Muddy Tracks

by Demarco, Frank

• ISBN13: 9781571742575
• ISBN10: 1571742573
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-01-01
• Publisher: Hampton Roads Pub Co Inc

Summary

What is reality? For millennia, human beings have slowly gathered pieces of the puzzle. During that time, many religious and scientific institutions have arisen as we tried to make a single piece here or there become the whole puzzle, creating a huge network of belief systems to fill in the gaps. Frank DeMarco is convinced that "belief" and "knowledge" -- something that comes only from first-hand experience -- are not the same, and that reality is much greater than anything we have previously accepted as truth. By sharing his personal explorations into the uncharted territory beyond "reality", DeMarco hopes to provide others with the tolls and incentive to discover first hand that we, individually and collectively, are more than we have ever believed possible.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Colin Wilson
Introduction ``I of my own knowledge''	xix
Upstairs, Downstairs	1	(31)
Of God and Shirley MacLaine	32	(12)
Past Lives, Present Life	44	(15)
Guidance	59	(41)
A Matter of Focus	100	(28)
Gateway Voyage	128	(46)
An Altered Reality	174	(43)
Inner Connection	217	(19)
(Non) Ordinary Life	236	(16)
Connection Between Lives	252	(46)
Connection Between Individuals	298	(22)
Connection Across Time	320	(20)
Interim Report	340	(11)
Afterword Pointing at the Moon	351	(6)
Appendix I Monroe's Toolbox	357	(4)
Appendix II Mapmakers	361	(3)
Appendix III Author's Note	364

Excerpts

Chapter One

Upstairs, Downstairs

    Do you want psychic abilities? In this book is all you need to learn to experience such abilities on a daily basis, rather than having to rely on second- or third-hand reports. You won't get there without work, but if you choose to pay the price, you will get there. The resources, helpers, and abilities that all humans have can transform your life. It's just a matter of your realizing what is there and how it may be used. And if our society as a whole could learn even what I have learned so far, it would have a vastly expanded idea of what we are.

    That you may absorb what I know emotionally, rather than merely intellectually, I will tell you stories from my life. These are true stories, whether or not you at first dare believe them. My life now seems magical to me. It didn't always seem that way.

    What I was before I slowly learned to change is relevant to what I learned to be, for it is unnecessary to live isolated, as I lived then. I started as a solitary, lonely individual, struggling along, afraid of others, afraid to open my heart, afraid to trust myself. I lived (as I would now say) only Downstairs, without day-to-day connection with my Higher Self or with other levels of being. I did try to believe in God. Many times I believed quite strongly, and learned that I could safely rely on invisible support. At my best, I said, "Dear God, show me the way," and trusted. At my best, I loved. But it was all so intermittent! So hit-or-miss!

    I was a member of the last generation to grow up in what I call the medieval Catholic Church. By nature, I was a mystic. The Latin Mass, the sense of the all-pervading infinite world behind this one, the firm belief in an unchanging order of things, including a black-and-white code of behavior, appealed to me at my deepest levels. When, as a teenager, I found myself unable to remain a believing Catholic, I didn't realize that Catholicism was only one specific religion expressing humanity's supernatural connections. I thought it was all or nothing, and I had seen--I thought--that it was nothing.

    Atheism didn't suit me. I couldn't see worshiping The Big Nothing, and couldn't see how anyone could say absolutely that There Is No God. I could imagine saying either, "I have experienced God" or, "I haven't experienced God." But how could anyone say, "I have experienced No-God"? It didn't make sense. Atheism seemed a bigger act of faith than believing.

    So what was left? I had an affinity for Buddhism, but it isn't my path; at least, not this time. For a while, George Bernard Shaw's brand of spiritual evolution appealed to me, but gradually I came to see it as the expedient of a religious man who was looking for an intellectually respectable way out of the contemporary belief only in material reality. Carl Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul came to me as a godsend, if that's not too bad a play on words. Here was a mind-scientist who could investigate deeper realities--even those involving church doctrine--without giving up his right to inquire and make independent judgments.

    In Henry Thoreau I found a friend, a wise man. Colin Wilson's works bred in me a sense of untapped human potential. Those of Laurens van der Post reinforced my belief in the underlying spiritual, rather than physical, nature of life. So did those of Yeats, and Ouspensky, and Gurdjieff, and Schumacher. So too, Richard Bach.

    All of this, though, was only reading, and reading is a most solitary enterprise. I have done way too much reading in this lifetime. It tended to take me ever farther away from the world I was supposed to be living in. Not that a life of much reading is not as worthwhile as any other. But too much reading may lead you to think you understand what in fact you merely recognize . Without active life as a corrective, you misinterpret what you have read. This is the value of a teacher.

    I well remember a day in my early twenties, standing on a city street reading that "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear." I wanted desperately to believe it, and didn't know whether in fact I could. He showed up, in person, within months. Although he made his living by teaching art in the public schools, he did not appear with a sign around his neck saying "Teacher!" He was not a perfect being without problems and neuroses. Nor, over the years, has it been a case of him always teaching and I always learning. More often, he and I have been able to help each other; sometimes at the same time, sometimes alternately. Indeed, the saying about students and teachers hadn't prepared me for relationships in which the roles could unpredictably reverse from moment to moment. But that is the characteristic of assistance between and among equals. Evidently my life is a no-guru zone.

    As well as human teachers, I was blessed with other sources of inspiration and assistance. The divinatory arts, for instance: the I Ching, astrology, tarot. Various forms of inner guidance. In time came dreams and dream analysis, very powerful tools indeed. All very powerful. All as readily available to you as to me. And attempts at self-discipline were always available: prayer, fasting, and meditation.

    I sought "psychic powers," if only as a proof that there is much more to life than the material world reported by the senses. I sought them, and obtained them, and found that they are not things divorced from ordinary life, but things that one culture has refused to admit into its own arbitrarily limited view of ordinary life. To regard them either with New Agers' awe or with religious fundamentalists' fear leads equally to superstition. In fact (reckless generalization number one): if any single thing discredits accounts of extraordinary experience--metaphysical, religious, or spiritual--it is this tendency to treat such experience as somehow disconnected from ordinary life. It isn't. Life is filled with all sorts of things, regardless how hard we try to make it consistent, logical, or "safe."

-2-

    For more than forty years I endured the long, hard, solitary road. Yet I had gotten a startling glimpse of the existence of a better way of living one night late in February 1970, when I was a few months from turning twenty-four. I was in a drugstore checkout line when a strong impulse led me to pick up a paperback book off the rack. Oddly, for some reason the thought came to me that I might steal it. I still don't know why that thought came across, unless merely to underline for me the importance of that book, a science-fiction novel called The Mind Parasites , by an author I'd never heard of named Colin Wilson. I bought it, and that moment turned my life.

    The plot was simple enough. Two scientists at the end of the twentieth century (then more than thirty years in the future) discover that we are all the unsuspecting hosts to--well, to mind parasites, creatures that sap our vitality and our sense of purpose. After sundry adventures, the scientists learn to defeat the parasites, and for the first time begin to take possession of humanity's unsuspected abilities, including a host of powers then usually called occult.

    When I read that book, I was seized with the conviction that the author was telling the truth. We do have such powers, and they are inexplicably beyond our grasp. What is more, it was clear to me that the author believed it too. The strength of his conviction ran like a strong current beneath the surface of the story, and was spelled out clearly in his preface.

Excerpted from Muddy Tracks by Frank DeMarco. Copyright © 2001 by Frank DeMarco. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.