Turquoise Bees

"I sought my lover at twilight.
Snow fell at daybreak.
Residing at the Potala, I am Rigdzin Tsangyang Gyatso.
But in the back alleys of Shol-town, I am rake and stud.
Secret or not. No matter. Footprints have been left in the snow."
– The 6th Dalai Lama

"Astral projection is usually understood to be the act of separating the subtle or astral body from the physical body, so that the astral body can travel away from the physical body carrying with it the consciousness of the traveler." - Donald Tyson

My favorite and most reliable escape from normal reality is bargain books. Whenever my day-to-day becomes so dreary that I am forced to imagine the suffering of the billions of humans who suffer far more than I, just so I can coax myself out of a mental funk, I know I can always find inspiration in the clearance shelves of a bookstore. When the world isn't treating me right, a bargain book orgy is all I need to keep me here on the planet another day. This is where weird underappreciated publications go to die, and shopping from that stack of discards is a whole other experience than purposefully striding into Barnes and Noble to pull a current title off the full-price shelf.

There's a mystical quality to it, because you, the seeker, approach the clearance cart without expectations. You are unlikely to see a single volume of anything you would recognize or would have ever thought to buy if it weren't marked down to $1.99 (10% less if you have a bookstore membership card). You probably wouldn't have bought the heavily illustrated Repair and Restoration of the Civil War-Era Banjo, a tome on Calligraphy Prior the Industrial Revolution or the autobiography of someone who knew someone who dated Jack Kerouac. You may never have had any interest whatsoever in the Cuisine of New Guinea, The Unauthorized Guide to Invertebrates, or Pebbles: A Story of Courage.

The books on the clearance shelf have already been rejected by consumers and judged totally without merit or interest. It's the last stop for this shabby, dust-jacket-torn collection of misfits. Without a buyer, these orphaned volumes will go back to the publisher, be bought up in lots for on-line sales or just destroyed. No one needs Cooking with Pomeloes, A Natural History of the Reindeer or Building Your Own Calliope. We're good, thanks.

For me, though, catching a book just before it disappears from the common retail market forever gives me the same sense of purpose that I imagine ethnobotanists feel when they scour the rainforest for lifesaving medicinal plants just ahead of the slashing and burning. There is bound to be some worthwhile jewel in those bargain books of which I know nothing, and, even more importantly, I wouldn't have even imagined to go looking for in the first place.

For example, one of my favorite books rescued from the Shelf of Obscurity is a small volume of poetry called The Turquoise Bee: Love Songs of the 6th Dalia Lama. Six ignored any Buddhist nudging toward abstinence or celibacy. He was a Party Lama of the first order, and his poetry reflects not only his passion for wine and women, but his complete disregard for public opinion.

According to one reviewer, Six was a great tantric adept, who frolicked all night in Lhasa's brothels and bars. Then he'd drag his holy carcass back to the Potala palace before sunrise to perform his spiritual duties as the incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

I bought that book years ago, and His Holiness Six has done more for my spiritual education than many masters I've encountered. Forget the Noble Truths; Six would have been on his way with a light heart and a wineskin tucked under his robe to the bed of his mistress while the rest of the monastery was busy suffering and non-attaching.

Two gems of lesser known Buddhist wisdom authored by Six:

"People talk about me. And what they say may be true. But I am five steps away from the winehouse of my lover."

and

"Pure glacial waters from Crystal Peak.
And dewdrops from a vajra-plant, fermented with the yeast of ambrosia,
brewed by the dakini of wisdom.
If drunk with pure commitment,
the misery of lower states need never be experienced."

I have retrieved some other, genuine oddballs from almost certain extinction like Beginning Sanskrit and Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, which is a clever lonely heart's type book where animals write in for advice on their mating problems. Dr. Tatiana (an evolutionary biologist) is kind of a Nurse Sue Johansen to the wild kingdom and dispenses birds and bees info to lesser mealworm beetles and shiner perch.

This is not to say that I score a winner every time – I have yet to get through The Biography of Carl Gustave Jung – but more often than not, the clearance shelves of any bookstore overfloweth with amazing esoteric knowledge. I would hate to miss knowing about turquoise bees or the sexual dysfunction inherent in the reproductive organs of the male golden potto. It's all just too irresistible.

So, I was waiting on a pizza the other day and I wandered to the next door half-priced bookstore for a few minutes. The clearance bargains there are so low that the price is practically inverse – if you agree to take a book home, they pay you. It's a great store for readers with specific passions like, say, JFK conspiracy theories or military history or modern witchcraft - topics that might be sparsely represented in mainstream bookstores, but hardly in the number of volumes you find at a down market store that isn't catering to publishers or shareholders and isn't concerned about inventory and positioning. Half-priced book dealers just sell everything that comes their way – new, old, good, bad, indifferent, obscure, controversial or conservative, it's all there in a jumble.

You are unlikely to find any specific title, but if you're willing to let the Universe steer your book purchasing fate and just to pick up whatever calls to you – i.e., The Gothic Teen's Holy Bible; The Bachelor's Little Black Book of 101 Perfect Martinis; Architecture of Post-WWI Detroit; Caring for Your New Iguana; Etruscan Needlepoint Made Easy; Trolls: Truth or Fiction?; Prevention of Disease and Plague in the End of Days; Mushroom Soup for the Midwestern Soul; Accountant! A Memoir – you are in the zone.

The book that captured my interest on this particular visit – Soul Flight - promised to be "a revolutionary new perspective on astral travel" wherein the author, an esoteric scholar, presents a "radical breakthrough on the topic, exploring astral experiences from a quantum perspective."

Now, I did not walk into the store with any pre-need to expand my knowledge of the subject. Like any person who survived adolescence in the early 70s, I was passing familiar with Carlos Castañeda and his tales of shamanic trance. And, like any high school sophomore who spent her Saturday nights riding around in Lance Everett's Good Times van, I had already done a fair amount of out-of-body trekking and did not feel particularly drawn to revisit that landscape.

But if a book calls to you, you ignore it at your own peril, so I plunked down my handful of silver, dropped it into my environmentally friendly eco-bag and went on my way.

Over the next few days, Soul Flight sucked me in and offered me a possible answer to a question that's been nibbling at my mind for much of my life and, probably, confounds a lot of people – the seeming dichotomy between the physical world and the world everyone experiences to some degree, but is poorly understood and almost shamefully acknowledged, the metaphysical world.

We almost universally agree about the properties of the physical world. There are some folks out there who might insist that the earth is flat and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, but on the whole, we concur that the sky appears blue and the moon orbits the earth and we need oxygen to live. While human behavior can be something of a loose cannon, it is also remarkably consistent across the globe – we like jokes and stories and music and we make art. We find partners and raise offspring. Wildlife behaves as we expect – zebras, for example, don't get a wild hair one day and start performing spontaneous interpretive dance on the savannah. You wake up every morning to a world that looks pretty much as it did when you fell asleep the night before.

Science and just our own observation allow us to restate, refine and measure our assumptions about physical reality over and over again. Our whole lives are spent captive on a little planet that appears controlled by unvarying absolutes. When some sort of phenomenon creeps in that doesn't fit the puzzle and which we haven't yet quantified, our logical minds note that it's a new bit of data and it will eventually find a place in orderly scientific knowledge.

Physical laws describe the physical world very well. And when our senses are not acute enough to tell us what's happening, mathematical models fill in the gaps.

But the thing that befuddles us is that most people have experience of a non-physical reality. Mainstream religious traditions speak unabashedly about a supernatural Creator and the promise of a life in spirit after the physical body dies, even though there is no physical proof that this is, in fact, the case. Move even slightly off-center from there, and all sorts of metaphysical data just pours in…psychic gifts, creative genius, soul projection, shamanic visioning, past life and near death experiences, visualization, meditation, sweat lodge, Qigong, telepathy, spirit communication, intuitive healing…you get the idea.

If you cannot conceive of phenomenon that is outside of your senses, then you may be tempted to just write it off as the projection of an uninformed magical mind or a type of delusion. You would need to ignore the fact that your community has a church erected on every block for worship of the metaphysical, but you might make an exception for this category, or agree that religion is one corner of metaphysics that is genuine. But you in all your rationality could claim that all the rest does not exist.

And you would be correct. For purposes of this discussion, metaphysics does not exist on a physical level in a physical world (although, it seems like with all the wild quantum level research going on, we might be close to finding a way to reconcile those opposites). But here's what I got from Soul Flight – we bring insights from the astral planes and transmute them into the physical all the time.

The best way I have to describe it to myself is by framing it with the phenomenon of imagination. The creative spark is not physical, although the brain is hyperactive in the creative state. Artists, musicians, actors, writers, poets all take a journey out of their minds when they create. It's a low level of trance, but the process is very familiar to us all. We need words, ideas, images and we remove our conscious awareness to a place slightly removed from our physical reality. If we are very gifted, the images we receive are transcendent and through skill, we transform what we see and hear into physical reality. The inspiration becomes the painting or the symphony; the dream becomes the book. Really sensitive geniuses do this better than most of us, but we all connect to another plane of knowing, and this includes scientists.

Religious believers and practitioners of yoga and meditation slip into these simple astral states fairly easily due to their practice of directing their attention inward to "hear the small still voice." The physical effects of their astral travels are measureable as changes in respiration, heart rate and brain activity. Obviously, the travelers ARE on a journey in their minds to a different non-physical reality. That's the whole point. And when they return, they bring back their knowing.

Until I read Soul Flight, I never fully comprehended that I was attempting to interpret the metaphysical world with the language of the physical world. This is not successful because it's like trying to describe the wind by its color. Wind does not have the physical property of color, although we feel its effects and we observe the impression it makes when it blows through. The astral planes have different properties. Take, for example, a very common type of astral travel known as prayer.

When you pray, you hope to have a few moments with God, or the deity of your choice. This is not odd – in fact, this is the objective of every Christian church in America…communion with God through prayer. Deep prayer takes you to a place that feels different. Perhaps you see yourself surrounded by light, in a marble hall or forest temple or nowhere at all. Your purpose is to ask your god a question you want answered, a need you wish to have fulfilled for yourself or for another entity, or maybe you are just visiting to offer your gratitude. People who practice prayer will tell you that a Presence enters their awareness and fills them with a sense of peace and joy. They bring this impression back to their bodies and the experience, naturally, reinforces their belief in a loving God or a Consciousness outside of themselves.

In our linear world, we look upon this sort of experience as mystical, but can't quite define exactly where it arises. Hard science would say that it's just a fantasy created by the mind, because there isn't any physical proof. But that's the box that holds the whole argument isn't it? For anything to exist it must be physical in nature or create an observable physical effect (see wind). Therefore, although people have non-physical experiences day in and day out, that they can coherently describe and are shared by many, many other people across the world, they cannot, really, exist. Even though, like the wind, physical evidence of their effects DOES exist (see heart rate during meditation).

In any case, when you are scavenging the carrion on the clearance cart, you just leave it to Fate to provide. Soul Flight, a book I would have never thought to seek out, offered me a new way of thinking. This is a journey that never grows familiar or stale.

Now that I have a guide to the astral planes, I might be traveling more often. With any luck, I will run into Six. And perhaps he will whisper turquoise bees and love songs into my ear.

Note: From the 1970s to 1995 the CIA funded an intelligence program called, among other names, the Star Gate Project. The Soviets had been using methods in what could best be described as psychic espionage for decades, and the CIA countered this by developing a program employing a system of a particular type of astral travel called remote viewing. In the Star Gate Project, remote viewers were trained according to a specific protocol to move their conscious awareness to target points, observe and retrieve information and relay it back to headquarters. See ex-CIA agent David Morehouse's book Remote Viewing: The Complete User's Manual for Coordinate Remote Viewing, 2008 if you're curious.

Ref: Soul Flight: Astral Projection and the Magical Universe, Donald Tyson, 2007.

< Previous column

Next column >

Ingrid lives on San Juan Island.

While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

editor@sanjuanislander.com

About Us | Advertising Info | Contact Us | Privacy Policy