Dear Irv,
No, I have no hand in anything. Were you jesting, or being paranoid? Everyone is just being quiet. Infact I just developed a streamlined way to archive posts, so I have been just anxiously waiting for the mailbox to fill up again, so I can do it to it.

But, I will tell a story during the lull. A couple of weeks ago I rented the video on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (TBD) and, as I sat down to watch it, Sage's post about needing to do a psychopomp thing for the cassette-tape-eating Scottish fisherman came across the line. I went about my business noting that it was interesting, sending Steve a note about it, but not thinking much deeper about it. Then last week I bought the little bitty TBD edition put out by Shambala Press and have been reading it. I started talking about trying the 7 weeks in total darkness as an alternative way to get to the experiences described in the Bardo Thotrol

Irv, you know how I am about this death thing from my old stories of trains and death, but if anyone else out there is not familiar with this story, send me a private note and I will send you a copy. Suffice it to say that death is an important theme in synchronicity for me.

My brother moved into the Hotel Flora Vista (my house) last week on his search for a new career (he's having a midlife crisis). He was checking into going to acupuncture school here in Albuquerque. So we were sitting around the fireplace on the night after he went in to get an application and we decided to check what the Tarot cards had to say about this potential. As usual with my cards, they are very on point, but never tell you something that is not obvious. It kind of blew him away, just as I imagine the I-Ching does to someone who doesn't realize how just on point these things can be. You know what I am saying here, Irv. So while I had my cards out, I asked them about this synchronicity I was "waiting for" and came up with the 10 of swords.

Lord, grant me brevity here! The card shows Athene calling a halt to Orestes' suffering at the hands of the Furies. The very abbreviated divinatory meaning: "The end of a painful situation or state. There emerges an ability to see the situation realistically." I woke up at 2:30 am the next morning with the image of that card in my mind and realized that it was exactly what the TBD was about.

Then later that day, my son called to see if we could meet for dinner. His favorite place is across from this little pagan bookstore, so we always meet at the bookstore then eventually wander across the street to eat. The previous week I had seen both David F.Peat's book and Coombs and Holland's book and planned to come back and buy them. The library angel was hanging out there apparently, as The Psychedelic Experience (Leary, et al.) was sitting next to the books I wanted. The Psychedelic Experience is about accessing the TBD experience through hallucinogenic drugs. I thought about buying it also but with a limit to my funds stuck with the synchronicity books, promising my self next time I have 5 bucks to go get it.

Meanwhile, I am revamping my theoretical issues addressed in my dissertation upon inspiration from our own Simon G. Powell, the mystic psychedelic guru who inspired me to start reading about chaos theory. I recently picked up a copy of Beyond Natural Selection by Robert Wesson, who was writing about the juncture between evolutionary biology and chaos theory. In it, he spends a significant amount of space devoted to Lamarkianism and tells the story from Arthur Koestler's Case of the Midwife Toad about the last great Lamarkian biologist Paul Krammerer, who committed suicide after somebody monkeywrenched his experiments. Well, I ain't no Lamarkian, but I do believe that evolution is not played by the rules of classical genetics. So, having pledged myself to my tarot card reading "to see things realistically" and being willing to committ academic suicide (as my major professor is a cladist) I decided to focus my work on a premise that species are merely convenient constructs for human classification and diversification also proceeds by multi-furcative processes at the population level (rather just the bi-furcative processes recognized in modern taxonomy). I have been working on writing a position paper to support my ideas that is going to really challenge the hell out of my major professor. Oh, well, he has his Sun conjunct his Pluto, which is respectable, if it wasn't for the wishy-washy Libra moon...

Meanwhile, Steve had some weeks ago sent me Braud's experiment on which our own yet-to-get-started experiment is based and my attention had raised 15 degrees when it was mentioned that this German fellow had written on the taxonomy of sychronicity. As you old alt.psych.sync'ers know, I am very keen on developing experimental taxonomies of synchronicity as heuristic tools. This guy had studied seriality (ACE's?). I never remember names of people (just plants... I even forgot my own name once!). Then three nights ago, I was reading Combs and Holland and realized that this German fellow was the same Paul Krammerer, last of the Lamarkian's.

I would like to ask Sage to try to get in touch with him and ask him for guidance for us all. Simon just came back from a shamanistic experience communing with the gods, and I think that it is significant that the next day in the U.New Mexico campus newspaper there was a note about the extremely violent storms in London and people getting killed by the storm. Now that I am a born-again Shamanomaniac, I take this as significant to the whole story. Also, my uncle is in the final stages of terminal liver cancer, so my whole family is also talking about death, but he is not the kind of guy to want the Bardo read to him. AND don't forget my recent post about meeting two people in succession whose fathers had committed suicide (one of them is the lab assistant I hired to work for me and the other was a guest at the Hotel Flora Vista from Sanger,Texas where one of the richest people in the town got that way by importing cadavers from third world countries for biological supply companies).

Well, I really should have packaged up this whole tale and summed it up with the word "transformation" and sent it off to Steve for the experiment, but it's too messy, too based on my personal thinking disorders, and too weird. That's not to say, though, that I don't like it. I hope you like it too. All comments are welcome.

Yours,

The JackRabbit Woman.

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