Prelude: An Encounter with John Cage
The first time I heard of any spiritual practice of an occultish nature, besides the Ouija Board, was in college. I was a theater techie and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was in town. As we set up lights and backstage needs, John Cage worked quietly in the house gathering objects to use in his homemade ‘orchestra.’ Like a true ultra-modern composer, he tested the objects for sound, made notes, and consulted a flock of computer print-outs. To impress this famous icon, I found a metal noisemaker that you ratchet by twirling it. Building up courage, I presented it to the great radical composer.
John Cage + prepared piano
Mr. Cage took the noisemaker and did ten things with it: scraped it on his table, hit it with a pencil, help it in place and spun the knob – none of which were what you are supposed to do with it. In the future I told my students this story as an example of what an incredible inventor he was. But in that moment, he handed it back to me, thanked me, but said his parameters only included wooden objects. When I asked him what he meant, he pointed to the print-outs and told me that they contained a record of a series of tosses of the I Ching sticks, that they were selected for wood, and that that was the basis for his musical score.
I never forgot my encounter with Mr. Cage. That night I saw a modern dance performance for the first time and spent the next five decades creating music for modern dance. But that was just one path the encounter put me on; the other was research into the I Ching, discovery of other occult practices, and an openness for all things Woo-Woo.
Tarot and Beyond
A few years after that, when I was in graduate school studying how to direct Shakespeare and Brecht, my next door neighbor Leanelda turned me on to Tarot. Leanelda read the cards every morning with her coffee, as a meditation. She believed a reading was good for about eleven and a half days. She gave me such a clear and easy intro to the Celtic Cross spread that I was hooked.
Later when I met my wife Sarah we learned how to do chakra readings and did Tarot or I Ching when we needed advice from the soul. It was my curiosity about these ideas that led me to the initial concept for The Reincarnation Chronicles: a string of past life visions that form a narrative. My fascination with psychic work has proceeded in parallel with my fictional output, so much so that I’m never sure what’s creative impulse and what’s psychic intuition.
Closer To Venus
The interplay between Creativity and Intuition was the subject of a podcast I made for Johnny Burke’s Closer to Venus podcast. We introduced my series (at 0:29 of the interview) and I defined the qaraq – a group of connected souls moving through lifetimes together. Years after I began the project I learned that a soul circle or soul family was a concept out there in the reincarnation community. The first example of creative and psychic crossover in my writing experience.
Johnny Burke usually discusses topics with a spiritual practitioner, so in my usual genre-bending way I made the poor man factor in fiction. Johnny was very gracious and careful about it. And I offered my actual spiritual experiences with past life related phenomenon (4:18). For example, for research I underwent a past life regression or two under the skilled hands of Michelle Brock, as well as at a seminar with Dr. Brian Weiss, the psychiatrist who discovered past life regression without intending to. I saw memories as an Indigenous Lenape man with his family, escaping with our lives from the tribe.
Johnny also asked me about ‘lives between lives,’ (7:53) which I call the ‘interlife’ in the series. (Johnny liked a few of my terms and asked to use them later). I talked about imagining working with a spirit guide in Heaven, reviewing my life like watching a movie. I had this thought as a child and later learned William Butler Yeats called it the ‘Dreaming Back.’ So did I imagine it or remember it?
Johnny also asked me about any future lifetimes I’ve seen (18:01). In describing a vision of a futuristic house and an encounter with aliens, I mentioned how murky the vision was, and where my imagination had to fill in details. Johnny wondered if the ‘filling in’ might have been spirit guides helping me. I responded with the idea of the Infinite Intelligence guiding us at times.
Reading the Akashic Records
The other methodology I’ve actually studied and practiced that Johnny asked me about was reading the Akashic Records (15:05). There is a notion that out there in the ether (Akasha in Sanskrit) is a file room or library of every soul’s past life history. The universe is huge, right? Any soul can ‘log on’ to the Record and locate a past life story. Again, for research purposes I attended a webinar about it by Andrrea Hess, got hooked, and studied the technique with her.
Reading the Akashic Records not only enabled me to see a curse, a vow of silence, or a soul contract from a past life that constricted someone’s present day life, it provided plenty of ideas for fictional stories. I’ve never used a story from someone I’ve read, but there are plenty of situations I learned about from studying the Records. In the podcast, I talked about where an Akashic reader must use their imagination as part of the process, another crossover between Creativity and Intuition.
Another interesting crossover is when I have come up with an idea for a fictional past life story and it showed up in my own past life regression or Akashic reading (20:36). I surmised to Johnny that since Creativity and Intuition both arise from the unconscious mind, there can be a thin line between them at times. I’m writing a fantasy series with a 1001 past life stories: to generate all those tales, I’ll take anything I can use – imagination, personal history, and psychic experience.
Like the dialectic between Creativity and Intuition, Johnny’s focus on spiritual practice and my perspective as a fiction writer managed to interact and intersect in a pleasing, successful manner. I shared my books and spiritual practices, and Johnny got to explore some of his burning questions about the nature of Time as a unity where past, present, and future exist all together. I hope we each accomplished what we had hoped.
But see what you think: you can listen to the entire episode of Closer to Venus HERE. On Johnny’s website there’s timings for certain sections, so you can use this post as a guide to sample parts of episode.
Meanwhile, I’ve learned a new revisionist way of looking at Tarot from the brilliant and charming Lindsay Mack. I just completed an Akashic reading for my son’s girlfriend, so I still got it. And I would have consulted the I Ching about what order to edit Book Five, rewrite Book Six, and outline Book Seven. But Chat GPT was available. I hope Mr. Cage isn’t rolling in his akasha! Forgive me, John – you’d have loved Chatty, I’m sure.
Despite AI, my Psychic Intuition and Creative Process are still strolling down the lane together.
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