 Hello everybody, welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. Today is our first installment of our new book, The Hathor Material by Tom Kenyon. And you guys, we just finished up the Magland manuscript. I was so sad to see that book go. I'm always sad to see books go, books become like friends. But I'm really excited to move on to the Hathor Material. It wasn't a book I was considering reading, but Tom Kenyon did the Magland manuscript and I really like that. So I thought, why not? Let's try it. As you guys know, with this stuff, with the Understanding the Magland series, I am reading it for the first time with you on the show. When I do the missing books of the Bible, I always pre-read and research and very scholarly about it. But with this stuff, this spiritual work, deep spiritual work, I'm doing it with you guys live, cold, right here on this recording for the very first time. The only thing I determined before I record is how far I'm going to read into it. I usually do that by seeing how many pages I'm going to go into, because that gives me an idea about how long it's going to take me to get through the material. So if you guys joined us last week, we promoted this book. I will put a link to the book down in the description box below if you would like to read along with us. However, as you know, as with most of the books, if money is tight and it's not something you can afford right now, no big deal. I'm going to be reading it live word for word. I do suggest you have your own copy if you can afford it so that you can make notes or go back and reread. But once again, it's kind of like our our spiritual book club, you know. And of course, I give my commentary and I love hearing your opinions down in the comment section below as well. As always with this book, we got CDs that come with it. I talked about this last week. I've not listened to these CDs yet, but I do have a CD player in my car. I am recording this early tomorrow. I will be going up to see my friend Cindy for my next Luna key rights. So I'm planning on listening to some of these CDs in the car when I'm driving up to Marietta. So with that being said, let's get started. The Hathor material. So I'm not going to read the dedication or am I going to read about the book just because it gets more into the production value of how this book came about. We're going to start on the prelude. All right. Okay, here we go. Before we proceed any further, I would like to offer the reader a bit of advice and intellectual consideration if you will. As you pursue this material, I suggest that you keep an imaginary box beside you at all times. If what I say doesn't make sense to you or violates your views of reality, then I suggest you just toss it into the box. Never swallow or accept as true anything anyone says without shifting it through your own life experience, your own sense of logic, and very importantly, your own personal values. I agree with that completely. If more people had that perspective, the world would be a better place. Swallowing ideas without chewing on them and digesting them thoroughly can lead to a type of mental and or spiritual indigestion. And for this type of ailment, there is no such thing as an instant ant acid. There are those who say that you should leave your sense of logic and rational thinking behind when you when entering into spiritual realms of experience that you must fully and completely surrender to faith and not let reason enter into the picture. Personally, I think this type of thinking is dangerous. I agree because that gets into spiritual manipulation. And that's why it's one thing I really love about like Stephanie when she reads or other readers I watch where they say take what resonates and leave what doesn't. It's another way of that spiritual box of tossing what doesn't work for you. It's taking what resonates and leaving what doesn't. If somebody's telling you that you have to believe what they're saying 100%, they're probably not there for your highest good. Our people are saying my tarot cards are always right. They're not there for your highest good. People like this that say like you should not you should always have your own sense of discernment. These are people that are healthy minded and spiritual manipulation is huge when it comes to emotional abuse or spiritual abuse. We need all our wits about us and all intelligence we can muster if we are not to become deluded on our own way to spiritual illumination. It is after all the true light of self-awareness that we seek and not false luminosity of a personal fantasy and desire. In this regard, logic and rational thinking are not the nemesis of channel communication. They are critical allies. All right, so this takes us to a personal journey. Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction. Lord Byron, romantic poet and satirist, 1788 through 1824. Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one. Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel Prize winner, 1921. This chapter is not indispensable to the material in this book. It is a description of some parts of my personal life before I encounter the half-wars. I offer this biographical tidbit because I think it may be helpful to offer those who are facing a shift in their perception realities and are opening into their own inner worlds. We've all been there, haven't we? I mean, I've been on this journey for a really long time, so I'm used to this. But you look at, again, our friend Stephanie, the shift she's made in one year as she's gone through her realities, her perception on reality shifting. For whatever reason, it appears that more and more individuals are experiencing what sometimes are called paradigm shift in which one's previous views of reality are radically altered. They're also sometimes referred to as spiritual emergence or even spiritual emergent seas. Since when a sudden shift in your view of reality emerges, it can create vast implications for your life and the lives of those around you. Furthermore, I think our experience of the world and our beliefs about the world are tempered by how we were shaped by time, place, and circumstance. Radical views of reality do not appear out of nowhere. They developed in our birth from the womb of life and direct experience. My quest for reality, Samadhi, and cows. So once again, Samadhi is a yoga term. It means total union with God. I've always been intrigued by the concept of reality and like many things in my life, it began with a misunderstanding. It wasn't until I was around seven years old that I realized there was no such thing as reality companies and that reality was not the same as reality. For some reason, still not clear to me when I saw signs for real estate, I somehow jumbled the letters in my fledgling childhood mind to come up with the word reality. And for a long time, I wondered what reality agents did for a living. It was perhaps my obsession with the idea of reality and how one separates what is real from which is not. And that drove me into the study of psychology to begin with that and what happened to me when I was 18 years old. This strange and pivotal event in my life occurred as I was walking across one of my uncle's pastures on his farm in North Carolina. It was autumn and the air was crisp. The trees had turned brilliant reds, yellows, and golds and although it was cool, the sky was clear and the sun was bathing the field with warm light. And then it happened. I was overtaken by an urge to sit down on the cold ground beneath the tree. I pulled my leg into a lotus posture ala hatha yoga, a body contortion I never tried nor had any concept of enclosed my eyes. The world quickly faded away and I entered into a deep state of inner calm and sense of infinite space like the likes of which I never remotely experienced. So again, lotus posture of hatha yoga is a padmasana. That is the Sanskrit word is padmasana. My sense of time and my location in space disappeared and I no sense of myself as me. I was pure awareness without a body or any sense of the outside world. The event seemed to last only a few moments but when I opened my eyes the sun was low in the sky indicating that a few hours had passed. Several cows had wandered over to my vicinity and were looking at me intensely. I know context for what had just occurred. It was only later in my quest to figure out what the heck had happened to me out in the pasture that I discovered the odd truth. I say odd because because I was a white boy raised with no conscious connection to or understanding of India or the ancient practice of yoga. Without knowing how I did it or even what was done, I had inadvertently slipped into a yogic meditative state of consciousness called samadhi. This experience haunted me and drove me into my personal quest to comprehend what had happened and why. I began to study the world's major spiritual and mystical traditions and I practiced every yogic mystical technique I could get my hands on. In retrospect, one of the greatest allies in my pilgrimage to understand the nature of reality and what had happened to me out on the pasture would come not just through the mystical and spiritual lineages that I would soon be diving into but eventually through the discipline of science. For me, the odd union of personal mystical experience discoveries of Western neuroscience would produce a maulagam that continues to occupy my passionate attention. I believed that altered states of consciousness like the spontaneous samadhi I mentioned earlier in the states of mind that the half-wars open for us are rooted in the latent creative potential of the human brain backslash mind. They can reveal to us innovative solutions to problems and enrich our mental emotional lives through deep creative insight. The trick is how to navigate the waters, so to speak, angels at my side. As I entered my junior year as an undergrad at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, I was deeply immersed in personal explorations with meditation and yoga. I experimented with and compared the meditated techniques of yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, contemplative Christian mysticism, Supism, Taoism, Egyptian alchemy, and eventually shamanism. In addition to my studies at the University, I was probably spending several hours a day in various forms of meditation and contemplation. I was in the final stages of my degree program in speech and communications. But I already knew that I was being drawn to the study of psychology. This was no doubt an attempt on my part to understand the altered states of consciousness I was experiencing on a daily basis. While my experiences with meditation and mystical contemplation were an oasis of peace and insight for me, my overriding question was, were they real? One fateful afternoon during my senior year, I was walking to my psychology class, the topic of which was psychosis, seeing and hearing things that aren't there. All of a sudden in broad daylight, I felt two immense presences walking beside me. I turned to my right and my left to see two angels, complete with large white wings. I have to put the word see in quotation marks to indicate that this was a psychic seeing called clairvoyance in the mystical traditions and not seeing in the physical sense, but the visual impressions of these two beings was vivid nonetheless. I also felt an immense feeling of love flowing from them to me. For a moment, I bask in the warmth of their celestial love, but my reverie was broken by my paranoia. What if someone saw these two angels falling on campus? And even worse, I was going to a class, the topic of which was psychosis, a mental state in which a person sees things and hears things that aren't there. What if I walked into the class with them by my side and no one in the room saw them but me? That's why God has a sense of humor. I silently told the two beings that they would have to leave. Instantly they disappeared and I would not have another experience with angels for over 10 years. The student and the yogi. It was also during this period of studies at the university that I lived in a large, dilapidated house with some fellow students and musician friends. For whatever reason, I wound up living in what had once been the ballroom or a very large dining room with ceilings that were about 14 feet tall. The space was immense and being a student who was putting himself through school, I had no real furniture. So this became my minimalist period. I'm still a minimalist at 39 years old. Let listen. I've always been told I'm a cheat date always but every man I've ever dated, I have always been told that I am a cheat date. My favorite restaurant is Waffle House and I don't need a whole lot. I don't like designer stuff. I just dress comfortably and practically. I don't care about cars. I don't care about fancy stuff. So I get it. I laugh because he's talking about how high the smaller the room, the better for me. I feel better. I'm like an animal that way. You know how dogs sometimes like their crates. They'd like to kind of go and call small kids. That's me. That's me. I like to be like in a small space because I feel safer that way. I feel more cocooned. So I'm laughing at him being a minimalist in this big ballroom with like these high ceilings. I would have died. That would have been such a hard practice. I mean, I would have seen that as like a practice. It's oh, this is interesting. This is something that's going to trigger my like fear of being like vulnerable. But yeah, I prefer the smaller rooms. I like a big bathroom now. Really, my next place I live, I want a huge bathtub. Huge bathtub. Huge. That I like. Most of my bedroom was simply a large expanse of empty space. In one corner of the room, I had a used mattress on the floor surrounded by books. Half written papers, dirty laundry and of course my guitar. It was a slobbery mess by any estimation. That I am not. I am not messy. I'm very, very clean and very organized. I mean, I make my bed up like military style every day. I tuck the damn sheets in tight. My to actually looking at my folded towels right now, I fold them like hotel style. Towels have to match. Like if I have two towels hanging in the bath and they have to match. So that I am very OCD about. I cannot stand mess. I can't stand mess. The corner of the room was however a different story. I had found a small coffee table on the street and had transformed it into an altar. There were candles on it and pictures of the saints and mystics from traditions I had been experimenting with. There was a prayer rug on the floor and from the table and everything in that side of the room was in perfect order. A far cry from the chaos that sieved and wreathed in the demands of my everyday life as a student who had two part-time jobs to make ends meet. I had read that real yogis got up in the morning to meditate. So I vigilantly tried to do this but I was not and still am not a morning person. And so many mornings I fell to get up at this time to meditate. It's not just seated meditation. We're going to talk about this more in the yoga course and we might talk about it more in this book as it comes up and it might actually bring as I've been reading this I've been thinking about bringing somebody on the channel to actually talk about meditation. Emma and I spoke about this. You should not be meditating doing seated meditation over like 15 minutes a day. And the reason being why in traditional yoga you need the asana you need the posture practice as your meditation because your mind will go into psychosis if you're just sitting there closing your eyes in a corner doing nothing. Like it's very dangerous to do that and I want to stress that. And when he's talking about getting up early in the morning I've spoken about this is called Brahma Morta. So this is any time between two and six o'clock in the morning. This is considered the time of God. It's the Vata time of day and that's why we practice so early in the morning because it's Brahma Morta. It's the time of God and it is a very magical time and you do feel the presence of God there more than any other time of the day. And he says I'm not a morning person. Well most people aren't most people aren't warning people. And when I got into traditional yoga I was it's a joke like I was getting up in the morning to go to the shower at the times I was usually going to bed when I was in college. So it's it's a discipline that's why it's a discipline is because it's not no one's getting up that early in the morning because it's easy. Not anybody is having an ease waking up at that time of day. So I don't really like that excuse right. It's not really an excuse to say oh I'm not a morning person. Oh it's hard for me to get up in that when people say that I want to smack them across the face. I'm like everyone's tired at that time of day. No one it's it's not easy for anyone to get up at that time of day. You're not special. You're not special. It's just the people who are getting up at that time of day to do this are disciplined. They're disciplined. Nevertheless I pursued my dream of being a real yogi and so I meditated and when I could I continued to experience the mind-altering effects of these types of meditations produced. I was living in two worlds. This is where you need a teacher. You're not supposed to be living in two worlds. You're supposed to be living in the one world. Everything is intricate. You're watching the world. You're the watcher. You're experiencing the world around you as you're connected to your soul. That's why you need a teacher. That's why you don't sit around and mess with this shit without having someone to guide you because then psychosis and neurosis will start to happen. Delusion will start to happen if you don't have a teacher there to help you. In one world I was Tom living my life as a student. In my other secret world I was an aspiring yogi. He entered the infinite cosmos and that dwelled within me. In these inner worlds I soared through space encountering beings of immense light and could even sometimes converse with them. Most of the time I re-entered the same deep serenity that I experienced on that fateful afternoon on my uncle's farm. But without even knowing it, a gulf was growing inside of me. I was separating two aspects of myself. Yes, then one of my friends and fellow students knew as Tom and a secret person living a secret spiritual life I dare not speak about. There are dangers when we separate ourselves into parts. Yes, okay, so that's what he's talking about here. And most of the time we don't recognize when we are doing it. Hence why you need a teacher. It often only becomes apparent to us when it is pointed out to us by someone else, someone who is living outside the box we have built around ourselves. Hence why teachers are important. For me that occurred when a friend of mine and I decided to go to a consort together. He had not seen my new living situation. When he came to the door I opened it and let him in. He glanced around the room for a moment and then quipped who's your roommate. His words stung and a dim light went off in my head. I had somehow split myself into two competing aspects into the sacred and the profane. The profane part of me lived in one corner of the room with the mattress on the floor and the swirling chaotic mess of my everyday life. While the sacred part of me hung on the other far corner of the room, the one with the pictures of saints, the prayer rug and where everything was perfect. I had not found a way to bring the human and the divine together in myself. I had to find the middle ground. But in my room the middle ground was empty space like the intellectual null zone in my head when I tried to reconcile the two. Exactly. It's about reconciling the two being a spiritual person but also living in the now as you as a human being. It was your human experience the mundane everyday life of your human experience. The pain of being human is what's teaching your soul who it is. They're not two different things. They have to be lived into one life. Looking back at it, I think I was suffering from a severe case of dogmatitis when one follows too much religious or spiritual bullshit with a few notable exceptions. All the spiritual lineages I was exploring held the view that spiritual worlds were better than physical worlds. This is why you should not be studying spiritual lineages without a teacher because in the spiritual lineages that I have studied in India that is not a true statement. That is not a true statement. The Shiva, the Shakti, the Purusha, the prakriti, one can't exist without the other. They are two worlds into one, one world. No spiritual lineage is going to tell you to separate them. If you separate them, that means you're dead. At one point in fact, many of the lineages said that one should endeavor to liberate oneself from the prison of Maya or the samsara of earthly life by slipping to the no, no, by slipping through the secret door of paradise. No. If anybody knows Tom Kenyon, I would really like to speak to him and this again is why you should not be studying this stuff by yourself. Maya means delusion. Samsara is like, it's like your samsara life. Like I shared the video of Richard Frimeray talks about yoga ruins your life. Well, it ruins your samsara life. It ruins your perception of reality. But yoga is not telling you to separate these things. All the yoga, all these lineages are telling you is that your human suffering is caused by Maya. It's caused by delusion because who you think you are is your nature, is your body. But who you really are is your eternal spirit. Your body is just a creation of that spirit for the time being. Don't leave it. You can't go live off an ashram by yourself. Not everyone can do that. You have to exist in your life. That's why if your life you were supposed to be living as a monk, you would have been born into a situation where you would be a monk. But me, I'm a white girl living in Atlanta, Georgia. That's my experience. And so I have to take the practices of yoga and know that the world around me is merely a hologram. It's merely a reality I created for myself to learn my soul. And the delusion is me thinking that my life is real when the only thing that's really real is my soul. My life is something just to be lived. I hope that makes sense. So that is not an accurate statement that he made here. 100% not an accurate statement. And so that again, that that is a statement coming from someone who seems to have just read a bunch of books instead of actually learning with a teacher. That again is why it's very important and crucial to have a teacher as part of the parampara, the transmission of knowledge. All right. Mind you, each tradition has its own view of what paradise was. Who would be able to enter it where the secret door was? There is no secret door. It's inside of you. Even Yahshua said that. Well, behold, heaven or hell is inside of you. There's no secret door. There's no thing outside of you but you. You're the cosmos. You're it. Adding to the severity of my dog Midas, I had grown up in a quasi-catholic and part-time Lutheran. And so it was the brainwashing of my childhood had filled my intellect with both the implicate and explicit messages that all of us were born in original sin and idea that we were tainted just for being born simply for existing. And of course, this dogma paradise was reserved only for those who believed in Christ, the sacrificial lamb of God who died for our sins, a concept that is actually very pagan at its roots. It's also very satanic. And in the very Christian version of paradise, anyone who was an untrue believer is doomed to an eternity in hell. The secret door in this faith, faith without reason, as Saint Ignitus of Lola wrote. Yeah. And that's very satanic. Again, it was around this time that I had another spontaneous spiritual experience, similar to the different from the episode on my uncle's farm. I think in retrospect that this event may have been a result of my wrestling with the undaunting task of reconciling my humaneness with my divinity. And like he said that, reconciling my humaneness with my divinity. That's it. That's the opposing forces we talk about in yoga. That's what you're trying to balance. You're not trying to escape one for the other. If you were trying to be one or the other, you wouldn't have come down on how to human experience, right? You have to balance the two. In some of the traditions I had been exploring and whose meditations and contemplations I had been practicing, divinity meant different things. And some I was divine because I was a child of God. In other traditions, I was inherently divine because my innermost being was an expression of Buddha Chika or Ottoman. So Ottoman is the Ottoman. So we say in the West, we say the soul, right? But if we get, I've kind of reframed from really talking about Ottoman because it could be very confusing for beginners like we think the soul. But if we can deepen the philosophy from the East, the soul is actually not even the most divine part of us. The most divine part of us is our Ottoman. Okay? That's what he's talking about, the God within. Right? He says depending on whether you viewed it as a Buddhist or as a Hindu. And just so you guys know, Buddhism comes from Hinduism. Hinduism is the mother of Buddhism. There's a lot across over between the two faiths. This was difficult philosophical territory for young men in his early 20s. The incident occurred unconsciously enough while studying for an upcoming exam. And let me go back to the Ottoman and the Chika for a while because that is again the idea of eminence which we spoke about in the Divine Sophia. Return the Divine Sophia, eminence and transcendence. Eminence, these two things have in common because eminence means that God is within you and God is with all around you. He's omnipresent. He's already here. He's with you. You were born with the Holy Spirit inside of you. Transcendence is what the Abrahamic faiths teach. Like he was saying in this last paragraph here where he talks about the sacrificial lamb who died and having to believe in Jesus for your sins, to get into heaven, to get to God. That's called transcendence and that's the biggest difference between the Abrahamic faiths and the philosophies of the East. The philosophies of the East say no, no, no. You're already, you already have the spark of life inside of you. You already are Ottoman. You already are there, but your delusion makes you not realize that. And so the Abrahamic faiths in that philosophy pull us further from understanding who we are. Whereas the Eastern faiths bring us closer to understanding who we are and Yahshua taught from the Eastern faiths. He taught from the Eastern eminence. Yahshua Magdalene taught eminence. They didn't teach transcendence. Transcendence is satanic. Eminence is of God. All right. Suddenly I felt some part of me slip out of me. The moment was truly odd as I could see two perspectives at the same time. One perspective was through my eyes, but the other perspective was from a position somehow floating a bit off the floor and looking at me and over my shoulder to the textbook that was opened. I felt completely detached from myself and from the environment around me. I also felt a familiar sense of deep peace and serenity that I often experienced during meditation, but my eyes were open and I was not sitting in a lotus-like position. Again, that's called patmasana. And I've had that experience too that he's talking about where you're in your body that you also feel yourself watching your body. I've had that experience a couple of times. I think I've spoken about one time I had that experience and it left me feeling nothing but bliss and joy, but then all of a sudden I was right back into my misery again. So I understand what he's talking about. I marveled at the oddity of the situation and even more so because a part of my mind or awareness seemed to be observing every thought and emotion I was having with a deep sense of detachment, amusement and compassion. Yep. I suddenly felt the urge to get up and walk a short distance to the nearby park. It was early evening near twilight as I began my stroll. The sense of complete detachment from my body and the environment around me continued unabated as I left the house and entered the park. The twilight was quickly turning to early evening. There was a sea of cars beneath the small knoll where I stood and I had the oddest sense that I could somehow sense the people inside their vehicles and then suddenly I was slammed and I mean slammed with the deepest sense of love that I have ever experienced. This was completely impersonal kind of love, the likes of which I'd never felt before. It loved everything and everyone. I could feel it extend itself to every one of those drivers and to every passenger. I became intoxicated with the intensity of this love and then I recognized what it was. I had been reading the writings of the great Christian mystics, contemplatives from the Middle Ages, saints and mystics with names such as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa and the mystic Mr. Eckhart. Their words wept to me from across the centuries. They spoke about this love, this very love I was feeling. They called it agape. I staggered from the impact of the realization and then this strange unanticipated love slammed me again. I felt it loving me and I felt it loving every blade of grass and every atom. This love moved in torrents leaving nothing untouched by its grace and I marveled that we humans live in it every moment of our lives but most of the time we do not even know it exists and then as quickly as it had come over me it was gone. The love, the deep sense of serenity, all of it was gone. I was back to myself and the world no longer hummed with a divine ferocity I had experienced only moments before. I turned to head back home and after walking a short distance I saw an archway in front of me. The illusion was created by the fact that the burrows of two trees had bent over towards each other. On the other side of the archway I could see a streetlight and everything on that side was bathed in a somewhat bluish white light. I was standing on this side of the arch in darkness. Evening had turned to night and once again I lost my usual sense of time just as I had done out in the pasture of my uncle's farm. As I walked through the archway literally from the darkness into the light I heard a distant voice speak to me. It was not an external hallucination but whether it was a clear unmistakable presence in my mind. It spoke five simple words that somehow jolted me to my core. It said you can never go back. I was now in the light of the street lamp and my intoxication with agape had come to a sudden end. I walked I walked home thinking about what had happened. My overriding concern was simple question that had been haunting me since that singular event when I was 18. The spiritual worlds are so beautiful but are they real? A detour into the twilight zone. After I graduated from university I entered one of the strangest phases of my strange life. I did not know it at the time but I was laying the foundation for my later work in brain research with music and altered states but at this point I had no idea this was where I was headed. I was in my early 20s and I had just graduated with an essentially useless BA degree in speech and communications and I had no idea what to do with my life. Since I have been playing guitar in clubs and lounges for several years and had a bundle of country folk songs I had written I decided to head west for Nashville Tennessee. Woody, a musician friend, had an empty bedroom in his rental house so I drove into town with my trusted 64 Ford Galaxy dubbed Big Red because while the car was really big and it had once been a bright cherry red by then the paint job had faded to a kind of muddy red mixed with faded sun splotches and rust. In any event with a few dollars left in my pocket I settled down into a life as a country singer want to be. I don't like country music. I worked as a cook during the day and sang in clubs at night. I hung out with studio engineers and made demos and waited breathlessly for the big break. The weird thing was the studio guys who heard me sing my tune said that I was sure to hit pay dirt anytime soon but the producers with money just didn't seem to be interested. After about a year a truly strange event occurred that would turn my life around in a totally different direction and like many strange events in my life it happened around a full moon. We're going to be doing episode on full moons with Shaunty by the way. It was like any other normal night in Nashville. I just finished picking some tunes with Woody when I looked outside to see a new van had stopped at a stop sign near our house. All of a sudden it burst into flames. The engine exploded into a mass of spitting and spewing fire and the passengers ran for their lives. Woody and I ran out into the yard to see what the heck was happening as the fire trucks arrived to put out the inferno. I had the oddest feeling that something had happened to red even though my car was at least 100 yards away from the melting van. I looked up to see the full moon and had an ominous feeling about big red and I went back into the house. The next morning I went out to my car to drive to work and it wouldn't start. I called a tow truck and after trying to start the car himself the tow truck driver hauled my trusted seat off to the shop to see what was wrong. The word wasn't good. The timing belt had snapped and it would cost way more to fix big red than I had or would have in the foreseeable future. I know nothing about cars at all. My country singing career came to an abrupt and sudden end and I decided to head back to North Carolina. As fate would have it my friend had to visit family in the area and I was headed to so I rode with him back over the blue ridge mountains towards Greensboro. He said he just needed to make a stop over to see a teacher of his who lived in the mountains. We would spend the night there he said and take off in the morning. What transpired was truly one of the oddest experiences of my life up to that moment. We arrived to meet his teacher who lived in a house that was filled with many people who had come to hear him speak. Jim Gore the man who all these people had come to listen to took me aside and said he wanted me to do something for him. I never met this man before in my life and these were almost the first words out of his mouth. I'd like you to go out into the front meadow and see what you can sense. Come back and tell me what you experience. I had no idea what he was talking about. What is there to sense out an open field that has nothing in it and what did he mean by the word sense. Nevertheless I went outside to the crisp air and walked out to the meadow that was large expanse of stub grass. I looked up to the sky stars were beginning to appear as the sun slipped behind the ridges of the mountains. The blue ridge mountains are beautiful guys. It's like North Georgia. That whole area like Greensboro is not that far from here. That's the base again of Appalachia. In Appalachia it's where we did the North Stam episode with the Isis temple. This is the oldest mountain chain in the world. It's a very mystical place. All right again I looked up to the sky stars were beginning to appear as the sun slipped behind the ridges of the mountains. They looked like sparkling jewels in the cold autumn air and then I looked back at the meadow to a small rise to my utter amazement. I had the visual impression of a dome sitting there but this was a mental imprisonment I was experiencing and not physical sight. I rubbed my eyes and looked back at the empty knoll. There was nothing there but the mental impressions of dome persisted. As I looked at the dome I could see inside that there were different chambers with colored lights and there were people inside meditating for peace and an inter-conflict between all peoples of the world. I recognized that some of these people meditating were Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns. I shook this strange mental apparition from my mind and headed back to the warmth of Jim's living room where class had already started. I sat in the corner and listened to him talk until the class was over. I don't to this day recall what Jim spoke about. I was sidetracked by the distant sense of light I felt coming from him. As people began to leave Jim took me to a small den and asked me what I saw. I was a bit tentative at first having never experienced psychic seeing in that way before and I was hesitant to share it but Jim's gentle persuasion encouraged me to reveal every detail. After telling him what I'd seen out an empty meadow he smiled and walked over to a desk and pulled out a blueprint. He rolled it out on the table. It was a blueprint of the structure I had seen. This was to be a dome Jim said that would have many rooms with many different types of light. There was to be a meditation and prayer chambers where people could come from all over the world in order to meditate for peace and uplift for humanity. And he said some of them would be tied back. The next morning Woody and I headed east for Greensboro and it is here that the story gets even stranger. Shortly after settling back into the house that I have left for greener pastures a friend told me about a powerhouse psychic. He was coming through the town that evening and she would be offering a free class. Two words stood out my mind from this conversation psychic and free. That evening I tentatively walked into a room cramped with folding chairs. I found an empty one towards the back of the room and closed the door. I strategized that if the meeting got too weird for me I could more easily make an escape. A woman named Marion walked into the room. Marion was a no-nonsense kind of person and after everyone settled down she launched in. Her first words stunned me and riveted me to my chair. I couldn't believe my ears. She said as a matter of fact if anyone had had any car problems on a certain date that previous week and meant that they had agreed to offer the White Brotherhood some of their personal energy and an effort by the Brotherhood to avert a catastrophe on earth. And this mysterious transfer of energy would have somehow taken place she said not to wantly via your automobile resulting in sudden and unexplained car problems. This was mind you the very same day when I was in Nashville the very same day on the full moon when the van at the intersection near our house had burst into flames and it was the very same day that Big Red had died I was in a state of shock. My mind fell into a state of sheer pandemonium. What is the great White Brotherhood I asked myself and what the heck did she mean that some of us had agreed to offer extra energy through our cars going wacko. My logical mind was an utter state of confusion. I would have dismissed most of what she had said as mumbo jumbo except for the odd coincidence of her naming the very state that I had lost my car. Much of what she said followed the disclosure I did not hear. My mind was still racing with shock of the car thing. I could hear her talking but my mind didn't register her words. My intellect was locked in a game of mental chess. I was moving my rational thoughts around like chess pieces to counter the irrationality of what I had just heard. And in my distraction I wrestled with a crystalline clear realization that whatever this White Brotherhood was they had not asked me about messing around with either Big Red or my dreams or being a country singer. And even now decades after the strange event on the full moon night Nashville I still don't know how to intellectually wrap my mind around what happened or Marianne's explanation for the matter. Towards the end of the meeting Marianne mentioned that she would be in town for a few more days doing personal psychic readings and to please confirm your time with her assistant if you had previously made an appointment. I don't know what possessed me. My rational mind was still grappling with the irrationality of what I had just heard but undeterred by my logical objections I found myself in a line of people who were confirming their session times with Marianne. There were actually two lines. One was more of a cluster of people around Marianne and the other was a stream of people to Marianne's assistant who stood next to her. When I came to the front of the line I stammered and asked if there were any openings. I recalled Marianne's assistant looking at me as scant as if I had come from some other planet. She announced that Marianne was booked at least six months in advance and if I wanted an appointment she could put me on the waiting list. At that moment Marianne apologized to the person she was peeking to and said she needed a moment and then she turned to assistant and raised a finger in the air as to ask as if to put the moment on pause. Marianne then turned to me and proceeded to look from my feet up to the top of my head. I had a distinct feeling that she was scanning me although I didn't even know at the time what scanning was. Nevertheless I felt this woman whom I never met before had pulled back the veils and looked to my very soul. It was a very unnerving feeling. Marianne then said to her assistant make room for him as soon as possible if I have to I will skip lunch just fit him in. Her assistant seemed truly surprised by this as was I. She gave me a time to see Marianne the next day and wrote down the address please be on time she said the next afternoon I showed up a few minutes before I scheduled appointment. The assistant I had met the previous evening showed me into a den and said that Marianne would be with me shortly. A few minutes later Marianne entered the room and sat down in a chair a few feet away from me. She put a cassette tape in the recorder and sat down on a table next to her and pushed the record button. For the next hour she spoke nonstop at a fast pace like a verbal Gatlin gun about things that no one could have known other than myself. She talked about my childhood and incidents that no one knew but me including some of my most private thoughts and emotions. I was stunned yet again by this woman who I had never met. Her manner as the night before was no nonsense and straight to the point. It was as if she was reading my life like an open book. When she paused to see if I had any questions I asked her how she could possibly know these things. She waved her hand as if to dismiss the answer. The Akashic records dear I'm just reading your Akashic records. I never heard the term before and asked what on earth these records were. She laughed and said they weren't on earth. They were in the high etheric worlds and everything that had ever happened to me was recorded there. Then her tone changed to one of extreme urgency. You may have noticed that I made a place for you in my busy schedule. I nodded. Do you know why? I shook my head and mumbled an almost inaudible no. What did you say? Marion asked Naton as if to say don't waste my time with inaudible answers. I cleared my throat and said I have no idea. And then Marion shifted in her seat and looked straight at me. Look she said there is something you need to understand if you had stayed in Nashville one more month you have been discovered and your country's singing career would have taken off like a meteor. My mouth had turned dry as dust. I never mentioned to Marion my time in Nashville. The strange incident with big red are that I had gone there in hopes of pursuing a singing career. Would you like to know why your singing career ended before it began? She asked yes. I said your soul had a different desire for you. You were at a choice point in your life my dear and had you become a country star your soul's desire would have been eclipsed. I know you have no idea what is coming but all I can say is that you will find a new way of using your voice and it will have something to do with healing. I must have looked down found it because Marion seared in on another childhood memory. Do you remember that incident when you were 13? My mind searched through my memories of that difficult year when my family had to move to a small cramped apartment by the ocean for financial reasons. My only escape from the stress of that period was the recreation pink pong room downstairs. It was winter and there were hardly any people staying at that old dilapidated seaside apartment complex. I would go down there regularly to the basement room to sing because it had a great echo and I could travel in my mind on the sounds of my own voice echoing off the walls. I never sang when anyone was around but as I said it was winter and in all the times I had ever gone into that room to hear the echo of my voice no one had been there. One afternoon after school I was alone in the rec from singing. I discovered that listening to the sound of my own voice echoing off the walls could help unwind the stress that I felt in my body and retrospect the source of my stress was a powerful tension between my parents. It would be about two decades into my future before I would enter into brain research and learn how hearing the sound of my own voice had helped me through the stress and strains of the difficult adolescence. My reverie was suddenly and rudely interrupted. I felt the presence of someone at the door. I stopped singing and looked over at a man I had never seen before. He spoke in a very soft voice and said only a few words before departing. I don't mean to disturb you he said I just want you to know that you will heal many people in this world with your voice. I had someone say that to me once not about my voice. It was right before my first trip to India and I was going through like therapy but I was also doing spiritual therapy too not just trauma therapy and a spiritualist told me that the reason why I was granted all these opportunities not just opportunities in the yoga world going to India and studying under the most powerful yoga family the most famous yoga family in India like literally studying under them like they know my name but I had to be given opportunities of extreme struggle and suffering because my purpose according to my acoustic records was to help people on a grander scale one day and so that kind of just gave me chill bumps and kind of reminded me just in that split second you know my when lockdown happened I lost my shala as a lot of people. I just started my own program. I had been assisting and teaching at different studios and shalas and then I started my own program where I was the director of this Mysore program at Ashwagna house of yoga and Johns Creek and it was growing it was getting really big it was growing and then all of a sudden the carpet was pulled out from under all of us and that studio the shala where I was teaching was new and so it couldn't survive the financial tower moment that the government inflicted on us and that's when I just kind of was told to go on YouTube when I started YouTube you guys remember I didn't even talk about yoga at first when I was starting YouTube I just told stories I think I thought I would go back to TV Mysore and this was just something to bide my time that I enjoyed doing during the lockdown and then the summer of 2020 happened and there was so much violence and I started to get more vocal about my political opinions which I had kept to myself for years for years I mean I had been following the military back channel and didn't tell anyone in my yoga world I kept it to myself and then as my channel grew and as my platform grew and I started going meeting other people especially people like Shanti and Mornay and Tamara who are also healers who also studied in India I started talking more and more and more and more about my education and my time in India and so I don't know that's just powerful to hear that I know Rob Doss talks about that a lot that sometimes things happen to us and we're not sure why they happen everything that happens to us there it's in our caution records we agree to it but then if we can turn around and look back on on our lives we can see where what we thought was a bad situation actually turned us into a trajectory that we needed to go to put us in a better situation and so and I know part of my job and me I already know when the timeline flips I already know what my job is going to be if I've been told it's going to be to help people spiritually it's going to be to help people through yoga through the traditional teachings through understanding that there's nothing they have to prove to God so I don't know I felt like sharing that because he's sharing his story and I just know that there are other of you out there watching us that probably have some similar experiences because every single person on this earth has a purpose we all have an acoustic record and so if you're someone that's gone through a really hard time you've been struggling and suffering God has a plan for you I promise there's a plan you agree to it as well there's a micro and a macro you're healing yourself you're clearing your karma but there's also a bigger picture as well all right with those words he closed the door and left and I never saw him again my description of the incident when I was 8 13 ended and I was propelled back to the earlier time at the present moment as Marion left leaned forward and spoke to me her words were short to the point I remember them to this day because they seemed to carry a power and an intensity that was from beyond this world that man Marion said was not a man he was an angel and he was sent to give you a message Marion looked over at the clock on her table and pushed the stop button on her recorder she pulled up the cassette and handed it to me it was very nice meeting you Tom and with that she led me through the door through which I'd entered the sky outside was shining and it it seemed and it felt numb and electrified all at the same time I took the cassette tape home with me and listened to it over and over again always marveling at how this woman I never met knew so much about me the hypnotic key many years would pass before I finally found an intellectual construct that could explain Marion's uncanny ability to access information outside the constraints of time and space I discovered this construct in the field of paranormal psychology and I became fascinated by one of its theories such as there being a non-local aspect of human consciousness this theory proposes that information is normally acquired through our five senses but in certain altered states of consciousness like meditation or hypnosis persons can retreat information from distant locations and in some instances distant time as well we actually have more than five senses we have ten senses that's in the yogic studies we have ten senses and maybe one day I'll go into all ten of our senses eventually my fascination with the altered states and the phenomenon of non-local awareness would lead me to pursue my master's degree in psychological counseling but the real turning point in my understanding of altered states occurred when I did some postgraduate training in Ericksonian medical hypnosis. Ericksonian hypnosis uses language in specific and elegant ways to stimulate highly unusual healing states of mind and body not only this but most of the content in hypnotic states uncannily resemble many of the experience I had been having in my yogic meditation and mystical contemplations. I was on to something my self-description of my experiences in meditation and mystic contemplations began to shift I began to look at my experiences of the inner world from a new perspective and a new question arose what was happening in my brain mind for these types of experiences to occur in retrospect this intellectual juncture was one of the most significance in my life because it led me away from spiritual dogma as an explanation for what was happening in meditation to the precision of science. Brain, mind and music and I will say before we get into the next section yoga is considered a science too. Patanjaleen was a science he called it the yogic sciences. Brain, mind and music. I began to use the Erickson medical hypnosis more and more in my private counseling and psychotherapy practice and I began to immerse myself in the latest brain mind research that was taking place it was exciting time in the early 80s. Neuropsychology was in its infancy and so was psychoimmunology the study of how our thoughts and emotions affects our immune system. Let me read that again for those in the back that still believe the bullshit the doctors tell you. Neuropsychology was in its infancy as was psychoimmunology the study of how our thoughts and our emotions affect our immune system. Listen are you there I've been telling you this for thousands of years are you there I've been telling you this. It was also in this period that I came across the work of Dr. Lozenoff by way of best-selling books called super learning. His groundbreaking research showed how music affected brain state and that certain types of music could activate brainwave activity conducive both to enhanced learning and reducing stress. I was intrigued I had after all put myself through college partly by playing music. I began to play recordings of large movements of Baroque music to my clients at low volume steering hypnotic transport and notice that we go deeper when this type of music was playing in the background. What was happening here I wanted to know in detail how music was facilitating the powerful changes that I was seeing in my clients. This question hounded me even as I use Lozenoff's method. Now I just did an episode a couple of weeks ago with Shanti over sound healing and I will place a link to that episode down in the description box below because we talk about this and sound healing. So if you know are you theta the three elements of are you theta are food breath and vibration which is sound. I began to compose my own music for my clients and played it for them during their therapy sessions and with this addition of my compositions the depth and power of their psychological work astounded me. Convinced that sound and music could facilitate more profound healing in the psychotherapeutic process I decided to form a loose research group that I dubbed the acoustic brain research to scientifically document this therapeutic approach. This group consisted of myself and several researchers from different colleges universities and independent labs. For 10 years I worked in brain research and focused primarily on the use of sound to produce various altered states of consciousness. While members of our group use varied methods to approach the topic of sound in the brain one of the most useful to me was neuro mapping a type of computer enhanced EEG. It was clear to me from this and other data that certain types of sound could produce a wide range of brain changes which could then be utilized to access creative and non-ordinary states of body and mind. You can view some of this actual research as well as the articles I wrote on the topic by going to www.TomCanyon.com click on the acoustic brain research tab on the home page you will then be taken to a wealth of scientifically related material and topic you can also hear audio samples of psychoacoustic sound patterning that I developed to alter brain state I will put a link to that in the description box below. The synergy of personal history. As I write these words I am looking back from vantage point in time that it did not possess when the actual events that shaped my intellectual views on reality were being formed. After going through a spontaneous samadhi in my uncle's pasture I had set off on a quest to discover what had happened to me. My journey took me into Christian mysticism, Supism, the Yogas of India, Tibetan Buddhism, Tantra, Taoism, Egyptian alchemy and eventually Shamanism. I experienced with and compared their numerous methods for altering consciousness and for a while I was caught up in what I call transcendent fever. During my daily meditations I was raised up from my day to day existence into numerous worlds of light. I lived for those moments of transcendence and the occasional encounters with being seemingly from other worlds of existence. My self description of altered states began to change however as I began to study Neuropsychology. The overriding question changed from philosophical ones to questions of anatomy and physiology. Exactly what was going on in the brains of those who reported spiritual experiences? What were the commonalities between the various spiritual traditions when you look at them through the lens of Neuropsychology and brain function rather than the thought lens of spiritual dogma? I began to think that spiritual experiences might be results of both non-physical events in consciousness as well as neurological and biochemical events in the brain. But as the researcher Karl Pryburn once said, there is actually no such thing as the mind. The mind is not a thing. It's a process that runs parallel to brain activity. Thus you can have a brain without a mind as in a cadaver but you cannot have a mind without a brain. Indeed, this seems to be the crux of the question. Were all spiritual experiences merely a result of novel brain activity or was it possible that some of them might also be transcendent to brain activity? And if some spiritual experiences did in fact transcend brain activity, how on earth could you scientifically prove such a hypothesis? I did not recognize it at the time but I was on the brink of a paradigm shift and this shift would change some of my most basic and hard-won presuppositions about the nature of reality. While the idea of a paradigm shift might sound exotic and romantic, it can in fact be rather annoying or even downright disorienting especially when you are invested in your own version of reality. By the time I had my first half-or-encounter I had invested quite a bit in my own little paradigm. I had after all spent over 10 years in brain research with acoustic brain research and I had recorded dozens of psychoacoustic programs that were being successfully used by therapists and laypersons all over the world. To top it all off, I had over 20 years under my belt as a psychotherapist and counselor. A collision of worlds. That fateful day of our first encounter occurred during a personal meditation retreat that had nothing to do with the half-or-s. In point of fact, I was practicing an ancient Indian meditation practice known as Siddhas yoga. After I came out of a rather deep samadhi, I psychically sensed two beings in the room and with that collision of two worlds spares in mind. I entered an adventure into consciousness that addressed head-on the conundrum I had mentioned a moment ago. Despite my intellectual protest regarding our ultimate nature, the half-or's insisted that they were non-physical beings and that human consciousness could not be described solely through cerebral firings of neural networks. Human consciousness was, according to them, rooted in both a quantum reality of subatomic phenomenon and non-local hyperspace. In other words, spiritual and mystical experiences were indeed partly a result of novel brain activity, but they were also more than that. They were windows to a non-localized consciousness that transcended all phenomenon, a consciousness that was woven into the fabric of the universe and a consciousness that all humans could potentially access. The stories of my encounters with these enatic beings could surely be the topic of an entire book itself, but for the sake of space, I won't go into them here. If you are curious about some of the details around our collision of perceptual worlds, you can listen to a free audio file in the sound gift section of our website. www.tompkian.com entitled my first experience with the half-or's. The half-or's and their message. The half-or's are a practical lot, even if they are non- coreful beings who live in the light realms. They also have a deep affinity for humans and a great sense of humor. In my mind, the two go together, actually. I mean, how could you possibly have a fondness for us humans if you didn't have a well-honed sense of humor? In all the years that I had known them, that would be over 20 years now. They have never been dogmatic regarding their views on nature of reality or the potentials they see for human consciousness. They also never told me what to do. It is not in their nature. In fact, if you ever encounter a being that says he or she is a half-or, and that being tells you what you must do, then you are not dealing with a half-or. If I might be so bold as to summarize a large body of information that they have shared with me over the last two decades, it would be this. One, you are a miraculous being who lives in a world that is continually shifting between two seemingly divergent expressions, matter and energy. And at point of fact, you are, by your very nature, an expression of both matter and energy. You have the inherent abilities to shift between these two states at will once you free yourself from the perceptual boxes you have been conditioned to believe in. Two, your ultimate nature is transcended to both time and space. While your body may be currently bound by these limitations, your ultimate nature is unfounded. Three, as you free your mind from conditioned responses that keep you locked into a world of limitation, you will experience greater and greater freedom. Four, your life force key to higher states of consciousness. And by cultivating your life force and raising it up into higher vibratory expression, you will enter perceptual worlds that are heavenly or blissful. Five, earth is going through her own evolutionary ascension into higher vibrational realms of expression. And as a soul, you decided to be here at that time to witness it and to participate. Six, life and matter is neither a curse nor a condemnation. It is an adventure in spirit. Seven, love is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.