Glimpses of the Rose Garden

The Parching of the Heart

Would that the minds of some had a little more spiritual water to stop their withering blooms dying totally. The more I see supposedly great minds expose the desert of their souls through rejection of all psychic, religious, spiritual worldviews and reality, the more I am willing to assert and advocate for that discarded. C.S. Lewis warned us. Left-brain certainty in scientism and fundamentalism literally dispirits us. It is a frightening thing to see the psychic and psychological impoverishment often more dangerous than the material type. Having discarded vision of a spiritual reality and thus any restraints on their actions, they can justify godless experiments they are engaging in relieved of moral responsibility through substitution of technical power for objective value truth. Though we will bear the burden of their spiritual disablement and (to coin a term from the French based on the word devilish) their diablementality, I feel more sorry for them than they will for me. Some have a spring in their steps as the retro-propaganda anti-religious machine goes into overdrive seeming to corroborate their posthuman denial and direction. Mention the Virgin or nuns and a programmatic-propaganda comes out without examination of evidence. The word ‘propaganda’ came from the Catholic Church and propagation of faith. In a great inversion propaganda became about spreading materialist faith and spiritual unfaith. That is part of the media centrifugal spin laundering history and reality.

A Prompting Vision. Sub Rosa

I was walking in the wood at the start of August when I saw a swift but meaningful vision of my grandfather. He was a politician that had been involved in the land struggle and independence movement but who died the year I was born. So my images are confined to photos of him at public occasions or going to important functions. This was animated and striking in the way such appearances are in that odd domain or dimension of subtle perception. There was a clear message as if telepathically given which was to pray for the family. It made no real sense to me but as a real phenomenon I had little doubt. So I prayed a rosary on the way. Many scoff at such senses, nonsense or sentiments.

I think it was later that same day my sister rang and mentioned that a distant relation of mine from the West of Ireland had been kidnapped in Haiti on the 3^rd of August along other people and a very young child. She traipsed over a mountain in the dark. The warm weather thereafter was uncomfortable while they were reunited when incarcerated. I know I spoke afterwards as I mentioned to my sister that I had had a vision and its synchronicity thereafter was obvious. I never heard of Gena beforehand that I recall. I wasn’t alone in praying.

Gena Heraty has had a lifelong Christian mission to care for children in Haiti. A lot of people prayed for her in captivity. There were vigils in the area where my father and his family were born and some are buried. The Irish Government were very active in securing her release after nearly a month. I understand that the sceptic will point to all the times when prayer does not work and refute its value with real world action. The wisdom of not demanding or respecting results is reflected in various statements such as by great swordsman Miyamoto Musashi in The Book of Five Rings in 1645.

“Respect the Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.”

But that is not the end of it. We deal with multiple levels of reality which we tend to collapse into a reduced, empirical materialist set. There is more.

Gena, Angels, Light

I learnt about Gena and was humbled by her courage. Such grit and fortitude is consistent with the families in Mayo that survived civil war, the war of independence, the land struggle and the Famine to name but a few challenges. She was matter-of-fact in a previous interview describing the brutal murder of one of her helpers at the orphanage. This threat reflects daily reality in the environs there. Her core concern throughout the work is the welfare of the children ‘her family.’ She will not desert them nor flinch before danger. She focuses on children with special needs. Gena volunteered for the humanitarian organisation Our Little Brothers and Sisters (Nos Petits Frères et Sœurs) founded by a priest. She had wanted to fulfil her personal mission and has done so for 30 years. She was the Humanitarian of the Year in 2019 for the Irish Red Cross. She no doubt sees her family in Haiti as angels and many would see her as one and celebrate her endeavour. I know that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.

Kidnapped on the 3^rd of August and confined with others, her concern was for them, particularly the young child there as well as ones left behind that would have expected her help. They were kept in dark, unhygienic conditions surrounded by a gang outside. Many such gangs she said tell you they worship the devil in ceremonies. She was worried that they would be used in a sacrifice. The intellectuals who scoff at the reality of God, Jesus, Mary and the Holy Spirit also laugh at ideas of people who take devilish behaviour seriously. Any such belief is merely deluded paranoia. Old practices are merely culturally distinct religious ones which should be judged by relative standards.

Apart from the darkness she related of the experience, actual and spiritual, there were three sources of metaphorical light or transcendent comfort she indicated. The young boy communicated on more than one occasion that Mother Mary was with them. He was adamant, though the others could not see the same. That is remarkable enough.

She also said that when attacked, she firmly believed that the blows were softened or taken by angels, being those who had lived in her home. This was another spiritual comfort.

My sister (who I had talked to) later sent me a voicemail from Gena disseminated to her family and friends thanking them for their prayers. In it she mentioned another interesting aspect of interior light perhaps, though that is my term rather than hers. With plenty of time available she prayed the rosary. Gena said she doesn’t do it often. Again she was plain about that. But she did say that when praying she was certain that the old ones from the place she was brought up in, where my grandfather was born and raised, were there with her.

Rosarium

Years ago I had a very significant affective dream once in Scotland that changed me in a subconscious almost clandestine way. After it I felt cleansed and refreshed in a strange fashion but could not remember anything about it save that it was significant. All I could remember was that it was about ‘the rose garden.’ I had no idea what that meant. I knew there was a long line from Persia through Sufism to Rosicrucianism that emphasised the rose. It was a critical esoteric symbol for Yeats. I had another similar dream much more recently where I had a wonderful scene and saw some vivid colours perhaps as in a garden or a Monet painting disappearing behind a descending curtain of duller reality as the vision was suddenly veiled to my waking consciousness. The colours were otherworldly and almost animated. The hypnopompic state is a common source of insight. Stranded like a waking shipwrecked sailor once again on the beach of consciousness, the memory of floating unconscious in a dark marine dimension disappears as you come to.

I have come to see such dreams or visions as associated with the Virgin Mary, not without reason, over a period of time. Such observations are difficult for most people, scoffers, super-rationalists and Protestants to say the least. They have had great difficulty with Her. Indeed Mary stands over the great border between.

Let me state a few propositions before the inverted perverted world we are entering purports to render them unsayable. The spiritual universe has a sense of right and wrong, good and evil. We do not live in a state of existence of moral relativity. Our actions have consequences. We choose our actions mostly. We are also responsible for them in a spiritual sense. Killing a helper in cold blood is obviously wrong. Genuinely looking after vulnerable orphans with special needs is obviously good. The society we live in represents or reflects the values we have committed to individually. We are participants and not mere observers. We are involved and engaged. We are also entangled in a dimension beyond the mortal and mundane, beyond time and space and the here-and-now. The disposition and decisions we make now are relevant to that otherworld as well. Like in this world the good forces and bad forces persist and play out their destinies in different principalities and mansions. We are entangled also in that otherworld in communion and become aligned with or move into accord with forces greater than our own. Our soul or spirit may be captured, oppressed or possessed also by entities. But acceptance or belief in the spiritual reality also allows us to draw sustenance from forces consistently affirmed as ontologically and phenomenologically real no matter how much materialists and empiricists laugh or become vexed. Human spiritual capacity and potential is founded on a deep receptivity to remarkable perception that our technocratic masters and mistresses deny and decry. We flourish amid these corridors of nonsense when we are spiritually nourished even by evanescent visions and vanishing scents whose reality impresses precisely by its affect, suggestion and reality. The spiritual commonweal is something we can feel and which defies its denial by mundanely-sanctified psychically insensate physicalists.

In many Marian interactions roses appear. The scent permeates certain contexts. Scoffers say it is a phenomenon associated with UFO’s and UAP’s. A flying saucer seems material so the materialist can swallow their existence, especially if it explains away the inexplicable like Fatima. Swedenborg was clear that the spiritual world was reflected in our own. These divine roses may come into our dimension wherein our experience of them in this fine-tuned universe has been more mundane no matter how marvellous. The rose garden idea perhaps has extended for me to represent or rather indicate a real zone that we are capable of experiencing in glimpses in our incarnated self in the very distinct and limited physical conditions of existence. That place or state is fundamentally related to the condition of the better angels of our nature. Instead of denying sensuality of our existence, it indicates a higher level of perception that involves the spiritual eyes. When the scales fall from our eyes and doors of perception are cleansed we have a better sense of a real promised land. But demands on our spiritual being render us responsible to the reality of its mystery. Kindness, courage and care are necessary nutrients that cultivate conditions for ourselves and others. Our inability to engage in tending to the garden within and without alienates us from an ability to anticipate and actively seek a celestial one. Whither thou goest?

We live in an astonishing place whose narrow potential for life is remarkable. We are meant to be here with all our limitations and live as we are present, but it is not all. Yet the deadly atomistic attitude within science has promoted a left-brain disposition which somehow denudes our world of beauty and truth. The matrix from which we have emerged involves exercise of free will no matter how much biologists and physicalists insist on determinism. Mystical, spiritual and religious experience often involves cultivation of conditions of receptivity. Some forces of goodness and evil are easier to spot. Around their focus is a penumbra of perception-potential wherein subtler aspects of our spirit can operate. When people activate the higher forces of care and compassion they arrange and align channels which others can experience. There is a reflexive relationship between the attitude we bring to other dimensions and the one we exude in the here-and-now.

As the deserted and desiccated dark souls of scientism become more obvious through their own projection in sterile statements and plans, the thirst, desire and receptivity to true beauty will become more pronounced as the contrasting and coming force becomes available for those who want to choose it. The spiritual world is real and we are participants therein. Those who want to should get Real. I pray that Gena’s example of bravery, tenacity and compassion challenges us all to believe in redemptive effects of example as the best teacher. But there are forces behind those appearances that are true. The rosary is related to roses. It means a rose garden or garland.

While Rosenkreuz is a legendary figure associated with Rosicrucianism, Rosenkranz in German means rosary. A rose by any other name may not be a rose. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco meant everything and nothing. From Homer the dawn was rosy-fingered from the goddess. This recurrent perception of mystical significance of the rose is not an accident.

At the very least, recognition and cultivation of the active angels of our nature and potential of ourselves and others for compassion and care can be visualised as an affective place of beauty wherein projections of those values manifest or even originate. Our reflexive relationship to sources of beauty, truth and goodness enables them operate as real. Reality becomes spiritually real through relationship. But let me let you in on a secret if you are sceptical. These places and people are real. But we choose not to see. When we will not open our inner eyes, the outer world may merely be a place of brutal sensation as we are duped with sinister sadistic efforts to supersede our spiritual consciousness that has become doped and insensate. Yet there is a rosy ether which connects to the sub rosa sense of us. We choose.