I discuss the life of Lewis Carroll and his interest in the paranormal. What do we know about his library and his associations? How much (if any of this) affected his writing?
My Alice in Wonderland retelling is called Down the Treacle Well. The book trailer is below.
ORDER HERE: bit.ly/3roGX9f
SIGNED COPIES AVAILABLE: Contact himalayaspencerellis@yahoo.com for more info!
Filed under Books
Starting the week with a blessing from John O’Donohue’s book, Anam Cara (Soul Friend). I discovered his work several years ago during the Covid crisis. Diving deep into Celtic wisdom and honoring nature seems appropriate as spring takes hold and St. Patrick’s Day festivities happen next weekend.
Filed under spiritual
(Feb. 19- Mar. 20)
Happy birthday Pisces! It’s your turn to shine this month.
You are a mutable water sign, capable of diving to the deepest depths of emotion. Pisceans can adapt to changing circumstances and situations. Staying fluid and being able to almost shape-shift when required is not a weakness but a strength. Deeply compassionate and sensitive, Pisces often brings healing to events and people around them. Contemplation and a deep engagement in the search for inner truth comes naturally.
Since Pisces is the last sign in the zodiac, it has traversed all the signs and experienced many lessons. In all these situations you experienced hope and joy, fear and pain. All of these are deeply understood and felt by you, Pisces. This is what makes Pisceans so sensitive and vulnerable. Pisces needs to remember to stay grounded in the 3D world.
Your symbol is the two fishes seen in pairs in the gorgeous illustration above. The two fishes represent how Pisces’s attention is divided between fantasy and reality.
Your ruler is Neptune.
Neptune’s energy is feminine and associated with changeability and illusion. On the positive end, Neptune can be a source for dreams and creativity. But Neptune can also function as deception or delusion.
Have you ever wondered what astrology has to say about your past lives?
Filed under astrology
EVOLUTIONARY ASTROLOGY
Evolutionary Astrology is where the past becomes a steppingstone, not a millstone.
So, what is it exactly?
Many seekers over millennia have sought out and used the tools of astrology. In modern times, a birth chart reading provides insight into the personality or psychology of the individual. But behind that chart lies another chart, hidden from all but the most ardent of explorers. This is what evolutionary astrology endeavors to parse, the blending of the psychological with the metaphysical to produce a kind of elevated psychology. Perhaps this could be viewed as a sacred level of psychology–the psychology of our evolving consciousness.
Whether as a literal reality or metaphor, evolutionary astrology uses the idea that we have all lived before. Through those lives, we faced lessons and challenges. We learned and grew, and we continue to confront challenges in this incarnation. This is an astrology that honors the individual and individual difference. As a sacred esoteric tool, it empowers each one of us with the free will of choice. Throughout life, an individual makes choices amongst a vast field of archetypal astrological possibilities and always an individual retains free will. We evolve through incarnations based on our choices.
What evolves lifetime to lifetime is consciousness. Exploring the evolutionary chart will reveal past-life situations and dynamics but the focus of evolutionary astrology is to evolve consciousness through understanding, healing, and releasing. The seeker enters the realm of the sacred—the deep, the mystical, the past. Together, astrologer and client go in search of pattern and archetype. We uncover triumph and failure revealing both treasure and wound.
It is important to remember that this analysis employs a symbolic system and is not literal. It is not possible to tell if someone lived in the 14th Cent. Florence or fought in the Boer War. The chart will not reveal personal past-life connections to people in our current lives. These areas may be best explored with psychics or mediums. An analysis using evolutionary astrology will uncover situations and experiences an individual has likely faced many times in the past and these are the issues that are active in this incarnation. The proof of evolutionary astrology is borne out by the presence of these issues in one’s life today.
Are you ready to find out about your past and get a taste of what your soul yearns for in this life?
For $100, payable through PayPal, you will receive your own personalized report along with your birth chart. This is NOT a computer-generated report but a detailed, specific analysis uniquely for you, written by me. Want to see a sample? Contact me through himalayaspencerellis@yahoo.com for more details and scheduling information.
Let’s make 2024 your year!
Filed under astrology
By Ainslie MacLeod
In this popular book, psychic Ainslie MacLeod outlines a system of soul evolution that fascinates and provides fodder for deeper exploration. In his system, the soul progresses through ten levels or ages on earth. The first stage of existence is lived out in simplicity, isolation, and naivety. We are brand new souls trying to understand the very basics of incarnation. A soul will spend 5000 to 6000 years in each stage reincarnating as necessary until progressing to the next level.
Briefly, here are the levels and their characteristics:
Level 1: isolation, simplicity, naivety
Level 2: fundamentalism, nationalism, discrimination
Level 3: church, conformity, conservatism
Level 4: morality, aspiration, hypocrisy
Level 5: ambition, materialism, exploration
Level 6: social justice, uncertainty, introspection
Level 7: complexity, creativity, innovation
Level 8: activism, liberalism, sophistication
Level 9: spirituality, self-improvement, healing
Level 10: altruism, inertia, compassion (you will need to read the book for the explanation of inertia here, but is does make sense)
Anyone reading this, no doubt has decided which level they think they are currently have achieved. Our soul’s perspective on life goes through massive shifts about halfway through the process. The way MacLeod uses the term “old souls” is clarified in the book to be associated with qualities representing more peaceful, more empathetic individuals who are more accepting of differences and more open to questioning belief systems. The author goes as far to say that political beliefs are an indicator of someone’s level. (To me that means, I could easily draw a line to define the US red/ blue political split above.)
Exploring MacLeod’s system further, we find that each soul expresses through a personality that was created on the astral plane before incarnation. There are ten soul types. Reading through these, you can choose what resonates with you as a primary. You may also be drawn to a secondary. Some people have several which overlap and influence. You can sign up to take the soul type quiz on the author’s site here: https://ainsliemacleod.com/soul-type-quiz/
Soul Types: (and percentages of the population)
Although most of us have no conscious memory of past lives, our past lives form the basis of our daily existence in all kinds of ways. We gravitate toward the familiar. Talents and skills spill over. So do limiting beliefs, phobias, and fears. Unexplained physical ailments from past lives often carry over. Even events in our current life can trigger traumas of the past. A good portion of MacLeod’s book covers this terrain. The cases he presents are intriguing.
Some of the material will sound familiar to those who have read many sources on past lives. There is something to be gained from trying the mediation exercises at the end of the chapters to see what can be gleaned for the individual. This is a book that makes you wonder about your past and what you might be bringing forward. Why you like certain things and not others. Why certain cultures call to you. Why you like such and such music or art. Patterns that you repeat. Why you have an ache or pain, or what about that scar… It will also make you think about that friend or family member who can’t heal or break out of a cycle. It’s about plunging deeper into the unseen and life. Many libraries have the book, go find it. MacLeod has been interviewed by Oprah. The book is great fodder for conversation if you can find a person willingly to dive deep with you. I hope you do!
To find my books, click below:
ASTROLOGY SERVICES:
Filed under Books
The chill of autumn has arrived along with its spectacular color pallet. Yards are sprouting pumpkins and skeletons; witches hang from brooms. Time to pull sweaters from closets we haven’t seen for a year and sip warm cider from mugs. This time of year calls for the dark and scary (truly, it’s the only socially acceptable time to talk of death).
I’m going to combine two interests here, Japan (because in the spring I’ll be traveling there) and all things creepy because Halloween beckons. Come, we venture to the exotic land of the rising sun. At the base of Mount Fuji, is a forest called innocuously enough the Blue Tree Meadow (Aokigahara), or the Sea of Trees. Lovely, little tourist area of dense forest which flourishes upon a lava bed dating from 864 CE. The forest is known for its profound silence part of which is undoubtedly due to the sound absorbing properties of the area’s volcanic rock. The conifers and cypress trees must also suppress sound. Perhaps it was this uncanny quiet of the forest that first linked Aokigahara with the traditional ghosts of Japan: yūrei. If only it were that innocent…
In Japanese culture, the spirit or reikon, leaves the body when someone dies and goes to an in-between state awaiting funeral rites in order to be reunited with the ancestors in the afterlife. If everything is done correctly, the reikon journeys to the afterlife and becomes a guardian of the family it left behind. Sometimes, however, things don’t go well for the reikon. If the proper rites are not carried out, or if sudden or violent death occurs, the reikon’s journey is disrupted. Even strong negative emotions (revenge, jealousy, hatred, etc.) around the time of death can act to pull the reikon back to the physical world as a yūrei. The yūrei continues to haunt until the appropriate rituals are completed or the emotions that fuel the ghost are resolved. By legend, Aokigahara is full of these persistent spirits. A likely reason for this is that ubasute, or the practice of leaving the elderly, sick or infirm out in mountain or remote locations especially during famine conditions may have been practiced here as late as the 19th century.
In more recent times, Aokigahara has become associated with suicide. The 1961 novel, Tower of Waves by Seicho Matsumoto popularized the area when he became Japan’s best-selling and highest earning author of the 1960s. In 2010, 200 suicide attempts were recorded with 54 suicides. To curb the association with this grim activity, the police no longer release data regarding suicides. Signs have been posted to discourage it. However, every year searches are made, and bodies are recovered.
The two Hollywood movies that have been made about the forest are The Sea of Trees (Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe, Naomi Watts) and The Forest. Both are good and might deserve another viewing. Happy Halloween!
To find my books, click on the link below.
Filed under Halloween
I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.
All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.
I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
To find my books, click on the link below.
ASTROLOGY SERVICES:
The Intention Experiment
I’m reading a book called Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza. In chapter three, he recounts research from an article in Wired (“Mind Over Matter,” Apr. 1995). Now from my perspective, this is not anything out of my understanding of things because this is the world I’ve been reading about and living in for the last couple of decades, but I know some of you are going to drop your jaws over this. Good! We want that kind of response. Your world is about to crack open. Here goes.
photo:CSIRO
Rene Peoc’h is a French researcher who wanted to study the possibility that intention might operate in our world. He started with a computerized robot set up as a random event generator. Set lose in an area, the robot turned right half the time and left half the time, thereby covering the area equally over time. This is perfectly in keeping with the idea of a random generator. Then he allowed some chicks to imprint on the computerized robot as if it were their mother. So the chicks bonded with the robot creating an energetic bond on their part (at least). Once the chicks had imprinted, Peoc’h put them in a cage where they could see the robot but not go to it. What do you think happened?
photo: Thomas Quine (not the robot from the experiment)
If you hold a materialistic view of the world, you would say nothing. The random event generator can’t be affected by the minds of the chicks. It’s ridiculous! But- the pattern of movement of the robot clustered near the chicks’ cage. No longer was the robot moving randomly, but now it had gravitated near the babies. Cool experiment, right? And easily replicated. The larger question becomes if baby chicks can influence objects around them, how much influence do we have? And how do we develop and control it??? That’s what Becoming Supernatural is all about. Interested? Grab the book but be warned, the work is hard and all-consuming. Advanced yogic practices are made accessible to everyone.
Hopefully, I’ll have more to share later but I wanted to share some personal happenings here, too. I am about four months out from returning to the US (YAY! I CANNOT WAIT!!!). My third book is about to be released (FINALLY!!!). The downside is that things are about to get very busy. This blog will probably be interrupted by these major life upheavals.
Filed under Book Review
Let’s find out! I visited Bruges recently and share some of my photos below.
The beguinage at Bruges (Belgium)
The 12th and 13th centuries were characterized by renewed religious fervor. New spiritual pathways emerged. Some of them were seen as heretical (like the Cathars), while others were tolerated. Franciscans and Dominicans came into existence to reorder the Church from the inside out. The beguines emerged as one of the most original spiritual pathways and they endured for hundreds of years. They can also be viewed as the first feminists.
The beguines appeared at the end of the 12th century. These women initially came from the poorer classes and sought a life of faith without taking formal vows. At first, small groups located themselves in urban settings near hospitals or abbeys. They dedicated themselves to prayer and contemplation, but worked in their communities caring for the sick. The beguines were a conundrum and a challenge to the social order. Free from the male dominance of a husband or spiritual director, the beguine was an independent entity. Her freedom also required she support herself by working. This beguine structure for the first time opened a religious path for poor women who previously had no access to it. Nuns came from wealthy classes and bought their way into the life through large dowries, impossible for poor women.
There is controversy over where the first beguine community was, but we know the movement spread quickly from Flanders through Italy, France, Poland, and Hungry. Over time a communal lifestyle prevailed and took hold. The beguines lived in a beguinage that functioned as a predominantly independent community, with rights and the ability to own property. Women often sought work in the thriving textile industries of their cities. By 1240, most of the beguines in the south of Flanders were living in communities surrounded by walls, where the door was closed at night creating its own version of a monastic center. The beguines had no founder and adopted no universal rule. There was no central authority. Each beguinage was a separately functioning entity, and this was sometimes a strength and sometimes a weakness.
Not surprisingly, beguine communities were the subject of much concern for the Church. The movement ran counter to the power structure and heresy was often a concern, but two papal bulls in the 13th century did support the movement. But it was not enough. Some beguines were burned for heresy while others received protection. By the 14th century, the beguines were suffering. They were subject to inquisitional authorities, and some beguinages closed losing their assets while others were absorbed into traditional monastic orders. Some beguinages persisted through the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution, but only a few survived into the 20th century. These were clustered in Belgium including the one at Bruges.
I’ve been to several former beguinages in the Low Countries now. They are always peaceful, contemplative places. From these places, there are still echoes of women wanting spiritual space and a place in the world. Sauve Garde.
Read more:
The Beguines:Women in Search of Sanctity Within Freedom -Silvana Panciera
The Wisdom of the Beguines- Laura Swan
Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics– Bernard McGinn
Owl Killers– Karen Maitland (fiction), starts and ends at the Bruges beguinage
Sisters Between-Molly Connally (fiction)
Filed under Books, Spiritual/Mysticism, travel
I’ve always hated my birthday. December 21 falls too close to Christmas for it ever to have been celebrated like a normal birthday. As a child I can remember (and remember vividly) the one and only birthday party where I had neighbor kids over. The rest of the time, birthdays were small family events squeezed in among the hubbub of Christmas. Not fun and not special. That coupled with the yearly reminder from my mother that I was born on the darkest day of the year did much to cement my feelings of apathy about my solar return. For a few years, I moved the event to January hoping for a better outcome. But there was no escaping it.
2017 turned out to be quite an eye-opening experience living abroad, and in an attempt to take advantage of some once in a life-time opportunities, I thought maybe this year marking my birthday with the rising sun of solstice at Stonehenge would make a memorable birthday. It was!
The tour bus left London in complete darkness at 4:20 AM and we made our way to the plains of Salisbury where we picked up some light rain. We were given the option of walking 50 minutes to the site or waiting for a shuttle bus. Luckily, the English Heritage organization that controls access to Stonehenge has done this for years and there were plenty of shuttle buses, so we boarded the bus and rode. We were dropped off, in the misty blackness at the edge of a parking lot with hundreds of others. All along the way, my husband and I were looking for the famous stones to orient ourselves but even standing with the crowd, we had no idea in which direction we’d eventually be led.
Finally, someone from English Heritage ventured by with a flashlight to tell us that they were waiting for some light before they’d open the field for us to go up to the site. When someone asked her where, she gestured to the left behind a wire fence where again we saw nothing. The crowd was animated. In the distance and to the left, drums beat, and a lone bagpipe played. More shuttle buses came and left, and we waited.
Not long after, the stones were lit on the hill above us and the pasture fence dropped. Stonehenge emerged from the black night on the first morning of winter. Druid drums beat a rhythm as the crowd and I were led through the marshy pasture and up to the historic site. I felt very emotional going up the hill and had to focus on my breathing to circulate the energy. Whether this was a reaction to ley lines, the crowd’s festive spirit, or my own internal work I don’t know, but it was powerful and deep (and Scorpionic?). There was a sense of rightness in this crowd moving up to take back this site.
By the time I reached the stones, several hundred people were already massed in and around the site. Stonehenge is a relatively small area. The center was held by Druids and pagans who had begun their ceremonies. Eager to join in, my husband and I moved in as close as we could. Our initial position was just outside the center ring. Gradually things began to lighten. We honored the four directions and offered prayers of peace being led by, I believe, a Druid priest. We chanted, sang songs, and summoned the ancestors. It was a festive, lively, and inclusive ceremony. The official sunrise came without notice as the clouds never permitted the sun to shine. Once the ritual part of the gathering had concluded, a group of pagan singers dressed in red streamed into the center of the stones and led the crowd in more songs. After a while, it felt like time to leave and my husband and I walked around the circle. I had a chance to touch some of the stones and walk the grounds of the site.
One of the most important reasons to visit Stonehenge at one of the solstices is that people are allowed in among the stones and on the grounds. During the rest of the year, tourists are allowed only to walk a paved path behind a barrier around the site. Those restrictions have been in place for some years now to protect the site. Only on limited rare occasions can visitors access and touch the stones (although technically you’re not supposed to, but everyone does).
Stonehenge is positioned on the top of a gentle hill with a panoramic view of surrounding fields. It’s isolated and unexpected, retaining its mystery. I settled on a fallen stone with some others. Revelers in the distance kept up the party atmosphere as I dropped into a healing mediation with the aid of the beat of a steady drum. It was easy to ground and go deep. I emerged sometime later, cold and stiff. It was time to leave.
The visit had been characterized by three different phases. First, there had been the emotional climb to the site. The stones themselves and the experience of greeting the solstice was joyous and a shared one. The final phase was solitary, deep, and healing. No bolts of lightening but more a gladness that I’d been there. That this birthday was memorable and special.
I was surprised that I had not felt more in the way of energy at the site, but then I had done some shielding ahead of our arrival. An unexpected thing happened the next day in London though. While we were waiting to get the underground, I suddenly started running energy that intensified in my palms. This lasted for some time and I think was connected to the previous day’s work. So, I’m keeping an open mind and we’ll see where this goes. Maybe a blog in the future.
Filed under Spiritual/Mysticism, Uncategorized
ellisnelson 