​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.

                                                                          March 3, 2024

Dear [Family],                           

I offer you something you probably don’t want to investigate, but, as family, this is something I refuse to keep silent on. Obviously I’ve undergone an ordeal recently; the facts of my pneumonia are objective, but they’re less than half the story. What follows is a full picture of one of the biggest events in my life, something with profound implications.

The last time I burdened you in this manner was from New Zealand, when I announced I’d reached The Gates of Dis: One small dream let me know very clearly, and then two follow-up dreams confirmed the place & journey & mission. Dis is the place in the soul where, after achieving flight—following my Nine Men sequence & 81 steps to flight—the soul immerses in the greater universe within. Volume Two of my albionspeak curriculum, in fact, is called albionspeak: the gates of dis, and I offer my teachers’ profound teachings on the subject in that volume’s very first chapters (Sessions 57 & 59). Session 59, in fact, is largely a literary discussion between Scribe, a new flyer in 1999, and Don, two of the most brilliant literary thinkers who will ever walk. I was more a witness then, though in 2024 I am now the journeyer.

Importantly, the journey is mapped; many have travelled it before us. By far the best reference is Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is a great touchstone, though we learned Dante combined the roles of different characters into a single character, Virgil. Virgil actually represents both the role of guide, but also Dante’s companion, who, I believe, needs to be a witness & sounding board, rather than a participant, a great listener who is not personally knowledgeable of the map. That is, the journeyer needs someone to share with, grounded on Earth to keep an anchor on “reality,” meaning this Earth & this given reality, not the infinite Forest beyond the human Village.  

I met Danielle on my 12-day rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. She’s 65 years old, a single woman, who’s made a full career as professional artist in New York, living in a giant apartment her family has owned since her building went up in the 1920’s. She has a studio and consistently has commissions putting together installations in new buildings (especially new hospitals). Mostly she paints, but she jumps among genres so that her home walls display many paintings that do not resemble each other. On our rafting trip, Danielle was the only other unpaired traveller, so we were naturally squeezed together for boat rides and sleeping tents. We formed a deep bond that included ouija, but not much from our personal lives—meaning I trust her deeply, but don’t know her well. After my dreams in NZ, I was directed to offer her the role of the Companion, and she accepted.

Thus what follows is my “report” of my ordeal, all of which came in one continuous flow/draft upon returning home from the hospital. All my close family need to know what’s transpired recently. I summarize for you in my report to her; I don’t feel another presentation could improve it. 

And I certainly don’t think I can convey this in person, especially at a birthday party with neighborhood toddlers, parents, birthday cakes & noises. What’s happened to me is profoundly wonderful. I don’t need to shout it to the world, but my family should know. D. & K., we’ll talk at some point, I hope at length during your visit here; I love your thoughts. But mostly on other matters, topics immediate & wonderful to us all, and I’ll have to mask. See you soon!

D.

PS:  You don’t need the ouija allusions, but they are integral to the full perspective—mind-blowing, frankly, if you reconstruct the sequence in time. Since my website is probably over 2000 pages now—where Volume 2, only one-third finished, is longer than most books already—I offer the direct steps here for navigation: albionspeak.com/Volume Two/10.0 Ouija 1999/10.1 Session 57. I recommend also checking out my quick, but amazing dream A Vilansit or Two, as well as the debriefing around it that follows: albionspeak.com/Lesson 5: Soul 1/5.2 Session 34.




Danielle,

I hope you’re well and would love to hear your thoughts and learn about your life & art. Namely, I don’t like one-way exchanges. I share, and the asymmetry of the relationship between the visitor of Dis and the Companion is not something I’m comfortable with. It seems egotistical. Thus, I invite you to tell me of your life; but, as I repeat, you’re under no obligation to volunteer anything, nor even ply me with feedback. I realize in this context part of what made me a great teacher (I was; many kids & parents told me repeatedly): A teacher & student have an asymmetrical relationship, but a great teacher always gets constant feedback. I stood in front of my classroom to present, but I knew the minds of every kid in my class, because I welcomed & demanded questions & feedback. In fact, I generally met one-on-one with every kid in my class every single class period to go over homework, give & get feedback on every possible question. Many kids flunked my classes, but no one slipped through the cracks invisibly.

I’ve wanted to keep you informed, but, for the month of January [2024], I had little to say, except that I was “fucking up.” Why am I so intransigent? Why do I self-sabotage? Why, in comparison to my fellow Jewel Net karassmates, do I seem so slow to develop (by far the slowest)? Because I’m an albion “generalist,” not focused on a singular subject or art, it’s simply harder for me to focus narrowly, but it’s also the case that I seem contorted, even “convoluted” in Josef’s words, and go out of my way to make my own life much harder. (I do not compare my difficulties to anyone else’s, especially Ukrainians or the children of Gaza.)

Having said all this, let me catch you up on what has been a very hard time in my life, a true discontinuity, which is almost certainly life-changing, though in ways I did not expect, which seems to be my continuing story.

First, two quick corrections/additions to my last email regarding Don’s poem The Wait: “la espera” means “wait,” but not, as I thought, “hope.” “Esperar” means both “to wait” and “to hope,” but “hope” as a noun is “la esperanza.” I learned this from Spanish PhD daughter Rhiannon who further informed me of something else in the poem I did not understand. I thought “The Wait” used the second person as a kind of generic impersonal “you.” Apparently not. Rhiannon makes clear that not only is there a specific “you,” someone the narrator is addressing directly, but that this person is female. In English the gender is not distinguished.  That’s significant, though I have little more on that line to add.

Now Dis, or rather my end-run around the process of my own convoluted fashion: You’d think, after receiving my clear directives from the higher Albion (not my normal overseer), that I could measure up. If Jesus asked you (impersonal) to rise & walk, that you might at least stand up. But I did not. Albion told me to start on Monday. I immediately found the technical loop hole and said “which Monday?” and thus postponed. I gave up smoking dope briefly—solely to initiate dreaming—but then found my piano playing suffered because my attention is so poor. Dope gives me better focus, enables me to follow an idea much longer before my “many-mindedness” (ADD) interrupts. It’s been crucial to my writing to allow me to penetrate the (literally) infinite acoustic chaos of voices & music & my mind, enabling me to find the right voice, Albion’s, or the right music to connect to. Even so, interruptions are common & all-but inevitable, and while writing I regularly have to go back, reread what I’ve written, get back in that flow, and then resume. It helps much in piano, too; I can play in the flow much longer, but still—not even a single time yet—have I yet to play a piece of music straight through longer than two pages without losing where I am. As soon as I start to enjoy the music as music, as soon as I’m listening & connected to it, then I forget I’m the pianist who has to hit the keys, and I’ve lost my place on the page. My fingers will continue for several measures in their kinetic memory, but even a one-note distance between mind & fingers is enough to stop the play. I figured that as a beginner who now reads music that dope still helped me at least to play what I could, because without it I get lost on the first page. But, in the final analysis, this is probably the main reason I’ve been steered to piano in the first place: to be able to hold on to the continuity with my own mind & without chemical aid.

In January [my wife] my wife and Rhiannon went to Hawaii for two weeks while I stayed home and fed the animals and had a glorious marital reprieve. I felt like I deserved a brief let-down, which meant I smoked liberally (not extravagantly) and allowed the dishes to pile up a bit, etc.—not any binge, mind you—just a vacation or hiatus, before getting back to business, namely piano and also Spanish work, which, frankly, I didn’t touch. Bottom line, I got a clear direction from my higher soul and didn’t stand up.

[My wife] returned; I saw Rhiannon for one day only, and then I delayed till another Monday. The one activity I did pursue with perfect conviction (since I’m not currently writing) was the intermittent care I gave to my grandsons, Silas & Charlie, 2.5 & 1 respectively, because I love them and because I know young children are literally the most important connections souls on Earth can make. I am a perfect grandpa in every second of interaction; not one second of my love is temporal, though most of that time merely involves endless feeding and changing poopy diapers. I am not a helicopter or codependent grandpa; I meet my progeny on their non-verbal terms and give them every facet of my attention.

Ironically, my grandchildren became the vectors that led to Albion’s “natural consequences” for not meeting his directions & directives. Late in January I came down with yet another cold, thanks to my snot-filled grandchildren, a minor cold with major muscle aches, that I thought would pass like any other. I continued my activities into February, but by Feb. 4 I developed a cough and was quickly diagnosed with pneumonia, which I’ve had before. An inconvenience, I thought, as I stopped smoking and followed doctor’s orders and antibiotic prescriptions.

But I didn’t improve. By Feb. 7 my condition deteriorated to the point I had to go the ER because I couldn’t catch my breath. I have an oximeter, which became the measure of my life for weeks, and I was consistently reading 92% oxygenation, where 99-100% is normal and where 89% is a serious medical concern. The ER here was thorough, gave me IV’s and better antibiotics, along with a slew of tests, but I still didn’t get better; so finally, after exhausting every intervention known to Olympia, I wound up in the emergency ward in Seattle’s Swedish Hospital, the best care in the Northwest. By this time I was dipping regularly as low as 85%, where just going to the bathroom would exhaust me, send me into hyperventilation for more than an hour, though there were few other symptoms: no fever, no chills, no pain, not much coughing even, though it was violent & exhausting once I started, though nothing came up.

I just returned from Seattle yesterday after six nights in a nice isolated room of the infectious diseases ward (no roommate). I’ve given more than 30 vials of blood, absorbed probably 8-9 different IV antibiotics, lots of steroids, and lots of anti-clotting shots in the belly to prevent bedsores. I’ve had every test imaginable, and I know I don’t have COVID, RSV, flu, sepsis, TB, MRSA, any known bacteria, any normal fungus, cancer, or a host of auto-immune diseases. The best doctors still have no answer. I had a bronchoscopy, where saline solution was injected into my lungs to wash them out, suck out mucus, and culture the mess they found. The nurses call it “water-boarding,” except I was unconscious. No difference, no change, no result. I was feeling better than at home, mostly as my resting pulse came down from 110 to about 75 (I’m normally below 60), but my oxygen levels were stuck on 92% (with minor deviances, better in the evening, poor upon waking).

Right now I’m comfortable writing you. I hope to play piano later, but that feels like a mountain now, just the energy needed to focus & move my fingers. I’m still very very sick, though now at 94% rather than 92%, the difference being the only reason I’m not still in the hospital. My arms & stomach are badly bruised from all the needles; I’ve lost 15 lbs., and I can relate with precise detail every TV news event, global or pathetically local, that has transpired in the interim (nearly every bit of news of late seems particularly horrific). I can tell you the exact weather forecasts, even down to the exact temperatures & predicted inches of precipitation in every town in western Washington. Remarkably, throughout this mess, even while deprived of oxygen my mind remained quite sharp. I made good human connections with my nurses, found a profound eternal connection with one nurse in particular over a single night shift, affected her deeply she told me, and was for my nurses a nice reprieve from patients who were screaming and literally dying in the rooms around me.

Now the Dis news: No, I haven’t had one dream I can remember, but something almost as profound has happened. You recall when I visited you in New York? We met at Penn Station, and you showed me around (thanks!), and then I went to The Met and a couple of other great places, but then, on my third day I awoke with probable COVID, where the gland on only the right side of my neck swelled from the ear to the clavicle, quite disfiguring me. This was about 10 days before New York City was consumed in the death storm of Lombardy COVID, before there was any testing. I knew I had Wuhan COVID, if I indeed had COVID, a much safer variant, and aside from my neck I felt only fatigue & recovered in about a week.

But I remember Penn Station. My train to D.C. was to leave around 2 PM, and my plan was to visit the Twin Towers memorial, but I was too weak to walk there or to appreciate it if I’d taken the subway. So I checked out of my hotel room as late as possible, 10 AM, and went to Penn Station simply to wait with my fatigue & swollen neck. Nobody had masks, so I isolated in a corner of the waiting area surrounded by construction, and there I had an amazing experience: I achieved a kind of hyper-clarity. The whole station revealed itself to me. This was not what others might call “mystical,” and yet it was not simply a cognitive or intellectual event. For example, of all things the intercom played several string quartets, both Mozart & Haydn, probably to keep riff-raff away, not for music appreciation. I loved it. Now you know I love classical music, but string quartets are really “hard” for me. They’re not written for entertainment, not for the Vienna masses. They’re written as advanced pieces that musicians play for each other. I’ve tried repeatedly to “get” them, but they’re such work that I find them mostly exhausting. Suddenly in Penn Station I was absorbing these pieces effortlessly—not intellectually, since I still lacked the training—but loving them as intricate music, picking up numerous nuances I normally would not. The experience was not musical only. I grasped all the stimuli around me with ease, with compassion & empathy, with joy, understanding all the time that I was sitting there with a potentially fatal, incurable disease. I understood fully that something profound was happening to me.

That moment lasted half a day, and since then I figured out what transpired at a mystical level. I refer now to my website’s Lesson 12.2, ouija Session 68 S/Div, where Vilansit debriefed Scribe’s & my birthday day on Salvia divinorum, a legal & powerful hallucinogen. Vilansit, in her remarkable teachings, clearly let me know that something profound had occurred on my “trip”: I cleared the excess voices & noises & radios & music chaos of my mind. They all just left me, leaving me free & clean. Penn Station marked a profound moment without that drug.

I have had no voices or noises in my head since early February. The clarity has lasted nearly a full month; it persists to this second, and it may be, in fact, a permanent feature of my new life. !!!!!!

I could point objectively to my ability to learn weather forecasts without any effort or desire. Before hospitalization, I could watch four straight hours of Great Courses on TV, full of dates & data, and memorize effortlessly all the graphs & numbers. I have a mind for numbers and can do this normally without much work, but this is a clear intellectual boon. Much more important, however, was how I was not just good with/for my nurses & doctors, I connected immediately, “charmed” everyone, meeting their needs, at whatever level. This was not smoozing, not playing good word games for fun (they all said I was the “funniest” man they’d met, meaning only that I kept things light when others around me were constantly screaming). This was not ego; it was aliah, absolutely as eternally far as each person could go. Some nurses found me a funny pin cushion; two I got to know deeply, one of whom theoretically could even be Jane, though I never saw her face or got her last name, and mathematically should never expect to see her again. She needed and was open to a profound connection, and we reached that place in less than ten minutes (starting around midnight). The clearest measure of this experience was simply the lack of noise in my head. I’m still there.

Now a little piece of miraculous confirmation: I refer you to albionspeak’s Lesson 5.2, the beginning of Session 34, specifically my dream there A Vilansit or Two. As I believe I state elsewhere, this dream from 1995 made no sense to me at the time, namely the morning after, and I almost discarded it, except it had such heavy, indelible dreamweight that I couldn’t forget it: a very weird & funny short dream which surprisingly returned in the first exchanges of that year’s first session, setting the tone for all that followed. Even then, I had no idea how far this little dream went, because I had no idea that O, Oliver Sacks, was in our karass. Once I learned in 2002 that Oliver & I were deeply connected, I immediately saw how this dream (unlike any other I’ve had) came not from my mind, but from his: It takes place in a hospital ward, involves medicine, and specifically refers to the Periodic Table, which Sacks loved & wrote about extensively. I did not know till 2001 that I personally am represented by the letter U, which above all describes my life’s smooth (slow) parabolic trajectory, or that I am also symbolized by the atomic element uranium, U, atomic number 92 on the table, which is the largest atom that appears naturally on Earth. This might be my funniest dream ever, and even lying there paralyzed in the dream I was laughing throughout the whole dream.

My family called me in the hospital daily, long conversations for all except [my wife], who was frightened and predictably blamed me for my pneumonia—reasonably because of my marijuana smoking, but also claimed I got pneumonia from not eating enough vegetables. She was so scared that I had to keep her rational, and I was grateful that she could not visit me two hours from my home. Deirdre & I spoke about grandkids and politics and life, while Rhiannon & I spoke of literature & life & mysticism, for Rhiannon remains the one person I can discuss my whole universe with completely. She gets most of it and reaps all its benefits. (By the way, I had complete, detailed, frank discussions with my pulmonologists about marijuana & my state: They were open to the possibility, but in the end there was no evidence that marijuana played any role; and they absolutely separated the effects of dope versus those of nicotine, which I’ve never smoked. Nevertheless, I will alter any future smoking methods, learning all I can from this experience.)

Suddenly, in the middle of one of my talks with Rhiannon, when she asked how I was, I turned backward to look at oximeter and got hit: “92,” the constant number where I had been stuck for weeks, literally the only measure that mattered, lying motionless in my hospital bed. Wow. And yes, I found it very funny.

And what now? No dope for months, not just no desire but a deep visceral repulsion, which seems a very reasonable biological reaction to my ordeal. Piano playing for sure, once I can again sit and move my fingers without exhaustion, though now I’m going to have to aim for continuity in my play without chemical aid. Spanish? I hope so, though as you might know, learning any language is hard & time-consuming &, for me, not fun. I have to learn to enjoy it, much as I can enjoy a 9 x 9 hard kenken puzzle without taking any notes (namely, in my head alone), mentally prime factoring five and six digit numbers and memorizing 81 separate boxes. Most people don’t find that fun.

It’s clear that if my current noise-free mind can be maintained, I’m at the start of something huge. I’d like to be smarter—who wouldn’t? But my brain has always been good enough to master most pursuits, so that’s not what I seek. It’s what I can do with people that I hope to pursue, the ability to meet everyone at their core, where they & their free will needs might best be met. It’s not ego; it’s beautiful, and my own motivations are as pure as good as gold.

The only other experience of a noise-free mind that I know I do know well, because I was able to achieve it virtually every time I aimed for it: Soccer. As I write in Lesson 12, for at least the last ten years of my soccer “career” I reached that state—probably more serene & enlightened every time I played—not as a coach, mind you, not at all as a fan watching others play, but while playing only. I strove unsuccessfully for years to take that state and bring it beyond the 90 minutes & end lines of the game itself. Nope. Now pneumonia has taken me where I wanted to go, some twenty years later. I’m so slow, but my U trajectory remains smooth and continuous. If can survive pneumonia and the next 20 years, I should have a lot left to contribute.

I close now, at 95% blood oxygen saturation, incredibly grateful & optimistic, despite Trump, despite the US Supreme Court & the House Republicans, despite Putin, despite record fires in Texas that nobody seems to connect to record temperatures & record winds. Dallas hit 94 degrees in February; two days later 500,000 acres had burned at a rate of 2.5 football fields per second. I have a mind for numbers, and my brain is really really clear. The doctors have given me six weeks’ worth of powerful drugs, after which “we’ll see from there”—no promise of recovery, probably motionless for at least another month.

I will dream, but the true fact is that life itself is just a dream. Lucidity in life is no different from lucid dreaming in sleep. More than my karass friends I am connected to & committed to this dream in particular. There are an infinite number of worlds out there. This is where I belong.

I’m so grateful you’re here to dream with me, Danielle. Thank you for listening.

D.





§ Hail aliah





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​albionspeak 2:  the gates of dis ​(13.1)