Letter to an old college friend

Dear Old Friend,

You wrote me at a very interesting time. I looked you up a few months ago -- I saw you got a grant on your research. Congratulations. As for pictures, to my disappointment, you have never been one to show up on the web with images, but there recently has been a young girl who has shown up on the google searches with your name. She is an aspiring actress, and is said to be quite good. She looks nothing like you.

I got married this past Thursday, just a day after the bar exam. Can you believe the timing? My fiancee works as a doctor, and she is from Providence, Rhode Island. We were set up by mutual friends, she moved up here to Denver, got a job, and then we met. I proposed to her after just a few dates.

As you can guess from what I just wrote about the wedding, I also just took the bar exam this past week. I picked up my law school diploma this morning. I can't believe all the studying for the bar exam is over.

As for everything else, there are a lot of pressures on me from all sides to do the things I need to get done in the next few days / few weeks. Everything is changing around me and while it is all very exciting, I have found the need yesterday and today to hide out in my new apartment and not answer phone calls because I am feeling quite stressed with all the things I still need to do. The people who are calling me consist of two main people -- 1) my rabbi who is urging me to prepare spiritually for post-wedding life, and 2) my mom who is upset about the religious customs we had at the wedding and she is wondering when we are going to visit her.

From an objective view everything seems to be right on target. I seem to be doing everything I am supposed to do. My goals are in line, my values match my actions, and yet with everything, I am totally freaking out about the whole experience of being newly post-law school without a job and with a new set of responsibilities that I have undertaken. If you are as intuitive now as you were and you are picking up my high stress levels, you can imagine why I'm pretty high stressed. There are a lot of things I need to get done in the next few weeks.

As for my spiritual path, as I know you've always loved that part of the discussion, I have found meaning in the universe through the dogmatic doctrines of my faith, and I am still delving around in the mass of teachings trying to make sense of the experiences I've had. Some wacky stuff has happened these past few years and it bothers me that religion cannot explain it or at least explain the "how" of it. What weirded me out is that for a while I thought it was all in my head until I took a video recorder and documented my experiences and was surprised to see that they were still there on the video when I played them back. When I tried to show people, they thought I was nuts, the rabbis told me that it cannot be real, and I experienced more pain than anything because immediately I felt alone because I couldn't share my experiences with others who would take me seriously. Huna gives a good explanation of the things I've experienced, and I have continued my fascination with this topic while trying to follow the master plan of how a Jew is ideally supposed to act. I know you were never into this to the degree that I immersed myself into it, but it just seemed right at the time for me to do it, and it has since become a part of me. Anyway, on another level, I've found much interest in the hemi-sync / holosync technologies and I wonder whether there is validity to their methods and applications. This is something I will pursue in the future.

As for everything else, while I have been introduced to EVP and reverse speech and other such topics, I have avoided them quite actively because I have found that whenever I try one of these things, it usually works and so I don't want to attract these kinds of energies to me because most of the energies that surround these kinds of things are violent and are not happy. Recently a psychic walked up to my mom and told her that I can talk with spiritual entities.

The problem is that with what I've learned with Judaism, these aren't the sort of entities I want to be having a relationship with, and so while a few years ago I would have meditated and tried to make contact, recently I've kind of been hiding from the whole experience and have been trying to be normal. So you don't see me meditating or doing anything weird any more, but between you and me, I've kind of figured out the whole energy interaction thing between people and things in nature and have attained a degree of control over it which I think is pretty cool.

Unfortunately, it is still not strong enough to do anything with it (and I don't think it will ever be strong enough) and it can't do anything substantial so I have no use for it other than to wonder exactly what it is, and I can't tell people about it because I feel stupid, especially because of all of the movies that have recently come out on the topic where the experience has been portrayed as a hollywood superpower and so I pretend that it is all in my imagination or that it does not exist. Plus, there is an opinion that I am doing stuff that I shouldn't be doing and I am messing with the natural order of things and that it might have consequences or attract bad things to me. At one point, I thought it was a muscle and if I practiced at it, I would get really good at it and I did, but the application of it in its present state is stupid and amounts to nothing more than a parlor trick which is useless. I wish I understood it. I don't think I ever will.

As for everything else, everybody is okay.

It's always nice hearing from you. You were always an important part of my life and I'm happy that I still occupy your thoughts from time to time.

Warm regards,
Zoe

EVP & Reverse Speech

Oh my gosh, I am totally freaked out. I was just watching "White Noise," a so-so movie with the guy who played the original Batman and in the movie Duplicity.

I was very weirded out by the concept that one can receive communications by listening to the static of a TV set, but then I got to thinking that how cool would it be if it were real. Then... AT THE LAST SCENE OF THE MOVIE... There was a message on the screen saying that:

"7 out of 10 EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) messages contain violent messages."

Huh? You mean this stuff is thought to be real? So then I did a search on google.com for "EVP" and I found a WHOLE BUNCH OF SITES that talk about this "phenomenon" as if it is a real thing. Here are a few just to get you started: ghostpix.com, the skeptic's dictionaary, American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena.

Holy Smokes! This totally weirded me out, especially from a Judaism point of view. Judaism teaches about the structure of the universe, and it talks about Angels, Demons, Spirits, and non-physical entites, and the laws for and against interacting with them. However, this is all theory -- there is no experiential side to these teachings, at least not for simple people like you and me.

I then surfed from site to site, and I noticed that on some sites they actually had some sound file recordings of the EVP messages and their relevant contexts. I played them, and it weirded me out further. I wondered after playing a few soundbites whether this might attract these unhappy spirits to me and my house, and I wondered what energies would be attracted to it by playing these sound bites. After all, if these non-physical entities are trying to communicate with us, then obviously someone who is paying attention to their existence might attract them. This scared me because from what I know about Judaism, any entity that contacts me here on our level cannot be a good thing, because our physical world (called Asiyah) is in a position only to attract the evil spiritual forces. There is more to this and I am sure my statement will be misunderstood, but this is not the place to go into it.

Bottom line, if this is real, then this is scary for me because it makes very real things that I only thought were in my mind and in my subjective experience. I have been told by countless psychics that I have contact with non-physical entities on a regular basis, but I have always thought [and still do think] that this was all a bunch of bologna.

Anyway, I don't want to be contacted by spiritual entities, and it weirded me out at how easy it was to do so, and I am sure that if I tried this EVP stuff that I would get some massive results because with my hearing and my sensitivity to magnetic sounds and visual distortions (my brain doesn't filter out all the visual impressions that my eyes receive as it should and so I see streaking patterns all day long -- again, a topic not for this post [in fact, I've written about it in the past])... Okay, bottom line, this stuff scares me and the fact that it is somewhat a "science", that scares me even more.

It scares me because it reminds me of a phenomenon I am VERY FAMILIAR WITH called REVERSE SPEAK (a web site describing this can be found here). When I was in college, I analyzed recorded conversations and especially my highly emotional diary entries and I found messages embedded in my own voice that were totally relevant to what was going on at the time of the recording -- but these messages were only found when I played the recordings BACKWARDS. Maybe I'll put a few of them up online in the near future. I spent many weeks working on this project and found significant results to the point that I got weirded out by the whole thing and then stopped it. I also scared a few people along the way.

Another reason I scrapped the project was because I was getting negative messages about the relationship I was in at the time telling me the whole thing wasn't going to work out, and I thought the messages were my imagination. Hindsight, the messages were 100% on target and that relationship totally didn't work out for the exact reasons the reverse messages said they wouldn't.

Anyway, enough weirdness. Back to bar review. I am sort-of uncomfortable with the subject because it might be real.

Webaroo.com

A few quick things.

Firstly, I have 18 days and 5 hours, 8 minutes, and 11 seconds until my bar exam.

Secondly, I am doing well. I am totally in study (cram) mode, and I will expect from myself more than I have asked from myself in many years.

Lastly, there is a site: http://www.webaroo.com
I'm very impressed with their free software, which allows you to have internet access (so to speak) even when you are OFFLINE. Cool, eh?

In sum, much is going on, and I am half asleep and have to wake up in a few hours to meet with my Rabbi to get fitted for a Karpota for the wedding. This is totally exciting.