February 21, 2012

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I am trying to teach Steve a new technique--giving him several of the key thoughts for an entry just before he sits down to type, rather than for him to just jump from one association to the other. It's similar to trying to remember one's dreams, which he has been doing lately, and it will also be necessary if we are to successfully channel music. So bear with us.

After the last big party upstairs that lasted until 3:00 in the morning, Steve wrote a rather terse note and taped it to their door. They've been quiet, since. They're not bad kids, just young. We were about that age when we got married in 1836. And I still enjoy get-togethers with my friends. Most times one is about to criticize, one can find some point of commonality to sympathize and understand, if one would only try.

But the "karmic threads" are kind of interesting. Things tend to repeat in infinite shades of variation and combination. The first psychic reading Steve had was with a woman named Patricia Kobleur, now retired. (Well, the very first, Steve reminds me, was with a gypsy--an actual gypsy--in the middle of a Renaissance Fair named Zenobia. And you may recall that I went through a phase in my childhood of thinking I might have been adopted from gypsies, as I've told Steve, though this is not anywhere in the written history.)

So, Patricia Kobleur tells Steve that in the French Revolution, he was a woman, a revolutionary, who tacked hand-bills up on doors. She told him, furthermore, that her writing, her style of humor, was to say something sarcastic that could be taken either way--to push the envelope just to the point that people would know what you were saying, but couldn't definitely prove that's what you were saying.

This is a perfect description of Matthew's humor, as when, for example, his character, Ethan Spike, attends a lyceum lecture on astronomy, and reports that the speaker waxed eloquent on the "heavingly bodies."

For that sort of thing, Matthew's brother, John Greenleaf Whittier, turned away in disdain. That and sibling rivalry. Today, you find worse hidden references in cartoons. It was all quite innocent, like the mischievousness of a child. Steve remembers, from his childhood, a "Rocky and Bullwinkle" episode, one of the "Fractured Fairy Tales," in which the "21 Blackbirds Baked in a Pie" rhyme was enacted, and at the end, the character turns to the viewer and remarks, "I always wanted to give the king a bird."

See how Steve saw this as a child, and he has remembered it all this time? He had no conscious memory of having written humor like this as Matthew (nor, if Patricia Kobleur was correct, in the French Revolution).

Steve is staying very close to what I set out for him, and there is one more thought I had added, and then it's back to the free-form, association method.

From the recorded history, we know that my father was Joseph Rochemont de Poyen, from a noble line in France that supported the throne, and that they had a family crest and were, naturally, quite wealthy. Several of my brothers and sisters were named after French royalty, including Annette (who began life as Marie Antoinette Poyen). There was also Francis Louis and Elizabeth Josephine. The others were named after my mother's side or my father's side. I was the only one named for another person in the local community, as I described in my previous entry. We know this, again, because of an embroidered sampler with our family genealogy (not counting my youngest sister, Lucy, who came after it was done). None of this is channeling--I have simply instructed Steve, "Set out what's known about my family history showing my father's loyalty to the French crown."

For the hundredth time in here, I do not physically take over Steve's fingers. I am standing over his shoulder--at times, literally, at times, mentally--and prompting him, as though dictating a letter, and he is trying to follow, and adding in or editing as he feels I would like it to read. It is a known technique--I nudged Steve to read about a similar technique online yesterday.

So I was born into a family in which my father was a conservative supporter of the French crown, and of noble French blood, himself. And, even according to the history, he was quite a lively, intelligent, and talented character. One account says that he was much in demand as a fiddle player for the young people's dances; and we have an ad, taken out in the newspaper well before I was born, offering to teach sword-fighting to the local New England youth!

But we also know, or can deduce, from the history, that I was liberal. Whereas my father's money came from his father's plantation in Guadeloupe (before the slave uprising that brought them to the coast of Massachusetts!), I was an Abolitionist. How do we know, other than my telling Steve, and the psychic reading by Joseph Shiel, which clearly implied it? Because, in the recently-discovered publication that Matthew edited in 1838, the "Salisbury Monitor," there is mention of a poem, written by Matthew, about a slave girl in Guadeloupe who killed herself. Even the historical evaluation from the auction house suggests that Matthew must have gotten that story from me, and obviously, I must have heard it from my father.

Steve interjects here that all we know of the several issues of that weekly magazine, which were bought on Ebay for about $100, and then resold via Bonham's Auction House for about $7,000, are the two sample pages and the online description. We tried our best to contact whoever bought it, unsuccessfully.* That works in our favor, in this way--that if anything Steve has remembered via far memory turns out to be confirmed in that publication--including if we printed a fledgling version of "A Christmas Carol" in it--after Steve publishes, and after he passes on and joins me, that information will go public, and the public can compare Steve's writings with that historical source, knowing he couldn't possibly have seen it. The same goes for another key source.

If Steve is mad, there is definitely method to his madness.

Guess who also holds a copy of Steve's first book? Dr. Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia. Steve met him when he videotaped Dr. Tucker in 2007. That videotaped interview gets seen quite a bit online--in fact, a German fellow with a huge website just wrote Steve, asking permission to translate it into German.

So now Steve is pausing, having dutifully "spilled out" everything I'd given him, in condensed thoughts, before he sat down to write (and a little more).

The point of all this is karmic patterns moving forward, weaving in and out in subsequent incarnations. Now we diverge from recorded history. Steve and I have both been royalty. We have been on both sides of it--for, and against. Get good karma; become privileged; misuse that privilege; become like those you abused or neglected; become a revolutionary. Always, one has been both. But the trimmings and trappings, the people, the experiences, the ideas from the earlier lifetimes still follow one around and remain on the periphery of one's life. Habits and tendencies remain. You know how French humor tends to be on the sarcastic side. What Patricia Kobleur (note the French name) said about Steve's humor as a woman during the French Revolution, is exactly on-target for that culture. But see how it followed her/him into a subsequent incarnation as Matthew, who wrote with the same type of satire, and married a French girl? A half-French girl, to be more precise, who rebelled against her father's conservatism and wanted none of the privilege. In fact, she joked about it--she wrote Matthew's sister that Matthew, having recently married her, was a privileged child, himself, now, and was thus privy to her letters. It was an inside joke, because he had called her a "privileged child" and she wanted none of it. (Matthew was now also a "privileged child" in ways that we won't go into, here--we were separated, because Quakers couldn't allow us together under the Whittier family roof, and I wanted Matthew to read this letter to his sister. I wanted him to see that I had written Elizabeth I sometimes felt I would go wild, and that he was a "privileged child," hoping that might induce him to come to me. It worked--we moved to nearby Dover, New Hampshire the following month!)

Steve knows absolutely nothing about French culture in this life. He can't spell English words that derived from the French, no less attempt a French accent. And yet he still writes with some of the same style of humor, with this difference, that he tries not to hurt people's feelings with it. He stays away from politics, now, but is still quite the radical in this new field of reincarnation awareness and afterlife studies. And he still loves me, "desperately and deeply" as we tell one another. He is still a "privileged child." And he is still poor, and I am still rich (trust me).

So things shift around, but they don't go away. They swing to this side, and then back to that side, and hopefully, wisdom is gained along the way.

Am I Abby? Am I my previous incarnations? Here, it is quite natural. We don't have to think about it. We are all of them, just as you may be a grouch in the morning and quite sweet in the evening. Was the tousled-haired woman who vacuumed the rug this morning, the same as the refined woman who dines in her evening gown at a fine restaurant tonight? Is there any big problem about this?

From our perspective, here, these past lives were not really so very long ago. More like, who were you when you lived in Wisconsin five years ago? You were a different person then, in a sense, weren't you? But in a sense, obviously you were the same old Sally or George. Same here, with a condensed view of earth-time.

These things that other channelers make such mysterious mumbo-jumbo about, as though you couldn't possibly understand them but I am going to try to explain it to you--hogwash. Could you explain to a man from 300 years ago how to use a computer? Of course you could. He' be surfing like a pro in three weeks. Maybe four. But if you wanted him to worship you, to be impressed with you, you could do that. It's all in how you present it to him.

Good teaching makes things fun, easy, and non-threatening. Steve used to tell his son, when he was little, "Don't be afraid of big words. For every big word, there is a little word that means pretty-much the same thing."

Just so, there is really nothing so scary or difficult about what we are doing--in channeling, or our relationship as a whole. You mostly just have to believe it's possible, which means, shaking off the propaganda you've received in a materialistic culture which says that it's impossible.

It took Steve 170 years to realize that I had actually, in fact, survived death, and that we could do what we'd promised each other, i.e., continue our marriage. Now, you will find people, authorities, who are advising you how to free yourself from past-life vows. I will not get cheeky about this particular topic. I feel very sad about it. Obviously, we will let you out of your commitment if you want out of it. Thank God, Steve didn't have the slightest interest in that teaching! His only sticking-point was whether I had actually survived. Once that was established, he rushed into my arms--emotionally, if not physically, obviously--and there was no question of trying to be released from our vows. He remarried me, didn't he? :-)

But this takes a real soul-mate connection. I can't help you discern what is what, there. So many close relationships look like a soul-mate relationship; and then, soul-mates can find that their partner is too immature to pull it off, yet. Each case is different. There is no principle I can give which would apply to all cases, and I would not wish to do violence to any couple by laying down any principle that would hurt even one couple. You have to find your own way. All we can do is demonstrate that it's possible.

Now, Steve feels that this is a good wrap-up. He's about to close it out. But, dear, I'm not done!

So he will get quiet again...

I only want to convey how deeply I feel for the couples out there who would wish to do what we're doing. I feel more deeply than Steve does, and it's difficult for him to convey that in words. It feels to him--and perhaps to you--that he is trying to embellish. Not so. He is feeling a little of what I feel, and dutifully and honestly trying to express it. I feel towards each of you what I would feel for a dear friend. It's personal. I've tried to get Steve to express this before, and I think it comes across as a literary contrivance, which in a sense it is, as Steve tries to express something he, personally, isn't feeling to the same extent I am. Does that make sense? It would be an affectation were Steve to express it on his own. IF you automatically assume he is writing this on his own, then you have no choice but to interpret such expressions as a literary device, a disingenuous affectation. But that's not the point. I do feel this way--I know you, the reader, in a more actual sense than a physically incarnate writer would know his audience. I feel each of you, though, as said before, I don't intrude.

That means I feel your grief; or, if you are a single person in a life-long search for your soul mate, I feel your longing for that reunion. This is tricky, expressing this, because what we are doing is not for everyone. But it is for a few, and those few, who may actually number in the hundreds of thousands, world-wide, have been getting short-shrift. They have borne the brunt of a materialistic world in which everyone is told to "move on." It is our particular part to try to communicate this option, of what we are doing, to them.

This is why I don't worry so much about not being popular. It would be better, really-speaking, if we weren't, so long as the people who need to read this journal end up reading it.

For you, I say, your fondest dream of reunion with your loved one is not only possible, it is right around the corner, lacking only your own faith that it is possible, and the determination to do it with an open mind and a commitment to absolutely honesty. This requires rock-solid grounding, a well-developed character, and, paradoxically, the willingness to reach out in exploration with one's intuitive faculties. What would normally be experienced as imagination, must be trained and purified until it becomes intuition and direct inner contact with one's beloved. It isn't easy--but wouldn't it be worth it?

Steve told the German fellow, who wrote for permission to translate Dr. Tucker's interview into German, about what we are doing. His response was, he believes it might be possible, but wouldn't it be better to have a physical partner while one is physically incarnate? He is thinking in terms of having "a" partner. We are thinking in terms of finding "the" partner. Do you see the difference? What he's saying is fine for perhaps 90% of the world. Let them all experience lots of partners--within one lifetime, or from lifetime-to-lifetime. That's their path.

We are talking about something totally different. At times it has been popular--then again, it has been overthrown as an ideal. But it has never been for everyone. It is for those who know that, figuratively speaking, one breathes in, and the other breathes out.

If you think that's nonsense, a fairy-tale, co-dependent etc., then you should never attempt this. You should have relationships so long as there is a reason to continue, and then "move on." (You will accrue less karma if you do this with other people of the same persuasion--a word to the wise.)

No-one ever listens to "words to the wise."

But if you understand immediately what I mean when I say, "One breathes in, and the other breathes out," then despair not, dears, because you can be reunited.

My love and best wishes to each and all,
Abby

*Abby prompted me, the morning after channeling this entry, to mention the following. We were told it could have gone to a historical society or a university, though a representative of the American Antiquarian Society said they hadn't purchased it. I gather from the description that the reason it was considered so valuable was that some of John Greeleaf Whittier's early poems were printed in it, and there were slight differences in the wording from the known versions. It had nothing to do with Matthew. Perhaps Matthew was trying to help him by editing them slightly, or John Greenleaf modified them a bit in later years. In any case, we see clearly that Matthew was trying to promote his brother's work, though from what I can see he got relatively little help in return, and what help he got was questionable and came only when absolutely necessary. For example, many years later John Greenleaf penned a letter to a publisher requesting that Matthew's "Ethan Spike" columns be bound into a single volume--but the letter was never sent.--SS