Seeing and Hearing on Other Realms: A Theory (edited 6/11/08)

I am currently writing a piece about my experiences studying in Paris at Le Mimmodrame de Marcel Marceau and what happened to me while I was there.

There was an exercise in dramatic arts class to visualize a rose. I asked the instructor if that wouldn't be like having a hallucination, because it sounded impossible to me. He very nonchalantly said, "Yes. Exactly." I had been so shocked by his response, but you didn't question too much at Marceau's school. The school's motto was similar to Nike's ..."Just do it!"

That week-end, I had gotten a library book out from The American Center in Paris on Transcendental Meditation and experienced an altered state in my "chambre de bonne" (maid's chambers) in my little room in Pont de Neuilly. I saw things, felt things and heard things that I never had before. I was isolating myself on week-ends and honing my acting/mime skills through all the exercises I was learning. I was determined to find a way to create - to become a serious actress.

I went into a trance-like state and it felt like some negative entities were taking over my body. I heard an actress who was alive then ... Colleen Dewhurst say, "Beware the cat-o-nine-tails" I had no idea what this meant and I was frightened by the whole experience. The book had said you could tell spirits to leave and that they would because it was your body. I guess I was playing with fire. Later ... much later I found out that Colleen's words meant to be careful about "whips" being too harsh on oneself or by others.

Marceau's school was too strict. It did not give us enough for the imagination and exhausted us with all the physical training with nothing left for our spiritual selves. I suppose this can be interpreted many ways. I was impressionable and overworked.

However, I still do believe my meditative state was a kind of channeling. I know people who didn't try to invite such an experience, but experienced hallucinations visually and auditorially and this wreaked havoc in their lives, causing them to be labeled as "mentally ill".

Well...perhaps human beings tap into areas of our brain and don't have a roadmap. The sixties were a time when people used drugs to travel to different realms of the mind. Meditation alters our mental state in a positive way...reducing stress.

So...perhaps we will find out with new technology that what is called an "illness" is an opening of mind centers that cause us to hear and see what is conventionally nonexistent, yet...perhaps exists on another realm. Sound crazy? Maybe not. What did people think in 1492 when Columbus was trying to prove the world was not flat?

Enjoy the videos of Woodstock. They are amazing!!! A travel back to a time when the youth was idealistic and open...I was too young or I would have been there for sure.

Here are the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane's song... "WHITE RABBIT"
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Recall Alice
When she was just small
When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving slow
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said;"FEED YOUR HEAD