.

Of course this blog, Shattered Reality Podcast, online banking, and all your personal photos stored on your computer and in the cloud will also be irretrievably lost. Saving a hard copy of your favorite picture of your mother or your cat is recommended, however an event like this of great magnitude would likely be the end of civilization as we know it.

Though I would never say I channeled this blog spot, I was very pushed by something outside myself to write it.

Fahrusha is a blogger, podcaster and professional intuitive. She encourages all polite comments to this blog and endeavors to answer them in a timely fashion.

 

Strange Automobile Ride

What lurks unseen on the highways? Spirits of forgotten ancestors?

A couple of weeks ago I was heading into NYC from north central New Jersey. I put my NYC address in my GPS. It decided to send me via the George Washington Bridge after first indicating the Holland Tunnel. I complied with the instructions, figuring there must be some sort of traffic snarl along the other routes. Both the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels are closer to the East Village.

Heading Eastbound on Route 80, I was again diverted to a side road driving first past my “Shattered Reality Podcast” co-host’s place of business and then was sent directly to her home. I checked the GPS and somehow the address displayed had been changed without warning or incident to Kate Valentine’s home. I discovered this about a block before arriving and beat a hasty retreat, wondering how this could have happened. Her home address was one of my past locations but I hadn’t been there in several months. Also of interest is the fact that her place of business is not on a direct route between where I started and her home, so there would be no reason why I should have been taken there first.

Never before had the GPS malfunctioned in this way, and it gave no notice that the destination address had changed, as it should have done when the destination is changed. The GPS controls were never touched. The New York City address was again put in the GPS as I headed eastward on Route 80. In less than five minutes from leaving the proximity of the Valentine home, out of nowhere, Kate called me. I asked her politely about the purpose of the call and she said she didn’t know why she called. She just felt like calling me. Since the passing of our beloved audio engineer Bill in May, the podcast has been on hiatus and Kate and I speak a bit less than once a week.

I told her what had happened and she was aghast. Her home is set back from the road and has lots of trees and shrubbery obscuring any view of the road. We had turned around before reaching her house and it was twilight and we were in a very unremarkable black car, so clearly there was no way she could have seen me. There is no view of the road from inside the house. We decided it was a sign that we should endeavor to restart the podcast and maybe, just maybe it was a sign from beyond the veil from Bill.

 

What kind of co-incidence?

Co-incidence and consciousness researcher Dr. Sharon Hewitt-Rawlette.

Early this morning I was listening to a Thanatos TV presentation on YouTube by Dr. Sharon Hewitt Rawlette about the phenomena of co-incidence and how she as a philosopher and professional writer evaluates whether or not the coincidence is paranormal in nature.

Yesterday I was thinking of a client I hadn’t heard from in more than six months and wondering how she was doing. I had a few questions I wanted to ask her about someone I thought she might know and few other things. I thought of her quite intently for several minutes. I was not consciously trying to use any telepathy to contact her.

This morning my client sent me a text saying that my card fell out of her wallet and she decided it was time for a reading.

Hewitt-Rawlette’s possible causes for co-incidence begins with chance. Could this event have been mere chance? Since it is a three way co-incidence (my client, Dr. Hewitt Rawlette and me), I find this very unlikely.

Was it telepathy on the part of my client? Unlikely. My card fell out of her wallet.

Was it paranormal powers on the part of Dr. Hewitt-Rawlett? Probably not, as her only motive would be to further the interest in co-incidence as evidence of paranormality. There would also be a big time distortion involved as her interview with Thanatos was a month ago. There is even a small time distortion here because I listened to the interview approximately 14 hours after I thought strongly of my client. But time is the fourth dimension in our time space continuum and as such it can be traversed in inexplicable ways. I did not listen to Rawlette’s interview in any way because of my client, but rather because I have an interest in her work in general. At 6:30am today my client was far from my thoughts.

So that leaves three possibilities as I see it. By merely thinking of my client strongly I unintentionally caused my card to fall from her wallet psychokinetically. Or was I involved in some sort of precognition of the fact that she would contact me?

Finally could a deceased person or other disembodied entity have caused this three way co-incidence to occur?

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive in the New York area. She is also the co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast” which is currently on hiatus. She welcomes all polite comments on this blog and strives to answer them in a timely fashion.

 

Donald Keyhoe and UFO Disclosure

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Major Donald Edward Keyhoe published a book called The Flying Saucers Are Real in 1950. Wikipedia says: Donald Edward Keyhoe (June 20, 1897 – November 29, 1988) was an American Marine Corps naval aviator, writer of many aviation articles and stories in a variety of leading publications, and manager of the promotional tours of aviation pioneers, especially of Charles Lindbergh.

I think he is an important figure to consider in light of the current UFO disclosure hubbub. He was very knowledgable about the aviation of the time and had extensive contacts in both commercial aviation and military aviation and knew people at the Pentagon. He writes in a friendly and accessible style. He was an early proponent of the idea that the US government should release its classified information on the unidentified aerial phenomena which seemed to proliferate intensely during the post WWII era.

I was happy to come upon a LibreVox audio version of the book on YouTube recently. The reader of the book, Roger Melin, was very listenable with a pleasant and clear voice which was cogent. It was apparent that he understood and was interested in what he was reading. He is, I believe, an author in his own right.

In listening to it, I was saddened to realize that this “disclosure” movement has been doing the same dance with the government for approximately 75 years if not longer; and we, the people, are still in the same place of half truths, distortion and disinformation as we were 75 long years ago.

It is not my intention to malign anyone from today’s “disclosure” movement. I regularly listen to John Greenewald’s Black Vault podcast and had Steven Bassett, disclosure advocate, on the last published episode of “Shattered Reality Podcast”. (“Shattered Reality Podcast” is currently on a tragic hiatus.) I also met Luis Elizando very, very briefly at a Cherry Hill NJ MUFON meeting and asked Hal Puthoff some questions about Australian UFOs at an IRVA (International Remote Viewers Association) meeting several years ago. I appreciate all honest efforts.

So if you are expecting some Earth shattering revelations about flying saucers, unidentified flying objects or unidentified aerial phenomena, I really suggest you read or listen to Major Keyhoe’s seminal work on the subject. It is my fervent wish that there will be some reveal here this time, but logically I doubt it.

I welcome your polite comments.

Fahrusha is a host of Shattered Reality Podcast and a professional intuitive. She can be reached at fahrusha@fahrusha.com. Please be sure to whitelist her email address on your email server if you wish to receive an answer.

 

Get a Job? Not So Fast!

Recalcitrant Neanderthal in the bastion of Cro-Magnon religion refuses to become employed by the Man and visits with ancient Earth Goddess.

Homo sapiens sapiens or anatomically modern man, is supposedly the only living member of the genus Homo. What’s so special about them? Are they more important than other forms of life? Why would “higher beings” or “aliens” care anything about them? How are they different from other animals? Other mammals? I’ve met nice humans and horrible humans, but I couldn’t conceive of why they were superior to a dog or a tree. I cannot think of one reason. 

I sometimes say I’m half alien and half Neanderthal and I’m only half joking. Bada-bing!

So finally instead of asking why Homo sapiens sapiens are better or somehow more worthy, my question became “is there some way in which they are different from other animals?” and what I came up with startled me. I chose not to include plants or rocks in this blog spot, because their consciousness is so different and I do not want to get into a long discussion about consciousness vs. self-consciousness.

What do anatomically modern humans do that other mammals don’t do? Communicate? No, mammals communicate though their means of doing so and their languages are different from ours.

Mammals have roles within their groups. In herd and pack animals, a member might lead the group, be a scout, or bring up the rear. These roles may change as they age or join a different pack, herd, or pod. Other erect hominids such as homo nalidi, Denisovians and Neanderthals have one role description unknown (as of now) in other mammals, and that is the role of shaman.

In contrast to their direct ancestors, the erect hominids, “modern” humans work at a vast multiplicity of jobs for outside agencies. No other mammals willingly work for outside agencies that are beyond their social group. Domesticated canids see their humans as the leaders of their pack. Much has been written on the human dilemma concerning lack of meaningfulness or relevance of a wage job wherein the employed person can find no connection in the “real” world to what they are doing because they are participating in making useless products for profit or pushing buttons on an automated assembly line. There is a soul crushing disconnect in this. However this is not a diatribe against the corporation. In fact when giving insights to clients about investing their funds, I often suggest they invest in companies whose products they themselves use.

To my knowledge, no other wild mammal, including other erect hominids, ever naturally work outside of their herd or clan group. How did this behavior arise in modern humans? In contemplating this my mind wandered toward alternative human history narratives. I have always been fascinated by theories about older civilizations in prehistory, particularly in Egypt, promulgated by Robert Schoch, the late John Anthony West, and others, since I had spent some time in Egypt. Then came the discoveries of the late German archeologist Klaus Schmidt around the purposefully buried structures of Göbekli Tepe in eastern Turkey and the theories of alternative human history were suddenly more valid.

I am a “be in the now” sort of person, devoting myself to an Eckhart Tolle version of reality wherein now is the only time that exists. It is always now. This keeps me relatively sane. So spending lots of mental energy on what may or may not have happened in the distant past was not my thing, but it was curiously interesting, as I have the habit of visiting what I consider to be power spots of antiquity.

From what has emerged from these discoveries it appears that there was some sort of a cataclysm around 12,000 years ago which caused a reset of human society. “Civilization” had to start almost from scratch and many people (most?) were annihilated. From this cataclysmic time come global tales of the Flood including that of the Biblical Noah. The waters rose and some former human habitation centers were drowned underneath the sea.

The current best guess as to what caused the annihilation and massive change in climate is that pieces of a broken up comet bombarded Earth over the course of several years. However, my mind suddenly became drawn to the work of Zecharia Sitchen. I had known of Sitchen’s work, but never focused on it at all. Now thinking about it and his theory of Nibiru and the alien overlords who bred and forced humans in Africa to mine gold, it became a possible answer to why Homo sapiens sapiens work at jobs having nothing to do with their lives and work for the profits of others outside their clans. Current thinking seems to preclude the idea of another planet such as Nibiru but there are some theories as to a brown dwarf companion to our Sol that may have come closer to the solar system.

Laird Scranton who has been my guest on “Shattered Reality Podcast” has been able to fill in some of the blanks of these theories through linguistic studies starting with the current cosmology of the Dogon tribe to ancient mining pits of South Central Africa to Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands to the Australian outback.

So to come back to my starting point, Homo sapiens sapiens is the only mammal that works for the profit of others outside his own biological group (clan) causing feelings of sadness and hopelessness. Did this originate because of the needs of alien entities for gold? I do not know. I do think that working in this manner is senseless. In the current reset I hope that individuals will work in smaller more manageable groups for their own best good at tasks they enjoy. This is not some sort of Marxist fantasy because in that system the government replaces the corporation and the only result is less productivity, just another less efficient Big Brother. Spirituality is discouraged and sometimes forbidden.

Although I still practice the doctrine of the NOW, I also try to wrap my monkey brain around the concept that linear time, as we commonly think of it, does not exist. Everything is happening now and the 4-D world is only a manifestation of energy.

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive and the host of “Shattered Reality Podcast”.

 

Whistle

On the morning of January 1, 2021 I woke to find a steel whistle on a black lanyard on a low bureau next to the bed where I currently sleep. Atop that bedside bureau normally sit my water vessel on a birch coaster from Finland, several lotions and unguents and a white plastic pill bottle containing melatonin tabs. If there were an extra similarly packaged lotion there I might not have noticed. But a whistle was totally out of place. I believe that the whistle was once an object owned by me, but I hadn’t seen it in several years and in fact, hadn’t thought about it or looked for it either.

Did this teleported object have a meaning? Should I now wear it wherever I go? Is it symbolic or literal in meaning?

“Alert, alert,” it seems to say.

I am reminded of the late Mary Rose Barrington, author of the excellent book J.O.T.T.: Just One of Those Things all about items that come and go from our households as if they have minds of their own. She was a guest on “Shattered Reality Podcast” and that episode can be heard here.

Do the items move on their own or are they moved by disembodied entities?

• 

• 

As if in silent homage to the excellent Mary Rose Barrington, the whistle reads “The Acme Thunderer, Made in England”.

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive and the host of “Shattered Reality Podcast”.

 

Uncanny

In October of 2019, I wrote an email to a gentleman I consider to be knowledgeable about geo-political goings on in the world, asking if I’d be safe traveling to Spain in November. He replied that he thought I’d be alright. I’d purposely avoided Spain in the past because I despised bullfighting. My small one woman protest.

An amazing package deal had come my way and my nearly constant wanderlust took over, so just before Thanksgiving off I went. Madrid was noisy and exciting. I loved the Prado and other museums and squares filled with night life. Vegetarian food was hard to find, but not impossible. These folks are big meat eaters.

A delicious tapas plate of fried peppers in Madrid.

A day trip to the walled early Spanish capital Toledo was beautiful but disappointing because almost everything was closed during the hours I was there.

View from the walled ancient city of Toledo down to the newer Toledo below.

My last stop was Barcelona. Here the Catalan language could be heard. There were peaceful protests in the streets everyday and signs warning of pickpockets. One did not wear one’s purse on the outside of one’s clothes. Pickpockets were all over the Rambla, Barcelona’s long main street filled with market stalls and tourists even in the slow season of November 2019.

Inside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, also known as Barcelona Cathedral constructed between the 13th through 15th century.

Both the medieval architecture and the more modern Gaudi contributions were breathtaking.

The author at Gaudi’s Parc Guell.

After buying varieties of turrón candy for gifts and for my own consumption, I really wanted to get something for myself to remember this trip. Finally I came upon this wonderful mask shop run by two charming elderly people. Then I saw it, a doll of Dr. Peste, the plague doctor, a famous figure in Southern Europe during the Black Plague. I knew that was what I wanted. It was not inexpensive but it was handmade and well worth the money in my opinion.

Dr. Peste figurine with clothes from Arlequi Màscares.

Little did I consciously know at the time, but a novel disease from China was already making a small inroad in Spain.

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive and host of “Shattered Reality Podcast.”

 

Black Cat Dream

On April 17 I woke up with the memory of a talking cat. I have cats sleeping with me most nights, but the cat that was talking to me was an all black fully grown male cat and he was not on the bed, but next to it with his paws on the wooden edge of the bed looking into my face and talking to me.

When I woke up I didn’t remember what he said and there was no such cat in the room at the moment.

Shortly I picked up my phone from the floor and turned it on. I don’t keep the ringer on during the night. You could say I value my sleep.

Then I looked at the newsfeed on my phone. Very depressing. I scrolled down. There was an article featuring a picture of a black cat, a well known talking black cat, a YouTube sensation named Sylvester.

The fellow responsible for the cat saying funny things had committed suicide. Mental illness the article said, bi-polar. More sadness I thought. Can’t get away from it. Like many comedians and literal clowns his impulse to make people laugh covered up a darker aspect of his personality. Sometimes the need to make people laugh corresponds with the need for approval from others.

Immediately after, a friend named Susan in Italy posted a photo of her 2 black cats. Now that’s a mild synchronicity too. And later in the day a fellow named John, who I only know from Facebook, but a thoroughly nice chap, messaged me a video of a talking and singing dog. I don’t recall him ever sending me a funny personal message before. The style of the dog singing was eerily similar to Steve, the cat man’s videos. Was it his?

It wasn’t. It was Nikie Smith’s dog Amos doing a quarantine rendition of “Stayin’ Alive” on Facebook, which come to think of it, is very topical here.

The genesis of this synchronistic series of events may originate with my unofficial at-home study of dream remote viewing as propounded by Dale Graff, former manager of the DIA’s Project Stargate. Graff is a prodigious dreamer who is able to dream about what sort of news story will appear on a particular page of a particular newspaper a given number of days hence. His specialty is airplane disasters but he “sees” many other things, and has been a guest on “Shattered Reality Podcast”.

I do not remember my dreams as much as I’d like to, so I have been writing most of the ones I do remember in a dream journal. I hadn’t “tasked” myself the night before the talking black cat dream as I would have were I practicing dream remote viewing, but I think my previous tasking had somehow carried over. My success rate is quite good when I can remember my dreams, but I often don’t remember.

 

The late very funny and creative Steve Cash, a popular YouTube personality best known for his “Talking Kitty Cat” video series. Rest in peace.

My deepest sympathies to Mr. Cash’s family and friends. He brought smiles to many faces.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

Fahrusha is the host of “Shattered Reality Podcast” and a professional intuitive.

 

Extraordinary Soul Retrieval Experience While Lucid Dreaming

On September 25, 2019 I had an amazing experience involving a recent very sad news story, a soul retrieval and my iPhone6. I attended a meeting of TMI (The Monroe Institute) in NYC hosted by E.B. on the Bowery in Manhattan. E.B., a gracious host has taken over the group from A.M. (also very gracious) who moved out of town over a year ago. I’m using initials here to ensure the privacy of the participants.

The subject for the evening was lucid dreaming. Five people were in attendance, E.B., R.O. (long time friend), J.F. (never met before), R.S. (recent acquaintance) and me. We gathered in the living room area. E.B.’s place has an almost eerie resemblance in some aspects to the former host’s apartment. After greeting everyone and discussing what we would be doing, we then moved onto cork mats on the floor in another room where we donned headphones, laid down, got comfortable and listened to a Hemi-Sync exercise meant to promote lucid dreaming.

The funny thing about doing some of these Hemi-Sync exercises is that one can be conscious in an altered state and hear yourself snoring. Somewhere a few minutes into the exercise I discovered that my personal lucid dreaming guide was to be a tall blonde showgirl, which I found absurdly amusing. I followed the directions on the audio and subsequently slipped further into a dream state.

After the audio concluded we gathered again in the living room area to discuss our inner experiences with the audio. To my surprise, after mentioning the description of my dream guide, our host told us that a friend was staying with her for a few days that was a tall blonde knockout. She wondered if perhaps I’d picked up her energy. We went around the room with each participant speaking about their experience. Suddenly I recalled a “dream” I’d had during the aforementioned exercise.

One of the Monroe Institute methods, and something Robert Monroe, the eponymous founder, engaged in, are “retrievals”. Briefly, a retrieval involves guiding the soul(s) of the deceased to the “Light” and off Earth plane where they may be stuck. I have done numerous retrievals with TMI groups both at the actual Institute and at meetings at A.M.’s apartment and at the request of friends and clients. These retrievals are somewhat like shamanic soul retrievals done by other groups as well. Being a very pragmatic individual, I have often wondered if I were making these scenarios up. The retrievals could be done for groups of deceased, as in a plane crash, or for individuals.

In this case, our meditation objective had nothing to do with retrievals, but rather lucid dreaming. I related my experience to the group. Several days ago I had seen the headline of an news article, a man drowned in Tanzania whilst proposing to his girlfriend. I saw only the headline and didn’t read the news article but for some reason thought he was from Australia. He was not. I did not give it another thought.

In my lucid dream experience, I found a man submerged underwater. His body was quite thin, white and clammy. The experience was very palpable. I lifted him up and propelled him higher. Water was dripping off him. He wanted to go back and marry his girlfriend. He seemed to know he had come to an unfortunate end but hadn’t really accepted it. I explained to him that he would see her again shortly. He was worried that it meant she would die soon. I told him that I didn’t know but that it was not necessarily the case because time was different on the “other side”. I was joined by other beings who were escorts or helpers and that some folks call angels. We travelled upwards through mists. I perceived an old thin lady with longish sandy hair that seemed as though it may have had a permanent wave. She reached out to him and he clearly recognized her so I released him to her. The word I got in my mind was “grandmother”.

I then proceeded to tell the group that I was always a little doubtful about my retrievals, but that this had happened during a possibly lucid dream and I had no desire to do a retrieval prior to having had the experience. At that moment, my iPhone, which was in my zippered up handbag next to me on the couch, shut down in the sleep mode with the ringing and alerts off for the exercise and meeting, burst forth with Siri saying “I didn’t quite understand what you said.” Mouth open and baffled I took the phone out of my handbag and the screen which was connected to Siri simply said “the grandmother”. I showed it to the assembled group. I do not have an explanation for how that happened. I think everyone in the room was stunned. Sadly I did not have the presence of mind to snap a screen shot and would have had to figure out how to do that.

R.O. and I interpreted it later as a confirmation that I had actually done the retrieval. In checking the actual news story today I discovered that the deceased man was in fact quite thin and white, but hailed from Baton Rouge, Louisiana where I had once lived for a year. In addition I have visited Tanzania and was once left behind in the open ocean while on a dolphin swimming expedition in the area of the Bermuda triangle near the Bahamas. So there are three points of contact.

For the record, I am not advertising doing retrievals and I know nothing more about this case, so please do not assume that. This post is solely for the purpose of documenting this amazing experience. I also want to express my condolences to the victim’s family and friends.

Steven Weber, Jr, the deceased man.

 

Dream Mining

A very few nights ago, I was beside myself. I had mislaid a check, not a very large check, but a check large enough to warrant a search, a check that would take time and red tape to have reissued. I have been staying in different places. When one stays in several different places, inevitable things happen. The thing you want is always in another place. This is a universal truth.

I searched all over for the missing check. My memory told me I had taken the check from the drawer at Place A where it was stashed and put it into a large over the shoulder bag in a zipped compartment, with the idea that I would transfer it to a drawer at Place B, where it would live with several other checks until they would all get deposited into a bank.

It has also been a habit that on certain nights, I would attempt to program my dreams to see something in the future by loosely using the “Dale Graff” method. This former Defense Intelligence Agency remote viewing tasker turned out to be more psychic than some of his proteges, through the use of dreams. I have found using his protocol to be quite amazing!

The night that I was looking for the check, I did not give myself an intention to dream. Frustrated with my incompetence in finding the check, I just went to sleep. When I woke up, I only remembered a snippet of a dream. I had dreamt of my Betsey Johnson rhinestone cat pendant that I was trying to fix. Specifically I had dreamt of the reverse side of the pendant.

The Betsey Johnson cat pendant in question.

Dutifully I wrote down the dream snippet I remembered in my dream journal. Thought nothing of it and went on with my business. Among other chores I continued to search for the check at place B.

Yesterday I was again at Place A and, of course, looked in the drawer where the check had been kept, in case I hadn’t actually removed it, though I remembered removing it. This was my “last chance” to find the errant check. Of course, it wasn’t there. Later on I saw the pendant, lying on a work table. I had intended to replace a finding on this cute little fellow, with moveable arms, legs and tail. Upon lifting it up, there was a piece of paper underneath. THE CHECK!!! The back of the pendant, the part I had dreamed of, was resting on top of the check. (The pendant is all together in one piece, BTW)

OK, I’m amazed, once again. But I have a big question I’m not sure can be answered. I’m not even sure if everyone reading this will follow my line of thought. Was the answer buried in my own subconscious mind all along or did the information come from the Universal Mind or did I simply see the future, wherein I discovered the check?  Had I unintentionally, but fortuitously, tasked myself with finding the check?

Note: I have not described the method used by Dale Graff, but if you click on the link you will be directed to his page.

 

Pareidolia and A Silly Synchronicity.

Two photos I took late last year could be pareidolia or ???

Pareidolia is the phenomenon of recognizing patterns, shapes, and familiar objects in a vague and sometimes random stimulus, says RationalWiki.org. Faces are thought to be the most common things seen as an effect of pareidolia.

 

Photo taken by Fahrusha on November 15,2018

Multiple faces can be seen beside the cat witch nightlight.

Photo taken by Fahrusha on December 8, 2018

This is a shadow caused by towels hung on a hook in a bathroom. Seeing these faces while alone in a quiet place can be somewhat unsettling to the average person. Each individual must decide for herself where pareidolia ends and anomalous experiences begin.

An amusing case of precognition occurred while I was attempting to get some exercise this past Sunday. I was walking with a companion around a half mile plus Rundgang around a large pond or small lake. To break the monotony, I sometimes make up silly simple songs to sing softly to keep myself amused. These ditties are generally very absurd stream of consciousness numbers like:

Emergen-cy

Brain surgery

Is not for me.

Is not for me!

At a particular point on the path and out of no where, I began to sing:

Doggie treats are good to eat

For me and you

And doggies too.

Eat some doggie treats today.

Woof woof. Yum yum!

Granted, this is nonsensical and silly but exercise for the sake of exercise can be mind numbingly boring. I stopped singing and continued to walk around the path sometimes pumping my arms for extra exercise benefits. When I got around the lake to the same place where I had been singing my impromptu doggie treats song about 20 minutes earlier, there stood a tiny elderly lady in a winter coat, Hello Kitty pajama bottoms and an unusual thick embroidered helmet hat. Very elfin. She was with a younger man who could have been her son. In her hand she had a pouch of dog treats and was handing them out to two smartly attired Scottie dogs who were walking with a woman on the path. None of those people or dogs were present during my earlier circumnavigation. The elfish pixie and her companion continued to walk very slowly around the body of water and stopped twice more to give other dogs some treats.

The key to this precognitive event, I think, is the use of my stream of consciousness for the silly songs, freeing up my mind. What made it memorable was the fey and whimsical appearance of the little lady who was well under five feet tall.

See also Precognitive Dreams, and Pareidolia Or?

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive and the co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast”. 

 

The Upset Worm

The path I attempted to reclaim.

I have always liked garden worms, I even maintained several tropical red worm farms both personally and in a NYC primary school. Of course non-tropical earthworms are not quite the same, they are bigger and more pink than the red tropical worms.

In any case, I was attempting to reclaim a concrete path from the encroaching grass and weeds, when I came across what appeared to be a garden worm. It looked like a perfectly ordinary earthworm but a bit stiffer in the body because of the cold weather and had a darker redder stripe running down each side. I have seen that in the past; the worm’s body not being as flexible in the cold. I lifted the worm and placed it about 10 inches in from the place I was clearing. Generally when I place a worm away from where I am gardening it merely burrows into the soil and goes about its business.

The place where the angry aberrant worm reappeared.

A few minutes later the worm reappeared in front of me. It was angry. It had eyes and a mouth open. It lifted its head in front of me and seemed to be yelling at me, but of course, there was no sound.  I never saw eyes and a mouth on an earthworm, but its body still looked like a normal 6 inch earthworm. What was it? Tiny snake? What kind? It had no legs so not a reptile of any sort (chameleon, skink, etc.). It was fairly cold out, not over 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Was it a cryptid? Was it a shamanic vision? It was as real to me as the dirt on my hands. I was so freaked out I fled the scene. The vision is burned in my mind.

My depiction of the worm could not accurately show the mouth, which looked angrier and displayed a toothless gum ridge. Otherwise it is fairly accurate.

Unusual heretofore unknown fact: The common earthworm can live to be six years old.

Fahrusha is the co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast” and a professional intuitive.

 

Species Dysphoria

 

There is a lot of discussion in the media about gender dysphoria. This blog post does not intend to make light of the subject, but this post is largely not about gender dysphoria. Tangentially it does play a small part. I was listening to an interview with a prominent paranormal thinker who noticed that oftentimes psychic readers, professional intuitives, and paranormal practitioners come from the population of marginalized individuals and communities. He particularly mentioned those in the LGBTQ community and the gender dysphoric. This may be true, but a large number of readers and psychics I am acquainted with are straight females, myself included. But this is not the actual topic of this post. And a hearty welcome to those intuitives from that community!

On a page on FaceBook, I made some disparaging remark about the destructiveness of the human race on the planet Earth. I was not faulting any particular person or group. A man with whom I am vaguely familiar, shot back at me something to the effect that he was tired of all the self-flagellating whiners like me. This surprised me deeply, not because he was critical of my stance, I rather expect that. It surprised me because it revealed something to me about myself, of which I was not so acutely aware. Something that I doubt he could have imagined. I did not think I was self-flagellating in the least because somewhere in my mind I do not identify with being human. I do identify with being in an animal body. I eat and like to have shelter and have sexual thoughts like humans and other mammals. I speak a human language but have as much kinship with cats and trees as humans. I also have what appears to be a human body and I often wear clothes. I wish all humans well and sincerely hope for a positive solution to human problems, but I don’t think that it looks at all promising. I have thought to blame my Neanderthal genes for seeing humans as destructive, but confidantes have laughed at that. It does make some sense to me that ancestral memories of Cro-Magnons invading and destroying the lifestyle of some of my predecessors could be a cause. This could jibe with seeing humans as “others”. By the way, one of those confidantes refers to himself as a Yeti (you know who you are). 🙂

Others have kindly suggested that perhaps this species dysphoria is because I am highly evolved spiritually. Personally I doubt it. Although I do think I subscribe to Robert Monroe’s primary statement, “You are more than your physical body.” And I do appreciate the approach of some North American indigenous people in envisioning other species as brothers and sisters and seeing the environment as sacred.

So many people who align themselves with spirituality or religion view things from a human-only point of view, seeking to reach an anthropomorphic Godhead of some sort, believing that a Supreme One somehow sets mankind on some evolutionary pinnacle as more important than other terrestrial beings. They also think that if angels or extraterrestrials or discarnate beings exist, that those beings wish to communicate specifically and only with humans. This hubris astounds me. Perhaps they’d rather communicate with rocks.

I think a whole lot more could be learned about paranormal phenomena if seen from a position that is non-species specific. We all operate some of the time on a subjective basis; the “it’s all about me” stance that some never have moved beyond, ever. So it is natural that as a group humans might view all intelligent paranormal phenomena as being about humans and directed towards humans. Now conversely, I do think that it is highly possible that some paranormal phenomena originates with individuals (human or animal or plant or non-respirating), but please note that a substantial portion of those humans in the modern era, who have displayed psychokinetic abilities, attribute them to extraterrestrials. Make of that what you wish.

Is this post somewhat tongue in cheek? I’m not sure and neither are you.

Fahrusha is an intuitive reader and co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast.”

 

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon

 

I was thrilled and honored to take part in an unscripted comedic sketch on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon which aired on NBC on March 19, 2018. It was so much fun to interact with these two enormously talented gentlemen, Jimmy Fallon and Blake Shelton. Many thanks to the entire crew and production team.

 

Everyday Precognition

The day was so cold I wasn’t sure I’d make it to yoga class. I was in the bathroom washing and getting dressed while planning my strategy. If I wasn’t ready in time I’d have to go to the gym instead and be bored senseless on the treadmill.

My mind wandered. I started thinking about making a headband. The best way might be to crochet one in an alternating rib stitch. That would give it a bit of elasticity and keep my hair off my face and my ears warm. What color should it be? Maybe close to my hair color which is a light auburn brown. Would I ever get the time to do such a thing? I continued musing that I used to do such things fairly regularly. Where does my time go nowadays?

I was out the door in plenty of time to make the yoga class, in fact I was there before the teacher. A young woman with cropped black hair walked in two minutes later. Bizarrely she was wearing the very same hair band that I had a half hour prior considered making, crocheted in an alternating rib stitch in a muted brick red. I asked her if she had crocheted herself and she looked at me as though I might be slightly daft and mumbled something about her mother. She was clearly uninterested in chatting with me about it, which was okay, but I was a bit blown away. This was clearly not a commercially common head band but the very one I had imagined making.

This is the kind of thing that happens to me on a regular basis and I don’t often write about. Was it synchronicity, intention or precognition? I honestly don’t know and am not sure if the word matters. It is what makes everyday life magical.

Fahrusha is an intuitive reader and co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast.”

 

The Plight of Women and How We All Become More Conscious

As a woman in the greater New York area, who worked in show business as a younger person, fighting off unwanted advances of agents, casting directors and fellow performers, was a way of life for me. I wrote “Me too” on my Facebook status, like countless others, but did not post my war stories. But the above article in the New York Times really made my blood boil. It speaks volumes to the argument against the domination of patriarchal religiosity. It speaks to the organized abuse of women and children by a patriarchal system that cannot be accepted. Women must not be complicit in this abuse of other women and children. Patriarchal fundamentalism in all so-called religions cannot be tolerated, whether it wears the mask of faux Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. I am not against the true spiritual teachings of mercy and compassion.

I found this essay by my friend Zelda and it gave me hope for the future.

An essay below by my wise friend Zelda Hall, an Irish born transpersonal psychologist living in beautiful Amsterdam:

THE #METOO CAMPAIGN AND THE CALL TO BECOMING FULLY HUMAN
Yesterday I had a discussion with a (male) friend of mine about the #metoo campaign in which women are speaking out about the many times we have been assaulted in one way or another by a man and we have often kept quiet about it because we wouldn’t be believed, might get into even deeper trouble, be killed, or lose our job on which we were dependent to keep ourselves or our kids alive. Or we just accepted that this was what we had to subject ourselves to if we were to get on in the world as we are all told is what we are here for. To be “successful”
Some men have joined in, in different ways. Some to support women and others to admit their own oppressive behaviour and yet others to say ME TOO.
Of course I too have had to deal with the assaults that many women talk about. The abuse of power.
The older boy who flashed at me in the woods when I was a young girl. So that the woods, which were a place I loved were no longer quite so lovely. The doctor who insisted that he had to do a breast examination when I went to him for the pill. The Spanish bloke who tried to rape me when I thought we were only going to share bananas and milk at his place, not bodily fluids. After he tore the buttons off my blouse and almost broke the zip on my trousers, I got him off me by shouting ‘you bastard’. He only stopped because felt insulted by that word! I had bruises on my breasts. I have never felt paralysed, as is a common reaction, fight or freeze, when attacked in this way. I am very lucky. I managed to fight off an attacker in a New York street at seven in the morning when I was 22. I could run faster than he could.
I have never felt afraid of men.
My mother told me a story about how when she was a school teacher, all the women teachers would pass the word on not to be alone with a certain school inspector when he came to the school. No-one complained to ‘the authorities’. So many of us learned to avoid certain men or situations. Some of us could not avoid them.
There were and still are too many of these stories. There were and still are people who say well ‘that’s what men are like’. Or ‘boys will be boys’.
But I don’t believe that that is what men are like. I do believe that all of us suffer under a system that needs to change if we are to continue to live on this planet.
We must evolve from what Rianne Eisler called the dominator culture, to partnership. From culture that believes that there must always be someone on top. That there are only winners and losers. That accumulation of material goods is that which will ensure our rise to the top of the pyramid and will insulate us against misery .
To a culture in which we think as ‘we’ as not as ‘them’ and ‘us’ where we can be partners and allies in innovative ways of solving the planetary crisis.
You may say I’m dreamer but I’m not the only one.
I am reading Roddy Doyle’s book ‘Smile’ at the moment. It is painful. The main character, Vincent, describes in such exquisite detail how the boys in his school are brutalised by the members of a religious order who are teaching them. And how this abuse of power is reiterated in the boys’ relationships with each other.
And in his internal world.
One of my very dearest friends suffered from this same brutality. It injured him deeply.
A prominent Dutch male journalist speaks out about a well known media figure who raped him when he was much younger and just starting out. On TV, several male commentators on a programme about football laugh uneasily about what he has told. Seemingly totally unable to face the implications of it and acknowledge their own discomfort.
Women have taken the lead here and have risked being attacked yet again for telling their stories.. This is why some women really resent men ’jumping on the bandwagon’ and starting to speak out about their own abuse under the same hashtag, as part of the same campaign. I understand this.
The men need to do this for themselves. Not in the form of whatabouttery. We women cannot do the work for men. There are men who are addressing this. Who are confronting, supporting, and embracing their fellow men.
There are plenty of women who have abdicated to patriarchal authority structures. There are mothers who have abused their sons. There are women who have started wars and sent their sons off to do battle, to be martyrs. There are women who demand that their men support them financially and then berate them for not earning enough or not spending enough time with their families. And there are women who tell other women who speak out to shut up.
We all must acknowledge our misuse of power. Our contempt for others or for parts of ourselves. Our dismissal of our tenderness and hurt and inability to protect ourselves or others. And we must become fierce in our defence of life and our planet.
Many evolved women are yearning for men who have found a sense of purpose, who can acknowledge the parlous state of humanity and our treatment of the planet. So that we can be allies in evolution towards a more expanded state of being in which we can dismantle the patriarchal structures which we have allowed to hold us captive for so long. And which are slowly killing us all.
It is essential that we learn to communicate well, that we can listen, that we can hear. That we can hear the pain of another without wanting to jump in and say what about me? That we can acknowledge our role in creating that pain. Without simply becoming stranded in guilt and shame. That we can begin to create the kind of world in which all life is honoured. And that we honour the spark of life, the call to becoming fully human that lives in us all. That we live in service to this greater calling.

Sunset by Zelda Hall

 

The psychic mushroom

Author in front of rooftop UFO.

A few days before Memorial Day weekend 2017, I went to the NJ shore. There I visited with a woman friend of many years. We walked the boards and talked about our escapades of previous years, including singing “We German” to the tune of Bob Marley’s “Jammin'” in Upper East Side night spots along with another mutual friend. That, and the UFO model on the roof of a boardwalk business led us into a discussion of psychoactive substances such as ayahuasca. But what did our Northern European ancestors do to commune with the higher realms? Why should we have to travel to South America to partake of this magical substance to become enlightened? Our conversation turned to fly agaric also known as Amanita muscaria.

fly agaric illustration

This mushroom is associated with shamanism, Santa Claus, and reindeer. You can see it on many German and Swedish Christmas cards. It is prevalent in illustrations across Iceland and probably other Nordic countries as well, but I am speaking here from experience only. I actually purchased a delicate glass tree ornament of a fly agaric mushroom at a Christmas shoppe in northern Iceland. Now think about Santa Claus. According to tradition, he lives at the North Pole and flies in a sled pulled by reindeer and he wears a red suit. This description fits that of a Siberian or Lapland shaman. It is known that tribes from the Arctic region, particularly their shamans, ingest fly agaric to go on spiritual journeys. They also herd reindeer and the reindeer also eat the mushrooms which incidentally grow underneath fir trees (Christmas trees).

Santa as shaman. (courtesy of Ancient Time News on Tumblr)

So my friend and I agreed that probably the most culturally appropriate way for us to experience higher realms would be to dose ourselves with fly agaric. This was all said largely in jest and under the influence of a vodka and tonic. No way that either of us intended to go out and find and consume potentially poisonous mushrooms that neither of us had ever seen in the “flesh”. In fact we doubted that it grew in our area of the world.

Shortly thereafter I drove to Northern New Jersey where at a familiar location I found these mushrooms.

Northern NJ fly agaric mushroom

A NOT intrepid explorer and fly agaric mushrooms in a bed of sweet woodruff under fir trees.

 

I have spent much time at the location in various seasons but NEVER saw this type of mushroom there or anywhere else. I am interested in mushrooms and as a child broke out in a horrible rash from excessive handling of puffball mushrooms. I always stop to look at mushrooms when I see them in the wild. Needless to say I was blown away by this seeming synchronicity, I actually felt like the mushrooms were calling me to have a taste. But I didn’t. I had heard all the stories of professional wild mushroom pickers who died from making a wrong identification.

About a week later I visited Providence Rhode Island and came upon these sweeties on an evening walk.

Providence RI fly agaric?

This was beginning to get uncanny.

Then I received this toy figure as a gift.

 

Toy fly agaric figurine.

I don’t usually do a photographic essay for a blog post, but this little episode really calls for it. I still haven’t ingested any fly agaric, though I can’t say I’m not tempted. I think that the late Terence McKenna explained this best. He spoke of mushrooms being conscious and their spores traveling through outer space. Could these mushrooms have been speaking to me? I think that they were. I think they were speaking directly to the Neanderthal in me.

Listen to Terence MaKenna on this subject (short) on YouTube.

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive and co-host of Shattered Reality Podcast.