"More Things in Heaven and Earth..."
Dr. Hamlet's Rx: Entertain At Least Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
In these Rahuvian times of ours, with reality itself apparently splintering apart, the concept of “the truth” is starting to seem old-fashioned.
Or maybe it’s worse than that, maybe truth is a casualty of the post-postmodern era (or whatever we’re supposed to call this rendition of a brave new world).
Can’t you just see headstone now? ‘Here lies the truth, fallen in the line of duty.’ Beneath a few feet of stony soil, her emaciated body riddled with shrapnel from the fracturing of the world as we knew it.
Or maybe, just maybe, truth has faked her own demise, à la Huck Finn. Has gone underground, where she can ride out the current wave of madness. Maybe she’s been living down there a long time already, and few of us have ever seen her face. Maybe we’ve heard tell of her and dismissed the tales as preposterous.
Maybe she’s down there biding her time, just waiting. Or maybe she’s been surfacing strategically by night in guerrilla missions. Persona non grata in the brightly-lit media sphere, maybe she’s using the underground channels available to her to spread her message through the rhizomatic web of the subconscious.
Maybe you’ve glimpsed her in dreams, in visions, heard her ring in a song that won’t leave you alone.
Maybe you feel her stirring inside you even now, seeking the cracks in your armor so she can reveal herself. For she wants to be known, despite the interests who will move mountains and kill without hesitation to prevent that from happening.
So: if you were the truth—immortal yet chronically abused—how would you play it? Would you come out in all your naked glory, in the face of a mad world ready to deface you all over again? Or would you maybe try something a little different this time?
~ ~ ~
I won’t waste many words on the mad soup we find ourselves in. We’ve all heard it rehashed, starting with the polarization that’s affecting all levels of life. Deeply intelligent, caring, well-meaning people believing things contrary and incompatible to one other, the fractures cutting through families, communities, nations, the globe.
Not that profound differences are anything new, but our individual reality tunnels no longer even seem to share a common set of coordinates. They’re squirming off in uncharted directions, metastasizing at an accelerating rate in the digital echo-chamber we’ve dreamt into being.
Dissonance hardly describes this state of affairs, because dissonance at least implies a shared medium (such as sound). Our situation is stranger, more ragged and mongrel. It’s as if we’re living through a second tower of Babel, our common language giving way to mutually incomprehensible dialects at every turn.
Some are obsessed with apocalypse and revelation. Others can’t shut up about meme coins and liquidity mining. Then you’ve got weird old wizards who natter on about herbs, astrology, omens and well, the stuff we’re about to get into today once this preamble is through (bear with me).
All the while, the political pendulum swings wildly between extremes, marking out time on what could easily pass for an armageddon clock.
In times like these, even a new age, old age, ancestor-revering, Hindu-leaning animist and unapologetic diviner like me might be tempted to take some cues from John the Revelator.
But my topic today isn’t religion, exactly, nor politics, nor will I wax on about the beauty of early Magic: the Gathering cards (which is at any rate self-evident).
I’m here to broach something stranger, if that’s possible. It starts with the observation that, if objectivity (always a trickier proposition that they’d have us believe) has become a war zone, perhaps the subjective has more to offer. Perhaps wiggly, non-statistical ways of knowing might be a refuge and place of sanity. A bastion of truth, even.
But that’s only post-hoc justification for what’s really an organic interest. What’s grabbed me of late is material from past life regression hypnosis sessions.
I’m by no means an expert in the history of this field, but one name looms large, that of Dolores Cannon. (If you google her, ignore the Wikipedia results, as that august publication never misses an opportunity to smear anyone at odds with their rationalist-materialist program).
Cannon was born in 1931 in Missouri, married a military man in 1951 and had kids, and as far as I can tell lived a typical mid-century American middle class life but for one thing: her interest in hypnosis. This began after she and her husband experienced the benefits of hypnotherapy for smoking cessation and weight loss. Cannon then had the opportunity to try her hand at hypnosis to help a patient at a medical base; she evidently had a knack for it, and to everyone’s surprise the patient was able to access material from a number of past lives during sessions which became the basis of Cannon’s first book, Five Lives Remembered.
After her husband was disabled in a near-fatal car crash, he and Cannon moved to rural Arkansas, where she was to make her home for the rest of her life. With her children grown, she dedicated more time to hypnosis and continued the past life regression work while honing her technique. This led her into contact at one point with the 16th century mystic Nostradamus, who was keen to clarify the meanings of some of his famous prophecies, as detailed in what became a three-book series titled Conversations with Nostradamus. (This is material I haven’t yet looked at).
Needless to say, Cannon stirred her share of controversy. All the more so as, working meticulously and methodically, she found her way into the subject of the Essene community in Qumran where the dead sea scrolls were found (something Nostradamus apparently predicted) and the life of Jesus, by way of a regression subject who was a teacher among the Essenes while Jesus was a young student there.
Though her “choice” of subject matter might read as bold or brash, in reading her work it’s always apparent that Cannon approaches her work with curiosity, openness and an eye for detail. She asks questions doggedly, leaving few stones unturned, eliciting as much as she can from each subject. She puts this meticulous detail into her books, which feature context and commentary interspersed with extended transcripts from the sessions themselves. Reading them, one gains a direct, sometimes intimate view of some mysterious and (yes) controversial subjects. Cannon became known on the UFO circuit, for instance, for her work with regression subjects who described various kinds of abduction experiences and past lives on other planets as well as on the lost continent of Atlantis.
One is struck by the way in which these accounts rhyme: they never tell exactly the same story but are consonant with one another. Taken together, they illuminate a larger potential reality like individual flashlight beams playing over a giant edifice.
Perhaps needless to say, the reality revealed by these sessions defies many conventional narratives about the world. If you are willing to entertain the hypnosis material—and I think it’s compelling enough to be entertained—you may find yourself, like Alice once down the rabbit hole, “believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Though belief is not required, only open-minded consideration.
What’s at stake is a completely different picture of the universe and our place in it than anything we’ve ever been taught.
One either has to dismiss the Cannon (à la Wikipedia) as a fraud and accuse her tens of thousands of subjects of deceiving themselves and her, or else consider that something very, very interesting is going on.
I’ve chosen to side with Hamlet, he who said,
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come…”
Life is more interesting if we entertain the improbable. Which is what I advise, by the way: not that anyone swallow any supposedly revealed or channeled material whole. Rather, that they consider entertaining it if it has the ring of truth. I find Cannon’s work often does.
Her subjects clearly believe what they’re relating, and the information dovetails with and sometimes explains various anomalies across time and space. For instance, a single chapter Cannon’s The Convoluted Universe, vol 1 has brief and quite matter-of-fact sections on Stonehenge (an ancient school of astronomy/astrology), the Nazca lines (navigational markers elaborated in artistic fashion by bored pilots from a bygone civilization), Easter Island, the Bermuda triangle, crop circles and Bigfoot. (If that sounds like a laundry list of crackpottery, that’s understandable, but prepare to have your assumptions challenged. Try it, it can be thrilling.)
I’m still in the early stages of working my way through Cannon’s corpus, but the overall feeling is of breaking through into a greater narrative framework, one whose contours I’ve glimpsed in the past but that’s here laid out on the page in plain language. Cannon’s subjects help connect the dots and supply missing connective tissue that puts humanity into a totally new historical and philosophical context. If what she’s bringing for has any merit, most of what we think we know about ourselves is wrong. And if there’s even a 0.1% chance that the truth is with her, the implications are so vast that that that 0.1% demands our consideration.
In the picture she paints, we’re not alone in the universe or even on this planet, and we never have been. In that picture, (largely benevolent) beings from other parts of the cosmos have been intimately involved with human evolution and culture, and contact with them is possible even now for those who are ready for that experience. One might even say that we’re part alien ourselves.
With the pace of disclosure by former government employees currently ramping up, the existence of UFO’s is more or less an open secret by this point—see for example the work of Dr Steven Greer, former ER doctor turned UFOlogist. This man has the courage of his convictions and is worth your time, if you can look past the gimmicky aesthetics everything in this realm seems to get stuck with.
But if correct, Cannon’s material goes well beyond establishing the existence of extraterrestrials. If you follow her down the rabbit hole, you’re soon confronted with the idea that our civilization is not the first technologically-advanced one that the earth has known. In the lost history that emerges independently through dozens of her subjects, we learn that earlier civilizations such as Atlantis, which spanned millennia, were ultimately swallowed practically without a trace in cataclysmic earth changes provoked by hubris (which I think of as a nasty potion composed of pride, ego, entitlement and foolishness). This was hubris of the technological variety: man playing god and pushing things too far.
If that sounds eerily familiar, then yes, the fall-of-Atlantis material (as presented in The Convoluted Universe, vol 1) is especially chilling now, when humans are (once again) testing the limits of our powers and on the verge, perhaps, of defying the gods themselves with our re-creations and manipulations of life. The political and societal chaos we’re experiencing may be but tremors of a greater quaking to come, whether in another three years or three hundred—so perhaps revelation and apocalypse aren’t so wide of the mark. (Cannon’s work explores biblical themes in some depth, in some cases corroborating received scripture, in some cases highlighting how accounts have been politicized and distorted over time.)
Scary as these notions can be, I find the hypnosis material hopeful in a sense. Not hopeful for our political moment or the fate of this country, which looks deeply ominous. Not hopeful for the millions of species that are going extinct or the lives being crushed by the caprice of the powerful. Hopeful that, despite the carnage, there is a much larger story of life on earth and indeed in the universe. Hopeful that in the destruction of our current dysfunctional way of being, something new will be born. And hopeful that the work of brave souls like Cannon and Greer may be providing an avenue, however unlikely seeming, for hidden truths to emerge.
I’ll leave you with this.
According to the picture painted by Cannon’s subjects, a tiny percentage of Atlanteans escaped the cataclysm. These scions, bearing fragmented remnants of their civilization’s knowledge and technology, became ancestors of the most ancient and brilliant civilizations we know of today, the likes of ancient Egypt.
These were people who understood that we can die, but our souls can’t. Likewise, the truth can be quashed and defamed, but she can never be destroyed entirely. She will always find ways of re-emerging. Even if she’s been hiding in plain sight all along, like a massive sphinx and three giant pyramids.