The seed of this metaphor germinated back in the days when a daze was part of my day. Candles were the preferred lighting in the third-floor apartment at the Clarinda I shared with two fellow Creighton students. And those candles were as much entertainment as they were lighting when enjoying a bowl of Moroccan blonde hash or some tarry Nepalese. We would gaze into those candles like people today stare at their smartphones. Those days are long past, along with the smoking material. But the memory of playing with fire stayed with me. Follow along.
I used to blow out a candle and immediately place a lighted match in the column of smoke rising from the wick. The candle was dead for all intents and purposes but if the lighted match connected with the column of smoke before it dissipated too much, even inches above the wick, the flame would leap down the column and reignite the candle, bringing it back to life. In my mesmerized state, I would repeat the phenomena over and over, seeing just how far up the column of smoke from the wick I could place the match and still “reanimate” the candle. If I waited just a tad too long, if the smoke particles dispersed too far into the atmosphere, they were irretrievably lost and the candle would not leap back to life. The candle was not only merely dead, really most sincerely dead. Without a much more direct application of new energy, it would stay dead. See the video to play along. https://youtu.be/YPcSjQaryik
Picking up the torch. Many years later, long after setting aside the hookah and the doobies, the image of fire-play stayed with me. Meeting and learning from Manly P. Hall, reading Madame Blavatsky, CW Leadbeater and other Theosophical giants prepared me for an enhanced realization of what that candle-play mimicked. I found myself in my Burbank house playing with fire again. I had just read a chapter in Leadbeater about orgone, a concept of life-force that is similar to prana or élan vital and other concepts representing a mass-less energy force that can coalesce to form physical manifestations. Orgone was described as sort of “energy globules” that, when coordinated closely would impart a sense of “life” to a being.
So one sunny morning, with a candle on the passthrough, I played the match/smoke game. And the thought occurred, “What if that metaphor is what happens when someone has a ‘near death’ experience or even dies? What if some consciousness reapplies the life force to the dispersing energy molecules before they get too far apart? Would the wick (person) reanimate? Not all the little energy bubbles, molecules return to use by the person. Some are lost to the noosphere and other ones take their place. But most of them re-coalesce and the person comes “back to life” though usually feeling “different,” somehow changed, because of those new globules. That accounts for a near death experience.
Extrapolating from there, if no life force igniter (match) is applied or it is applied too late, there is no return. The energy globules, bubbles, continue to disperse. They aren’t held together by anything but slowly lose entropy and remain at least close to each other as they mix in with other energy globules from other “people.” Are ya with me so far?
Hey, and by the way, this concept travels. It’s good with the life of beings, relationships or projects.
Of BBs and Boxcars We’ve been using a metaphor of a candlewick and its flame as being like a human. If the flame burns, the human is alive. If the flame’s out the smoke molecules (orgone energy globules) begin to dissipate and if re-energized quickly enough, the “human” returns to animation.
At this point, it’s convenient to switch elements in the metaphor because from here out we’re going to call this the “Hundred BB Theory.” C’mon, you can handle it. So now, instead of thinking of a candle wick as a human being, think of a human being made up of 100 metal BBs, like you have in a kid’s Daisy BB gun. Make them magnetic, in the shape of a human like the guy on google maps and imagine that a “life force magnet” is attached at the head, holding our little human together as a being. And… our BB-man is sort of floating near the top of a train boxcar traveling through the railroad line of “time.”
Now, if that life force magnet is somehow removed from the BBs, it’s the same as the flame of the candle being removed from the wick. If the magnetic life force drops down and is reapplied in time, the BBs can reassemble, maybe missing a few but gaining some strangers out of the Universal supply, and you have your near-death scenario. But what if that magnetic force doesn’t reappear? Or reappears too late? Well, the BBs tumble down to the bottom of the boxcar to await the reapplication of that magical magnetic force known as “life.” The train travels on through the years. (Diazepam) The BBs get more and more jumbled, some from the 1800s, the 1900s or the 1200 B.C. years.
We’ll get to completion in the next episode. Stay tuned.
Be well.
Heartland Healing is a metaphysically based polemic describing alternatives to conventional methods of healing the body, mind and planet. It is provided as information and entertainment, certainly not medical advice. Important to remember and pass on to others: for a weekly dose of Heartland Healing, visit HeartlandHealing.com. and like us on Facebook.