A Journey of Re-discovery – Part IV
What is a Spiritual Journey?
When you are embarked upon a spiritual journey as I have been, the destination is not always clear and well-defined. You may not even be aware that you are embarked upon one… as I was for many years. Call me a bit thick-headed, but the concept of a New Age wasn’t very well known except among those who studied some metaphysics. New Age bookstores and crystal shops were still rather avant garde.
I’ve told some of my readers in various emails and comments that for me some of the answers that I have been seeking have taken me nearly a lifetime to discover. It won’t take that long for the Second Wavers or those who follow in THEIR footsteps as the frequencies now support more rapid change and transformation, thanks to the hard work done by those of the First Wave of volunteers who did the hard pick axe work of breaking trail. Sometimes you don’t even KNOW that you’re on a spiritual journey. The journey just picks you up like a strong current and sweeps you along. Eventually certain things begin to dawn on your waking consciousness; others take a bit longer.
From my description of life on the Royal Teton Ranch, you may think that I didn’t entirely enjoy the experience and you would be right… and wrong.
I was, again, part of a spiritual community. The awareness of having lived in one in other “past” lives was very strong within me. Instinctively I KNEW that I had been a part of the Essenes, a Cathar, a Templar Knight… and so on.
At the church, there were many books to read, some written by Elizabeth Clare Prophet… or rather by her editorial staff, which was extensive. And there were volumes of other classic metaphysical books sold at the local store, across the highway from the Ranch. Having a little money, I bought books and read during what free hours I had in that place.
The questions of why I couldn’t be satisfied with a “normal” life refused to be answered. Indeed, for a long time I never even bothered to ask them. I was asking questions about everything I could think in the spiritual realm. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I was getting the “correct” answers at the time, but I was fervently involved in growing my conscious awareness of other beings, other worlds… primarily the Ascended Masters and the Archangels. The Church didn’t cotton to extraterrestrials. There was no mention there of the presence of friendly galactic forces; no, that would come much later.
Still, while at the Ranch, I learned about Sanat Kumara and His great pledge to assist humanity during a time of great darkness upon the planet. I was sure that I was one of His 144,000 volunteers who came here from Venus… and I was right. However, I found verification of that fact much, much later, when I could finally emotionally “handle” it.
What I objected to at the Ranch, at least covertly, was the amount of control exerted over the staff and students to think as the Messenger thought, to accept whatever she told us as “truth” and not to question anything. In other words, you were given instructions to give over your personal sovereignty and power to the Messenger. That doesn’t work in any setting, my friends, and certainly not in one that purports to be acting from a place of spiritual integrity.
So, while I appeared to adapt to my new surroundings, I found myself somewhat dismayed and disappointed in what I thought would be a glorious spiritual experience. As a volunteer staff member, I wasn’t paid a dime. In fact, I paid a nominal sum towards room and board. As a student, the fees continued. The Church claimed tithes from its members and accepted vast amounts of donations from its international membership and sales of books, tapes and various other published pieces. In other words, it was a money-making proposition for the Messenger. The staff, little more than her servants, were completely enamoured of the woman and her messages. I wasn’t so much, but still wanted to be there, despite my real physical and emotional suffering. Anyone who has lived to survive a bad marriage or relationship can identify with my ambivalent feelings. It’s hard to break loose when you have little self-respect or love left due to intense conditioning. Yet I managed to do just that, eventually.
As you can well imagine, after I did leave the Church, I had somewhat ambivalent feelings about the Ascended Masters, as well. When I was told to leave the grounds of the Ranch by the secretary to the Messenger, I was told that El Morya indicated that my path lay elsewhere. There was no further instruction, apology or good-byes made. I was dismissed like a pariah dog being kicked off the street.
Yet while I was on the grounds of the Ranch, I experienced a few revelations that would linger in memory through the following years.
With my great loss of weight, I was able to fit into a short-waisted flight jacket… a modern version, at least. One night as I was combing my hair in front of the mirror while wearing the same jacket, I had a vision or realization of myself as an RAF bomber pilot. The next day, I strode into the office and asked one of my co-workers if he had been in the RAF during WWII. I knew he had; he had already shared a story or two. When he acknowledged that he had been navigator aboard a bomber, I looked at him square in the eyes and told him that I had been his pilot. He remember bailing out of the wounded bird after she was hit over Germany, near the French border. Somehow I got her turned around and over France before the plane went down, crash landing on a farmer’s field. My friend and others of the crew got away. Stuart joined the French Underground until he was apprehended by the Germans and killed. I died on that abandoned field of injuries taken from shrapnel, bleeding out under the iron gray muzzles of German rifles. Is it any wonder that I have not been comfortable around guns in this lifetime?
I caught other glimpses in “past” lifetimes… once as a temple dancer in SE Asia, tiny and dark-haired. Then as a Hindu dancer in the court of Akbar the Great, and so on. One day, I began to tell a staff member of these visions that I was receiving and got an odd reaction. She told me to keep the knowledge to myself that others in hearing about these visions might get jealous. I thought it odd since we were constantly being told various stories from the Messenger of what she or members of her family had done in “past” lives. Apparently it wasn’t the thing to have done these things ourselves, although it was, on the surface at least, that many staff members were also in these exotic settings with the Messenger in other lives.
Another revelation was received by me in the reading of a little book entitled, St. Paul in Great Britain. It is a metaphysical classic and still available… although what truth it holds, I do not know. Still, in that first reading a realization that I had been on Mona at the time the Romans invaded and destroyed the great Druidic groves and college that existed there.
For those who are unaware, Mona was an earlier name for the island of Anglesey, which sits off the northwest coast of Wales. It had been a seat of learning for thousands of years, where students came from all over Britain and Alba (Scotland), Erie and even from Europe. The Druids, while given a bad reputation in stories that I had read in my childhood, were persons of great learning. To belong a full Druid, you committed to twenty years of intense training. There were three levels of mastership, each with different focuses. Some of the students were not present to become druids, themselves, but to be taught the basics of governing, natural sciences, healing, languages and the like.
Finally I understood why I had experienced such difficulty in Wales, getting physically sick while we stayed in a bed and breakfast located right above the Menai Straits. I had encountered an astral record of the great massacre, that either I had experienced myself or envisioned from afar, because of the highly developed psychic senses I possessed during that particular lifetime. Much later, in fact some 20 years or so later, I was to verify it for myself that I had viewed the massacre from afar, in a crushing vision.
I had been a student of some years at the colleges and already possessed what the Celts call “The Sight” even as a child. Being a younger son of a northern chieftain and lightly built, I wasn’t warrior material, but the druids had their eyes throughout the land, searching for those who were suitable for teaching as druids.
The head druid was a man of great vision and terrifying in aspect to one as young I was, a mere boy from a far-away village in the north. Yet he was good teacher and spent some time even with the youngest of the students, girls and boys. Yes, girls received instruction there, too. The druids respected the intuitive gifts natural to the female of our species. Many of the women became priestesses, instructors of the young and healers.
It was later that I would encounter, via the Internet, the reincarnation of this same Druid leader. We had some karma to balance between the two of us. For I knew if no one else did who betrayed the druids to the Romans. The powers of the Druids were stronger than that of the Romans, but the college was allowed to be destroyed. I could not understand what I perceived as treachery at the time; I understand now the need…. Simply, cycles are… power rises and then falls — the cycle of the druid as a political power in the south of Britain was now in twilight. The colleges and practices would continue amongst our Pictish cousins to the far north, but that was all in the dim future…
Can you understand what it feels like to walk between two worlds? I have done so many times in the past twenty years, experiencing parallel or “past” lifetimes while living this one. Sometimes it has been as if I were in the midst of a movie, two movies, or more. Still, I could maintain a presence here and was, as far as I was concerned, emotionally stable… probably more so than what passed for “normal” in this crazy world.
Given these new “perspectives” on life upon this planet, it was easier for me to be open to information that began to flow my way more frequently.
Still, I had periods of almost completely shutting down to receiving. One of those periods occurred after I left Montana and attempted to rehabilitate my body after a lengthy and ill-defined illness.
Returning to Montana after leaving the state so abruptly the previous autumn, I got a job at the local University, as secretary to a small group of research scientists on campus. One of the professors was also a member of C.U.T., although I don’t remember ever seeing or meeting him at any of the larger public sessions at the Ranch.
I was still attending services and a member of the Church, only now I was part of the small study group situated in a nearby town. I only attended a few more services held at the Ranch, until such time as the security at the Ranch increased allowing only certain approved individuals on the property. It was period of growing paranoia that spread among the members of the Church worldwide, compelling some people to give up their jobs and move to Montana to escape from whatever was “coming.” Does that sound familiar? It’s another avenue of control or group think… and not a good thing to get involved in whatever level it occurs, whether in one church, an entire country, a community or in a family.
It was at this time, I got involved in the now infamous episode of fall-out shelter building by members of the Church, the largest upon the grounds of the Royal Teton Ranch itself and others on the Glastonbury property, located to the north above the Yellowstone River. I bought into one of the shelters, although I frankly didn’t have much faith in it being “safe”. Still, we were encouraged by the Messenger to prepare for an atomic war that would tear apart the country, along with other dire warnings of earth and climate changes. Of course, the date when these calamities were to occur passed without event. And the Messenger and her third husband got caught up by Federal authorities in a “plot” to buy guns in another state and bring them to the big shelter at the Ranch. Not very good press for a “spiritual” leader.
With the failure of the prophecies given by the Messenger and the legal battle with the Feds that ensued, the Church lost a lot of membership in the days that followed. I wasn’t one of them, but then again I hadn’t sold up to get to Montana; I was already living and working there. Many people lost pretty much all they had and either left Montana or returned home to attempt to start over.
At some point that spring, I had one of my hunches that I would be moving soon. Two weeks later, I left Montana, this time for good, and headed back to my parent’s house north of Seattle.
I was hoping to financially and physically re-group. I was in poor physical health, but still able to work at an office job. Initially, I just wanted to spend the summer there; I ended up living with the parents for the next nine years. It was the beginning of a new phase of my spiritual journey.
The story continues with Part V: On Another Tack
©All Rights Reserved, Elizabeth Ayres Escher, http://www.bluedragonjournal.com