The Tar River Visions

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It purely amazes me that people in general, don't have a clue that they gotta take the board out of their own eye before they can "see" to help another person remove the splinter from their own eye. Of course, it took decades for me to begin to comprehend the dynamic that causes this principle to be thus.

I've written about the incident that allowed me to grok this principle several times. I don't read my old entries here, so I don't know how long it's been since I wrote about it. I had been invited to a party in a house that was off by itself next to the Tar River in Greenville, N.C. about forty years ago, and I remember it like it was just yesterday.

The reason for the party was about LSD-25. I had "tuned in, turned on, and dropped out about two years previously from a promising job with a huge American corporation and left my first wife to accomplish that. I literally ran away from home in the middle of the night. I knew that if I didn't I'd be stuck with being married with children for the rest of my life.

The fact that I'd left my wife and a young child like a thief in the night became an enormous source of guilt and I was in a lotta pain because what I'd done was outrageous, and I'm still paying for it in conscience to this day. That's a long time to pay for one's sins. Maybe it's forever.

I ate a bunch of LSD that night. Enough for four adults. I became so confused I didn't know how to control my body, so I managed to take it over to an empty sofa and sat down. Almost immediately I became aware of a bright whitish, cloud-like light above my head.

As soon as I realized this light had a spiritual nature to it I was pulled upward into it and heard a voice that said, "You are becoming one with the creator of your own illusions." I didn't appear to have any choice but to go along for the ride. This light pulled me out of my body into itself. My body was left sitting on the couch. I could see it sitting there with it's eyes closed.

Outside of my body I moved around the living room of this house that was originally built as a family home, but now was occupied by college students. It was not the same house I received my "remembering vision" at. That house was also close to the Tar River in the same town, but on the other side of the business district.

Without knowing for sure how I got there I found myself sitting on the floor with two young coeds who were having a conversation about college life and the boys they were dating. I proposed to one of the girls that we could have sex together while she was talking to her friend.

Without interrupting her chat with her friend, she called me by nayme, and told me to leave her alone and to stop being a jerk. Couldn't I plainly see that she was busy? It wasn't like I was expecting her to have sex with me. I wasn't occupying my body (which was still sitting passively on the sofa), and she wasn't.

The voice she used to tell me to go away was the same voice she was using to talk to her friend, it was as if there were two of her. The part of her that spoke to my disembodied spirit was that part of her that would be what left if she separated from her body, but she wasn't about to leave her body to engage in spiritual sex. No blame.

Soon after that incident, and it was the only event I remember while I was floating around the room out of body. Soon, I realized that I was re-entering my body on the couch, but now it was my own voice that was repeatedly saying the same sentence over and over, as if to remember this phrase when I returned to beta consciousness, and all the people having a good time in the room.

It was that phrase I brought back with me from my out-of-body adventure that became the basis for my finally comprehending the concept of projection. The phrase was, "Every thing is nothing but the idea that it's something, and it could be anything at all." It was in that moment that I realized I saw "things" as ideas, and the idea I labeled earthly objects with wasn't the thing itself.

For the first time, just now, I have realized that two of the most significant spiritual visions I've had happened in close proximity to the Tar River. I had realized previously, of course, that they both happened in the same town, but their happening a hop and skip away from the same river hadn't crossed my mind.

One other facticity comes into play with this particular vision. It shaped the way I looked at Moses' Ten Commandments from the story of the Exodus of the tribes of Judea from Egypt. Two in particular. "Thou shall worship no other God before me.", and "Thou shall not worship graven images."

After this vision I found it difficult to state that I'd never encountered God personally, and that God was the same entity as me. Pretty much in the same way Pogo said, "We have met the enemy, and it is us." The voice in my vision did state that I was "becoming one with the creator of my own illusions". It did not state that I was God in the Biblical sense. I am is the creator of my own illusions, and thus god-like in the sense of also being a creator.

The "graven image" commandment became important to me as I began to notice that many of the people around me based their relationship with this creator in themselves on what they read in holy books, not their own experiences, but upon other, long dead people's experiences. Experiences that were related symbolically via images engraved on paper or papyrus or sheep skin.

Most of these graven images are located in secret vaults in the papacy. A "papacy" is a place where papers are kept. The very people who worship their bible of graven images are commanded by Moses not to do it. It just doesn't make sense to me to worship other people's visionary experiences when I've been given my own. They will probably kill me for it, but I ain't dead yet. '-)

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