Interview with a ghost
Joel likes to refer to The Joy of Sox as What the Bleep meets baseball. He’s referring to the movie phenomenon of 2005 (full title - What the Bleep Do We Know?) in which Hollywood actually addressed such exotic themes as quantum physics and consciousness in a feature film. New Age scientist celebrities served as talking heads, while animated graphics showed how our emotions influence our neurotransmitters, and how our beliefs create the life we experience. It wasn’t a blockbuster hit, but it did create a bit of a buzz for its venture into new cinematographic territories.
So, not to be outdone, we’ve had our own run of good luck interviewing respected and visible scientists who offered their commentary on the mysteries of consciousness and baseball. In fact, we now have enough raw material for a NOVA episode or two on the nature of consciousness, apart from those connections to baseball that make Joy of Sox unique. However, there was one other angle to What the Bleep that caught my eye – the movie featured the first live channeling session that I’d ever seen in a feature film. The movie did not make clear that one of its interviewees – a woman named JZ Knight - was actually the channel for a non-physical entity called Ramtha. If they had, the movie might have been even more controversial.
The subject of channeling is of course quite controversial, though in many ways it’s just a modern version of Biblical prophecy: a person speaks with wisdom and clarity about topics s/he should have no direct knowledge of, supposedly because another intelligence or spirit is talking through them. I confess to a longterm fascination with this process, in the course of which I’ve come across some very clear teachings that are purportedly delivered via this mechanism. There’s the work of Edgar Cayce (19th century America’s “sleeping prophet”), the classic series of books from the 1970s known collectively as the Seth material (written by housewife Jane Roberts speaking for Seth, “an energy-personality essence no longer focused in physical reality”), and the more recent best-selling Conversations with God series of books. Whatever questions linger about the validity of the process itself, the clarity of information that becomes available has been hard to deny. So why not seek out a channeled perspective on the whole topic of fans and prayers and intentionality and baseball?
The channel I have been most intrigued with recently is a woman named Jerry Hicks; she channels a consciousness named Abraham, and he/she/it/they teach about manifesting your desires by using the universal law of vibrational attraction. They teach that events don’t just randomly happen in your life; rather, your emotions and attitudes literally draw certain types of events into your life, and the happier you are, the more readily you’ll attract positive events. This struck me as a good parallel to the Red Sox situation. After all, if individual people can bring desired events into their lives by using a positive focus, then couldn’t that be what happened in 2004, when millions of members of Red Sox Nation joined with a team of wackily happy ballplayers in a shared focus that eventually led to victory?
Last weekend I attended a day-long Abraham workshop; it was my third one in recent years. I had gone to the two previous meetings with the specific goal of being chosen for one of the Q&A sessions, so that I could ask Abraham for his views about the Red Sox team magic, hoping that I could then get permission to use a video clip of the interview in our film (all the Abraham sessions are videotaped). But try as I might, I didn’t manage to get chosen. I did, however, manage to get stressed out enough with all my trying to get called on that I didn’t really enjoy what should have been a fascinating day of learning. So last week I decided not to get bent out of shape about whether I was chosen or not. I’d just enjoy the show, and if I was chosen, then so much the better.
Well, as luck would have it, this time I did get chosen, and was able to participate in a very stimulating 10 minute conversation with Abraham (in the person of Esther Hicks, the friendly middle aged woman who acts as the channel). We talked about fans, vibration, joy, competition, and the Red Sox. Yet as I sit here now, I don’t remember much of the informational content. It was a very intense experience, and I found it disconcerting to be the focus of 500 peoples’ attention (I know - imagine what it’s like to be batting in front of 50,000!). But as the conversation was unfolding, the content seemed right on, even if my intellectual mind couldn’t hold on to it. That’s why I’m so eager to review the audiotapes when they come out in a month. Hopefully, the information will corroborate our Joy of Sox theories (and hopefully, permission to use the video clips will also be forthcoming).
One thing I do remember - the main lesson of the day had to do with canoeing (!?). The key metaphor was that we don’t have to spend life struggling to row upstream; we’ll achieve our dreams and enjoy the ride when we learn to travel downstream with the flow. And I think that’s what happened to me on that Saturday – I stopped trying to force the issue to get myself called on (the equivalent of paddling upstream), and instead I just allowed myself to enjoy the day as it unfolded (going with the current). And, lo and behold, I was chosen. The message for the Sox should be the same – focus on the enjoyment of the moment, and don’t get so lost in the upstream worries about salary caps and contract extensions and on-base percentages that any sense of downstream enjoyment and team cohesion and harmony is lost. It was the joy of Sox that brought us victory in 2004, and that joy is still available to us in every moment. In fact, it has the potential to bring us success again in 2007.
So, not to be outdone, we’ve had our own run of good luck interviewing respected and visible scientists who offered their commentary on the mysteries of consciousness and baseball. In fact, we now have enough raw material for a NOVA episode or two on the nature of consciousness, apart from those connections to baseball that make Joy of Sox unique. However, there was one other angle to What the Bleep that caught my eye – the movie featured the first live channeling session that I’d ever seen in a feature film. The movie did not make clear that one of its interviewees – a woman named JZ Knight - was actually the channel for a non-physical entity called Ramtha. If they had, the movie might have been even more controversial.
The subject of channeling is of course quite controversial, though in many ways it’s just a modern version of Biblical prophecy: a person speaks with wisdom and clarity about topics s/he should have no direct knowledge of, supposedly because another intelligence or spirit is talking through them. I confess to a longterm fascination with this process, in the course of which I’ve come across some very clear teachings that are purportedly delivered via this mechanism. There’s the work of Edgar Cayce (19th century America’s “sleeping prophet”), the classic series of books from the 1970s known collectively as the Seth material (written by housewife Jane Roberts speaking for Seth, “an energy-personality essence no longer focused in physical reality”), and the more recent best-selling Conversations with God series of books. Whatever questions linger about the validity of the process itself, the clarity of information that becomes available has been hard to deny. So why not seek out a channeled perspective on the whole topic of fans and prayers and intentionality and baseball?
The channel I have been most intrigued with recently is a woman named Jerry Hicks; she channels a consciousness named Abraham, and he/she/it/they teach about manifesting your desires by using the universal law of vibrational attraction. They teach that events don’t just randomly happen in your life; rather, your emotions and attitudes literally draw certain types of events into your life, and the happier you are, the more readily you’ll attract positive events. This struck me as a good parallel to the Red Sox situation. After all, if individual people can bring desired events into their lives by using a positive focus, then couldn’t that be what happened in 2004, when millions of members of Red Sox Nation joined with a team of wackily happy ballplayers in a shared focus that eventually led to victory?
Last weekend I attended a day-long Abraham workshop; it was my third one in recent years. I had gone to the two previous meetings with the specific goal of being chosen for one of the Q&A sessions, so that I could ask Abraham for his views about the Red Sox team magic, hoping that I could then get permission to use a video clip of the interview in our film (all the Abraham sessions are videotaped). But try as I might, I didn’t manage to get chosen. I did, however, manage to get stressed out enough with all my trying to get called on that I didn’t really enjoy what should have been a fascinating day of learning. So last week I decided not to get bent out of shape about whether I was chosen or not. I’d just enjoy the show, and if I was chosen, then so much the better.
Well, as luck would have it, this time I did get chosen, and was able to participate in a very stimulating 10 minute conversation with Abraham (in the person of Esther Hicks, the friendly middle aged woman who acts as the channel). We talked about fans, vibration, joy, competition, and the Red Sox. Yet as I sit here now, I don’t remember much of the informational content. It was a very intense experience, and I found it disconcerting to be the focus of 500 peoples’ attention (I know - imagine what it’s like to be batting in front of 50,000!). But as the conversation was unfolding, the content seemed right on, even if my intellectual mind couldn’t hold on to it. That’s why I’m so eager to review the audiotapes when they come out in a month. Hopefully, the information will corroborate our Joy of Sox theories (and hopefully, permission to use the video clips will also be forthcoming).
One thing I do remember - the main lesson of the day had to do with canoeing (!?). The key metaphor was that we don’t have to spend life struggling to row upstream; we’ll achieve our dreams and enjoy the ride when we learn to travel downstream with the flow. And I think that’s what happened to me on that Saturday – I stopped trying to force the issue to get myself called on (the equivalent of paddling upstream), and instead I just allowed myself to enjoy the day as it unfolded (going with the current). And, lo and behold, I was chosen. The message for the Sox should be the same – focus on the enjoyment of the moment, and don’t get so lost in the upstream worries about salary caps and contract extensions and on-base percentages that any sense of downstream enjoyment and team cohesion and harmony is lost. It was the joy of Sox that brought us victory in 2004, and that joy is still available to us in every moment. In fact, it has the potential to bring us success again in 2007.
posted by Rick Leskowitz,MD at 11:17 AM
2 Comments:
The only thing I'll say about your theories is that it's insulting to all of us, who pack Fenway every night, and who have supported this team our whole lives, regardless of how the team is doing, to say our interest (in something that's ingrained in us) is waning.
More importantly, how dare you take the name of a very popular Red Sox blog. Not only for your movie name, but then in this "blog" I'm now commenting on. There is only one Joy of Sox blog, and it's been around since 2003.
I didn't mean anything personal by that observation, but there are bound to be some days where the energy at Fenway isn't there to the same degree. That's part of human nature, I think.
Regarding our title, we developed it independently, not even knowing about the Joy of Sox blog. I contacted the moderator of that site to tell him of our plans to use a similar name, and he was totally cool with it. He said it's a fairly obvious pun, and wished us well.
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