© 2009 by William R. Mistele. All rights reserved.

Chapter Seven: Review

Objectives

Read another fairy tale along with a few essays

Do the homework!!!!

Chapter Outline

Story: Caelius Aurelius Luscus and the Mermaid

Essay: Twelve Traits of Undine Women

Essay: The Race that Replaces Human Beings

Essay: What Do Mermaids Do—Selected Writings

Homework and Summary

In Chapter One, I presented ordinary empathy. Chapter Two went on to explore one kind of “magical empathy.” The empathy in both chapters is accessible to just about anyone. They describe basic skills that are invaluable in personal relationships, conflict resolution, and for finding our way through the maze of human interactions.

Homework: If you have not already done so, try applying these various skills. If you have practiced or are familiar with them, the next step is to teach them to someone else—this is your homework assignment. The act of teaching vastly enhances your powers of observation and your experience.

Active Listening: How do you teach active listening? Let me walk you through it briefly.

Find someone you know—one of your children, a friend, someone you meet in a bar. Improvise. Use your imagination. Do it on line if nothing else in a chat room you create titled, “Active Listening Seminar.”

Now then, you say to the other person, “I would like you to do some active listening with me. I’ll do it first on you and then I’ll walk you through it as you do it on me.

“Active listening involves two things: 1. Paraphrase briefly what someone says to you as they talk about something of interest. 2. Mention in a word or a phrase what you observe about the way that person feels about the topic.”

First do this for the other person by having him or her talk about something. The sequence involves having them tell you how accurate you are in summarizing what was said and in reflecting on what is felt. You do not have to be dead accurate. Part of the process is having the other person state more clearly what he feels and thinks.

Then have the person do the same for you. I mean, how often really does anyone ever listen to someone else giving the other person his full attention? Here you get feedback and listening from another person in a free and easy way.

If it goes well, try the magical empathy as well. Everyone does these things in a slightly different way. Some individuals have natural abilities on the level of genius. But until you ask them to do these things their abilities remain hidden and unused.

In connecting to others, especially with empathy, the ordinary is requisite for the magical and the magical is requisite for undine empathy. Without the basics, the advanced psychic mode of connection often goes no where or else is counterproductive.

Have you ever had someone give you unsolicited advice? I find that very annoying. It is not being friendly and it is often designed to impress or demonstrate superiority rather than being helpful. If someone really wants to be helpful, let him ask questions so I can find my own answers.

On the other hand, if someone has demonstrated an ability to listen and to track accurately my own thoughts on a particular subject, then a purely psychic comment such as—“Let me just put this out there: I sense that you are going too fast and need to slow down--” is something I can hear. We have already established that each of us can act purely for the other’s benefit.

Undine empathy, as compared to ordinary and even magical empathy, is based on an enhanced sensitivity. It requires an individual be able to sense energy beyond the energies and feelings that occur in normal human interactions.

Chapter Three explored how mermaids perceive and feel water in nature. There is a bliss present that they sense. They perceive outside the boundaries of ego. And they feel the qualities of water in their souls: the ability to let, to experience release, to purify, to renew, to heal, to be at peace and serene, to immerse themselves in pure delight, to flow like a stream and to be as deep as the ocean—they sense an ocean of love around them and within them in every moment of time.

I am not making this up. I experience this with undine queens every time I interact with them. And I experience it equally if not more powerfully with specific women who possess mermaid auras.

The exercises I present are reverse engineering—I examine the skill as it exists and then I figure out a way to teach it so it is reproducible in human beings.

In the story, Caelius Aurelius Luscus and the Mermaid, Caelius sits and meditates each day with a mermaid in a woman’s body. He feels her aura flow through him. The story indicates his responses to this experience.

I know this woman in her present incarnation. While writing the story, I imagined her sitting in front of me usually for several hours every day just like the story says that Caelius did long ago.

Without any effort on my part, her aura flowing through me is exactly the way I describe the Ocean of Love Exercise presented in Chapter Four. In this case, however, her aura automatically performs the ocean of love exercise on me. It is the way mermaids are: part of the sea, their aura extends outwards around themselves and flows in and through anything near to them.

This woman also does massage. When she does a massage on me, at some point I turn into the Atlantic Ocean in my awareness. I feel as well that I have become the North Atlantic Current. I can not tell if I am the ocean, me, or the woman who is doing the massage. This is the nature of undine empathy: when there is no ego present, you are simultaneously one with nature, one with those who are near to you--both are flowing in and through you. Like nothing else, water destroys loneliness and the feeling of separation.

Does this all sound a little advanced? These are things that should have been taught to us ten thousand years ago. It is criminal (it is an indictment against the human race) that the spiritual traditions on earth do not teach every one of their practitioners how to do this.

All the same, there is a spiritual quest involved in reclaiming what is lost. And equally there are serious issues at stake should the human race fail to acquire these abilities at this late date.

As you can see from my essay on The Race that Replaces Human Beings, my genre of fairy tales takes a giant step forward into the genre of science fiction. You could say that this other race, the Perseians, offer a second opinion on the human race that complements the undines’ view of humanity.

Introduction

How to introduce this story? It is based on a woman I know. She read my essay, Twelve Traits of Undine Women, and then called me wanting to know how I could describe her so well. (See the essay that follows this story).

A mermaid I consult with informed me that this woman was once a mermaid and then subsequently acquired a human soul. There are at present a total of six women on earth who were once mermaids but have since acquired a human soul. In this story, I describe how this woman, basically one in a billion people, had the other four elements united with the water in her mermaid soul so that now she has the soul of a human being.

Caelius Aurelius Luscus and the Mermaid

In the beginning was an awareness. There was no “I” or identity within it. Unlike you, environment and self are not separate. But to be eloquent and concise, put it this way, “I was and am an awareness of the oceans encircling the planet—North, South, East, and West, surface and depth.

Human beings have trees that they make into wood to build tools, furniture, weapons, fences, homes and to plant and harvest orchards. They walk on dry ground and breathe the air.

You have words you use to record events, to communicate either in writing or by speaking aloud. You have five senses that operate, for the most part, in a solid environment.

You shape earth. You drink water and use it to cook. You control fire and metabolize food and oxygen in your bodies.

Your environment is your test—you use your wits and your courage to test its boundaries and to extract from it knowledge. With that knowledge of how nature works—its routines and patterns, its surface and its hidden, underlying mathematical matrix—you rise and ascend, reaching for the stars.

My environment is not a test I master in order to ascend. But this does not mean that I do not evolve. I am aware of ocean currents and how they affect the rest of the world. Weather and climate, ice ages come and gone, species when they appear, fish, animals, birds, human beings—the presence of your ships and fishing industries is hard to miss.

When a human being is curious, he invents a car, an airplane, or the means to transmit electricity. He fills in for what is missing in an overall pattern—the periodic table, subatomic particles, the motion of celestial bodies, the evolution of the species, geological ages, the creation and distribution of wealth, racial types and medical classification of disease and treatment.

I too am curious. It is not like the curiosity of human beings: “I will invent this in order to solve that problem or answer a question.”

My curiosity is the curiosity of nature itself: What species will replace Homo sapiens when they are gone? When will the next ice age come and for how long? How will the next asteroid that hits affect the oceans? How will changes in cosmic or solar radiation alter the climate? These questions are not all that different, are they, from what your scientists ask?

But how about this? When will an intelligent species within an “advanced” civilization embody the love that exists within the ocean? When will the dreams within the heart of the Goddess that is this planet become the dreams within the hearts of living beings?

Your race is known for its pursuit of knowledge and its technological advances. I think you are asking the wrong questions. The human heart, for all its capacity to wonder and to quest, contains a vacuum within it. You have an emptiness within and you do not know how to fill it.

I am the power of water with its capacity to flow, to let go, to be in the moment without prejudice or attachment. My way of knowing is altogether different.

To be as me? Imagine you are the sea encircling the world. Imagine its surface and its depth. Imagine the shores, the islands, and the rivers feeding into it.

Come down into the ocean trench. Sense the mountain ranges and the valleys, the volcanoes, the hot springs, the accumulation of silt, the temperature falling, the light and darkness, the salt and fresh water flowing, the heat exchange at the surface, and the icebergs drifting.

Now overlay this with life in its vast variety. Mammals and fish, amphibians and algae, plankton, amebas, and microbes too.

Now take a day in the life of the sea, now a year, a century, or a million years too. And sense in that defined period of time one feeling, one energy, one vibration, one common denominator for the diversity. Sense how that quality is flowing and changing.

Imagine further that this energy of the sea, this state of being and love, is flowing through you endlessly.

What do mermaids do? I have just told you what I do. Beyond the ability of the human brain as you know it, I am an awareness of nature and of life as it unfolds.

I am relaxed. I flow. I am in the moment without worry of how the next moment will go.

To be specific so there is no confusion, I share in common with you the delta brain wave configuration. I am the awareness that you meet in deep, dreamless sleep.

My curiosity got the best of me. For reasons I won’t go into, I wondered about humanity. It was not, “I wonder how the human race is doing?” It was more like “What is water in human form?” Can the bliss be as intense? Can they hear the songs of the moon? Can human beings feel one with the sea? In their hearts, have they learned to be free?”

In the depths of the ocean, in a deep, dark trench, I sat at the edge of a cliff, my tail dangling over, and asked these questions. And then, as easy as it is for me to sense an ocean current as it rubs against a continent to the North or to the South, I let my awareness drift. I found myself in the body of a woman sitting in a bath in ancient Rome.

She had dozed off and was in deep, dreamless sleep. Though her mind was turned off, there was still plenty of awareness to be found. I felt the moisture on her body, the open pours of her skin, her heartbeat, and the way her body leaned against the marble. I felt the mosaic tiles beneath her toes and heels.

I heard the sound of water dripping and felt the vapors forming where the heat from the water meets the cold air. There was the scent of skin, towels, linen, and crushed flower petals in the air. With the scent came pictures of flowers from gardens, fields, valleys, and mountains.

Her body, when asleep, was in a state of peace. There were no needs. The vibration of deep, dreamless sleep is almost exactly the same as the vibration of the ocean deep. Pressure and metabolic activity in the body are different, but there are water and salt and my consciousness can move between the sea and these almost without effort.

And then she woke up. She was not aware of me. Her brain waves retained unconscious vibrations for five minutes since waking up is a gradual process. Even so, it was obvious that this person was plagued with unhappiness. She felt shame, hatred, animosity, fear, repressed desires, and barely controlled passions. She was a disaster waiting to happen. In her self-loathing, she had declared war on herself.

If she could, she would have preferred one final battle--victory or defeat, winner take all. But her life offered no such opportunities, no definitive confrontations, no capacity to clarify her personal boundaries. She hated being dependent on anyone. She wanted freedom, freedom from need and freedom from society, and that was never going to happen.

Her mind began to speed up. She was thinking about the arrangements for a party and what she would have each servant do. She arose from the bath, dried off, and dressed.

I did not follow her long. I returned to the sea where there is indeed peace and freedom from need.

Three months later I came back. She was lying in bed on her back. She was content to remain in a void without consciousness, beyond thought or perception.

And so I opened her eyes and looked at the wall of the room and out through the window at the morning sky. The light was citrine and magenta with a hint of crimson and violet. I dropped my eyes down and looked at the man lying next to me.

He was still asleep. I entered his dream. He was talking to the captain of a ship in his fleet that sailed the Mediterranean Sea. He had far reaching commercial activities.

A storm had suddenly come down. Rain and surging bow waves, spray and lightning were all about. “Reef the sail. Steady! Hold the helm! Bear off. Ride the storm out,” he yelled at the captain in the dream. The ship was nearly lost.

I turned the dream off. The ship in my mind rode the storm out and now it was dawn and the winds were gentle. The mast unbroken, the sails were full.

………………………………………………………………………

Caelius Aurelius Luscus is a distinguished Roman senator. Skilled as a negotiator who works with men who feel fear, greed, and passions of every kind, with a glance into someone’s eyes Caelius can often read the other’s mind. For him, desire is a function of situation, personal history, expectation, dreams, and market conditions. If survival is not an issue, then the rules are fairly simple: you enter the other’s thoughts and look around until you find something to trade that is of equal and fair value.

But at this moment, as Caelius gazes into what should have been his wife’s eyes, he is overwhelmed. He forgets the fact that this is his wife who hates him, her life, and everything else. Instead, in this moment, as if ensorcelled by some vision, he falls into another dream--he is on a beach at twilight cooking a fish he just caught. And across from him sits a woman. It is his wife’s body, but it is a different soul inside. And then he falls asleep again.

That evening, Caelius sits on a balcony of his villa. And as the moon rises, he writes these words about that moment he shared with an unknown woman who gazed at him from the eyes of his wife’s body.

I remember the sea and how she came to me

Like a wave breaking on the beach,

The water reaching and then receding,

Soft, slippery, and tender, caressing my fingers

And then slipping back

Intimate yet detached

Like images on surface of a mirror

Receptive, responsive, enfolding

A man lost at sea, found by an island

Crawls upon the sand

He faints from exhaustion

Waking, he finds a peach in his hands

To taste, to eat

Her eyes deliver me from my pain

When I gaze into them

Every single time.

Caelius, though an excellent judge of men, is not lucky with love. As you must realize by now, fortune does not always smile upon him. So when a moment of tenderness appears, like a flower blossoming in a desert, he knows how to cherish the gift when it is given, no matter how fleeting.

It happens again a few days later. His wife is brushing her hair as she looks into a mirror. Caelius enters the room. She puts the brush down. She turns and looks at him.

The wife is gone. It is a different woman, the woman who changes dreams, who takes away pain, and who inspires poetry. Caelius turns and leaves the room quickly in order to hide his tears.

Later that same day Caelius made haste to depart for the Senate. There has been some commotion. An issue has to be resolved and Caelius is often called upon to find a solution.

His friend, Marcius Quaratus, has rushed to the villa. Sweat is on his brow and his breathing is still rapid.

“We vote him the title of Princeps and what does Tiberius do? He refuses! What is our next move?” Marcus asks irritated, feeling the emperor has made the Senate look like fools.

“I’m coming. Storms often blow themselves out soon enough,” replies Caelius.

As he is about to leave, his wife approaches him. With a voice Caelius has not heard her use before, she says, “There is danger here. The senators feel they must act. The emperor will be more receptive in a few weeks. Wait until then to discuss options.”

She then kisses him on the cheek as he leaves. This is clearly not his wife, Caelius thinks. What spirit strives to possess her? he asks himself. But matters of state push themselves to the forefront of his mind this day.

Several days later, Caelius ponders his problem. Not one to wait when action is required, he does what anyone in a position of power does when important issues must be weighed. He consults with a professional in order to understand what can be done.

There is a seer, a wise man who is gifted with prophecy. The seer has no association with any cult, temple, or deity, though he is from a family line of soothsayers, augurs, and astrologers. He lives by himself in his own villa attached to a large farm outside Rome. The fact that he had his own estate is testimony to the services he provides the wealthy. Though Caelius has had several referrals in the past to this seer, the seer is not well known. It is as if this wise man and free lance prophet prefers to live quietly and without recognition. The man is a contradiction.

Caelius visits him one evening and explains his problem, namely, that he thinks his wife might be experiencing some sort of spirit possession. The man looks at Caelius and senses that Caelius is holding back. The seer then asks, “The first time this other woman appeared in your wife, what happened?”

Caelius explains about how his dream had changed as he opened his eyes and looked into hers. “Anything else?” the seer goes on.

“That same night I wrote a poem,” answers Caelius. “Quote me this poem,” the seer says stroking his chin, looking up, and closing his eyes as he prepares to listen.

After hearing the poem, the seer reflects as if recalling myths from long ago, “This is not without precedent. The second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, had Egeria, a nymph of fountains and flowers as his consort and advisor.

“You will need to go to the temple of Apollo, the one erected by Augustus on Palatine Hill. Apollo had trouble with water nymphs. Don’t you see, he sent a muse who inspired your poem.

“You will need someone to speak on your behalf. Apollo is Cicero among the gods. Daphne escaped Apollo by praying to her father, a river god, and Castalia fled also blending into a spring of water at Delphi. The priests of Apollo will aid you in order to placate their god; Apollo would like to see a man win a nymph, especially this one who gives her love willingly.

“Wait. I take it back. Everything you do from this moment must remain hidden. We dare not involve more than one other. Forget about the temple of Apollo.

“I know the high priest of the temple of Jupiter. He will suffice. Your situation requires the highest authorization, the right words spoken, and the intent confirmed through ritual transaction.”

“I don’t follow you,” Caelius’ responds. “What is all this about temples and rituals?”

“Oh, yes of course. You, a man who knows the Mediterranean Sea like the back of your hand, you are not familiar with these other things of the sea. For reasons beyond human understanding, a water spirit most profound has taken an interest in you. I’ll say it again: this is no ordinary water nymph being chased by a god in some story by the Greeks.

“She also has two sisters who walk among us, having joined their souls with humanity. Now she prepares to come over as well.

“Love is the bridge. Both realms must agree. On her side, she is free. But for her to stay, to play it safe so the love you give does not fade, she too must be brought over.”

“The two of you must swear an oath at the temple of Jupiter on Capitoline Hill using the Iuppiter Lapis, the Jupiter stone. There are a few daily rituals to be followed. But the priest will assist you with the details. What is important is that you do not hurry—go with the flow.”

“What about my wife?” asks Caelius. The seer replies, “I will not speak on this matter other than to say, wait a year or so. She has her own fate and will not stand in the way.

The seer goes on. “I must insist again, do not tell anyone else about any of this. And do not consult with the priests of Neptune. I know it seems obvious that the god of the sea should be your primary focus. But his priests will question the propriety of your actions just to be annoying. The sea is not losing anything here. The gift has already been offered. It is up to you and to humanity too to receive what is given wholeheartedly and without reservation.”

“I have not contemplated any of this,” replies Caelius. “Speak simply—what are the options in the case of spirit possession?”

The seer waits patiently a few moments staring calmly into Caelius’ eyes. He then says, “This is not a spirit possession unless you are ready to say that those who love are slaves. You are on the verge of sharing a love that appears only once or twice in each century.

“You have three options. Do nothing and you risk losing this creature of nature imbued with divine grace. In any moment without explanation she may return to the sea. I, dear friend, am no Orpheus with the power to enter another realm and have a spirit follow behind me as I return to our world. If you lose her, she is gone forever.

“Second, if you desire her, there are ways to entice her to remain. You may give and receive pleasure. You may share love. But when either of you dies the love will only be a memory, like a dream, that fades away. She returns to her realm beyond human reach.

“Third, you are free to invest her with a human soul like your own. In this case, she will be bonded to humanity. The love you share in this life will remain part of your soul forever. Not only that. She is a gift from the sea to humanity. A new love shall take root on earth. It shall grow and flourish down through the centuries.

“No one can tell you what to do. An empire is founded and maintained by power. But the choice you make can only be guided by the love in your heart. But if I were you, I would look at the poem you wrote.”

“Is that everything?” Caelius asks.

The seer says nothing.

“Is there something you are not telling me?” Caelius restates the question.

“Because of my vows, I must answer when a serious question with good intentions is put to me. But you must refrain from sharing this discussion with anyone.

“As we speak, in the East a great world teacher has appeared; he promotes a new religion of love. Yet even he who embodies the light of heaven is not permitted to share with humanity the love you taste. In a distant future, these things shall be spoken of openly. But for now silence must reign.”

Over the next year, from time to time the mermaid would appear even as his wife disappeared. Was his wife aware? When she was not being mean to servants, drinking too much, or shopping for some next mosaic, Greek vase, Egyptian goblet, or some other work of craft or art, she did notice the way Caelius was alert around her. He was differential, as if whatever she did it no longer bothered him. In her presence, even when she spoke with a tongue of poison, he was patient and tolerant.

She let it go by. His comings and going were of no real interest to her. Affairs of the state were only good for gossip and entertainment as far as she was concerned. And she always felt distaste that her husband was involved with the commercial activities of shipping and trading. Such interests brought her no social status.

One night late after a party had ended his wife was in the kitchen intoxicated and screaming at the cooks. Glasses and plates were thrown against walls and floors. And then she came out, sat on a couch, fell over, and was asleep.

Caeleus lets out a sigh and walks out into the hall. The next thing that happens is that the mermaid’s hand has taken his as she whispers into his ear, “Come with me.”

She leads him out into the gardens of the villa. Like other patricians’ estates, he has paths among trees and a fountain with flowing water. Holding his hand, she smiles as she steps into the fountain and draws him to sit down beside her in the pool. Ripples from the falling water curl around their waists.

She then slips his toga off of his shoulders and arms. She does the same with his tunic underneath. Then very gently with her fingertips she begins stroking his upper arm and chest. The touch of her fingers are as soft as a feather, barely moving during the length of a breath.

After ten minutes of this she says, “I know you like this.”

Caelius replies, “My body loves it but my mind is perplexed. What are doing? It is neither a massage nor is it a caress.”

She replies, “The skin is a second body with its own language. The muscles say, ‘Release my tension so I can relax and feel happy.’ But the skin says, ‘Touch creates love and the feeling of connection.’

“Touch such as this is heart to heart and soul to soul. It is love without being possessive. It is being sheltered by another’s heart. But you must look for it, otherwise it remains unseen, the words spoken unheard.”

Caelius then slips her stola off as well. For the next hour they sit in the bubbly water softly caressing each other. With only the faint light of the moon reflected off of the garden walls and through the trees, you would have had to look very carefully to determine if two people were sitting in the pool or two statutes frozen in an embrace.

A year later, Caelius’ wife falls sleep while taking a bath after a heavy bout of drinking. She slips down into the bath, wakes up briefly, looks up at the surface of the bath, and struggles to stand up. But then she decides, as if all of this is happening to someone else, that the effort is not worth making and she drowns.

A moment later the mermaid steps out of the bath. She dries off, dresses, and goes to assume her new duties as the wife of the senator. Having found the body of the wife abandoned, she brought it back to life. Whether she remains now depends on Caelius.

Though the mermaid had sometimes fallen asleep with Caelius, she was never there in the morning. Other than the first time, it was always the wife who wakes up next to him. The next morning is different.

When she opens her eyes, Caelius looks into them and asks, “Are you here to stay?”

The mermaid replies, “As long as you want.”

Caelius, following the seer’s instructions, makes an appointment with the head priest of the temple of Jupiter whose first name is Lucius.

The temple of Jupiter is the foremost temple in Rome. The head priest, accordingly, is a member of the ruling families, highly educated, and well-trained in religious doctrines and practices. An astute observer of human behavior, he knows the activities of Rome and follows significant events occurring across the empire.

The priest is also a man of power. Though he rarely acts outside of the boundaries defined by traditional rituals, in a pinch he know that rituals have to adapt to changes in power as a town has to adapt to changes in a course of a river.

Previously, the seer informed Lucius about Caelius’ situation. Lucius considered the problem complex but not beyond the range of his power. The temple contained in its archives the spiritual history of Rome. There had been many unusual requests and rituals performed over the last few hundred years. Some were equal in magnitude to this one.

Lucius explains to Caelius that the main difficulty is that this is not a problem that can be resolved by performing a ritual. The resolution requires a special bond be created between Caelius and the mermaid.

Caelius is not an initiate of the mysteries so this stands against him. On the other hand, Caelius has a highly skilled mind and an imagination that he uses to weigh every option in a crisis. In any situation, he knows how to negotiate and how to formulate a fair exchange.

There are times when experience with life outweighs the significance of religious observance and knowledge of the inner planes. As Lucius sees it, Caelius can act as his own priest to intercede with the divine.

Lucius, however, designs several customized rituals for Caelius and the mermaid to engage in during the new and the full moon each month. He also has Caelius construct an outdoor bath with gods and goddesses placed into the mosaic representing the four elements of nature—earth, air, fire, and water. These elements can be drawn down into the bath, invoked or evoked, to accomplish what is needed.

The real problem lies with the fifth element of spirit. This will have to be transmitted directly from the soul of Caelius to the mermaid. Just before dawn, whenever Caelius is at home, he is to sit in the bath with the mermaid before the sun rises.

The priest explains to Caelius, “It is not the light itself but the spirit you put into the light that makes the ritual effective.”

Caelius asks, “How do I place into light the power of boundless spirit?”

Realizing a Muse will have to assist in the process, Lucius writes for Caelius a short petition to the divine which he is to speak aloud. The words call out to the light of heaven and also speak to the heart of the mermaid. They are to be spoken just as the first rays of dawn touch their skin:

From darkness light

Behold the sun upon the horizon

As its rays draw near

Witness love’s transformations

The child’s first breath

The lover’s first kiss

The seed within the earth awakens

Rising

Unfolding

Until the flower blossoms

By the power of love

The two of us are one

Neither life nor death

Shall separate us

What I am is now part of you

Equally as what is within you

Is now part of me.

Over the course of the next decade, Caelius and the mermaid meet many times before dawn waiting for the sun’s light as they perform their ritual. During this time, the mermaid residing inside of this woman’s body never fades. Instead, the mermaid acquires new abilities to enhance the soul she already possesses.

There are other interactions of a magical nature that occurs between the two of them. When Caelius has time, he sits with her for an hour each day without moving. Sometimes they sit next to each other at his villa overlooking the sea. Sometimes they face each other holding hands. During this time of quiet repose, he feels free. Nothing else in the world matters. Time dissolves.

All the same, he can feel her aura as it gently surrounds him, taking hold like a mist that flows down a valley or a fog that rolls in from the sea. He feels her around him and gradually she flows into and through him.

If tenderness can take the shape of moist air, cool and refreshing, gentle and embracing, then her aura is tenderness similar in sensation, caressing him from within. The temperature around him drops five degrees. There is no chill.

After sitting in her aura, he feels he can see the entire Mediterranean Sea before him. He can tell how each of his ships is doing, its progress and the weather around and before it. But he can not communicate with the captains or give them directions or warnings.

It is the oddest feeling, he thinks—he feels like he can sense the waves moving in their myriads of patterns across the Mediterranean: The huge waves rolling with storms; the cliffs where these waves break; waves continuing to roll on a thousand miles after the storm is gone; waves caught off guard with white caps new born struggling to rise as a storm crashes down; the gentle waves circling in a bay; the ordered waves of a steady wind and the crisscrossing waves among the islands of the Aegean Sea. In some places, the waves are wild and in other places the sea is calm. In a few places, the sea is a mirror where barely a ripple appears.

He knows it is heresy, but in truth he feels at such times that he has been transmuted into the god Neptune. He watches over the oceans from a state of great peace. The storms and waves obey his will. The sea is his servant, like a bride who yearns in her heart to please and to unite. These are feeling that do not belong to mortals but only to gods.

And so one day without violating the specific directions of the seer, Caelius stops by the temple of Neptune. One of two in Rome, this is the Basilica Neptuni, dedicated by Agrippa in celebration of the naval victory at Actium. The temple stands on the area of Rome referred to as the Campus Martius.

Caelius quickly attains an audience with the highest ranking priest. After preliminary greetings and honorifics are exchanged, after a donation that the priest finds to be quite interesting, the priest asks, “Senator, you have a question or a petition?”

Caelius replies, “You understand, I have ships at sea all seasons of the year. Your temple is obviously of great importance to my work. But my question is more of a personal nature. If you could speak informally to me about a question that has captured my imagination?

“Humm. Then I’ll take off my robe if you do not mind. Would you like some wine?” Asks the priest.

“Yes. Thank you,” replies Caelius.

“Go ahead, then, what is your question?” asks the priest settling down onto a couch.

Caelius asks, “Other than the normal responsibilities that accrue to a god who rules a kingdom, what activities occupy Neptune’s time? What does he do during the day?”

“A day in the life of the god Neptune?” The priests laughs wholeheartedly. “Wouldn’t you prefer a poet or story teller?” he asks rhetorically.

“As priests we perform rituals, sacrifices, libations, ceremonies, and we preside over festivals. In brief, we give something to the gods and they give something back in exchange. Honor and respect are common currency in all realms mortal and divine, as Odysseus learned the hard way.

“When a supplicant is desperate, I sometimes recommend that he cut himself and place a small vial of his own blood on the altar. Then he prays and meditates. And finally he takes his blood back and anoints himself with it.

“Having mingled his blood with the inspiration of the god, the same life force and vitality flows through each. And so insight arises naturally from sacrifice and spiritual union. In this case, the life force in the blood is the medium of exchange.

“But this example does not apply to you. You want my expertise, the insight I possess as Neptune’s priest. What you ask is most curious. I would never have thought to ask this question myself.

“To answer you, What does the god Neptune do? The questions leads to other questions: Can a mortal ever understand the mind of a deity? Do a god’s actions known or unknown ever reveal what he can do if he were to choose something new?”

Waving his palm from left to right in front of the face of Caelius, the priest says, “Give me a moment. What I now do is not forbidden yet it is not part of our religion. I shall put aside my mortality and my guise as a priest. I shall imagine that I have become Neptune. Now then, what am I doing right now?” the priest asks himself as he falls into a trance.

“With a simple glance, I can see into the waters’ depths—every fish and sunken ship, the hills and valleys, the caves and mountains that become islands—all of this I can easily survey. The storms, should I ignore them, go their own way. But should I choose the storm clouds can express my rage and the peaceful sea my tranquility.

“When I take my ease, the wind is my consort at night and during all hours of the day as she caresses the seas that are for her my body, forming waves upon waves. She is one with me and knows my ways. And when it rains the rain is my moist fluids nurturing the earth, satisfying thirst and the desires of fields and flesh. I am water in the springs and lakes and rivers—they are my bloodstream. Lightning is my heartbeat. In all seasons of the year, whether you see it or not, I am always near.

“The outer forms of nature cloak and conceal yet also reflect and reveal my innermost essence: I am the lord of water, salt or fresh. Its mysteries and treasures are mine to possess or to protect. I have an interest in horses, it is true. But the nature of my being is to nurture and to dream.

“Though I helped found Delphi, what is not well known about me is that I have a gift for prophecy. Like water, I nurture the seeds of the future. All that shall be passes through me. In the depths of my heart are found the sites and sounds of civilizations long gone and of civilizations unknown that belong to the far future. You see, I get around.

“The time displayed on your calendar is by necessity an illusion. It keeps you busy and engaged in productive activities. But for me, the moment ‘now’ encompasses the past, present, and future. It may appear that on occasion I doze off and lose interest in military campaigns, noble deeds, which emperor sits on the throne, and whether his borders are sound. But I assure you, when I relax my awareness increases geometrically.

“People may think of me only when their needs pertain to the sea. Yet the great men of your race, the heroes and explorers, your sages and seers, have yet to chart the open spaces of my heart.”

And then the priest chants in a deep, resonate voice completely unlike his own. There is a hint present, a faint intonation reminiscent of thunder pounding a distant horizon:

There are those among you who dream my dreams.

Listen carefully. These are my children:

They feel what others’ feel

They have the power to heal

When they love

They neither take nor possess

For like me,

They are one with the sky and the sea--

The waters of the earth flow through their souls

Each moment is both sensual and divine

And their vision transcends the limitations of time.

There are a few moments while the priest is silent. Then, opening his eyes, he looks at Caelius with a spontaneous smile lighting up his face and asks in his normal voice, “How was that? Have I answered your question?”

“Yes,” replies Caelius.

The priest goes on, “Good. I am glad. Perhaps you might send me your best recollection of what I just said. The reason I ask this is because when I speak like that imagining myself beyond human form I can never recall what I say. It is most annoying. In order to speak from another place, my memory is the sacrifice.”

“I will write down what you have said and send it to you this very day,” replies Caelius. And this Caelius does.

One evening, in the fall of AD 30, Caelius steps into his bedroom. There the mermaid stands naked, her silhouette outlined by the rising moon. She turns to him, taking his hands into hers. She says, “Do not align your self with Sejanus or the house of Julii. The emperor will turn against them. In my dreams, I see many bodies being thrown into the River Tiber.”

“How do you know these things?” Caelius asks.

She says, “I can sense the soul of anyone on earth. Sejanus is like a cat ready to pounce on a mouse—he is all predator, tight, vicious, with claws extended.”

“And how do I avoid becoming his prey if I refuse to support him?” asks Caelius now grasping her upper arms as her arms circle his waist.

She responds, “It is my nature to affirm life and not to harm so I do not involve myself in the affairs of state. But I will protect this family. If Sejanus even thinks your name I will erase the thought from his memory.”

Caelius looks at her. He sees the moonlight luminous in her hair. He wants to kiss her lips and feel her body against his. He wants to sit with her quietly as they do every day when he is with her, to feel time dissolve and the worries of this world fade away.

Her body has the scent of orchards and the flowers of spring. He kisses her lips, feels her response, and feels deep inside that their bodies are already joined.

To touch her skin is to find new kingdoms of the heart waiting to be explored. But in her eyes he sees great waves from the sea ready to flood the world if need be in order to preserve the things she loves.

He says to her, “It is best to not send a fleet to sea in winter. The winds can be dangerous.

He goes on, “You alone can understand my prophecy and how long it will take before it is fulfilled: one day a few men and women will use your power to establish peace on earth so war is no more. They shall do this without destroying or taking away but by turning malice into nobility. Wars will be fought not on land or sea but in the heart. And in that day no one will seek to cross swords with those hearts are as deep as the sea.”

In the Spring of AD 31, Caelius is summoned to meet with Tiberius at the emperor’s retreat, Villa Jovis at Capri. When Caelius walks into to the emperor’s hall, Tiberius is laughing where he sits at a table on the balcony. The emperor is reading a second time Caelius’ summary of the priest’s channeling of the god Neptune. The head priest of the temple of Neptune had taken it upon himself to give the transcript a title—A Day in the Life of the god Neptune.

Tiberius stands up gesturing wildly at the sea and says, “I wonder, will anyone ever write A Day in the Life of Tiberius Caesar Augustus?

“I do not see into the depths of the sea. I have no winds that comfort me. I have no knowledge of the far past or the distant future. What I do see is my own civilization destroying itself. I am sure many other civilizations will destroy themselves in the future just as easily; no warning I could send could postpone those events by even a day. My senators are the same. There is no wisdom in them.

“What is my day like? I mope. I rant. I rage. I grieve. I sleep poorly. I have indigestion. I drink excessively. Some accuse me of debauchery. And I worry about betrayal by my consul Sejanus and his supporters.

“I am no god. But here is true delight--that one man is curious enough to ask what a god does with his spare time. If the gods have not struck you down for your hubris, then, like me, they must delight in your uninhibited curiosity.”

Caelius replies, “I had no desire to offend.”

“On the contrary,” replies Tiberius waving the paper in his hands, “Your concept is pure creativity—you put a god on display to entertain.”

Tiberius sits down suddenly. He points his index finger at Caelius’ face and speaks slower and with suppressed rage, “You know, if it were not for you, I would have ordered the execution of the entire Senate. In my night, even a dim light appears bright. I know who you are. And so I ask you, What do you do when you lose as much as I have?

Caelius says, “What is lost shall be found. It shall come again unexpectedly, in a new form.”

Tiberius: “Spoken like a sailor who trusts the winds, tides, and the sea to bring him safely home. No one ventures into the unknown without trust or faith. In spite of my pain—you continue to believe a new day will dawn with hope reborn.

“I have lost my faith. But you Caelius Luscus are touched by the hand of the gods. Some benevolence hidden within nature holds you in its embrace. Even an inferior emperor such as I notices these things. I would make you tribune except I like you just as you are. In this way I will know that at least one person in the empire has peace within his soul. I find that concept comforting.”

With a bleak look, Tiberius waves Caelius away with his hand and then leans his chin on his palm. This strange encounter with the emperor over, Caelius returns to his villa in Rome.

Caelius and the mermaid survive the coming purge lead by Sejanus and the one that follows initiated by the Emperor in response.

Twelve Traits of Undine Women

Introduction

There are a few women who were once mermaids in other life times. They have since then acquired human souls under various circumstances and now incarnate as human beings.

There are also women who have no connections to the realm of mermaids. But they have the auras of mermaids. They reflect in themselves some aspect of water in nature—a waterfall, some quality of the sea, a lake, a stream, etc. In my article on Mermaid-Human Interactions (next chapter), I mention that about one in four thousand women have the auras of mermaids—the element of water is the dominant quality in their auras.

For the human race to survive, to overcome its immense proclivity for self-destruction, about one in ten women will need to reflect the aura of mermaids—the waters of nature--within themselves. Should humanity fail in this endeavor, our power over nature will reach a point where on a subconscious level human beings will no longer care if they live or die. They will engage in social and technological experiments that put their survival at risk.

Women who were once mermaids and women with strong water in their auras tend to share certain traits in common. These traits or qualities may vary in strength and intensity. An individual woman may have all of them but usually she will have enough of these traits to distinguish her from other women.

There are of course women who have psychic contact with the realm of mermaids—they see them, talk to them, feel them, etc. For myself, I can interview spirits quite easily. This however does not mean I embody any of their qualities within myself. It often takes a great effort to change one’s own nature. My writings are designed to make the realm of mermaids and undines more accessible to our world.

1. Undine women feel they are a part of nature in some way. They have a non-human identity. Some aspect or element of nature is alive within them and that is who they sense they really are.

Among other things, this allows them to accept the world as it is.

Some perceive the world as being richly satisfying and fulfilling. And yet this evaluation is not based on the extent to which their personal needs are being satisfied.

They are not greedy. They are not driven to possess whatever they can in order to insure their own security. They intuitively experience themselves as already part of the richness of life. They experience the abundant energies of life flowing directly through their own bodies.

One factor contributing to this outlook is that they usually have excellent childhood memories. They can frequently recall childhood dreams, dreams which still influence them as they consider their goals in life. They often have had spiritual experiences when they were very young, but they do not view these dreams and experiences as somehow removed from the adult they have become. Rather, they see them as seeds which are in the process of growing into fruition.

Additionally as children, they may give away anything valuable they have to others. They have a hard time understanding about owning something as their own. In other words, for them having a valuable object does not make you more valuable.

2. They have an emotional detachment from other people, no matter how strong the relationships or how involved they are with others. They feel they are observing life from a distance. For them, human beings do not carry the same emotional force they feel inside themselves. Consequently, bonding in normal human terms of relying upon, needing, or depending on another is not of major significance to them.

They don’t get sad or feel sorrow or loss. On some level, because they identify with water, they sense that love, like water is never lost. It just changes form. Love is everywhere and not a function of relationships; it is independent.

3. Even though they are detached socially, they can easily feel one with another person. They can feel that the life inside of another person is alive inside of them as well. For them, it is natural to give and to nourish the life inside another person, to treat it with respect and care.

In some cases, this leads to great empathy because they actually can sense what is going on inside of another person, even when the other is not present.

4. For many undine women, time in the outer world is not real. It does not exist. The present does not proceed from the past and move into the future. Rather, the past, present, and future are simultaneously together within the same landscape of time.

In this landscape, the events of my life are already interconnected and interwoven. There is a continuity and naturalness to life. Life unfolds from an inexhaustible, inner source. If I lose something important to me at one point in my life, it can be found again later during another stage.

Another person put it this way: “Well-being, for me, is a sense of timelessness--no outside goals or explanations are needed to justify how I experience things in the present. Nothing needs to be connected to the present moment of perception. I am absolutely in my own timeless space when I paint, garden, or hang out with my partner. This comes through to me as a feeling. I do not have to think when I am just doing and experiencing things.”

For these individuals, even relationships do not really end. What is begun in one relationship can be carried on and fulfilled in another relationship. They frequently say that they enjoy many people and that it is hard to choose someone to marry: They find it naturally interesting to be around all kinds of people. If the relationship comes to an end, they are often very generous and compassionate in talking about their former partner.

Undine women may feel that they have always felt the same inside of themselves their entire life regardless of how old they are: “When I was four I didn’t feel any different than I feel now. I feel like you could take me and put me into that little four year old body and it is still me. And I know that I will feel the same when I am older.”

In brief, they have a sense of time that is completely open. They are not running out of time. They are not rushing through time to get someplace. They may comment, “Time for me is not like it is for other people who say that they have so many hours and have to get so much done.” Consequently, they do not define their self worth in terms of what they accomplish or the goals they pursue.

Looking back on their experience, they see that the course of their lives was in no way predictable, and yet they also feel that whatever has happened to them has happened for a reason.

5. They often feel that other people are drained of life, as if they are not fully alive. It is like others’ life force batteries are always running in the red. There is no surge of energy flowing through them. They have heartbeats but the heartbeat of nature is not beating within them.

For example, undine women can have a meaningful, intimate, satisfying, and passionate relationship with another person. The other person meets their personal needs.

But if they looked carefully at the other independent of their personal needs, the other person is like a piece of driftwood thrown up on the shore: the person can be beautiful, artful, majestic, and fascinating, but he is still like the driftwood—out of touch with life. How do you share with someone who can not feel as you feel the beauty of the sky and ecstasy in the waves breaking on the shore?

In normal relationships, partners may get bored or feel a relationship is no longer satisfying for some reason and then move on. But for undine women, all men are inevitably unsatisfying. The men never feel the life that is so alive within the undine woman. Consequently, men are incapable of returning the same kind and degree of affection and empathy. In spite of this imbalance, undine women continue to be giving to whoever they are with.

6. Undine women do not feel alienation or isolation. They are quite content and enjoy feeling independent. They feel like they are from a time or a place where people feel less needy, dependent, and clingy.

Though empathic—able to feel what others feel--they still have a very hard time understanding why women do not know how to be as receptive as and to flow like water. They do not understand why women who are hurt by someone would want to hurt the other person in return. The idea of being revengeful, vindictive, hateful, or negative totally escapes them. These are alien concepts.

Women, like humanity itself, are like prisoners on a prison island who have no escape plan. They are desperate. Though surrounded by a sea of love, they simply do not sense their inner connections—the sea is not alive within them.

Women sometimes sense that undine women are different—more loving, free, easy going, and naturally affectionate. Consequently, some undine women have had bad experiences in which women have back stabbed them or been jealous for no reason.

7. Undine women do not have goals in the normal sense. They feel that the important things in life will come of their own accord. When opportunities do arrive, they respond and participate fully, becoming involved. But then they are also ready to move on. Experience is not something you accumulate and possess. It is something that flows through you.

8. They are not attached to their physical body. The body is like the shores of a river. It is important in that it is what guides the flow of water. But the shores have little importance when the river is no longer present. Therefore, death has little fear for them:

“I was thinking today about funerals. I never understood the attachment humans have with these dead vehicles (bodies). I feel the departed’s soul and see them and try to encourage them to celebrate their new journey.”

Death is not to be feared or even of major importance. It is merely a transition. “Death does not have the significance for me that it has for other people. It is not that important,” said another undine woman.

If the water of life flows strong, then what is happening is right. If the waters of life flow weak, then something is wrong. This is their morality in its best sense. They understand that lust is essential for love, that lust and love are entwined and perfectly natural.

If what you are doing makes you feel alive, then it is right. If what you are doing makes you feel weak, then it is wrong. This principle defines the sacred. In practice, however, it is not necessarily any easier for them to find which way to flow. Life is as complex for a mermaid woman as for anyone else. But they usually sense before others when it is time for a change.

An additional factor is that they are uninhibited when it comes to sexuality or nudity. They do not like to wear bathing suits when they enter the water.

9. They feel a compulsion to heal and to nurture the people around them, even at their own expense. They do what they can to help others feel happy, content, satisfied, and gratified. They do this because they sense that this is what life is all about. Sometimes they are told they are the most loving person the other person has ever met.

But being loving in no way implies that they feel a debt to someone when it is time to move on or to let go. Giving does not imply attachment. They are not codependent. And again, though very loving as mothers, they do not feel attached to their children. They simply do not comprehend the idea of being possessive or controlling or needing to determine the course of another’s life.

All the same, they may be aware that others unconsciously may act as emotional vampires, trying to take the energy the undine women seem to be willing to give in excess. It is easy, then, for them to feel drained while at the same time those around them or their families are full of life and changed up.

10. Because they are giving, highly empathic, and receptive, they are usually active in some psychic way. For example, they may interact consciously with others while dreaming; they may change the energy in the people around them; they may sense or send energy to people at a distance; they may be good at reading other people or sensing what others are like inside.

All of which is to say they perform some regular set of psychic activities without having to even think about it. It is just something natural that they do.

11. They tend to be very secretive or shy about talking to others about what they sense and feel. Their acute receptivity makes them different and it makes them vulnerable. How do you explain to other people what is so utterly natural and right—being able to feel others’ emotions or sense their energy?

12. And finally, they have a heightened appreciation for the senses of taste, smell, and touch. Some of them who are active on the astral plane realize that taste and smell are very special sensations that are in no way as strong on the inner planes. These senses are more real in the physical world than in the realm of mermaids. Consequently, they are often exploring new tastes and smells, appreciative of them while they still have them.

The Race that Replaces Human Beings

Note: This essay is experimental. It is subject to change or revision at any moment without explanation. As I do more extended interviews with individuals, a clearer picture will emerge.

It not possible to do psychic research, to channel or to telepathically communicate with spirits or “ascended masters,” without unconsciously promoting various concepts and preconceptions. In other words, things get lost in translation.

However, I strive to put my preconceptions on the table for everyone to look at: I am writing fairy tales. I want the human race to survive. I want the human race to learn its deepest lessons while we still have a chance to do so. For me, survival is never guaranteed and it is the height of folly to take it for granted.

Now then, let us proceed.

Franz Bardon, toward the end of his book, The Practice of Magical Evocation, casually mentions that another race will one day occupy the earth, after human beings are gone. This brief reference is under the section called Uranus and Pluto.

In context, Bardon is describing how the spirits associated with the spiritual aura of Pluto do not at present have any connection to our planet. He says that over the course of time a connection between Pluto and earth will be made. But he says basically “Don’t worry about it because we (the human race) will be long gone before that happens.”

He mentions a time frame for this event: the Second Day of Brahma. The text is:

“Beyond this there exists another sphere, the Pluto sphere; but the magician, in his present state of development, cannot profit anything from that sphere, for it will have no effect on the zone girdling our earth before the so-called Second Day of Brahma, the next cycle of evolution. The surface of our earth will then be inhabited by quite a different race of people, who will have a different skin color and different laws from ours.

A Day of Brahma can be around four billion years or roughly the present age of our sun. According to some, we are not yet half way through the current day of Brahma. In other words, there is another 2 billion years before the next day of Brahma. There are, of course, other interpretations involving far shorter time periods.

The spirits of Pluto are huge beings of pure power. For them to connect to the earth may not be so much a when as much as a how it will happen. In other words, if another race far more powerful and integrated than human beings were to be here on earth then the aura of Pluto could connect through them to our planet.

In this quality of soul interpretation rather than quantity of time interpretation, if and when a sufficiently spiritually advanced race appears on earth the Second Day of Brahma would kick in and Pluto and the earth would assume, spiritually speaking, diplomatic relations.

Since I write fairy tales, I am free to take liberties; my stories focus on matters of the heart, that is, on the choices we make and how we make them.

A scientist will describe the Periodic Table separating elements by atomic weight, numbers of protons, and variations such as isotopes. The scientist will split the atom making possible a nuclear weapon. But the scientist is absolutely brain dead when it comes to the choices human beings face in regard to how to use these weapons. The Periodic Table, mathematical physics, and science have no conception as to how to make choices in life or regarding life.

In my fairy tales, I focus in exactly on what is required in order to make wise choices in life. I have very specific plans for the human race in regard to its destiny and the requirements, not for distinguishing the qualities of the elements, but for attaining peace and freedom. As I sometimes mention, the fairies I describe are not less powerful than scientists. They are more powerful and more knowledgeable about nature than are we.

In context, it would appear that discussing the appearance of another race on earth that replaces human beings is not the genre of fairy tales. It is a different genre, namely, science fiction. However, in context, mermaids have a strong sense of the future.

Last week, I casually mentioned to a woman, who some consider to possess a mermaid’s soul, this topic of another race appearing on earth.

Her response was, “They are already here. I know one of them.”

This response caught my attention. I asked her to describe this individual. She said that he is an artist and that when he talks it was very hard to hear the words since he speaks so softly. But all the same she knew what he meant because it was like the words appeared in her mind.

As a spiritual anthropologist who also does psychic interviews, I went home and immediately tried to “tune into” the aura of the individual she mentioned as well as other members of this race. The members of this future race who are already here currently reside in human bodies.

At this time, the only difference is that their souls are quite distinct from the souls of human beings. In other words, currently their race does not reproduce itself through physical means. Rather, very gradually some of their souls are migrating from another planet and displacing human souls when they incarnate into a new born child.

The only similar example I can think of in science fiction involves the TV series, Babylon Five. In that TV plot, an alien race is about to wipe out the human race. But at the last moment they decide to surrender to humanity. The aliens realized that one of their great leaders had incarnated as a human being who had then become one of the human leaders. The soul had transmigrated from one species into the body of another species while retaining its qualities and powers, if not its memory.

My mermaid woman friend was not disturbed by the idea of another species appearing in the guise of human beings. She said, “I accept all life in whatever form it appears.” (Don’t you just love these mermaid type women?)

Furthermore, when I described to her the traits of this race she said, “You are describing the kind of consciousness I am trying to develop in myself.”

The most noticeable thing about this “alien” race is that they possess a laser like concentration. This is similar to a description I gave of a spirit of the sphere of Mars named Anator. This does not mean they use their powers of concentration as we would to focus our minds. Their concentration operates in an altogether different fashion.

The other remarkable quality is that the women have astral bodies similar to undine queens—feeling extends in and around them through a magnetic field of energy. This does not make them like undine queens. If a human woman had such an astral body she would be remarkable receptive, sensual, and profoundly loving. But again, this species uses that sensitivity in a different way than we would. At the same time, the few alien men I have studied all have close contacts with the undine realm.

The best I can make out is that their name for themselves is something like Breifupei. But for simplicity I call them Perseians after the Greek hero, Perseus, who slew Medusa by using the reflective power of a mirror. He overcame the “looks that kill” of pure terror that turns heroes to stone by using clarity of mind.

In another context, I mentioned how forty-nine advanced souls from the inner planes of Venus had incarnated on earth in the last fifty years to assist mankind. These spirits, however, failed miserably in their task. The earth has such a dense vibration that they were unable to express successfully the wisdom they possess regarding love and beauty.

By contrast, the Perseians are from the inner planes of the sphere of Jupiter. They are incredibly adaptable. And like I say, their minds are perfectly clear though again their clarity takes place on a level of awareness that human beings almost never enter.

Let us review a brief telepathic interview I did with one of these Perseians. By the way, there are at present 541 Perseian souls that have incarnated on earth. Part of the karma of incarnating is that they do not retain any memory of who they are. And they also at this time have not made contact with each other.

The normal human brain has strong personal needs. There is a strong desire to fit in. Personal history plays a significant role in shaping an individual’s identity. A human being can look at his circumstances and situations in life from his own point of view as it relates to his personal identity; and he can see the point of view of others in society. Whether he agrees or not with other people, he understands have different results impact the interests of different people.

And there is something left over. There is time for hobbies, spiritual pursuits, answering questions, curiosity, exploring by traveling or reading, etc. Individuals also have some concern and worry about the deeper issues of life that are not fully addressed by conventional explanations.

The Perseians, by contrast, use less brain energy and there is less mental activity than we have. In other words, you can not observe their higher level of concentration through a CAT scan or MRI.

When a human being relaxes, there is generally a focus on releasing stress and tension. There is a desire to feel good. When a Perseian relaxes, there is an automatic default neurological program that activates: it reviews the events of the last day, weeks, months, and years from something five different perspectives.

In other words, on what we would call a subconscious level, they are constantly processing their experience. They dream as do we but they do not need to dream to process their emotions.

One result is that they are more aware of the routines and behaviors of everyone around them than the individuals are aware of themselves.

Obama, for example, is not a Perseian. Obama’s gift is being able to address a large number of different people with different needs and perspectives and still speak in a way that asserts the most basic common interests and bottom line values for all those different people. Obviously, sometimes he is better at this than other times. And his gift does not make him wise in how to solve problems.

The Perseians, due to their mental powers, are far more integrated than we are. Their instinctual, emotional, feeling, thinking, contemplating, and goal oriented activities are all coordinated and interlinked. Feeling and desire are fully a part of thinking and well represented in their awareness.

Perseians do not have any conflict with the difference between themselves and normal human beings. This is because it is completely easy, effortless, to respond to each situation in a way appropriate to that situation. And this includes taking in other people’s points of views. They are not hiding anything. They are merely responding in a way that puts others at ease and which is within other human beings ability to understand and to perceive.

Since Perseians do not know they are not human, if you asked one of them about any difference between himself and other people you might not get much of an answer. In other words, part of the karma of incarnating is that you do not get to bring your memories from past lives with you. You do not have an “Owner’s Manual” sitting next to your crib waiting for you to learn to read so you can understand the best way to get on with your life.

Like anyone else, they start off life without a clue as to what the purpose of life is. Like others, they sit in a class at school. They listen to “authorities.” They get through the day in the best way they know how.

On the other hand, a mature, adult Perseian who was more experienced might say that he views the difference between his race and humans in this way: “Human beings actually believe they have an identity assigned to them by their social roles and personal history. They are like character actors on a stage who have forgotten that they are acting a part in a play.

“We would never make that mistake. Our identity is never shaped by our social roles or our personal history. It has nothing to do with what other people think of us. It has absolutely nothing to do with what we believe or accomplish.

“The main difference is that whereas human beings know their own weaknesses and then make no concerted effort to overcome them, the members of my race never fail to learn something new when it is there to be learned or to take advantage of an opportunity when it appears.

“We are constantly evolving. We have no fear of change. We are not attached to the past.

“If your species were to learn from us so that you do not become extinct, then it would learn this: get rid of your egos, your fear, and the way you drag your feet that causes you to fall into complacency.

“Learn to concentrate from a mind that is perfectly clear. Then learn to perceive precisely those things that offer you the greatest opportunity to take responsibility and capacity to adapting to change.

“Your race will become extinct because inevitably you will become stuck in a rut and then explode because the repressed instincts within you, the need to be whole, are at war with your conscious goals. Your awareness is in a narrow band when your attention should take in the glory of the universe surrounding you.

“I myself can hold in my awareness the writing and the rapture in the spiritual visions written by all the wise men of your race on this planet. And I tell you all of this magnificent wisdom and spiritual awareness is barely a beginning. You race has written the prelude to the book of wisdom. But you have no collective desire to get through the Introduction much less to read the First Chapter.”

I interviewed another Perseian telepathically. This Perseian’s mind is not as sharp as his racial capacity because he drinks too much. He likes to pretend he is a human being and hangs out with friends even though he knows he is not like those around him. It is a character flaw. Even this race has them.

He is on the board of director of a fairly large, but not international corporation. And he is on the economic council for his city. He has a wife and family within a gated community. Has access to a corporate jet once or twice a year. He collects antique boats. Absolutely everything about his behavior is circumspect, prudent, and conservative.

He only needs to sleep three or four hours a night. He does not need to dream. He has already processed all his emotional reactions. If one of his kids came down at 4 AM and saw him sitting in the living room reading, he would smile. He would talk about the child’s interests. He would be warm and encouraging. He is a successful, but relaxed kind of guy.

If you asked him and he felt free to respond: Are you a human being? He would reply, “I play golf. I see that those who play it with me consider it a passion and a great opportunity for relaxation.

“For me, golf is a set of clubs, a ball, a golf course with its grass, sand traps, and holes; You walk around, you talk, you hit a few balls, and that is all it is.

“People write books about this: they compare golf to the game of life, a strategy for succeeding and dealing with adversity. Human beings do not know what a game is. If you did, you would have colonies in other solar systems by now.

“You are slow to learn and as sure as I am talking to you now you will destroy yourself unless you learn to play by different rules.”

This individual has contact with many spiritual realms. Like I say, this is a telepathic interview. They are all good at telepathy when they need to be.

He is 37 years old and currently lives in Virginia.

Perseians can all change their brain waves to simulate others’ thoughts and so actually produce in their minds other’s thoughts and words. But this is not unique to them. Some human beings already have that neurological mutation and ability.

I ask him, “Tell me about your knowledge or interactions with mermaids.”

He replies, “I have a friend who is a mermaid. She is like a muse. She is more real to me than other human beings.

“Here, let me introduce you to her.” A mermaid appears right in front of me. The mermaid is very receptive and open. She connects instantly. She is warm, sweet, and bonds readily.

But what is unique about her are her eyes: she is like the sky at night with no moon. She reflects in herself the stars, their light, and the open empty vastness of outer space. The sea is a mirror in her heart that captures this vastness.

She says to me, “You are like him. He is more brilliant than you. But you possess a vastness his race can not comprehend. You have a longing more empty than the spaces between the stars. No wonder the undine queens like you.”

“And why is that?” I ask her.

She says, “Because you contain within your self with ease the depths of the sea.”

I ask, “And what does he do with you that human beings have not yet learned to do?”

She says, “He sits with me in quiet stillness beneath the stars at night. And together we listen to the silence and the starry distance. He listens with the heart of a Beethoven if Beethoven would ever imagine or dream of writing a symphony with no notes; rather, it would be fashioned from tranquility—and the feeling would be conveyed not through an orchestra but directly heart to heart.

“Come sit and meditate with us some time, the three of us shall be a little group. It would be nice, for a change, to have a human being around. I see so few of your race. They are busy with their jobs and have no time for contemplation or for feeling beauty. They prefer to worry.”

The Perseians would very much enjoy an individual such as the former Swami Rama. At the Menninger Institute, Swami Rama demonstrated his ability to stop his heart at will. He also at will could produce in his brain delta brain waves. These are the brain waves associated with deep, dreamless sleep.

All the same, Swami Rama could sustain an awareness while in delta of other brain functions that occur during theta, alpha, and beta brain wave activities. For example, he was more aware of what was spoken in the room by various scientists and could recall the conversations better than they could when the instruments showed he was in deep, dreamless sleep.

But the Perseians would feel Swami Rama lacked a clear sense of goals in life. Perseians, unlike human beings, do not suffer from a conflict between awareness that is focused on the inner world and that which is focused on the outer world.

A normal human being gives 98 % of his attention to the outer world. We have exceptions such as great yogis like Swami Rama who can focus his awareness down into the cellular level of his body and alter physiological functions. Perseians by contrast spend maybe 30 % of their awareness on the external world. And, like I say, they take in and review automatically external actions free of ego so that they have a much higher learning curve than we have.

The rest of their awareness engages directly the feeling, instinctual, physiological and archetypal levels of awareness. They are also or can easily connect to other spiritual realms. In other words, the outer world for them is just another level of consciousness they integrate into their awareness. They belong equally to other spiritual realms without being biased toward the physical one.

After my first discussion with the mermaid woman about this race, two days later I managed to meet and interview another Perseian, a woman. Let us just say “I was guided by the spirit” in the way I met her.

Typically, she has trouble using language to communicate. She was diagnosed when young as Special Ed due to acute ADD. The problem is that their brains are designed for a more subtle level of interaction than we use in our language and communication. They don’t quiet get it or fit in yet.

He task in this life is to learn to be herself: to develop an awareness of things around her without relying on thoughts or words to process them; this is operating again from a level of delta brain waves. It has its own kind of observation: it takes in everything going on without an ego identity or a locus of observation. There is no observer, just pure awareness.

I realize this description of a kind of awareness might be hard to grasp. If you can focus inward on your body and become pure awareness without ego attachment, then it becomes perfectly clear that consciousness can function without using language, thought, or the need to continually refer back to an identity which human beings are constantly doing.

In the interview with this woman, I could find nothing that a third party could observe and say, “Ah, this trait will allow me to identity these creatures.” She seems perfectly human.

When I asked her if there was anything in which she was different from other people, she said she has a strong sense of goals and how to attain her goals. But this action by itself is in no way remarkable.

She did have a very sensitive etheric body. Her nervous system was in advance of normal human beings. She says that she feels most alive when she is working out at the gym or doing so other activity such as scuba diving, surfing, etc. She has a degree in kinesiology.

I ran her though a standard repertoire of meditations. I had her do Taoist life force exercises, Buddhist tantra, the undine empathy practices, mental projection, and a solar meditation. She could do each of them with great ease. Her attitude was, “What’s next?”

She especially liked the Taoist meditation which focuses on circulating and refining life force. She seemed to have a great feel for the movement of vitality through the physical body.

Understand, discussions of time frames are pure guess work. As a race we have had some advantages. We have had an extra long interglacial warm period in which to develop our civilization.

However, as it stands, the human race, from an undine point of view, will very likely rise to a very great height of power and productivity over the next nine hundred years. And then within a short space of time our species will become extinct. Of course, this could happen much sooner or much later on.

In any case, the Perseians are polite. They have no agendas and are way too noble to participate in any conspiracies. You could say they have been invited by the Landlord (the divine world) to take a look at a “soon to be vacant” planet. There is an opening and if we choose to destruct then they are adaptable enough to settle in and thrive.

You see, our planet is one of the most beautiful and harmonious in this quadrant of the galaxy. The planet has its own purposes and any race that wishes to dwell here must eventually learn to grasp what those purposes are. The human race at present seems to have learned as much as it ever will in this particular planetary environment.

The Perseians, by contrast, are so mentally alert and powerful that, without genetic engineering, they can change their physiology and skin color in order to adapt to the environment. They could do this within a few generations. Yet the mermaid woman informs me the Perseians are also here to help us. If all else fails, they will assist us on the inner planes to find another planet where we can assume physical forms again.

Summary

One hundred and thirty years ago, some individuals envisioned that the evolution of souls on this planet would involve seven root races. According to this approach, we human beings are currently the fifth subrace of the fifth root race. After we evolve though the seventh root race, our souls will collectively move on to another world.

What was not imagined was how fast science and technology would develop. Two hundred years ago we were riding horses and using horses to plow our fields. Now we create new species in our laboratories. We have either walked on or have scientific laboratories roaming on the surface of other planets. We create temperatures and subatomic particles that have not existed since the beginning of the universe. We rewrite DNA. We create antimatter. We use mathematical models and computer simulations to trace the history of the universe from its beginning to its end.

Invent airplanes? Ten years later the government is offering contracts to utilize airplanes for military purposes. Split the atom in a laboratory in the pursuit of knowledge? Thirteen years later a government uses that knowledge to set off an atomic bomb. And another fifteen years after that first nuclear explosion we have the capacity to exterminate all human life on earth.

Science and technology are accelerating in their advance. Our understanding of the soul, by comparison, is at best treading water. While a few timid, conservatives in one country debate the ethics of cloning, in another country cloning not only succeeds as an experiment; practical applications are already available to the public.

Science has its own rhythm and pace and there is nothing in human consciousness that can guide, illuminate, or inspire it.

If the Perseians are more advanced than us it really boils down to one thing: for Perseians, the inner realms of the psyche and spirit are not separate from the outer world that consumes the attention of human beings. Physiological functions, instincts, feelings, thinking, direct psychic connections to others, and spiritual realms—Perseians center themselves on a level of awareness that integrates all of these at once.

As things stand now, accomplishing this feat, this level of integration, is not a part of human evolution on this planet. We are obsessed with power over nature and the ability to design and engineer our external environments. We master nature but choose to function in a very narrow band of awareness.

By contrast, Perseians are hard wired at birth with the capability to integrate consciousness on multiple levels in a way that almost no human beings on earth do at this time. Their souls are more advanced than are ours. All the same, we can learn from them. Their skills can be acquired through training.

My genre of fairy tales always offers the possibility of learning new things. I would hope human beings can extend their imaginations and hearts by learning from modern fairy tales in deciding which destinies to pursue.

What Do Mermaid’s Do? Selected Writings

Introduction

I received an email question, “What do mermaid’s do?” Put briefly, the answer is, they are aware of water; they feel a part of it and one with it. Mermaids tend to specialize so that their auras embody certain images of water in nature—a lake, a stream, a river, an ocean bay, an ocean trench, flowing waves, the sea encircling the earth, etc.

The undine queens can extend their awareness though water or a magnetic field—the water or magnetic field then becomes an extension of their senses and their nervous system. Some undine queens sense the entire magnetic field of the planet. Or, having a profound receptivity, they are masters of love or of seeing the past, present, or future.

Water is also like a mirror. It receives and reflects the faintest impressions and these include the things that shall come to be. To summarize all of this simply, if you can hold in your awareness the sensations of water and the subtle energy or “feeling” that is the energy underlying the physical sensations of water, then you are perceiving and feeling as a mermaid.

An even simpler exercise is to put your hands in water and feel the sensations of water touching your skin. Then imagine your awareness is the water holding your hands.

The trick next is to put aside your ego briefly. Listen carefully. The water molecules are attracted to each other. This attraction is like a tuning fork. The water touching your hands resonates with all the water on earth.

If you sense this connection of vibration that flows and extends though water, the awareness takes you to the astral plane and to a level of pure feeling. If you hold in your mind this sense of watery flowing and connection and joining so nothing else exists in your awareness, then you feel what mermaids feel: a sea of unending love surrounding you and flowing through you.

I am not exaggerating here, embellishing, or making this up. The awareness, this pure ecstasy of divine bliss, is right there in the touch of water on your skin. But when I reread what I just wrote it is also fair to say that I am no longer speaking as a human beings; I am speaking from the Otherside. I am viewing the world from the point of view of mermaids and mermen.

In the genre of fairy tales I write, I move back and forth between the human and the mermaid realm. I record the journey in both directions as it is experience by human beings and by mermaids. The gate to the realm of mermaids was never closed. It is the human heart that places obstacles in the way of tasting the love that Divine Providence has placed in nature for us to learn from.

In regard to feeling and empathy, then, the undine queens simply embody some of the things that we as human beings have yet to learn. In a sense, as I mention elsewhere, they are more human than we are when it comes to love and feeling.

The following selections are from the pervious stories in this seminar on undine empathy. They review and summarize some of the meditations, experiences, and accounts that offer glimpses into “what mermaids do.”

From Chapter Three,

The Ocean: A Meditation on the Sea (from the undine Istiphul)

Follow Istiphul and me as we join our minds. We are sitting on the sand with our feet in the water on Sandy Beach, Oahu. Imagine the sea--blue-green waves stretching from continental shores to continental shores. Look at the waves in front of you. Look at the waves as they spread out to the horizon and envision the vast expanse beyond as they circle the earth. Consider the winds that drive them and the tides rising and falling.

To the north, feel the icy pole of the world. Consider the wilderness where snow falls for a half of a year in darkness. Gaze upon white cliffs of ice and the icebergs to which they give birth. See and feel them drift to the south. And, toward the equator, feel the warmth of the moist trade winds. Visualize the archipelagoes and the island chains. Sense the ease with which clouds form from the seas and the hurricanes are fashioned from the warm air rising.

Visualize also the shores of islands as they gradually or rapidly drop down to the ocean floor. Send your mind into these depths. Among the deepest trenches of the sea are lost ships, volcanoes, and darkness, but you are able to move here without difficulty.

The trick in a meditation such as this is to become what you are contemplating. Become the primordial sea. This is the first step--feel the sea’s heartbeat, its breath, its currents, its tides, and the myriad forms of life dwelling within it.

The ocean, though vast and mysterious, is also the dream of being accepted--of being able to relax, to let go, and to flow in a place too great for the mind to imagine. Wave after wave of sensual caresses, with rhythm and passion, renew, heal, and yield to us the taste of beauty and freedom.

From Chapter Four: The Gate to the Realm of Undines

How do you know when you have made it to the gate? Easy. Undines appear right next to you. You share in common with them the way they feel and perceive. They accept you because you have their vibration.

You can communicate mind to mind with thoughts. But the connection is more a matter of embodying a watery vibration. Let’s do a test.

Take a few minutes and slowly move with your awareness through different images of water in nature. Become mountain stream, a waterfall, and a pool. Become a lake, a river, and the sea. Become an iceberg frozen in an arctic bay or a small bay in an island in the tropics. Drop your mind down into an ocean trench, become the sea.

Notice the different vibration produced in your body as you identify with each of these ways in which water appears in nature. If you meet or imagine an undine next to you, match her vibration. Let her energy flow in and define what you feel inside of you. Learn from the other. Extend your senses and feelings though the way the other perceives and feels.

Long ago when I first met women with a profound sense of well-being inside of them, it took me decades to learn to produce those feelings inside of myself. But now I go to the source of such feelings as they derive from the energies underlying nature and as they exist within the astral plane. We are meant to learn from each other. We are meant to flow in and through and give birth to each other from the gifts we give and from the life we share.

From Ahmed the Wizard

And so on countless nights, with far more skill than Donovan could ever imagine, Ahmed left his body to walk with Istiphul on all the seas’ beaches.  He learned to see through Istiphul’s eyes the night, the sky, and the sand.  He listened and learned the ways of the waves as they blessed the shore, curling over each other and caressing one another.

From the story, The Changeling, see Chapter Six

What of the human child now in a mermaid’s body on the astral plane? What is growing up like for her?

As she grows it is like being in an aquarium, except instead of fish there are mermaids swimming all around her. The mermaids come right up to her and there is this instant connection from inside without having to speak. She feels the other’s feelings flow through her. In this way she learns to sense and perceive as a mermaid, not though speech, not though imitative behavior, but intuitively understanding what water is, what it does, and how life exists within it.

If there were language, it would be like this: “Let us spend the summer watching over the reefs of this island, sensing each fish and its habitat, or flowing with the tides, feeling the sun and the moonrise. Watch the tiny algae, the larger fish coming and going, the young and the old. This is home; this is play; this is work; doing these things is what we are all about.”

It goes on: “Next, let’s flow with the current as it takes us to the North Pole. We’ll watch the seals and the whales and what could be more exciting than to sense the fresh water melting, mixing with the salt water, changing temperatures, sinking down, down into the deep, flowing back around the circumference of the world.

“If you want, you can slide along the edge of a wave as its rolls a thousand miles, as it breaks on a beach, moves on in a wave again and again since there is no end; feel that subtle magnetic swirl in the curling wave--it has its own taste, like a wine you can drink, bringing to life new things in your self you have never felt. Or just lie back and float on the surface of the sea and feel starlight as its sinks into your being, absorbed, coming to life as a song or a dream.”

It is not like there is a one on one mentor or parent. It is more like being part of a community or a large, extended family. Anyone can become your teacher or your friend. If you open you heart, you can draw near and share in the actions of any other water spirit. There are no social barriers here. The sea itself is your friend. Water is your breath. And there is always present the subtle vibration of love. It is everywhere and it is absolutely impossible to miss.

Being a mermaid certainly beats being unemployed, being in a bad marriage, or being a social reject. Here there are no bad marriages, no ill will, no suffering due to poverty, unemployment, failure, poor motivation, or to shame.

Does this human child ever think human thoughts as she sojourns among mermaids? Words from a dictionary are not in her mind. All the same, she is well aware she is not as these other beings. They are so innocent and pure. Their feelings are always perfectly clear.

She, however, is composed of five elements, even though her body is that of a mermaid. She senses something is missing. She can do what mermaids do. But the spontaneity and the total engagement in the moment is lacking.

Does she go on a quest to uncover the reasons for this? No. To be a mermaid is to go with the flow. Mermaid existence has its own bliss which often will reduce the desire for a quest or dampen the need to be curious.

But if she could put into words what she senses it would go like this: “They are never building anything. They do not make things. They have rank and power. This is clear. But no one is ordering anyone else to do something. There is no strife, no competition, no striving, and no struggle.

“They can learn a great deal and very quickly, but they do not test their own boundaries. They do not seek to overcome their own limitations. Yet the best is that they know how to let go: they can feel the entire sea of the earth flow through their souls in any moment. And as they do this the only things that exist are the sensations, the feelings, and the vibrations of being one with the whole.”

From the story, Doubling Changeling

What was it like for her to appear without intention or volition in another realm? She extended her field of awareness right through his body. She could feel what he feels. She felt the heartbeat, the pulsing of blood, and the muscle tension. She sensed his mind and his emotions. She sensed and entered dreams he had as a child.

Beneath the outer events of his life, she felt the inner flow like a stream on its way to the sea. She heard the questions he formed in his mind and also the questions he had yet to ask about the major choices he had made in life.

She felt very safe and very comfortable in his presence. This is in part because he was a good man. And this was also because her specialty was the art of transformation. She saw that his changes were things she could assist him with. And finally, she thought, here, with this man, the love can flow very deep.

As a skilled magician, when she appeared his mind went into high gear. He stopped all thinking. His was empty like a mirror.

And as a mirror is unafraid of the image that appears within it, he opened himself to sense what was in front of him. He found himself surrounded by the sea—the sky, the winds, the waves, and the depths. But this was not a set of sensory perceptions. He felt their energy flowing through him.

The wind was relaxing and he sensed the air within water and the way fish were breathing. The waves and the white caps were rolling. But he felt them to be like children playing, shouting with glee and dancing to some silent melody.

And at the core of his being, speaking with his own heart and voice, these words appeared through telepathy:

Come home. You need no pardon or quest before you take your rest. Love is a way of being. On this path you will be forever free.

What do mermaids do? Consider water where there is a flow of energy, temperature shifting, ice melting or freezing, currents and tides moving, waves breaking, white caps forming, fish flourishing, reefs growing, etc. In any of these situations mermaids are free to take an interest, to observe, to learn, or to become involved by enhancing the process.

What kind of conversation does a mortal such as Suramyn have with the undine queen Isaphil? If we put it into words, it would go like this. Suramyn: “I see what you see and I feel what you feel—the drive to make a dream real of the earth and the inner peace with the universe of the moon are not separate; in you, the earth and the moon are one. I stand as you, free of time; I see the ages unfold.

“Time is a sea. And for those who perceive its depths, they see where every need will be met and every dream fulfilled. Like a navigator who plots a ship’s course, the heart charts with purity and love a path to its home port.”

What is it like to spend a thousand years as a mermaid of high rank in the sea? You have your identity, your curiosity, you make decisions every single day, but there really is no you: there is just this boundless embrace of unending love that surrounds you.

Beyond the knowledge of mankind, at the core of one’s being and many levels deeper than what the conscious mind of a person could ever conceive, she felt a completion—a love that only the hands of the divine could ever imagine or define or call into being.

One mermaid described her this way—she was funky. She fit in fine. No one ever objected. But she was always curious, willing to try new things that mermaid would most likely never imagine or dream.

Whereas a mermaid would take something for granted, like a reef, and blend with its energy or enhance it so it flourished, Suramyn was thinking options. Why is no reef surrounding that atoll? Why can a reef not thrive deeper beneath the water? How do reefs in others seas flourish as compared to these?

The feminine is different from the masculine. Men go off by themselves. They may chart their own course. They set their own goals. They do what they must do because that is what it is like to be a man. They separate and then they come back. They reunite when the time is right.

Women are like a circle that expands and contracts. They maintain close contact. They flow in and through each other, preferring to stay together.

If one should separate and go off by herself, the separation remains external. She is still joined to the others from within. The self does not need to separate to the same extent in order to define one’s identity.

In a way this is the difference between fire and water. The man needs to test his boundaries to find his strength and claim his power. He must go on a quest to define and refine who he is.

By contrast, the very nature of a woman’s body contains the mystery of being one with another. Sharing feelings and experiences with others is a celebration of the mystery within. Mermaids may join in a group of three because in this way love flows more freely.

At the same time, each member of this group had her own unique interests. One was like Isaphil. She sang of serenity and the moon and earth joining the inner and outer worlds in peace and harmony.

The other preferred to explore the ocean depths, the ocean trench, and the mountain ranges and valleys of the ocean floor.

Suramyn learned from both. She could capture the beauty of the world, reflecting and holding its images in the stillness of her heart.

And she could also focus her being on the power of water—how it turns solid as ice and remains itself even with the pressure of a mile of water pressing down upon it. She was aware that water has the power of solid rock and can also pick up boulders and hurl them about. That kind of power was becoming part of her.

From A Mermaid’s Story

What is passion for a mermaid? For some it is the sight of great waves smashing against a granite cliff—the spray thicker than falling rain. For others, it is the roar of waves breaking on a lonely beach, where water throws itself forward onto the sand and then returns as an undertow sliding down into the depths. Then it is also countless shades of blue, green, and white taking form in endless ways in icebergs drifting free from their glacial moorings. Passion is need dancing with freedom in which every desire explodes in delight and reaches a new height as it attains a new form of completion.

From Caelius Aurelius Luscus and the Mermaid

In the beginning was an awareness. There was no “I” or identity within it. Unlike you, environment and self are not separate. But to be eloquent and concise, put it this way, “I was and am an awareness of the oceans encircling the planet—North, South, East, and West, surface and depth.

Human beings have trees that they make into wood to build tools, furniture, weapons, fences, homes and to plant and harvest orchards. They walk on dry ground and breathe the air.

You have words you use to record events, to communicate either in writing or by speaking aloud. You have five senses that operate, for the most part, in a solid environment.

You shape earth. You drink water and use it to cook. You control fire and metabolize food and oxygen in your bodies.

Your environment is your test—you use your wits and your courage to test its boundaries and to extract from it knowledge. With that knowledge of how nature works—its routines and patterns, its surface and its hidden, underlying mathematical matrix—you rise and ascend, reaching for the stars.

My environment is not a test I master in order to ascend. But this does not mean that I do not evolve. I am aware of ocean currents and how they affect the rest of the world. Weather and climate, ice ages come and gone, species when they appear, fish, animals, birds, human beings—the presence of your ships and fishing industries is hard to miss.

When a human being is curious, he invents a car, an airplane, or the means to transmit electricity. He fills in for what is missing in an overall pattern—the periodic table, subatomic particles, the motion of celestial bodies, the evolution of the species, geological ages, the creation and distribution of wealth, racial types and medical classification of disease and treatment.

I too am curious. It is not like the curiosity of human beings: “I will invent this in order to solve that problem or answer a question.”

My curiosity is the curiosity of nature itself: What species will replace Homo sapiens when they are gone? When will the next ice age come and for how long? How will the next asteroid that hits affect the oceans? How will changes in cosmic or solar radiation alter the climate? These questions are not all that different, are they, from what your scientists ask?

But how about this? When will an intelligent species within an “advanced” civilization embody the love that exists within the ocean? When will the dreams within the heart of the Goddess that is this planet become the dreams within the hearts of living beings?

Your race is known for its pursuit of knowledge and its technological advances. I think you are asking the wrong questions. The human heart, for all its capacity to wonder and to quest, contains a vacuum within it. You have an emptiness within and you do not know how to fill it.

I am the power of water with its capacity to flow, to let go, to be in the moment without prejudice or attachment. My way of knowing is altogether different.

To be as me? Imagine you are the sea encircling the world. Imagine its surface and its depth. Imagine the shores, the islands, and the rivers feeding into it.

Come down into the ocean trench. Sense the mountain ranges and the valleys, the volcanoes, the hot springs, the accumulation of silt, the temperature falling, the light and darkness, the salt and fresh water flowing, the heat exchange at the surface, and the icebergs drifting.

Now overlay this with life in its vast variety. Mammals and fish, amphibians and algae, plankton, amebas, and microbes too.

Now take a day in the life of the sea, now a year, a century, or a million years too. And sense in that defined period of time one feeling, one energy, one vibration, one common denominator for the diversity. Sense how that quality is flowing and changing.

Imagine further that this energy of the sea, this state of being and love, is flowing through you endlessly.

What do mermaids do? I have just told you what I do. Beyond the ability of the human brain as you know it, I am an awareness of nature and of life as it unfolds.

I am relaxed. I flow. I am in the moment without worry of how the next moment will go.

There are other interactions of a magical nature that occurs between the two of them. When Caelius has time, he sits with her for an hour each day without moving. Sometimes they sit next to each other at his villa overlooking the sea. Sometimes they face each other holding hands. During this time of quiet repose, he feels free. Nothing else in the world matters. Time dissolves.

All the same, he can feel her aura as it gently surrounds him, taking hold like a mist that flows down a valley or a fog that rolls in from the sea. He feels her around him and gradually she flows into and through him.

If tenderness can take the shape of moist air, cool and refreshing, gentle and embracing, then her aura is tenderness similar in sensation, caressing him from within. The temperature around him drops five degrees. There is no chill.

After sitting in her aura, he feels he can see the entire Mediterranean Sea before him. He can tell how each of his ships is doing, its progress and the weather around and before it. But he can not communicate with the captains or give them directions or warnings.

It is the oddest feeling, he thinks—he feels like he can sense the waves moving in their myriads of patterns across the Mediterranean: The huge waves rolling with storms; the cliffs where these waves break; waves continuing to roll on a thousand miles after the storm is gone; waves caught off guard with white caps new born struggling to rise as a storm crashes down; the gentle waves circling in a bay; the ordered waves of a steady wind and the crisscrossing waves among the islands of the Aegean Sea. In some places, the waves are wild and in other places the sea is calm. In a few places, the sea is a mirror where barely a ripple appears.

He knows it is heresy, but in truth he feels at such times that he has been transmuted into the god Neptune. He watches over the oceans from a state of great peace. The storms and waves obey his will. The sea is his servant, like a bride who yearns in her heart to please and to unite. These are feeling that do not belong to mortals but only to gods.

How to Meet Undines, from the book, Undines.

First Method.   Some might prefer an academic approach for gaining a rapport with an undine.  For example, we could try studying oceanography.  Then we proceed from science to literature in which we explore our imagination.  We could write a story as if we are the thing we are studying—become various marine organisms known and unknown, the ecosystems and their dynamics. 

   Become waves, the tides, the currents; drop down off the continental shelves into the ocean depths; send your mind out among the reefs and atolls; become an archipelago or the North Atlantic Current; become the North or South Pole or an ice age as it comes and goes.        

    In a similar literary vein, try writing a journal as if you are an undine.  Make an entry each day for what you—the undine or merman—did to occupy your time.   Talk about your dreams, your hopes, your innermost secrets, your desires, your actions, and your plans.  Talk about the things you love, what you notice about other undines and about any human beings who have caught your attention

     If you develop your empathy for the sea in this way, then daydreaming and imagination are ready for that magical shift in consciousness.  This occurs when you say, “I would like an undine to come and express herself through my voice or share with me her feelings and dreams, to talk to me about her self.” 

     What I have just written is absolute nonsense for a great many people.  But like I say, and I will assert my own experience on this point, there is no greater power than the power of love.  If you open your heart and reach out, you are free to join with anything in the universe.  The divine world has placed no restrictions on this activity. 

     You do not need to be an initiate of a magical order.  You do not need a robe, wand, magic mirror, or magic circle.  You only need to love.  Stick with it.  Play with it.  Let your imagination be as free, vast, and deep as the sea and undines will find your spirit similar to their own.

   Shall we give it a try?  I wrote these words when I imagined I was an undine who had entered the body of a woman.  It is not perfectly clear to me if I was writing these words or if an undine was writing them through me.  In any case, you can see how exploring undine sensuality might increase our perceptual abilities.

    The undine says, “I am found in the ten thousand different sounds of waves breaking on the shores of the world.  I am sounds of laughing and love making. I am joy overflowing. I am the sea’s own breath rising from the depths exhaling in a sigh and with passion as she tastes with her tongue salt and spray of  waves’ crests dancing free in curling drops of rain.”   

Second Method.  Another use of imagination is dialoguing or what is called active imagination.  Perhaps first mentioned by Carl Jung, you take a strong affect or feeling toward something and imaginatively change that feeling into the image of a person with whom you can speak.  For example, spend some time meditating on the sea and the life within it.  Get a feeling for the waves, the currents, the depths, the temperature changes, the various fish and sea life.  Recall your experiences with the sea.      

     Next, feel that the only thing that exists within your consciousness in this moment is the presence of the sea.  At this point, you can probably notice some sensations and feelings that arise in your body due to this contemplation.  Take those feelings and your sense of the sea and change them into the image of a person, in this case, an undine who embodies what you feel and sense. 

     Play with your imagination until your visual image of the undine feels right.  Sometimes you have to work at this and sometimes an image of an undine appears whose presence is fairly powerful, even overwhelming.  This feeling of presence or connection is common in using active imagination.

     Now talk to the undine.  You can be casual or serious, playful, flirtatious, or intense.  It all depends on your mood and personality. 

    This process involves two things.  You ask interesting questions and make comments that feel appropriate to the situation.  And you allow the undine, who embodies your subconscious connections to the sea, to reply and interact with you in an independent manner.  This is a creative interaction because the image represents a part of your self which is otherwise not directly available to your consciousness.  A dialogue with the image of an undine is a dialogue, then, with the depths of your self and with the archetype of the sea.

     You can also imagine you are within the undine and identical with her.  I will often project my mind into an undine so I can look back and see myself through her eyes.  This gives me an undine’s perspective and feeling for what it is like to interact with a human being.

     After you are familiar with assuming the imagined form of an undine, you can also attempt to do the same with a real undine.  You scan with your mind for an undine’s presence and then you attempt to sense what she is feeling. 

     There is a dog barking next door as I write.  It takes little effort for me to imagine how the dog’s consciousness works.  There is a dove outside cooing.  It is pretty easy for me to imagine I am that dove.  The ocean is two miles from my house.  If I place my mind out among the waves and the sea it does not take me long to perceive through the mind of an undine.  The world takes on an entirely different perspective when I do this.      

     Projecting into another person and imagining you are that person is a basic, straightforward, and simple exercise in psychology.  It can be used to develop empathy.  Projection also relates to role playing in which you act like another person to get a feeling for what that person is like.  I would recommend that everyone become acquainted with this act of transferring your mind at least into an image of another person

    I have already written about the difference between an imagined and a real undine.  Here is what I wrote: I visualize an undine that is a product of my imagination and ask her, “Tell me something I do not already know about water.”  

     She says, “What you do not know about water is how to let go.  You do not know how to become the waves of an ocean that encircle the globe by both day and by night.  You do not know how to become the warm current that circulates from the equator to the pole and returns cold sinking into the depths.  You do not know this journey.  You do not offer this renewing power to others.”

   The above illustrates the method of dialoguing.  It is not an actual contact with an undine.  The method is similar to visualizing yourself acting in the way you want in a sport or rehearsing for a job interview.  Or you can imagine talking to someone about a certain topic and then compare that to an actual conversation. 

    Later on, through deeper concentration and patient meditation, when you desire to speak with an undine, you are in a position to notice the difference between what you imagine and what occurs with an actual contact.  We all possess intuition.  Through a focused mind and a strong desire, intuition becomes psychic.  There comes a moment when what you sense is more than imagination or the imagery of a waking dream or contemplation.