Survey Time

[John Tynes]

>>So, you see, when I read about The Flying Woman, I found it all rather
>>spooky, wondering upon what inspiration the author had drawn, and if he was
>>familiar with other such stories.  John?  Greg?  Care to shed a little
>>light on this?
>
>I think it was mostly John's idea, wasn't it?

I thought it was your idea, actually.

You know, maybe in emailing all those files back and forth during 
development, we started spontaneously receiving files that neither of us 
had written and just didn't notice. Perhaps the credits should read "By 
Greg Stolze, John Tynes, and the Secret Chiefs."

--

As for ye survey...In practice, I'm a materialist/rationalist/athiest. I 
believe in a big ole clockwork cosmos devoid of a meta-consciousness or 
ego. I don't believe that humans are capable of understanding everything 
about the cosmos, however; heck, our naked eyes can't even see in 
infrared. So there's always a big unknown, and some things may fall into 
the "technology/cosmic principle sufficiently advanced as to be 
indistinguishable from magic" (see? no k!) sphere of affairs; the 
following are examples.

Like apparently everyone on this list and their dog, I've had a few or 
known of a few peculiar events. My mom seems to have a strong psychic 
presence. She saw the apparition of a limping shaman when she was a girl, 
at a spot in Jackson, MS, where she later learned a limping shaman was 
chased and killed by soldiers in the 19th century. One night after she 
and my father had stopped dating for a few months, she confided in a 
friend, "I just think that somehow Allan is going to be in my life," when 
the phone rang and it was my dad; they got back together and were married 
soon after. There's a few other things like this in her life.

I've got what seems to be a pretty strong empathic ability; I can "read" 
people and situations in terms of emotional states and the like. This is 
something I've only come to terms with in the last couple of years, 
following a period when my Spidey Sense was telling me something 
important that I absolutely refused to believe; I mustered every rational 
faculty I had to convince my irrational self that it was wrong, and I 
paid a heavy price, so I'm trying to trust it now. More recently, last 
xmas I had an aural encounter with a ghost dog in my grandparent's home, 
a situation that makes a lot of sense (so to speak) given events at that 
house in the last year (my grandfather passed away, followed by his dog 
six months later; my grandmother moved to a retirement home just after 
the dog died, leaving the house empty and ripe for an accumulation of 
energy); it was a friendly, non-spooky encounter--no black mastiffs with 
red eyes, happily--and naturally, my mom knew exactly what I was talking 
about and had the same experience there at other times. It turned out 
that my dad had, too, but had discounted them as nerves.

As a kid, I woke up screaming a lot at night. My mom swears--though even 
I find this hard to believe--that I didn't sleep peacefully until I was 
eleven or twelve. I do remember my late-night freakouts, but eleven or 
twelve seems like an awfully long time. Still, she says she has a very 
distinct memory of waking up one morning around then and realizing, "Hey, 
John didn't wake up screaming tonight!" More accurately, I'd wake them up 
screaming; they'd come in the room and I'd be sitting up in bed wailing, 
eyes open, but still asleep until they woke me up, at which point I'd 
stop screaming and be baffled as to what was going on. But that was 
probably just too much television.

When I was in college starting Pagan Publishing, I started to believe 
that the King in Yellow was real and that I was somehow his servant here 
on earth (hence the article in TUO1). But I pretty much got over that.

My friend Kim used to see auras all the time. Around people, power lines, 
that sort of thing. It was interfering with her driving, actually, and 
she eventually sort of willed it away or taught herself to ignore it; as 
far as she's aware, she can't see auras anymore.

I have another friend who's into all that wacky wicca/magick-with-a-k 
kinda stuff. He professes a rational detachment, but then talks about 
invisible elves, psychic rapes, and even some ghost animals of his own. I 
think he's got LARP on the brain.

Yet another friend who's never otherwise mentioned any interest in the 
real-world supernatural had a series of bad-luck events after his 
girlfriend brought some crazy fetish totem home she got at the proverbial 
Ye Olde junk store, which also coincided with strange footstep noises and 
that sort of thing.

Then there's the lady who lost her husband in a car wreck last year; she 
suffered some minor brain damage (if there is such a thing) but has made 
a seemingly full recovery. She's another magick-with-a-k person, and 
confided a few months back that she'd been communing via ouija board with 
a spirit who claimed to know her husband on the other side. It was also 
telling her not to tell anyone about their conversations, and that she 
should talk to it every day or something similarly 
controlling/manipulative. I was very drunk (we were in a bar) and started 
ranting at her about what an incredibly bad idea all this was and that 
she should really stop immediately; she claimed that she was 70% 
skeptical or something, which sounded about 30% too credulous to me. I 
may not believe in God, but I don't invite spirits into my body, either; 
the Demon section in UA is an expression of that philosophy.

A married couple I know who are thoroughly down to earth, easygoing folks 
once went on a campout on the grounds of an old seminary school. They 
both half-awoke in the middle of the night with an identical, dreamlike 
sensation of being in a cosmos surrounded by spirits; she said, "Do you 
feel that?" and he said, "Yes, we're all spirits in this place," then 
they both went back to sleep. In the morning they realized it hadn't been 
a dream, and that they'd both experienced it. Greg, I think this might 
have been somewhat equivalent to your immanence-of-God event, though they 
seem to regard it as an amusing anecdote.

One of my Pagan Publishing associates had a weird encounter as a child of 
ten or so with a sinister little faerie-like homonculus, while staying at 
a friend's house; it was a little man dressed in velvet or something who 
laughed at him and ran away.

So in short, it's a big weird world out there. I find stories like these 
fascinating, but I don't find them hard to reconcile with my worldview; 
persistence/transmutation of energy and the like could account for all 
manner of wonders without some externally directed code of conduct being 
drafted by a cosmic consciousness. (That's my big beef with religion; I 
want to choose my code of conduct through reason and introspection, not 
through dogma and mass hysteria.) I don't practice any religion, but 
sometimes I do find myself engaging in minor resonant, symbolic acts 
because they feel appropriate; that doesn't seem like a religious/occult 
belief system to me so much as a psychological living-in-harmony sort of 
practice. But others would probably call them magick-with-a-k, albeit a 
very small k.


<- John Tynes - rev at tccorp.com - http://www.John.Tynes.com/ ->
"It's the strange thing about you mystics--how often your
little ecstasies wear a skirt." John Updike, _Rabbit, Run_