Quantum Shaman: Of Ghosts and Roses

Once Located in Land o'Lakes, Florida, the Green Gables
Motel was an insignificant blight on an otherwise lush, green
landscape. Oh - and it was also irrefutably haunted.

The place where I grew up was either haunted or cursed (take your pick). I saw my first full-body apparition at the age of 8 - not once, but twice, in my bedroom. Many odd things happened there over the years, including my "father's" suicide in that same room in the year 1973.(No sympathies, please - the man was a tyrant, and as it turned out, not my father at all).

I was 6 or 7 here, standing by the "pond" which is actually
an extension of Lake Padgett.

The property was actually a 10-unit motel, a tiny house held together by termites holding hands, and several outbuildings. The 5-acres backed up to a pond/swamp/lake, and it was known that an aquifer ran underneath the entire property, giving additional credence to the possibility that the land itself was haunted, since it's a somewhat accepted fact among paranormal investigators that water increases spirit energy.

Shortly after the death of The Old Man, I moved out at the age of 17, leaving the place in the rear-view mirror. For several years, nothing unusual happened in my own life, though my mother did say she saw a "man" standing outside the bedroom window (yes, the same room) more than once. That might be entirely explainable, if not for the fact that the house was actually raised at least 2 feet and so the "man" would have had to be 8' tall or more... but no matter. We'll file that under the heading of, "Weird Shit Happens In Florida."

It was 15 years or more after I left that I began being "pulled" back to that haunted motel. In dreaming. Or, more precisely in what might be called an astral or out-of-body state. The first time this occurred, I was intentionally terrified by a dark force that apparently resides on the property. The "dream" was such that the details were more than crystal clear - the house still stood exactly as it had when I was perhaps 8 years old. Faded red carpet in the living room, jalousie windows covered with dust, curtains that had seen better days, the broken-down flower-pattern sofa, and the lush green grounds out in the courtyard. In one corner stood the forgotten old console television dragged home from some thrift shop, never worked right and only got 2 channels on a good day. The scent of amarillo lilies and tea roses drifting in through the open window... a setting that might have been nostalgically idyllic if not for the overwhelming and literally heart-stopping sense of pure evil that permeated the very fabric of the vision itself.

In the context of the dreaming, I knew I had been called there to do battle with this Thing. It had no name. No gender. No identity of its own. It was simply a living force - though I cannot even say with certainty that it was alive at all. I found a sword in my hand, though it was more accurately a dagger, and a small one at that. At this time in my life, I had never been trained in the use of daggers, knives or other sharp objects, other than for cutting into a juicy steak, so I was not only out of my league with this Thing, but also lacking in any type of skill set. I felt the entity laugh at me, projecting its power onto me as if to smother me. I was dying. I knew I would die. And then it was dark and I was back in my own bed somewhere in southern California.

In reality, the house and all the motel units had long since been torn down, the property abandoned, where it would be eventually reclaimed by nature. But at the moment I awakened in my own bed, I realized some other force had actually pulled me out of there - a force for which I had no name at the time, but one which has since come to answer to the name of my own double, Orlando. Though I was grateful (beyond words) for his intervention, I felt I had been utterly defeated by this Thing which was apparently attached to the property where I grew up. It was not something I wanted to think about. It was certainly not something I ever wanted to encounter again. And so I ignored it, hoping it would go away.

A few years passed, so long that I had almost forgotten about the Thing and the defeat and the terror it had caused me. But then I was again pulled back into that same crystal-clear setting sometime around 1980... This time, I was better prepared - though to be honest I could think of no reason why I had been singled out to do battle with something that was light years beyond my own abilities. Though I had trained heavily in martial arts for several years by this time, I was no fool. Even the most proficient martial artist would be no match for what amounts to an invisible opponent, one comprised of the pixels of Evil Intent itself. As my first martial arts teacher once said, "You can't fight the devil with a toothpick." Funny, since neither he nor I believed in "the devil," but the sentiment was clear and absolutely true. So when the Thing moved against me in this second encounter, I lay down the dagger and said out loud, "If it was your intent to kill me, would I not already be dead?"

The double is the vessel of our awareness beyond this mortal
form. We create it and strengthen it through intent, and
most of all, through unconditional love of Life itself.

The entity paused, but didn't stop its advance - though I did sense that it might have been considering my words. Then it was dark again, and Orlando was reeling me in, back into the safety of my own bed, my own body, somewhere in the stagnant suburbia of San Diego. I mumbled something that amounted to a thank you. Orlando only harrumphed. "If you die, so do I," he said as if it should have been obvious. "Self-preservation is a powerful motivator." And then he, too, was gone, leaving behind only the sharp echo of his words.

Time passed again. Over the years in between Then and Now, I engaged my path with heart fully, beginning in 1988 and continuing to this day. I studied the works of Carlos Castaneda, and found that they validated many of my own experiences, including my interaction with what the Toltecs call "the double." I applied myself to the healing arts, the mystical arts, and spent the next 20 years or so in what amounted to a self-imposed state of monkhood - reading, learning, practicing, applying the knowledge to my life, being particularly drawn toward the mystery which is the double. Wrote about it extensively in my first book (Quantum Shaman), and experienced so many magnificently strange things that I finally defeated the programming that tells us our dreams and visions are impossible, and insists that only the Real World exists. Sounds easy, perhaps, but it's the hardest thing any of us ever have to do - but it is also the only thing that gives us our freedom and awakens us to our own power.

Me & mom - with one of the motel units in the background.
Further back among the trees is the lake/swamp.

Then, last night - the early morning hours of May 12, 2018 - I was drawn back to that Dreaming again, into the same eerie setting that looked like something out of a scratchy celluloid commercial from the late 1950s. This time, I found myself in one of the dilapidated motel units - unit #9 to be precise. In the context of this dream, my mother was still alive (though she passed of natural causes in 2006). It was known to me that she had been living in this unit, but now the dark entity stood between her and myself. It was playing a wicked game of hide-and-seek this time - condensing itself down to the size of a little boy, hiding in the shadows, trying to lure me to come in and chase after it.

Instead, I called out to my mother, but there was no answer. Intuitively, I knew this was not because any real harm had come to her, but because the entity wanted me to think it had harmed her. It wanted to anger me. It wanted to get an emotional response rather than an impeccable one. It wanted me to come into its domain, into the darkness where it held all the power. This continued for several minutes, until I finally said to It, "I'm not going to chase you because I don't want you jumping out at me (my attempt to lure it into making a false move). If you want to play, come out and show yourself."

Love reaches where anger & fear cannot.

After awhile, I felt a movement in the darkness, like a cold wind sneaking in through a crack in the window. When it emerged and once again projected the full force of its Evil Intent toward me, I literally felt myself transform in an instant. The dagger I had been holding had become a single white rose. My own body was taller, more ethereal, and most definitely male. I was the double. I was Orlando. Though I could not physically see the entity, I laid the rose at its feet and only then realized there were tears in my eyes. In Orlando's voice, I heard myself say to the entity, "I am sorry for whatever happened to make you what you are."

For a moment, there was only the most profound silence I have ever experienced.Then the vision shivered and shimmered and I simply knew the entity was gone, and I also knew it was unconditional love that had defeated it (or freed it) without ever a battle needing to be fought.

So perhaps you can't fight the devil with a toothpick. Maybe with a rose. And definitely with the quantifiable force of Love.

____________

Della Van Hise

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