Spirits & astral travels

It’s not even Halloween and already my house is spooky again. I didn’t expect an entity’s visit after a hallway apparition six years ago, and the subsequent blessing of our home, which was built in 1971.

I have only one picture that shows me carrying Mikee watching the construction before the multiple renovations. Peping would go to Australia and I’d have the windows enlarged, the ceilings painted red, and the doors widened.

“What’s the flavor of the month?” Dad would tease.

When I felt events weren’t going as I expected I’d turn furniture around as therapy and most of them are antiques inherited and purchased.

Kakay, China’s friend whom we later discovered to have a third eye, peered outside China’s door, to see a man dressed in a suit in the hallway and carrying a folder. Very casually she mentioned it and we giggled, “A folder, a job applicant in the family hallway?” One day he was seen sitting on my dining chair. Another time he was standing in the den and the scariest of all was my secretary Ashlyn’s experience. As she stood on the main stairs of the house waiting for her car, she turned to her left and saw him next to her.

Instinctively she knew he wasn’t flesh and bones. “How did he get there?” She ran down the driveway and called my secretary Tony from her cellular phone in her vehicle. Instantly I hammered in a nail on the adobe stone and hung a rosary from Fatima. Enough!

I called Frank Regis whom I heard dealt with such occurrences. It took him five hours to bless the house and he pointed out a particular spot where China’s dogs barked regularly. His concluding prayer went something like this:

“To all the elemental spirits gathered here, I thank you. Go in peace to do your appointed task. To your respective homes.”

Light incense at every 6 p.m. he advised, and place a bowl with salt and ashes from a blessed candle. And then they left… seemingly.

Last Sunday, my nervous masseuse remarked “Ma’am, I saw a lady standing by your television set.” My guard Joseph said, “I saw a man… wearing a suit.”

The occurrences deserved a call to Eddie Backal of Mt. Banahaw, who promptly came with a tiny wisp of a woman, Ely, with a third eye and who minced no words. Walking into my computer room, she said, “There’s a man sitting on the chair wearing a suit and holding a folder.”

“You mean he’s back?” I quipped.

Going through my clothes, she said, “Ayoko itong baro at saya. Paki-alis lang dito,” as Ed held it. She didn’t want to touch it. So it went into the basement to my yaya’s room. Entering another room, she said, “May tao dito…” by the bed and another one sitting on my pearl-inlaid chest. So if I enter my room must I ask permission? But it’s my own room, right? Who was violating whose space? Ed and Ely promised to return Friday to perform the pausok in the house.

Two days later (what a long wait) at 7 p.m., the smoke made us all cry. The smell was pleasing but itchy to the nose. The ritual ended by praying the rosary. Hopefully my visitors would leave and find peace in their own homes and not mine.

Ed gave me a rosary of black wood. I had given him a notebook from his teacher Juli filled with her handwritten oracciones.

Then my yaya Christy said, “You asked for your shoes and I left you by the pergola. When I entered the walk-in closet, you were there, and when I ran back by the bar to give you the shoes, you were there, too.” It reminded me of the incidences in Tarlac when my secretary Lulu and my museum curator Bobby left me behind and hurried up the stairs to chase me, only to find me following them. One day Lulu called and said, “I will never go back to your Baguio house, Ma’am, unless you call me that you’ve arrived. I went to welcome you, saw you combing your hair by your antique dresser, I turned around to undo the bed, then looked at your direction to speak to you and you were gone. Maaaaam!” 

I had enough of my travels! I called Jimmy Licauco and rushed over to his office yesterday. He explained my experiences as astral travels or astral projection or OBE (out of body experience) that could occur while the physical body slept or was in motion. The body can travel to places and worlds without limitations. The idea is very ancient. During mental projection, the entire physical body is transferred to another location or teleportation. Cases in which the physical body exists and acts in two separate places at once are bi-location. I’m not looking forward to that.

A common belief is that the subtle body is attached to the physical body by means of a psychic silver cord. The final chapter of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes is often cited — “Before the silver cord be loosened, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be shattered at the fountain, or the wheel be broken at the cistern.” That subtle so-called “silver cord” remains connected to the physical body during the separation.

According the Max Heindel, the ether, also called prana, is the vital force that empowers the physical forms in order for that change to take place. That led to a brief lesson on the seven chakras with Jimmy Licauco explaining body energy, emotion and desire. With a dowsing rod made from a violin string and at its tip an acacia circular diskette held together by a piece of wood, Jimmy focused it on my head, throat, heart and navel. This was just an informal quest, remember. So I looked up chakras. They are centers of energy that govern our physical properties. The crown chakra is about wisdom. The heart chakra is about love and kindness, not cold and distant. If this chakra is over-active, you are suffocating people with your love. The throat chakra is about self-expression, not at all introverted or you tend to speak too much and domineer people. The navel chakra is about asserting yourself in the group and not being passive and indecisive. Jimmy’s dowsing rod will indicate negative or positive vibrations. The sacral chakra is about feeling and sexuality without being over-emotional.

Almost as though my visitors wanted to be discovered, I met a student who is “sensitive.” She had told my colonel that there was a child walking beside him in the training center. But his son was in their home. Upon being told thrice, he called her to his office. As she was explaining her vision, she glanced at a photograph behind the colonel and said, “That’s the little boy.” Colonel’s other son had passed away just last year at 12 years old from leukemia. Having known about the couple’s grief, I was told by the colonel quite casually about it, which convinced me to invite his student to my home.

At the house she felt numerous elements in my hallway. These elements are a quality of energy or forces from the astral world. Elements are not visible to those who are not clairvoyants and not real to the majority of us. I brought her to my walk-in closet and she backed away from the area where the baro’t saya that Ely did not like was located. In another part my closet, I had put a stampita of Fr. Pio, exactly on the spot where yaya Sally had seen a “being” 10 years ago. She said she felt a presence in the same spot. It was a coincidence! She asked Tony to remove a skirt that gave her bad vibrations. Viewing the garden my yaya Cheche brought out the baro’t saya for her to see. Again, she was unaware that this was what Ely wouldn’t hold herself. Officer Gomez, upon seeing Cheche approaching her, dashed behind the colonel and refused to touch my clothes. In a short while, we sat and she started shaking uncontrollably until we suggested that she hold the rosary crafted from banahaw wood and which Jimmy Licauco, after feeling its vibrations with his dowsing rod, looked at his clairvoyant secretary who said, “May orasyon yan.” Jimmy agreed because the energy the rosary exuded from Eddie was beyond control as we witnessed from his “flying” rod.

We have begun burning incense at 6 p.m., sometimes with trepidation, while trying to discover the who’s and the why’s. Our house is too quiet, with the children and grandchildren permanently in their own homes except for Sundays, when the elements and entities are jarred by the family’s laughter and screams delaying their desire to re-possess my Mindanao antiquities, their property once upon a time.

Right now, I am putting these antiquities under the sun for three days to remove the spirits’ presence. Amen!