I've been hearing a lot about "bloodlines" lately. I'm not a holy grail afficianado. Really, what it is and what it means just hasn't figured all that prominently in my life. I don't feel terribly let down by this, but my ignorance on the entire subject has generated some questions.

1) What the hell is the "grail" bloodline? I'm under the impression it is the fancy-esque name given to Jesus' descendants. Nothing in the Bible said Jesus WASN'T married or got his sacred bone on, so I could buy it. If you believe in the whole "supernatural entities are messin' wit our GENES zOMG" line of thought then I guess being descended from the Jesus would mean you have extra-awesome xeno-genes or something. But other than that it kind of conjures vaguely disturbing ideas involving a blood-filled cup and a very confused young lady. I don't know about you, but having a cup in my ancestry wouldn't make me feel very rad.

2) Why does Enki get a bloodline and why does it show up everywhere except Iran? Like most ancient gods Enki (later Ea) got his godly bone on on occasion, fathered Marduk, and had many adventures. I've read in passing that he was an actual person (a 'mans' in the vernacular) and that his family continues on in any number of places, such as Ireland, Brazil, and, possibly, Rapa Nui. I get the impression that someplace like Iran or Iraq would be too obvious for an ancient Sumerian deity's descendants to hang out. Furthermore, why doesn't his bloodline get a fancy cup-related name like "chalice", "quaff-glass" or "sippy-cup"?

3) How come noone seems to care too much about the other religious icons? Noone cares too much about, say, an Elegua bloodline or a Coyote bloodline. Surely these figures are every bit as compelling as Jesus or Enki. Try to find a book full of enigmatic masonic symbolism on an Odin bloodline. Probably won't find it. I don't get it. Surely these figures, especially the demi-human characters from mythology, have equally valid bloodlines and complex, conspiracy-filled histories. Surely the ENTIRE FRICKIN' PLANET has formed a VAST WEB OF LIES just to surpress these ancient, gifted families.

Sorry. I realize I'm getting a bit wound. It's just that MY family has all of these legends and secrets that state we are descended from Obnocsius Maximus, the Romanized version of the ancient Etruscan god of Bastardry, and a rather abrasive washerwoman. Rumor states that he seduced her somehow by turning into a flock of seagulls or a golden shower or a five-legged bull or something.I'm just bitter 'cause no one spends any time thinking about US.

No questions today. No curiosity. Just deciding to vent a few things now that I'm on my way out of a rather dark period in my life.

Seeking the truth is a tricky thing. I think that for most folks, myself included, we start out in our search by deciding what we think the truth should be and trying to find evidence to support our world view. It adapts, yes, and evolves, but you know that you've really just started your journey in earnest when you have to throw that preconception entirely out the window.

It's painful.

The religious systems of many cultures talk of a period of extreme agony before one can be initiated into the higher mysteries. Their bodies are broken, either literally or symbolically, by the spirits. Even in my old minister days I often spoke of the necessity of being "broken before Christ" in order to fully understand His will. Even the Buddhists say that "suffering opens the flower of consciousness." I always wondered why.

Theologically, I knew the answer: By divorcing ourselves from our own little preconceived notion of what constitutes reality we allow ourselves to be open to those forces that exist and operate outside of it's rules. We put our faith and trust in a power outside of ourselves and that allows us to grow in ways we couldn't otherwise. Or so I was told. I never really understood.

Now, though, I think I understand. It is difficult to put into words, but I will try.

There exists within myself, if no one else, a dichotomy. On one hand I wish very much to be wise to be knowledgeable and to be helpful. On the other hand I want lots of time to devote to useless, useless, body-driven crap. This had led me to be try and be knowledgeable and wise and helpful without putting any effort into it because then the unimportant things in my life won't get enough time. That's pretty damn shallow, but I didn't see that until a month or so ago.

Recently I've been forced to work several jobs at once in order to take care of my lovely wife and her crazy mother. It's hard. It's unpleasant and it takes away from my Vec time. I get irritable because I NEED to play video games. I NEED to sit around doing nothing for hours at a time. I need I need I need I want want want want want...nothing. Nothing of value. Just more time to play and keep on playing and ignoring the hard truths around me and inside me.

I look at my thought processes and I realize that I'm an addict. That I'm addicted to the flesh. That I'm addicted to the here and now. I'm addicted to pleasure. I am, in short, addicted to Vecordae.

I suffer not because of hard work. I suffer because my body is rebelling against something that means my focus will not be tied so strongly to it. So it fights. It shakes. It does everything it can to draw my attention away, to build up my panic and my stress so that I can't pay attention to anything else. This is NOT unique to me. Everyone who has to break an addiction suffers this sort of thing. And once they've suffered through it and mastered the piece of them that compels them down dark and foolish paths, then they become more aware. Wiser.

They become, in a way, initiated. Freed from the constant focus on themselves they can really start paying attention to other things that are important, be it the spirits, their family, their trade, their job, anything. They can grow and progress, and it's because now they are much more willing to put the real effort required into getting not what they want, but what they need.

And now I know what I want. I want to help. I want to be wise. I want to show people how to get what they need. So I'm going to enroll myself in a CNA program, get my license and start practicing. In a year or two I'll bump up to my RN status and, eventually become a male nurse. In the mean time I'll seek out the local pow-wow doctors and other crazy pagany folklore-esque people in my area and learn what I can from them. I'll melt away into obscurity, I guess, but I'll have done some real good for folks along the way and that, I think, is worth all the suffering in the world.

Argh. Having multiple jobs can eat up a lot of time, but I've still managed to get some research in. This time my interest has spread to cultural mythologies. They're pretty diverse, but they all seem to have quite a few things in common.

1) We learned from the gods.

I'm sure the Nephalim aren't news to anyone. The "Watchers" of the book of Enoch took human brides, taught mankind everything they new and produced monstrous half-breed children. Neat, but not interesting in an of itself. Well, the Babylonians believed that strange gods clad in giant herrings ascended from the deeps and, again, taught mankind a great deal. Go further west and read similar stories from the Greeks, the Celts, the Inca, the Souix...it really doesn't matter which culture it is, they generally attribute the main body of their people's basic knowledge to the gods. That's really interesting to me. The knowledge of how certain plants work, the working of metal. All of it. It's hard to find anywhere in the mythologies where it says "Then, lo, Stanly, the mud-farmer's son, didst bang two rocks together in his boredome, and sparks and holy fire and terror didst leap from them. 'it were an accident, forsooth, but yea was that rad.'" or anything like that. Either we as a race have elevated our great teachers to the status of gods or "gods" really were our greatest teachers. Either option is particularly intriguing because of what it says about us as a race.

2) The gods/spirits/whatever sure like intercourse

Maybe it's because we created them in our image. Maybe it's because they're just randy dudes, but the gods really seem to like getting their groove on with humans. In some cultures the spirits made love to humans and their offspring because wise men and men of great power or horrible monsters of great destructive capablity. Again, the whole story about the Nephelim comes to mind. So does the story of the minotaur. And Heracles. The list is pretty extensive. The faries did it. Hell, even aliens do it. What possible reason is there for all of that? I mean, most humans were pretty grungy and stinky back in the day. Still, we find the mantle of greatness being the direct result of the activities of the gods.

Well, not much more to say about it at the moment. I do have jobs to attend to. Besides, there are others out there with bigger reputations and lots more free time than myself pondering this stuff and they write of it with more eloquence than I can manage.

Still, one has to wonder at it. What is it about us that drives us to attribute our greatest accomplishments, mightiest heroes, and greatest villains, as people touched by the gods. Why give the credit to other agencies or entities? What does that say about us?

I live in the boonies, so it's hard for me to find local people who aren't interesting in drinking or hunting. The internet tends to be so full of conflicting ideas that it's hard to extract something useful from it at times. So, I turn to the readers of this site to help provide some insight for me.

So, I was hanging out with some friends of mine when the world started to go kind of fuzzy. The spaces between objects started to fill up with vague shapes. Then, I noticed an arcing line over a friend of mine's head. A closer look revealed that it was the back of some sort of canid creature. I could see it clearly enough, which surprised me. It's front paws were on either side of his head and its chest was resting on the top of his head. It's back followed the line of his head and it's lower torso disappeared into the middle of his back. It sat there for a while, looking around at the people in the restaurant.

That was a little unnerving.

I took a look at another friend and she had some sort of tall, gnarley, knobbley, thin old woman-creature coming up from between her shoulder blades. It kind of reminded me of a willow tree, but it had a vaguely smiling face and some sort of wing-like structure on its back. Maybe they were big leaves or plumes of dried up feathers. It looked down on her head and patted her possessively. It did not seem particularly angelic and felt kind of malevolent.

Also, a bit unnerving.

On the way home, I could still see the wolf-like critter on my male friend's head. It seemed to pause and turn around to look at me. It started baring its fangs and growling. When that didn't seem to intimidate me it turned back around and ignored me.

Huh.

So, folks, what does that all mean? I am used to seeing vague shapes around folks, but I usually ignore them. It's not often that I see anything that clearly. I'd like to note that the wolf-critter and the lady-critter were solid, but transparent. There was no color, but there were edges and lines and definition to their shapes. Creepy stuff.

Any ideas would be fine up to and including "OH YOU IS A CRAZY VEKORDAYS". I'm not seeking attention, but I am kind of concerned. Oh, and, just to clarify, this wasn't chemically induced. I'm not on any prescriptions other than some antibiotics at the moment. Nor do I drink much or often and I don't do any kind of recreational drug. Hope that helps.

Remove Viewing. Channeling. ESP. All of these phenomenon, if they are to be accepted as possible, require a kind of mental disassociation I find hard to understand. What I mean is that the person engaging in these sorts of activities has to do one of two incredible things.

His first option is accepting as fundamentally existent things which consensus reality tells us cannot possibly be real. He sees people that others cannot see. He hears things that others cannot hear. He feels a tightness in his chest in response to a place he's never been that, nevertheless, seems eerily familiar. It seems that some part of his brain has taken information from somewhere else, be it internal or external, and inserted it onto the waking world in such a way that it is meaningful if not necessarily coherent.

He is disassociating himself from the concept of reality that he has grown up with in favor of evidence that only he can observe. He has decided that his own perception of his environment is more reliable and accurate than the combined perceptions of everyone else around him despite the obvious, glaring discrepancies. This is not something human beings generally do these days. As soon as we find out that our personal realities do not mesh with the consensus, we start to fear for our sanity and filter out any observations that might deviate too far from what we are told is real. That's what we are taught to do, after all.

The other option is to ignore the constant stream of information piping in from his body and, instead, concentrate on a vague, fuzzy stream of information coming from somewhere else. For example: every sense in his body is telling him that he is laying in bed, but those senses are so far in the background that he hardly notices. No, he knows for a fact that he is flying through the air or skimming through realities outside, or possibly within, our own. It's so impossible, yet so vivid that he cannot help but accept it as reality.

Again, that seems to walk the fence between a healthy, functioning mind, and one riddled with madness. It fights against everything we think we know about how the universe works yet it nevertheless happens. I sometimes find myself both amazed and frightened by these concepts, but I know from personal experience that these things happen. What a strange universe we inhabit.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?

It's safe to assume that the people who frequent the message boards here hold some fairly non-mainstream opinions and beliefs. Why we possess them isn't important for the purposes of this thread. We've all reached our conclusions based on available evidence filtered through whatever worldview we hold. What I am interested in at the moment is how we handle the flipside of belief; that thing we call skepticism.

We all possess it. If we didn't, the mainstream views would suffice for us. Skepticism, like belief, is fueled by our overal worldview and usually serves as sort of a filter to protect it. We humans don't like having our worldviews messed with, so we tend to be fairly dogmatic in how we express both belief and skepticism once we've settled on a suitable paradigm. Even the most open-minded of us can fall into that behavior.

So, what I'd like to know is how you all out there use your skepticism. Do you tend to be far more skeptical of things that oppose your particular beliefs? Or of things that would seem to support it? Do you apply it equally? Do you ever really think about it? If you do, then why do you think it's applied the way it is?

This isn't a big deal, it's just to satisfy my own curiosity on human nature.

There have been a few articles here about the freaky nature of the moon. While interesting, they each mentioned a transcript of some radio communications between Apollo astronauts and Houston about aliens watching our intrepid explorers. I thought that that radio communication would be interesting to hear, so I looked for it for a while, but lacked the time to investigate it fully.

Well, yesterday, I purchased a copy of Unexplained! by Jerome Clark, a sort of compendium of various unexplained and anomalous phenomenon and the evidence for and against it's existance. While I've not finished the book yet (it's pretty big) one of the first articles in it addressed that same radio correspondance. I won't copy it in full, but I'll list the salient points.

Info derived from the Apollo Aliens article:
* Story first appeared in the supermarket Tabloid National Bulletin in 1969.
* Stuart Nixon of the National Investigations Committe on Ariel Phenomenon investigated it four years later (1973) and was unable to find any evidence to back it up.
* The transcript apparantly contains several basic factual and terminological errors amongst other things
* The National Bulletin was unable to back up it's story or even produce "Sam Pepper" the guy that supposedly wrote the story.
* The story has been recycled and used in at least two other books: Maurice Chatelain's Our Ancestors Came From Outer Space (1978) and The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore.
* Neil Armstrong apparantly sued Berlitz and Moore for reporting a false story about him.

So, there ya go. The author of the article seems convinced that the whole tale was initially concocted by a supermarket tabloid. If any of you feel like investigating the issue further it'll be easier to track down and verify the above details than anything within the supposed Apollo 11 recordings.

Keep in mind that I'm not debunking anything. Just because the story may be apocryphal doesn't mean there aren't aliens on the moon or that NASA's not hiding anything. I'm fairly open minded, but the price of that is accepting that some of the interesting things I hear may be mistakes, misrepresentations, or outright lies INCLUDING things that seem to validate my current worldview. It behooves all of us to investigate things for ourselves as much as we are able to.

I have a small problem. I honestly have noone around here to discuss some of my theories on how the universe works with. The locals get confused and angry if you discuss anything other than drinking, hunting, or sex. Since I really want to start expanding on my own limited ideas, I've decided to post some of my thoughts here on the TDG forums in hopes that some of you have interesting things to add.

I should mention that this is only my theory. It's not a belief, and it's certainly subject to modification. To attack my little theory is not the same as attacking me and my thoughts and ideas are certainly not intended to be an attack on anyone else's beliefs. This is simply my way of making sense out of this strange, infinitely complex and surprising world we live in. I hope you'll enjoy it.

It was a passage from C.S. Lewis' book The Problem of Pain that got me started down this path. To paraphrase, he says that the material world that most of think of constituting the whole of reality, is simpley a medium of communication that our spirits can use to intereact in a meaningful way. That engendered the idea of a sort of layered reality that we human beings in habit.

I pondered on that for a while, being the good little pastor-in-training that I was, and figured that, if that was the case, it would explain things like telepathy and telekensis and other weird "psychic" abilities. To me, it seemed, that our souls, the bit of us that exists OUTSIDE the meatscape could effect it or ignore it entirely in order to communicate with others. It's rare, it's "cheating the system", but it was possible.

Fast forward a few years. My faith in the church destroyed by finding out just what kinds of people the pastors in my area were, I cast aside my Christianity and started reading a lot of things I would never have bothered with because they would have threatened my oh-so-precious belief system. A big part of that was quantum theory, ancient history, and evolutionary theory.

Quantum physics was interesting. My introduction to it was, ironically, via a website called exit mundi, a collection of apocalyptic scenarios. It seemed that the material world, according to an increasing number of TRAINED SCIENCE-DUDES was merely the shadow of a greater, multi-dimensional super-reality. That concept struck a chord, so I started reading more about that. A lot of scientists warned that the whole multi-dimensional thing shouldn't be interepreted like it was in, say, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in which every additional dimension was a ninja-packed post apocalyptic nightmare full of robots and disembodied brains with speach impediments. Instead, it was just extra layers on what we think of as reality. Different vibrational axis for quantum particles, maybe. There was some dissent, but the underlying idea was pretty clear: We're only seeing 1/3-to-1/10 of what is out there and the rest was beyond human description.

Well, during this period a series of increasingly disturbing and bizzare events were occuring in my life. Things would get hurled at me in empty rooms. Weird colors outlined those I could see and shadowy, flickering figures hinted that there were others around I couldn't see. I became plagued with a form of sleep paralysis in which I'd wake up and be shaken back and forth for minutes at a time, unable to move or cry out. I kept my experiences to myself until I met a former practitioner of voodoo. This person had a lot to say about what was plauging me and some of what he said made enough sense for me to take a sort of academic interest.

Voodoo, at least the version presented to me, was more of a spiritual tool kit than a real formalized religion. The spiritual world was divided up into various types of entities and the ways that they could be contacted. The primary emphasis on this was that they could be negatiated with and weren't to be trusted. The Egun, or spirits of the dead, were around, too, puttering around until they had enough of our world and went off to explore the next.

What next world?

I decided to expand my religious studies.

Budhism, shamanism, neopaganism, voodoo, santa ria, wicca, islam, judaism, and even a reevaluation of christianity...

They all seemed to underscore the same basic structure of reality, a structure that was being "discovered" by scientists even now. Reality is a LOT like those multi-layered transparancies that you see in office presentations. You know, the kind where the presenter will flip a clear peice of plastic onto the projector in order to add an extra layer of information to the presentation?

Yeah. Reality is like that. We have bodies that exist ONLY as peices of information on four layers of the presentation. They are equipped to ONLY deal with those four layers and can't see anything else. In addition, there is a part of us that exists on more, possibley all of those layers. This part, however, is hard-wired into our meaty, potato-chip gobbling shells and doesn't usually interact or see anything outside what it's body is capable of facilitating. Maybe by choice, maybe by fate. Sometimes, however, this extra bit can sense the other layers, albeit faintly or incompletely and make sense of it. It can operate on a different layer to effect change on our primary "reality." All of these layers effect each other subltly, so, that all makes sense. Hence the wide variety of psychic experiences

Factor in the idea that we share with a whole class of "others" that exist, primarily, in those other facets of reality. Maybe they're the demons and angels of the judeo-christian beliefs. Maybe they're the disembodied spirits of the dead. Or animals. Or fairies. or aliens. You get the idea. Some of them are aware of us and may even be able to manifest in a way our soda-bloaded bodies can make sense of and you suddenly have the impetus for a whole plethora of freaky paranormal experiences.

Maybe this is old hat to you. Maybe you can flippantly label off a half-hundred sources that would agree with me or condem my notions as foolishness. I certainly can't. This is what I've come up with on my own and I'd love to hear any feedback, positive or otherwise, on what my theories cover, what it doesn't, what I'm missing, and what I've gotten just plain wrong.

Fill my headmeats.
Vecordae/Eternum