Preface to The Lavender Files

Into the Strange

Welcome to the Lavender Files, a fruit of my most recent dive into the occult (including hypnosis, past life regression and stranger stuff still). I’ve decided to share this material here in the Departures section, starting with the Preface below.

If you’re new to Seeds from the World Tree, you can find more typical fare in the main (eponymous) section, writing on acupuncture and herbalism over in Notes from the Bench, and on astrology and divination in Provoking Omens.

Or just, you know, jump in the deep end right here.

-dJEd

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The Lavender Files (Preface)

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

-Hunter S Thompson

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a driving hunger to explore the twin mysteries of the universe’s origins and those of consciousness. As a kid growing up in Manhattan, I spent many an afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, where I haunted the burnished, Victorian-era halls of the old Hayden planetarium and the carpeted underworld of the Hall of Gems and Minerals with its cases of glowing radioactive elements, enormous meteorites and giant geodes. At home, I ate off a plastic place mat depicting the planets of the solar system. What kept me up at night wasn’t vampires or zombies, but the terror and fascination of black holes.

My hunger to plumb the depths led me to study physics and mathematics in college, then religious studies; it later propelled me on a journey across countries and down rabbit holes I never knew existed. Meditative techniques, visionary medicines and spiritual practices conspired to break open my head and leave my former rationalist-materialist self a-swim in some of what Hamlet was talking about when he said to Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I won’t trace here all the windings of my long, strange trip from math and science student to acupuncturist, astrologer, ritualist and (now, apparently) channel. For these purposes, let’s just say that along the way I’ve become convinced that there’s much more to the human story—and the story of life in the universe—than is generally acknowledged. And that what we don’t know about ourselves and the universe dwarfs what we do.

My most recent dive into the world of occult knowledge was catalyzed in late 2024 by reading Dr. Robert Schoch’s Voices from the Rock. In the book, Schoch, a geologist with the courage it takes to question orthodoxy, makes a compelling case that the great Sphinx is several millennia older than has been accepted by mainstream Egyptologists. More recently, Schoch has updated his estimates to put the origins of the Sphinx at circa 7,000 BCE. Such a finding means that the received narrative about the rise of civilization[1] is simply inadequate. The implications are profound.

How is that, at a time when humans were ‘supposed’ to have been primitive hunter-gatherers grouped into small tribal bands, someone created art and architecture on a scale unknown until very recently? How is it, meanwhile, that halfway around the world at Machu Picchu and other South American sites, the very oldest layers of construction involve enormous stone blocks cut and fitted with a precision that rivals the most high-tech modern techniques? Meanwhile, the so-called Nazca lines are an example of ancient rock art on a scale that makes sense only when viewed from thousands of feet up.

These are not the only ancient sites that defy the conventional narrative of a linear march of progress from Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age and so on. Rather than a march of progress, these sites suggest a waning of human knowledge, ability and culture on the heels of a much earlier flowering. It seems almost self-evident that a society as sophisticated as that of ancient Egypt didn’t arise from a cultureless vacuum. That they were heirs to something grander than themselves. Of that something we have little physical record—though an absence of evidence does not make for evidence of absence. What we do have, however, are an abundance of tantalizing clues, and a psychic record written in the depths of the subconscious.

If this all sounds impossibly far-fetched, skepticism is healthy. Belief is not required. All that’s needed is a mind open enough to entertain possibilities. If there’s even a 0.1% chance that there’s truth to some of these ideas, isn’t that worth considering? A growing number of people think so, and old stigmas are losing their sting in our fast-changing world. How not, in an era when fantasy is struggling to keep up with technology, and the impossible is becoming commonplace?

For me, personally, information about hidden aspects of pre-history came trickling alongside information about other beings, call them inter-dimensional, extraterrestrial, sky people, or egbe[2]. I sensed that these mysteries—to me, life-giving water seeping through a dam—shared a common source somewhere upstream. That dam cracked and gave way when I discovered the work of Dolores Cannon.

Cannon was a mid 20^th century Midwestern woman who became an unlikely pioneer in the field of past-life regression. Over the course of thousands of meticulously thorough hypnosis sessions (or what she eventually came to call Quantum Healing Hypnotherapy), she regressed subjects to past lives. Many of these lives took apparently place on Earth during various historical periods. Some subjects regressed to lives in Atlantis and on other planets altogether. Over time, voluminous material on alien cultures and civilizations emerged through her work, as she followed the curious thread of inquiry.

Cannon’s subjects’ experiences and reports are widely varied; sifting through them one gains a necessarily partial yet coherent picture of a number of esoteric subjects such as Atlantean civilization, as well as insight into the origins of life on this planet.

Cannon’s work is challenging in that, as a reader, you are invited to entertain what can sound like madness. Many reject it outright as beyond the pale. There is certainly no definitive proof available for many of the claims of Cannon’s hypnosis subjects, though there are striking corroborations between subjects who never spoke with one another. It’s impossible to prove to everyone’s satisfaction that Cannon wasn’t a fraud or con artist, though such an accusation flies in the face of her character, which was ethical, earnest and meticulous to a fault. Far from being an eccentric or crackpot, Cannon was in most respects an ordinary person of her time and place, a fact which only makes her body of work more remarkable.

I don’t take Cannon’s hypnosis material as gospel. But I do choose to entertain it. I read her session transcripts with an ear for what is resonant, what fits with my own inchoate intuition and emergent knowing. My sense is that there are matters so deeply buried— because ancient, or suppressed, or both—that the truth of them can only make itself known through dreams, vague impressions, or methods like Cannon’s QHHT (Quantum Healing Hypnotherapy).

If you were a long-hidden truth, wouldn’t you use every available method for making yourself known, provided the time was ripe? It seems that it is.

On 5 February, 2025, I attended a QHHT session, my first, with a practitioner named Nora Karr in Chapel Hill. After guiding me into a light hypnotic trance state, she had me regress to a past life. In this guided meditative journey, I found myself visiting scenes from a life in medieval Italy, a region I was able to identify as Abruzzo. I was a princess, a girl who wanted to roam the hills and mountains, but who was ordered to stay close to the castle; she grew into a young woman who wanted to study with the resident astrologer-magus but who was unable to do because of her gender; a woman who lost her royal father to the plague, and who later forsook the comforts of her station after her corruptible brother assumed the throne; and finally a spinster living out her days humbly in a market town, finally dying quietly in her second-story room.

This past life material tied together several seemingly unrelated threads in my life: my connection with that part of Italy, my interest in astrology, my wanderlust, and my draw to medicine and healing work. (A skeptic would presume rather that I invented a past life out of fragments of my current one – but from the inside, I can say that’s not how it worked; each piece of the past life was something I had to discover by bumping into it, as it were.)

However, the more consequential part of the session proved to be the second half.

After the regression, Nora asked for permission to speak with my higher self, permission which from the trance state I duly granted. She then proceeded to go through a set of some 16 or 18 questions that I had written down in advance of the session. Although I didn’t feel greatly altered or as if another distinct entity was present, I found that I had an answer to each of these questions, which had felt burning enough to write down just days or hours before.

One question I had jotted down: “Help me to understand my soul’s trajectory across lifetimes--what agreement or mission brought me to Earth?”

The response was that I was here in part to gather information for other beings. Not as a spy, more like a reporter or anthropologist on a mission to this planet. I was told that these beings could see through my eyes, experiencing what I experience. As an emissary from this collective—about whom I was now growing intensely curious—I was told I was also here to serve in a helping or healing capacity. This seemed evident enough, given my career in acupuncture and herbal medicine, yet it seemed there was another facet of healing work that hadn’t yet come into focus, something to do with ancient/sacred sites.

Given that I had previously sensed a connection with extraterrestrial or interdimensional beings, the affirmation of their existence was not surprising. Anticipating something like this, another of the questions I’d prepared was about how to deepen my connection with such beings.

I was told to work with a particular type of crystal that I had just “happened” purchase the day before, on my birthday, while visiting a rock shop (a piece of violet-tinged quartz from S. Africa of a type sold as “spirit quartz”). It was suggested that these beings had guided me to this mineral along with a chunk of a similarly purple material called grape agate, which I had brought with me to the hypnosis session.

As for what practices I could do to enhance the connection with these as-yet-mysterious beings, I found myself answering something entirely unexpected: that I should engage in automatic writing. This was something new to me, and I had no idea if it would work. The key, apparently, was to get off the laptop (where I usually compose) and write by hand.

A week later, in the early hours of 14 February, I sat down at my desk with my violet crystals (and the violet desk lamp that also just happened to come my way) and put pen to paper. What follows is the result of that morning’s work and the work of subsequent daily sessions over the course of about two weeks.

I’ve opted to present the text with minimal editing, beyond my decision to interweave two distinct strands of the transmission. One strand is the practical, instructive material the beings wished to share regarding emotional literacy, the use of prayer, and so on. The other strand is a wide-ranging interview I conducted with the that touches on all manner of subject. In each writing session I would begin by receiving a page or two of the practical material and would then switch to questions, and it seemed fitting to let these quite different threads intertwine on the page, much as they did during the sessions.

After the main transmission ceased, I circled back on a couple of occasions to ask more questions to fill in some gaps. That process was complete by early March, 2025.

The weirdness of what you’re about to read is unabashed. Weirdness—the right kind—is part of what the world needs. See you on the other side.

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[1] Or alleged civilization. Cf. Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

[2] Egbe is a Yoruba term for “heavenly mates” or the spirit team that’s understood to accompany each of us on our earthly passage: those non-earthly beings with whom we have an affinity.