ESSAY: SPOOKY DAYS ARE AHEAD.

 

AT THE GYM, THE OTHER DAY I was carrying a plastic water bottle* as I hobbled around from one exercise machine to another. I held it in my hand like you normally hold one for drinking, and after a while I noticed the top half filled with air was warmer than the bottom half containing water. 

Gripping it as I was, the bottle’s plastic skin registered two distinct temperature regions on my palm. Not exactly an earth-shaking observation, but when I tried to gauge where the precise line or boundary was on my palm, where the surface of the liquid met the air in the bottle (such as two inches below the nose of that little guy in the illustration), I couldn’t pinpoint it without looking; I couldn’t feel the line where the two elements of air and water met in the bottle. That line of demarcation, that transition point from air to water and water to air, wasn’t apparent to me; my palm sensed only cool and warm, with a poorly-defined boundary between them.

 

Why do I mention this? Well, I guess because it reminds me of a few things I’ve been reading lately, about boundaries and barriers and states of separation, but also about layers and transitions zones, and states of fluidity where a thing, boarded by its opposite, can sometimes flow into it and the two intermingle, and blend into something new and unexpected. Rachel Carson wrote about such a place—she wrote a whole book about it!¹ She describes, in evocative detail, the shoreline of her beloved Maine, where the sea meets the land in an ancient, liminal ecology of opposites, where the land and the sea combine into a third element, fostering unique plant and aNimal life not found in the deeper, swifter waters of the Atlantic, nor on the land.

ANOTHER BOOK, this one a detective story, had something similar, suggesting an interface, not between sea and land, but between the living and dead! It was a bit of a choker, the novel, and I’m afraid to say a lame read, with an anemic plotline and cardboard characters, so I won’t give the title or author—I don’t want to rain on anyone’ s parade. It’s the kind of book we all run across where we think, “Hey, I could write this!” In point of fact, I did not write it and he did. He’s a first-time published author and I’m not. So, props to him for that. However, what made his story just interesting enough to read was the special talent of the main character (MC), who worked, IIRC, for the FBI in an elite “tracker unit” tasked with finding hard to trace criminals and missing persons. (They even have their own jet to get to crime scenes on the double! Wowzers!)

 

THE KICKER is that MC can see the trail a person leaves behind that he calls their “shine”, where there's no discernible physical evidence present. He sees a kind of “psychic trail” or residue, left from a person’s “essence” or spirit, in the form of coloured lines or paths that he follows to track their movements. Only his closest associates on the team are aware of his unique ability, where he’s known as the “Bloodhound” of the unit and disguises his paranormal powers by manufacturing plausible forensic clues to explain his unerring sense of direction trailing the baddies and finding victims of crimes—most of whom are dead, it must be said.

At the end of the novel, MC is with his dying suspect, a serial killer he has apprehended. In his hospital room, the killer taunts MC and expresses no remorse for his terrible crimes. During their conversation, MC looks up at the ceiling and sees the “shine” of the psychopath’s victims hovering there and realizes, in death, the killer’s rest may not be as peaceful as he imagines. 

So, how exactly is this like Carson’s book on marine biology? I guess for me, MC’s “shine” is a kind of transition zone or layer between our world and some other, an interface, a place of liminality like where the land meets the sea. And the traces he sees are just that—traces of another place or dimension that apparently exists near at hand, one we are unaware of and cannot perceive, yet are somehow connected with. They are the traces of our ‘other selves’, our auras, spirits, souls perhaps, things that don’t exist in our world but are found in another, and which leave behind their ectoplasmic tracks  MC can follow.²

HE CAN'T SEE BEYOND the “shine”, this region of contact, nor can he enter it but, of course, there is the suggestion that whatever lies on the other side has somehow blended or joined or mixed with our side in a more penetrating manner than we with theirs, and that there exists an intelligence in this unknown realm beyond the traces of “shine". 

And since I’m writing this in the days immediately following Halloween, that gives me goosebumps! Spooo-key, man! ³    

 

IN A SOMEWHAT DIFFERENT VEIN, a blog post by John Michael Greer takes an expansive view on what I’ll call inter-dimensionality. JMG is a Druid and a long-time practitioner of occult spirituality, particularly as taught by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He takes the human condition, along with the myriad other life forms on our planet, as being on the path of a very long evolution. That’s not controversial; we’re evolving, changing, albeit slowly, aren’t we? (Opposable thumbs and all.) But, more interestingly, he says our physical being, our bodies, and their maturation, are just part of the picture. In fact, they’re what he terms the “lowest and most dense” level of existence. He posits other, higher levels existing in separate dimensions or planes, layered atop one another. “Each of us has a distinct part of ourselves on each of the [four] planes.” (Care) 

First comes our material, physical bodies. Next, in ascending order are the planes where exist our etheric and then our astral bodies. Think of a hand organ or concertina with ribs along the bellows representing the different planes, all expanding and contracting in concert. That’s kind of like us, with each rib a separate plane of existence having different characteristics and operations, but all are connected and interpenetrating one another.⁴ For example, the “aura” that is said to be visible from time to time surrounding someone, is a function of our etheric body and represents what JMG calls our “lifeforce”.

 

“The etheric plane is the plane of life force; the astral plane is the plane of concrete consciousness; and the mental plane is the plane of abstract consciousness.” (Care)

 

I WON'T GO FURTHER INTO THE WEEDS here about the characteristics and functions of the various planes—JMG 'splains it so much better than I can! —save to say it’s a fascinating “mind experiment” (at the very least) to see ourselves as more than physical, as having other components or dimensions to our existence that are beyond our perceptions. At least for now. And this, for me, is another example of that sense of fluidity, of barriers dissolving and unseen connections revealed that comes to mind, especially now around Halloween when the dark comes so early, and ghosts walk the streets.

 

Cheers, Jake.

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* Definitely, my bad (even though I'm reusing it until it dissolves). But check out this short vid about plastic pollution.

 

¹ The Edge of the Sea, by Rachel Carson. 1955.

 

² Another way of understanding MC’s “shine” is to think of a person completely enveloped in a balloon. The ‘balloon’ is an undetectable sheath of another plane surrounding them. As they walk, the balloon leaves ectoplasmic traces on the ground that are visible to someone like MC. Or perhaps, since it’s around dinner time, maybe people are like meaty lasagnas, with multiple layers of existence, separate yet blended , each layer filled with different, tasty bits, all held together with a rich and spicy cosmic sauce.
[Sorry for the clumsy analogies—Jake is not at his best with those. Ed.]  

 

³ And for a spooky and rather grim prognostication on how the rest of the year and near-future will go, check out James Howard Kunstler’s recent blog post, here.

 

⁴ There are seven planes altogether: the material, etheric, astral, mental, spiritual, causal, and divine planes. (The last three are above humanity's reach.)JMG suggests we are currently involved with the first three planes, though in our evolution, we are miles away from reaching and utilizing the fourth, “mental” plane. 

So not to make us feel too bad about our stunted evolution, he points out that it took a heck of a long time to go from single-celled amoebas to blue whales. And he does say to reach the “mental” plane, which blends all four together into a (hopefully) harmonious whole, may be somewhat easier than our first evolutionary passage on the material plane. So, there’s that at least, my fellow plodders!

 

 

The Edge of the Sea, by Rachel Carson. 1955. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1959.

 

Greer, John Michael. “The Care of the Mind.” Ecosophia, Nov.4, 2021. https://www.ecosophia.net/the-care-of-the-mind/ .