06/10/14

Infinite Reality, Spiritual Sin and Illusion: Sage’s Dream

in my fathers house there are many mansionsWhen I was pregnant with my youngest, my mother told me that I should call him Emmanuel, “Christ is with us.” I ended up naming him Sage, of course, but the name my mom chose would have been even more accurate. When Sage woke up this morning and told me his dream, I truly felt that Christ was with me, illuminating my mind to the nature of reality that I always question so very much. The words coming out of my son’s mouth were simply beautiful.

In his dream, he was with an instructor who had a bunch of young folks with him. The instructor led them all to an infinite hallway, and gave them instructions.

“You’ve got this one lifetime to learn everything you can. We’ll meet up again in 70 or 80 years,” he said. “Don’t get lost. If you get lost in your reality, you’ll get stuck until you die.”

In the hallway were many other hallways branching off. Within those hallways were individual rooms. Within these rooms were more infinitely long hallways, and so on.

My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?

Some of the people had fun visiting other people’s realities and even becoming part of them. Others were frightened by the entire experience and decided not to participate. They just sat there.

Eventually, the instructor came back and offered the group the opportunity to either rest for a while in an astoundingly peaceful place called the “break room” that was simultaneously everything and nothing, or to go to another place for another period of time. The trip to the break room or yet another world of infinite realities is what we call “dying.”

When the instructor said not to get lost in your reality, what he meant was for us not to get caught up in ego and fear. For example, not to worry about what other people think, or whether or not we live in a “safe” neighborhood or have enough money for retirement. Getting caught up in these things stops the spiritual growth we were put here to experience.

You can go INTO your own reality, or you can go OUT into truth, considering everything that could possibly be. Realize that everything we see is an illusion and we can avoid going inward into a reality in which the argument we had with our mother is important, for example. To go into truth, is simply focusing on helping others and being kind. In other words, LOVE.

The instructor warned not to get stuck in a personal reality in which one thinks they have risen spiritually as far as they can go — in other words, believing one is Godlike and has nothing left to learn. This reality leads to spiritual stagnation and death, he said. When I heard this, I immediately thought of spiritual pride, and Sage confirmed that is what the instructor was referring to.

You can get other people lost in your own reality. This is a spiritual sin. Think of someone who ropes another person into an unhealthy belief system, subsequently blinding that person to the ultimate truth of his existence.

The dream continued.

Sage went to another world. In this world, he met our deceased cat Varmint. He hung out with her, and on their journey, they ran into some people with a meat grinder. These people were throwing plants, animals and people haphazardly into the meat grinder. They tried to grab Varmint, but Sage grabbed her and saved her. They left, and Varmint found a nice comfy couch to lie down on. Then her spirit arose from her, and it was one of an old lady. (I hooted at this, because Varmint always acted like an old lady.) Then the spirit changed into a young woman, who thanked Sage from rescuing her from that body, which was now represented as a metal prison of sorts. She told him that he rescued her by caring for her and loving her.

The meat grinder people, says Sage, are greedy world controllers — brainwashers, manipulators, power lusters. Think governmental and corporate control.

The whole point of it all, says Sage, is that we are here to learn, and we rise by helping others. Everything else is an illusion.

The entire time he was telling me his dream, it resonated with me so much. I felt my spirit saying, “YES!!!”

I think about the Beast in John’s Revelation, and I can see it being the meat grinder in Sage’s dream. Regarding the spirit being let out of the prison, I think of Jesus’ words about “setting the captives free.” There was so much spiritual truth here, and as I talked to my son, I felt as though I was talking to an old, old person with a very clear mind. I asked him questions and he answered them as though he were a direct channel to the divine.

I just told Sage about my sense of him being an open channel while talking to me about the dream, and he agreed. He said, “I still am. Ask me questions while you still can. Work that soul!” 🙂 Love it.

Life is cool. The joy of the Lord is my strength.

01/5/14

Your Thoughts Create Reality

hive mind love What I learned in 2013 is that our thoughts affect other people. Not only our actions, but our very thoughts. When Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he wasn’t speaking metaphorically, as I once thought.

It is true. What you think becomes reality. I don’t know how, but it certainly can.

Here’s how I know.

I feel a lot of compassion for folks diagnosed with schizophrenia. I also “get” them. Someone can be talking what sounds like gibberish to another person and it will make sense to me. As a result, I’ve made a couple of friends who suffer from schiz. This was not without problems, however, as I soon learned that building these connections exposed me to some pretty intense stuff.

One of the people was attracted to me and sent me sexual thoughts, which I picked up and thought were my own until he clued me in. To say I had a freak-out moment would be an understatement. At least it explained why I had been feeling like a randy 18-year-old guy. I discontinued that relationship, because it felt inappropriate. The feelings went away.

With the other guy, I began to pick up on demonic craziness. I honestly felt as though I was losing my mind. It was horrible. I cut off contact the second I picked up on those feelings and they went away.

As someone who wants to help heal others, this was frustrating, to say the least. How can you be helpful and supportive to another person if all their stuff is literally rubbing off on you? I don’t have the answer to this question.

Some folks apparently have the ability to project their emotions more strongly than others. But I’m thinking that everyone does this to some degree.

If this is true, then we are very responsible for what we think. Not only to ourselves, but to others. If you think bad thoughts about an enemy, you may very well cause them harm in some manner. It’s like negative prayer. Hence, Jesus’s command to love and pray for our enemies is non-negotiable.

Science supports this idea, by the way. Ant colonies and bee hives, for example, have a “hive mind” and demonstrate social behaviors that could only be learned through the cloud. Is it so far fetched that people might have a similar cloud of consciousness connecting them to one another?

If that’s the case, I want my contribution to the cloud to be love. Not fear, not anger, not jealousy. Love.

07/17/13

Mind. Blown.

purple glass heart

Dreams have been a big deal in our house lately. A couple of days ago, my son woke up from a dream in which he had lived for a hundred years, gotten married, had a child and seen the world destroyed. In my son’s dream, he was living in an entirely different world. He was able to tell me what was in the history books of that world and spoke words in that world’s language, which was ancient-sounding and beautiful. It took him two hours to tell me things, and there was always more. It was literally like talking to a really old person who would tell you all the details about the good old days and World War 2, for example.

I just woke up from the most amazing dream myself. Often, when I go to sleep at night, I am asking God to show me the truth. I don’t think ALL of the truth is to be found in church or even the Bible — at least not how it is often interpreted. And sometimes the truth is distorted or twisted. I want the real thing. Last night, I believe I got some answers.

This dream began with me going to visit my son at the treatment center he’s been at three times in the past year. My son would have a pass from the hospital and be out on the street rescuing people from the most horrendous situations. He would ask a helper to escort him back to the hospital when he got tired. There was so much darkness in the world where he was helping that even the maggots from the dead were black. I began to help as well. We had to avoid the maggots and the dead people, because they would contaminate you if you spent much time in contact with them. It was very dangerous to help, because very evil individuals would try to attack you if they so much as saw you helping to rescue other people from their world of child rape, lethal drugs and murder. Perhaps spending too much time with people who are spiritually dead will rub off on you and you will begin to lose your sight. Perhaps my son is helping people (or has demonstrated that potential) and he gets worn out, and yes, attacked.

I spent time out on the street giving balm (coconut butter) to people. You’d rub it in and your skin would look clean and new and be protected. Some people would leave dirt in the balm when they scooped it out, but that was okay. If you have something that can help people, you should give it away freely, no matter what.

The people/spirits who were rescuers had super-powers. We literally flew through the air to rescue some people. We were so joyful, and the reason we flew was to show people who we were. Oprah was one of them, and when I woke up, I realized that she raises people up in life by showing them love and support.

All the destruction and killing meant that pets had been neglected by selfish and blind people or were trapped in hotel rooms. In most cases, they had been living without water and had to be put down. I cried and cried as I rescued these sweet bony animals that had either been woefully neglected or had failed to find a source of water (even though sometimes it was right in front of them in the form of a bathtub having been left full of water, for example.) I felt so heartbroken when I had to give them to the loving people to be euthanized. When I found an animal that had found a source of life, they were in good enough shape for them to be eligible for the shelter to find them a new home. Some people have the source of living water right in front of them, but don’t see it. Others are not provided with it — they are neglected as others carry on their hedonistic, selfish lives. It breaks God’s heart, I think, when he finds people in this state. God rescues them from their hell one way or another, but it makes him so sad.

I got to meet the emperor of this world. The emperor was very concerned about his worldly standing. His son was among the many people that were injured in the general destruction and badness, and the dignitary informing of this gave him a hint that he knew his son was a gay IV drug user. (He had been found with pink peppermint in his veins, lol!) The dignitary gave him plenty of opportunities to admit the injured man was indeed his son, but the emperor continued to deny him, preferring to let his son die rather than to risk losing people’s respect for his standing as emperor. He denied THE SON. This also makes me think of preachers who get on the anti-gay bandwagon because it increases their standing with their base of support. The emperor did not choose love or truth. He chose fear.

After this encounter, I was walking down a staircase admiring a beautiful glass sculpture that had belonged to the emperor. He no longer wanted it. It was very expensive, but I was able to use all my money to buy a small piece that the seller broke off. He took care to break me off the very best piece. It came off in the shape of a light purple heart. When I turned it over in my hand, it made a beautiful musical sound. It was the sound of diamonds being thrown and musically hitting the ground. When I held it in front of me, I got so much power that all I had to do was stretch out my hand and doors were open and walls came down. I didn’t even have to move under my own power. A golden light lit the way as I went far away from the emperor and his men. This was a good thing, because the emperor had realized what he had given up, and was chasing after me for it. Love will break down all barriers.

As we were surveying the absolute destruction, the promenade we were on collapsed, and we began to fall the long distance to our death. A bunch of ugly art was falling alongside me. I was afraid at first — I was falling so fast, and I was thinking about what it might feel like when I hit bottom. Then I took a deep breath and said, “I love you, Lord.” Then the Lord’s peace came over me and I woke up.

I helped a lot of people and animals before I left that place.

The Bible says that the Holy Spirit is our helper. That He is the Spirit of Truth. I’ve asked God to help me to understand things better, and this dream is what I got. I’m not going to worry about whether or not other people agree with me or not. I’m not going to read other people’s interpretations of scripture and worry about fitting them into my worldview. I am going to trust in God.

07/4/13

What God Said About the 4th of July

American flag and cross

The American flag should not overshadow the cross.

Two years ago, my younger son was having regular conversations with God. He was visiting with God in a way in which he could literally see and hear him. One day, he and God were talking about holidays. He shared the conversation with me.

It turns out that God isn’t at all pleased with our holidays. My son told me how God finds Halloween to be an incredible abomination and Christmas to be the worship of things, not his son.

At this point, I considered the fact that my kiddo could have gotten these ideas from me. I am not a fan of Halloween, and I definitely complain about the commercialization of Christmas. My 12-year-old certainly could have adopted my ideas and projected them onto “God.”

Things got weird, though, when he started talking about God’s opinion on Valentine’s Day, a day during which much sexual sin is committed.(!) Then he talked about the 4th of July. He told me that God said that the 4th of July was idol worship. I asked him why. He said it was because people were honoring the country over God.

Note that all holidays are not awful. God likes Thanksgiving, according to my son.

At any rate, prior to that time, I had not given any thought to the 4th of July and any underlying meaning it might have. I was frankly stunned to hear those words coming out of my child’s mouth. Since that day, though, I have become more and more convinced that my kid did indeed hear God’s voice that day. That American Christians don’t question what they value. That we follow culture before Jesus. Stuff like that.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if he really heard the voice of God. I’m pretty wary of saying things like, “Thus sayeth the Lord.” Nevertheless, it’s food for thought, right?

As a Jesus-follower, I consider myself a citizen of God’s Kingdom. The rest is small change.

02/21/13

Vision of God or Schizophrenic Hallucination?

rainbow around the throne of God

This will never look the same.

I will never ever forget what my younger son told me when he was twelve. He said that he had visited heaven and had a talk with God. God had even given him a tour.

He went into a lot of detail. He described how God’s face cannot be seen because it is such bright white light. He said he saw Jesus, and that there were marks on his wrists. He told me how there are colors that can’t be seen in this world, and that there is a feeling of such indescribable peace that there are no worries or fear whatsoever. He talked to my Uncle Bob, whom he has never met. He saw hell because God wanted him to know it was real. God let him know that Love saves people from hell.

At the time, I was understandably thrown for a loop. Sage grew up fairly obsessed with Pokemon cards and being read the stories of Brer Rabbit, not the Bible — a fact I am not proud of. I had no idea where all this was coming from. It seemed odd content for a hallucination that would arise out of prior knowledge or interests.

I told his doctor about it, and he told me about the book If Heaven Is for Real. I told my mom about it, and she mentioned the same book. I bought it.

It is about a 4-year-old boy who sees heaven during a life-threatening surgery. I’ve always been pretty skeptical about these things, and it wasn’t on my reading list.

The book was a quick read, and after I finished it, I remember lying on the bed feeling almost paralyzed. I called Sage into the room. Having read about how the boy saw a rainbow around the throne of God, I asked, “Did God sit down?”

My son said, yes, he was sitting on a throne. “What did it look like?” I asked. He told me about how a rainbow went around it.

At that point, I my mind did a flip and I started to feel really afraid. My son said, “There is a dark presence in this room. God wanted me to tell you that we are going to be in a very large spiritual battle.”

Note that I don’t recall discussing things like spiritual battles with my son at that point. I remember I had just started attending church, after the dream he had where he was quoting the Book of Revelation to me.

So there it is.

I’m convinced this was a true spiritual vision — God forgive me if I’m wrong. I really think that if all this was only neurologically based, then the vision would have been of something else entirely. Like Pokemon characters. But no, his visions have never had that sort of content. It is always God, Jesus, angels, demons, and things like exploding nuclear bombs and parched earth.

We don’t watch the news and never have. We don’t have television since I discovered that watching it was causing him to stutter several years ago. So I can’t attribute this to something he had watched a few days prior.

I am so thankful for this. This vision caused me to completely desire to follow Jesus, to give my life to God. I count myself as very fortunate, as my intellectualism had set up many arguments against much in the Bible being literally true. Being a part of this experience has forced me to put my feeble human arguments aside and simply praise God that he permitted me to see.

And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. Revelation 4:3

01/21/13

The Dream That Transformed My Life

love and lightThere’s this person on my Facebook friend’s list who I never knew all that well, although he was a very close friend of my husband and some of our mutual friends. These days, though, I feel as though I know him much better, even though we haven’t exchanged a word in years.

About three years ago, this person’s life took a pretty bad turn, with addiction taking over his and his girlfriend’s lives. The girlfriend was pregnant, which made the situation particularly bad. My husband talked about his concerns a few times. My reaction was to condemn the guy, saying things like, “What a trashy life” and “that poor baby.” I am ashamed to admit I felt a degree of disdain.

One night, I dreamed this guy was dead. He was so dead that his face was green and moldering. His friends were so sad. They gathered around him and let him feel every bit of the love they had for him. That love came from God. The guy came back to life. He was glowing, happy, reborn.

I felt jealous of all the love this guy got — it was so powerful and transforming! God said to me, “Do you want to feel some of this love?” So for a moment, I stood under a literal shower of love and it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever felt in my life — asleep or awake.

This was more than a feeling, though. It was powerful, alive, light. It woke me up.

It is worth selling everything for.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Matthew 13:44

I found the treasure!

What’s more, the guy in my dream found it too. I had no idea, until my husband mentioned he had posted some stuff about God on Facebook. I sent him a friend request, and discovered that he has been healed of his addiction and is truly born again!

I love how God reprimanded me for my unloving, judgmental attitude in the most loving way imaginable. I am changed.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t still struggle, though. I sometimes still want to gossip and judge. I can relate to Paul’s struggle.

For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

There is no doubt in my mind we are in a spiritual battle.

I know who wins, though. Love conquers all.

Photo Credit: Ms. D. Meanor

01/4/13

The Day Reality Started to Shift

First of all, I’m sorry for writing the boring Proverbs post. There are a million (boring) places on the Internet where you can go to read that sort of thing. It was soulless.

But I’m still struggling with the truth. I feel like I am about to strip myself naked and get flogged. Psychologically, this may not be an exaggeration. You’ll see. You may be the one holding the whip.

Ugh. The truth. So. Awfully. Painful.

This truth that I find it so scary to tell started with a dream. It wasn’t my dream, it was my younger son’s. He was 11-years-old, and it took him almost an hour to tell it to me. He was traumatized. It was one of those dreams where you feel like everything really happened.

I wish I had written the entire thing down.

He was a warrior. He was fighting a literal, but also spiritual, battle. He was fighting in another dimension. It was an incredibly difficult war to fight, because small gnat-like creatures would fly into the mouths of his fellow soldiers and turn them into something evil.

The thing is, he couldn’t tell they were evil, because they still looked the same. Their hearts were rotten, though, and they were like zombies being controlled by this other thing.

So he had to use his sword to kill these fighters who had been part of his army, but who weren’t, even though they looked the same. An angel gave him the strength to continue standing as others were overtaken, psychologically, by the enemy.

Eventually, the demonic gnats managed to infiltrate every other soldier in his unit, he killed them, and he was alone. It had been a spiritual Armageddon. He said, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”

New heaven and new earthHe kept talking, and began to describe how there was peace on earth for 1,000 years. But there was one gnat, one seed of evil, left, and it rose from the dust of the Middle East like a demonic Phoenix, growing into something horrible, and began to wreak havoc.

Later on, when I read Revelations, this reminded me of this verse. At some point in the dream, he mentioned “a new Jerusalem.”

I had no idea why an 11-year-old was talking about a Phoenix rising from the dust in the Middle East, Jerusalem, or anything else. To me, this sounded like the dream of a 30-year-old man who has read a lot of literature and knows politics and the Bible. I also had no clue why he was quoting from Revelations, a book I had pretty much avoided since becoming alarmed as a child when the moon had a red tint to it one night.

Here’s the thing. You might be thinking, “Well, Michelle is a Jesus-freak, and she’s probably taken him to her crazy church where he’s heard all these things, and he’s processing it all in his dreams.”

That’s not true.

Two and a half years ago, when he had this dream, I didn’t go to church. I had taken him for a while when he was in third grade, but neither one of us cared for even the occasional mention of hell, so we quit going. I didn’t read the Bible at home to him (or myself either, for that matter), and it was pretty much a non-issue.

After hearing the bit about “a new heaven and a new earth” spoken from my 11-year-old’s mouth, I did read the Book of Revelation. I found another verse that he had directly quoted, although I didn’t realize it at the time he told me. Sadly, having misplaced my journal, I am not certain which one it was. I am not going to put it here, in case I get it wrong.

At any rate, hearing my unchurched 11-year-old quoting from Revelations made me decide to look at the whole Christianity thing a little closer. And it’s a really good thing I did. So many things have happened since that morning that I couldn’t have handled without Jesus. They are unbelievable, really. But I’ll try to have the courage to tell these stories anyway.

zombie comic(Image Credit: Humourisms.com)[/caption]