geoffoelsner.com

Hello, friends. The Monroe Institute is a most unusual
place in Faber, Virginia, where I and many others have pursued the development of out-of-body travel, remote viewing, and other paranormal capacities. In 1998, I had an important experience there that confirmed for me the actuality of remote viewing, and brought me into contact with perhaps the single best-documented and scientifically-tested remote viewer in the world.

This experience led to my contacting that remarkable gentleman again in 2011, when I initiated a project which I call the Psi-Sci Alliance, to bring climate change scientists together with extraordinarily gifted
intuitives in the service of refining present research and generating new approaches which might contribute to the mitigation of climate change.

I tell the story of all this in my book, A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, a Memoir of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature, and it’s been excerpted in an article in the Monroe Insititute’s latest newsletter, the Hub, which you can find at this link: http://monroeinstitute.org/thehub/

I’m going to begin excerpting some little bite-sized passages from my new book, A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive (available from my publisher Lorian Press, from Amazon.com, and in Fayetteville at Nightbird books). This won’t be a serialization, but a gradual collaging of various accounts of non-ordinary experiences, including some that relate to attunement and collaboration with the subtle, sentient forces of Nature. In this time of climate change, many people are now contemplating how to contribute to environmental harmony. My book offers some simple pointers for doing so in ways which can complement, though in no way replace, environmental activism. These ways, which involve blessing, prayer, and other inner Work, first came to my attention when I spent time at the Findhorn Community in Scotland in 1969-70. So I will commence my collaging here with a few passages from my book on the Findhorn Community. Here we go:

Writing this book has heightened my interest in the constructive possibilities of what David Spangler and Dorothy Maclean (an original founder of the Findhorn Community in Morayshire, Scotland) call “attunement” with Nature and its subtle sentient energies. You’ll come upon descriptions of some of my own attunements in these pages.

When she visited us and taught in Arkansas in 1980, Dorothy explained attunement as a simple process of going within to a relatively quiet, meditative space; getting in touch with a sense of what she calls “the living silence,” or the Sacred; then briefly holding a clear intention to commune with whatever one wishes. This may be as all-inclusive as the Sacred itself, or as particularized as a being of any kind. Next, one lets go of one’s intention, rather like one needs to drop a letter in the mailbox in order for the message in it to reach its destination. Finally, one rests in receptivity and notes whatever response may come by way of insights, impressions, images, words, the felt sense of a particular presence, energetic sensations, or physical effects like goose bumps.

The above process bears some similarity to the practice of Samyama described by the ancient Indian sage Patanjali in the third book of his Yoga Sutras. It also features some parallels to Eugene Gendlin’s practice of Focusing. There are many different ways to attune, but they all involve receptivity. Dorothy has written about her experiences with attunement in the collectively authored book The Findhorn Garden, and in her own books To Hear the Angels Sing, Choices of Love, and Seeds of Inspiration.

You can find a transcript of “The Doorway Process,” and another foundational exercise for attuning to the Divinity within, in Appendix One of Dorothy’s autobiography, Memoirs of an Ordinary Mystic (2010). Dorothy has found it possible to attune to any being after making a conscious connection with the Source of all beings. She writes, “Since most of us think of God as the highest spiritual reality, it might sound strange to ‘start at the top.’ You could think of it instead as beginning at the beginning: whatever has been made by God can be met through God.” I highly recommend this inspiring book about the not at all ordinary life of a blessed and beautiful soul. A voice recording of Dorothy leading “The Doorway Process” is also available, through the Lorian Association. The first part of this recording provides a fine guided introduction to her way of attunement.

Freya Secrest of the Lorian Association taught and traveled with Dorothy for ten years. In a communication to me, she wrote:

“Her whole approach is about connecting to the God within first. From there the contact with the nature world flows. Her links are through beauty, wonder, awe, and love. This is the first part of The Doorway Process and it illustrates her approach to attunement: get oneself resonating with the energies of love, wonder and beauty, all core generative energies of life, and one is able to be in tune with the life force at the heart of everything in the universe.”

Love and blessing open us. They allow us access to life force, and thus to all life forms. Have you read The Secret Life of Plants? It came out in 1973, and in it authors Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird described interactions and experiments with plants conducted by Luther Burbank and George Washington Carver, and later, people like Cleve Backster and Marcel Vogel. In a number of these pioneering experiments, plants showered with love grew faster, larger, and hardier than those in control groups which received no love (or worse, were bombarded with feelings of hate or violence). I know a few of the many people who successfully replicated these experiments after reading The Secret Life of Plants.

Actually, before I saw the book , I was already among the converted due to the time I’d spent living at the Findhorn Community. There in 1965, a garden planted on sandy soil with organic additives of little more than cow manure, grass clippings, and seaweed tested out completely satisfactorily for all nutrients, including rare trace elements, though the Morayshire County Agricultural Advisor considered this impossible at that time.

While at Findhorn, I participated in making the first batch of compost there, based on a recipe of specific organic materials that Dorothy received in an attunement. During my stays at the community in 1969 and 1970, I witnessed the amazing size and quality of vegetables that grew in the ambient field of love and cooperation which we co-created with the devas and spirits of Nature.

Joanna Harcourt-Smith interviewed me this week around the time of the publication of my new memoir, A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive.

Here’s the link, and below it, I’ve included a brief synopsis of the book’s contents:

http://www.futureprimitive.org/2012/01/geoff-oelsner-a-country-where-all-colors-are-sacred-and-alive/

Of course, even simpler would just be to google
www.futureprimitive.com and find my podcast, dated
January 28,2012 Mazeltov! G.O.

Synopsis of

A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir
of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature

by Geoffrey Oelsner, Lorian Press, 2012

Many of us have experiences that point toward a more holistic, interconnected Reality than we normally perceive. Episodes of telepathy, spontaneous healings, confirmed intuions, precognition, profound communion with the natural world, attunement to nonphysical beings, or nonlocal awareness of a distant place which proves to be accurate–all these can expand our understanding of what is possible for us and remind us of an undivided spiritual dimension of ourselves.

This memoir in prose and poetry is an account of my continuing education in such experiences, which can make us more aware of that dimension of oneness, and empower us to step forward into more conscious, collaborative relationships with the sentient energies of Nature. These sacred relationships can contribute to environmental harmony right now, and may help downscale our climatic predicament in days to come.

Lorian Press has just published my new book,

A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature

I’d like to share with you some appreciations by some leading authors and spiritual teachers from 4 distinctly different circles of people that I’m very much a part of, then a brief synopsis of its contents with you.
So, here goes:

Appreciations of

A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir
of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collboration with Nature

by Geoffrey Oelsner, Lorian Press, 2012

“”One of the challenges of our time is to discover how to
recognize in new ways the spiritual worlds that are all around us that we might have a co-creative partnership with the beings who inhabit them. Geoff Oelsner is one who has met this challenge and writt en this excellent book as a record of his discoveries. His stories take us into the heart of the world and help us open our eyes that we, too, may fi nd the country where all colors are sacred and alive. I heartily recommend it.”
— David Spangler, author of Apprenticed to Spirit and Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Guide

“No ordinary memoir, this is a chronicle of how one man’s
life and growth are propelled by his openness to and welcoming of anomalous experiences. A deceptively simple compilation, this book touches very deep places in the reader because of Oelsner’s humility, eloquence and willingness to share from his vast reservoir of spiritual experiences. Oelsner is a quiet mystic whose book will hopefully find a wide audience.“
— Eric Leskowitz, MD, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard
Medical School; Editor, Transpersonal Hypnosis

“What a marvel of a book! Geoff Oelsner is himself such
an empathic embodiment of the ‘ordinary mysteries’ he sings
praises to throughout this remarkable … I don’t know what to call it…A shamanic memoir? A poetic ‘Starry Night,’ its electric golden energies shimmering through words instead of colors? An ancient mystic physician’s bag of healing unguents, wrapped in straightforward recollections of his everyday life of serene, deep amazements? Thank you, Geoff, for this simple, sweet American Gaia Sutra.”
– Saniel Bonder, founder of Waking Down in Mutuality, cofounder of Human Sun Institute, author, Ultimaya 1.0 and Healing the Spirit/Matter Split

“Everyone has times of transcendent and sacred experience, but most of us do not fully notice them. It is noticing and honoring that allows us to live the sacred as we journey through our lives. Geoff Oelsner takes us along on his kaleidescopic travels in a way that heightens our awareness so that we may better perceive our own such experiences. A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive is a delightful vehicle of sacred wisdom of
remarkable depth.”
– Anna Cox, Founder of Compassion Works for All, which offers Dharma Friends newsletter for prisoners. Author of Just As The Breeze Blows Through Moonlight, and Dharma Friends: No One Forgotten, No One Abandoned, No One Discarded

Synopsis of

A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir
of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature

by Geoffrey Oelsner, Lorian Press, 2012

Many of us have experiences that point toward a more holistic, interconnected Reality than we normally perceive. Episodes of telepathy, spontaneous healings, receiving an intuition which is then objectively confirmed, precognition, profound communion with the natural world, attunement to nonphysical beings, or nonlocal awareness of a distant place which proves to be accurate–all these can
expand our understanding of what is possible for us and remind us of an undivided spiritual dimension of ourselves.

This memoir in prose and poetry is an account of my continuing education in such experiences, which can make us more aware of that dimension of oneness, and empower us to step forward into more conscious, collaborative relationships with the sentient energies of Nature. These sacred relationships can contribute to environmental harmony right now, and may help downscale our
climatic predicament in days to come.

Ox Cart Productions and the Music on the Mountain singer/songwriter series presents:

A Free December 6 concert by Geoff Oelsner and Harmonia.

There’s a lot to listen to and like as Geoff takes the stage with original songs, singalongs, and covers. As a special musical bonus, he’ll be accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Kelly Mulhollan and bassist John Johnston.

In addition to singing with Geoff, Leslie Oelsner and the much-loved women’s vocal group

Harmonia will perform some songs of their own.

Geoff will also share a short story or two from his new book, A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive.

The concert will be presented in Parker Hall at the Mount Sequoyah Conference and Retreat Center

Tuesday, December 6, 7-9 pm.

CHANGING HANDS

Heading past Green Giant corn mills on Hwy 13
Toward Wahpeton, he squints at the sun and says:

Nope, I don’t think they do anything these days
With hogs or cattle. No prize pheasants either.

The big barn with its ribbed roof and steel braces
Slouches now beside the silo that has a rusted cap—

One summer night I climbed halfway up and fell off,
Landing right smack on top of a manure wagon!

Long hours, days into night, combining corn and wheat
To fill dust-cloudy bins and put food on the table;

Year after year, grappling with rain-soaked bales
To bed down heifers and raise a fortress against winter;

Acres of electric fences, feeders, and grain augurs—
Uncle Kenny and I built all that up over forty years

And now it sets there empty and neglected.
Son, it’s hard sometimes to have to change hands.

Jeff Jentz, Jan 2011

WISHBONE FOR THOMAS MCGRATH

Tom, windy-eyed Thoreau boy,
Sitting alone tonight in your Minneapolis apartment.

Build a log cabin in your head.

Or else a farm! More places to discover
Beyond the power lines and dark smoky sugar beet mills
And those missile silos dreaming under the frozen prairie sod.

Better yet, invoke an army of savvy organic farmers
With their boots firmly planted in the humus of the future—
Seizing the hour at such a time
To raise aloft the green standard of Universal Peace and Justice.

Meanwhile, your resistless spirit haunts Dakota.
And the streetlamps of Fargo keep vigil in the starry night
Where your breath is blowing still. Words you sowed
Await now, like winter wheat, to leaven the souls of artists.

Poet, go on furiously scribbling your vision into the dawn,
Seeking to reclaim both worlds,

in your writing shack
out along
the Red River…

Jeff Jentz 12/15/10
CANDLE PRAYER

Our smoky errands here are like the candle
Glow of a child’s beside prayer.

Precarious angels and demons are whipped
Around the room by the chilly breeze
Coming through the fluttering curtains.

The flame, too, feels strong on its wick
Until the bright saber cools
And cannot cut what is only fear.

We give off the same wax, vapors, oily clouds
That stain the roses on the wallpaper.
Our shadows climb the walls
Or embrace the blazing log on the hearth.

The night table spins farther away into the dark
As we trace the mist on the windowpane,
Wrapped in midnight questions and doubts . . .

And the stars drifting above and beyond,
Always just out of reach in the blue,
Elude the halo of our fitful lights,
Here sending a signal so ardently upward.

“Conserve on all except light,” He said.

Only tilt the candle, Abdu’l-Baha, closer.
Closer, Abdu’l-Baha, closer!
Jeff Jentz

Note: Originally I wrote this poem in fall 1973 after I discovered the Baha’i Faith at a fireside through the words and teachings of Abdu’l-Baha, the son of the Prophet-Founder.

CHANGING HANDS

Heading past Green Giant corn mills on Hwy 13
Toward Wahpeton, he squints at the sun and says:

Nope, I don’t think they do anything these days
With hogs or cattle. No prize pheasants either.

The big barn with its ribbed roof and steel braces
Slouches now beside the silo that has a rusted cap—

One summer night I climbed halfway up and fell off,
Landing right smack on top of a manure wagon!

Long hours, days into night, combining corn and wheat
To fill dust-cloudy bins and put food on the table;

Year after year, grappling with rain-soaked bales
To bed down heifers and raise a fortress against winter;

Acres of electric fences, feeders, and grain augurs—
Uncle Kenny and I built all that up over forty years

And now it sets there empty and neglected.
Son, it’s hard sometimes to have to change hands.

Jeff Jentz, Jan 2011

WISHBONE FOR THOMAS MCGRATH

Tom, windy-eyed Thoreau boy,
Sitting alone tonight in your Minneapolis apartment.

Build a log cabin in your head.

Or else a farm! More places to discover
Beyond the power lines and dark smoky sugar beet mills
And those missile silos dreaming under the frozen prairie sod.

Better yet, invoke an army of savvy organic farmers
With their boots firmly planted in the humus of the future—
Seizing the hour at such a time
To raise aloft the green standard of Universal Peace and Justice.

Meanwhile, your resistless spirit haunts Dakota.
And the streetlamps of Fargo keep vigil in the starry night
Where your breath is blowing still. Words you sowed
Await now, like winter wheat, to leaven the souls of artists.

Poet, go on furiously scribbling your vision into the dawn,
Seeking to reclaim both worlds,

in your writing shack
out along
the Red River…

Jeff Jentz 12/15/10
CANDLE PRAYER

Our smoky errands here are like the candle
Glow of a child’s beside prayer.

Precarious angels and demons are whipped
Around the room by the chilly breeze
Coming through the fluttering curtains.

The flame, too, feels strong on its wick
Until the bright saber cools
And cannot cut what is only fear.

We give off the same wax, vapors, oily clouds
That stain the roses on the wallpaper.
Our shadows climb the walls
Or embrace the blazing log on the hearth.

The night table spins farther away into the dark
As we trace the mist on the windowpane,
Wrapped in midnight questions and doubts . . .

And the stars drifting above and beyond,
Always just out of reach in the blue,
Elude the halo of our fitful lights,
Here sending a signal so ardently upward.

“Conserve on all except light,” He said.

Only tilt the candle, Abdu’l-Baha, closer.
Closer, Abdu’l-Baha, closer!
Jeff Jentz

Note: Originally I wrote this poem in fall 1973 after I discovered the Baha’i Faith at a fireside through the words and teachings of Abdu’l-Baha, the son of the Prophet-Founder.

Ox Cart productions and the Music on the Mountain monthly singer/songwriter series rolls into December with a concert by Geoff Oelsner and Friends

in Parker Hall at the Mount Sequoyah Conference and Retreat Center, on Tuesday, December 6, 7-9 pm.

This event is free of charge. Parking’s also free.

There’s a lot to listen to & like as Geoff takes the stage with original songs, singalongs, & covers. He’ll also perform a few poems and it is possible that he’ll tell a story or two from his new book, What is Possible.

Geoff will be accompanied by LESLIE BERMAN OELSNER
AND the women of HARMONIA (who will also treat us to some tunes of their own)

Along with special guest, that multi-instrumental musical maestro, KELLY MULHOLLAN

Ox Cart productions and the Music on the Mountain monthly singer/songwriter series rolls into December with a concert by Geoff Oelsner and Friends

in Parker Hall at the Mount Sequoyah Conference and Retreat Center, on Tuesday, December 6, 7-9 pm.

This event is free of charge. Parking’s also free.

There’s a lot to listen to & like as Geoff takes the stage with original songs, singalongs, & covers. He’ll also perform a few poems and it is possible that he’ll tell a story or two from his new book, What is Possible.

Geoff will be accompanied by LESLIE BERMAN OELSNER
AND the women of HARMONIA (who will also treat us to some tunes of their own)

Along with special guest, that multi-instrumental musical maestro, KELLY MULHOLLAN

Hi friends. I’ve been reading a wonderful recent book by Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega described it as being “about the mythic roots of folk music originating in the UK.” Anyway, reading in Young’s book about well-known and loved artists like the Incredible String Band, and about musicians I hadn’t heard of before like Vashti Bunyan, has gotten me remembering some of my own visionary moments while living and traveling in the UK. Here’s one such memory:
1975. I fall into a heavy, buzzy afternoon slumber in the spiritually-charged realm of Glastonbury, England, after Leslie and I visit the Chalice Well, the lofty Tor, and the ancient abbey (itself purportedly re-discovered and excavated in part thanks to information mediumistically provided by a long-deceased monk attendant upon the place). I find myself witness to a lucid dream-vision of reverent, venerable hands pausing and passing over rectangular shapes draped by white linens fringed with intricate lacework. This vision is completely enigmatic to me, but it carries the felt sense of some archaic, repetitive, numinous activity. Something sacred has been inscribed on silence in this place.

Less than a month later, we land on the holy Isle of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. While Leslie rests at our bed and breakfast there, I attend a Communion at the Iona Abbey.
I’m curious to witness what is described in a brochure as an old-fashioned, historically authentic traditional Communion.
Expecting a tray of thin eucharistic wafers to be brought in, I am surprised to see rectangular loaves of fresh-baked bread draped by white linens with fine lace fringe borne in and placed upon the altar. The priest’s hands lift the lacey linens, and my puzzling Glastonbury vision makes intense sense as we break the body of the fragrant loaf, and taste.

This kind of visionary window seems to open on the collective soul-life of the country as we continue along our way. I try to write about what I see, albeit uncertain of the degree to which true vision is alloyed by the workings of my lively imagination:

There’s More “When” Here

They lovingly maintain their thatched and oak-beamed cottages, where the dense energy of generations amasses.

The fields here are often very seen. In certain valleys even shadows seem more deeply sentient, somehow wakened under the gaze of ages of eyes from those of Pict to Celt to
centurion to Saxon to those of the village lout or poet.

The country fairly froths with contemplation and plumes of Being that rise from churchyards with their giant yews and gray, lichened graves.

Astral temples stand in many groves and glens, tall bastions of Druidic attention and intention reinforced by later prayers and workings of the rural faithful and their elemental and angelic
co-workers.

Telluric currents of elven, gnomish, and faerie consciousness run under the earth, gathering in reservoirs or vortices in subterranean caves; emerging on moors, near barrows and
megalithic stones.

Communion with the countryside looms up like an aesthetic cumulous from the otherwise rather flat, repressed English sensibility, arising tumescent in the form of rowdy festivals and
rustic fairs, gnarly balladry, wild convoluted poems and plays and dances, and the sublime viney curvilinear meanderings of Celtic art and instrumental music.

The tangled profusion of Celtic design: lines fold back on themselves in interknit geometries wherein nest birds and bears and men. Our eyes exhaust themselves, after trying to
attend to these unwinding lines. Then the Mind’s Eye opens.

The landscape’s stacked and stratified with layers of history
and ancient heartfelt awareness striates the “inscape” with enduring ley lines that link sacred sites. There’s more “when” here.