Yesterday I went to the post office and picked up the two books I’ve been anxiously awaiting:  Linda Keen’s Intuition Magic, and her other book Across the Universe with John Lennon.  The edition I received was the original title:  John Lennon in Heaven.

Sweetie and I have been absorbed in, I’ve been reading it aloud.  John is hanging out as I read it, and he sometimes brings a few of his spirit friends to listen to his book.

One thing I’ve got to say first and foremost:  Linda has brass.  Holy shit, the guts it must have taken to publish a book like this twenty years ago.  Wow.  You know what’s really amazing?   How much of the same information we both received, independently and decades apart.

I haven’t finished reading the book yet, so this entry will be about the first 2/3rds of it.  As I read it, I have a pad of paper beside me and I make notes of the synchronicities and the verifications as they come.

The first note I have on my pad here is that John was psychic.  I talked about this in the Mind Games entry.  Linda talks about this too.

Another point comes up in one of Linda’s first deep meditation conversations with John, when they talk about the levels up to heaven.  Linda asks how many levels?  John holds up seven fingers.  This is the same answer I got on the beach when talking with John about the same thing – he got me to start drawing lines in the sand, and told me to stop when I got to seven.

A point which really amazed me was something I *hadn’t* written about because, frankly, I thought it was just too “out there” and I was afraid of putting people off.  One day while I was skimming through a playlist of classical music, which contained a great deal of Mozart, I said idly to Sweetie, “I think John was also Mozart in a past life.”

Well damned if Linda didn’t write the same thing!  See what I mean about brass?  I didn’t have the guts to write about that one!

In Linda’s detailed conversations between John and her spirit guide Basil, she gets into a lot of the same things I’ve been thinking and writing about.  The nature of the universe, of the reality we experience, of humanity.

One point that I wrote down is, “The ego wants everything explained rationally.”  Which is true, and yet this becomes a block for us eventually.  I’ll tell you about my nighttime lectures in another entry, but the short of it is that George has been taking my hand as I go to sleep and gently guiding me to a place where I learn about all these questions.  I often wake up at 4 am when I return to my body, and it seems like from 4 am to 9 am is when I actually get some sleep.

This week it looks like I’ve been sleeping 12 – 14 hours a day, but I know I’m out of body for most of that, learning the answers to the burning questions I’ve had.  I know I’ve learned a lot about the answers – even though I can’t really remember them in my waking state, the questions themselves seem answered.  I don’t feel compelled to dwell upon them.  I think I’ve come to understand that “rational” is only in the context of our incarnated, conscious brains, and that there is a lot of learning that can happen out of body.

This is where Linda’s book is so amazing for me, it seems like she’s been on the exact path of learning I’m walking right now.

Additional parallels with Linda’s conversations with John and our own are simple details of John’s family life and John’s adamant statement that he wouldn’t wish fame upon his worst enemy.  To Linda he’d added, “Unless they thrive upon vanity, stress and paranoia.”

In reading Linda’s confirmation that John was also Mozart, it opened up an answer to a problem I’ve been mulling in my mind but hadn’t really expressed:  If we express our spiritual selves so many times through so many lives, why am I running into characters like John and Kurt who happen to identify so strongly with their most recent life?

Well this is because this is how their spirit can best communicate with ours – this is how we recognize them, and are most open to receiving them.  With Sweetie, she’d initially addressed the spirit that was John Lennon by that name, and so he related to her in this way.  I met John through Sweetie, and so this is how he presented to me as well.

In one of Linda’s conversations, John expressed himself simply as a ball of light, sitting in a lawn chair drinking a glass of beer.  It is more difficult to have a conversation with a ball of light.  It’s much easier to relate to a spirit as their recognizable human form.

I’ll digress a bit here:  I’ve said before that I have never been so much a pop music fan.  I knew who Kurt Cobain was through cultural osmosis – his music surrounded me when I was a teen.  I was vaguely aware of him, along with a few other bands and names like Prodigy, Tea Party and Trent Reznor.

Sweetie and all my friends often teased me about this in disbelief.  “What were you doing when you were a teenager anyway?  How is it possible you grew up without this music?”

Well, I’ll admit, I was a classical music nerd.  As I’ve said before, I’ve had difficulty with the complex sounds of punk music which was popular in my youth – If I was stuck somewhere loud, crowded or booming this music, I could become overwhelmed to the point of tears or panic attack.  Beethoven was my Cobain.  (Sweetie laughed when I said this, but just listen to his music – he was a badass, a subversive.  His 5th speaks to his struggle with his emotions and mental illness.)

While my friends head-banged their way through the grunge movement, I listened to Bach, Schubert and Mozart.  When I saw the movie “Amadeus” I found it heart-wrenching and became a bit obsessed with Mozart after that.

I think if John had shown himself to me as Mozart, I would have shut the door in his face, just as I would have if Kurt had shown up before John.

One of the delightful readers I read for this week told me that my blog gently stretches the limits of her disbelief.  Well, in this same way, my invisible friends are gently stretching my own disbelief – a yoga of the mind.  They know just how much to show me and when.  I feel I am in good hands.

The final thought I wrote down on  my notepad for this entry is to share this realization:  the learning never stops.  Some people refer to earth as “hell” and can’t wait to be done and go back home to Heaven.  Do these people realize their soul’s challenges follow them to the other side?

We get healing, we get rest, we get all the love and care we need in heaven.  Yet, what I’m learning from John as well as from other spirits, is that we can still experience deep sorrow and loss in heaven.  The conflict follows us to heaven and we continue to work through it there, though it doesn’t feel like such torture as it can here on earth.

So don’t wait to work on your shit here on earth.  Don’t hope to escape the difficult spiritual work by dying and going to heaven.  If we don’t take every opportunity to learn and grow in this life, to face our fears, our shortcomings, our darker sides, the more we carry with us into heaven, the more we carry with us into the next life.