Retired U.S. Navy Commander Experiences Mystical Writing
Posted on 29 November 2010, 15:24
The line separating inspirational writing from automatic writing is often difficult to identify. Generally, inspirational writing is said to be spirit-inspired and coming primarily from the subconscious of the person, while automatic writing is said to involve little of the person’s subconscious and to come primarily from a spirit communicator without too much interference by the automatist’s brain, conscious or subconscious. As pointed out in the last blog entry here, Brazilian Spiritists refer to what most others call automatic writing as “psychography” and what most others call inspirational writing as automatic writing. It is all very confusing, but there does seem to be a significant overlap between the two. Suzanne Giesemann, a retired U.S. Navy Commander, calls her brand of writing inspirational writing, although from her description of it, some would call it automatic writing or psychography. Perhaps they can be lumped together and called “mystical writing.”
“While meditating I ask my spirit guides to blend their energy with mine,” Giesemann explained to me by e-mail. “I sit quietly and very often my right index finger twitches upward, indicating that it is time to write, that the spirits have something to say. At other times I very clearly hear the words, ‘pick up your pen.’ (My strongest way of attuning to the spirit world is through clairaudience).”
Words then flow from her pen presenting words and ideas which do not seem to be coming from her own mind. “I am aware of each sentence or phrase as it comes through because I hear and write it, but it is immediately forgotten after writing it, for I am holding a passive mind focus to receive the words,” she further explains. “If I stop to think about what I’m hearing, the flow stops. My understanding of this is that the spirit writers (those who are giving me the words of the poetry or prose) blend their consciousness with mine, with my consent. I surrender my consciousness and they let their ideas, concepts, and phrases flow through mine.”
Although she has been meditating for years, Giesemann did not begin to experience this mystical writing until shortly after writing The Priest and the Medium, a book published in 2009 about Anne Gehman, a very gifted medium, and Wayne Knoll, a Jesuit priest and professor at Georgetown University. The book tells of Gehman’s interesting paranormal experiences, including an NDE, and of Knoll’s struggles to overcome his loneliness and find companionship, and then how the two met and reconciled their views of God and the spirit world.
After writing the book, Giesemann took several classes on mediumship and an intensive course on the subject at Arthur Findlay College in England, then began developing mediumistic abilities of her own.
“Check my homepage, http://www.SuzanneGiesemann.com and you’ll find I have a pretty straight-laced background: 20 years in the Navy, management consulting…You won’t find any incense burning in my home or catch me wearing any wrap-around tie-died skirts,” she writes at her website. “The fact is, even I still have trouble seeing myself as the kind of person who would author a blog about talking to spirits. And others agree.”
When a business client heard about her book about the medium and the priest, he was somewhat taken aback, wondering if Giesemann really believed in “that stuff.” Giesemann responded that she sure did. “If he’d asked me the same question a couple of weeks earlier, I might have waffled,” she continues telling of her introduction to mediumship. “That’s what I did when telling a former colleague that the spirit of his deceased daughter had come through in a reading I’d recently had with a medium. The man was a retired senior naval officer who knew me back when we were both still in uniform. I felt he would want to know that a medium who knew nothing about his family had brought up his deceased daughter’s not-so-common name in a highly-evidential context with no prompting from me. There was no doubt in my mind that there’d been some real spirit communication going on, but I found myself apologizing to the man, lest he think I’d lost a few marbles since I left the Navy.”
After the conversation, Giesemann decided she needed to make up her mind: either she believed in the spirit world or she didn’t. “The truth is,” she continues, “since the death of my own step-daughter, I no longer believe, hope, or wish that our spirit survives the transition we call death…I know. Others may think I’m a fruitcake or a New Age nut, but what others think no longer matters.”
Giesemann’s step-daughter, Susan, was struck and killed by lightning on June 8, 2006. She tells of the signs received from Susan at her blog entry of June 20, 2009 and explains that her search for more answers about life after death began with that experience. Her research led to meeting Anne Gehman and the book unfolded from hearing her story.
On July 12, 2009, Giesemann meditated and asked her guides to blend with her. Sitting in the aft cabin of her sailboat, she had placed a notebook and pen on the desk in front of her. “I felt very lightheaded and knew from recent experiences that there was a presence with me,” she recalls, adding that she then asked for guidance on a presentation she would be giving at a workshop that Saturday. “I suddenly felt the need to pick up the paper,” she continues. “I placed it in my lap and wrote a few words. Within seconds, words started flowing. After a few sentences, I noticed that the words were rhyming. I felt surprise and slight elation, for the lines had real rhythm and rhyme, yet there were coming to me without my thinking. They came so quickly that I didn’t have time to THINK - I just kept writing and realized, ‘They’ve sent me a poet!’” .
Giesemann filled page after page without opening her eyes. “I could tell as I wrote each line that it made sense and that it rhymed, but I had no sense of the words as a whole,” she further explains. “I intuitively knew when they had finished, so I laid down the pen. And then I sat there and cried. I hadn’t even read the words, yet I knew they were special. I knew I hadn’t written them from my conscious mind. It had taken no more than ten minutes to write all the words, and I could not have done that by myself.” The words flowed (partial here):
The world is ready for these your words.
They wait and listen with wings like birds.
For ours is yours and yours is ours.
Such is the greatness of the Great Spirit’s powers.
Blessed are all who know these truths.
Shout it, blast it, from the roofs.
Be our voice, we work with you.
We come to speak of beauty true.
Divine is the light of which we speak.
Beauty lies in the watch we keep.
Speak of love, speak of beauty …
This, my dear, is your great duty.
We love you and hold you in our keep.
Go forth and trust that you can speak.
With this we leave you this blessed day.
Come back to us and together we’ll pray.
For we are here; at your side we wait.
It’s with great hope we anticipate
The truths you’ll carry to those who listen
The truths of God on your words will glisten.
Go now and rest for there’s work to do.
We have great love and trust in you.
You have our blessing. In you we’re proud.
Take our wisdom and shout it loud.
We love you all. For this we’ve come.
There is no rest ‘til the Spirit’s work is done.
After 369 poems – all of which are posted at her website – Giesemann was told by spirit that it was time for a “new phase.” Beginning on August 1, 2010, she channeled a new energy. “The voice told me that they were the collective consciousness of all my guides and that we were to call them ‘Sanaya,” she relates. “I later discovered, to my delight, that Sanaya is a female Sanskrit name meaning ‘eminent, distinguished, and ‘of the gods.’ They told me that I should prepare to ‘write and write and write as Sanaya.’”
Sanaya has delivered nearly 100 messages of wit and wisdom to date, including this one:
The death of a loved one is a trying time for those on earth, no matter how enlightened you are. You share memories with the one who passes. You share love and concern. Concern yourself at this time with those who do not have the full understanding of this very natural transition. Concern yourself as well with yourself.
Share with others and remind yourself that death is a point of celebration for the one who will no longer have to bear the pain and darkness of life in the physical world. Know that they will be surrounded by love and loved ones who have preceded them. Life will be far easier now for them, and we do stress this word “life,” for life is indeed eternal.
Concern yourself far more with remembering the good times and know that you will share these again. Feel your grief, but do not become swallowed up in it. Allow yourself a period of sadness for the close contact you will miss, then pull yourself back to that place of love within yourself. Do this as a choice—for yourself—with your own thoughts. It is not necessary to suffer. Your loved one no longer suffers and would want you to know this. They look upon you with new eyes and wish you to know all is well. They are safe and loved in the arms of angels, and so are you, my friend, so are you.
The other messages can be viewed at her web site.
Giesemann is convinced that the words are coming from spirit, not from her own mind. “At first I thought I was making up what I was hearing until I noticed that the words were rhyming,” she stresses. “I might be able to rhyme one or two phrases on the spot, but not verse after verse non-stop with such beautiful messages. After a year of receiving poetry, the spirits now give me prose as well, for I finally know that I am not making this up.”
She also points out that after channeling a message from spirit, she frequently finds the exact words or new concepts in her spiritual reading later the same day. “This happens repeatedly—words such as “fear not the morrow,” which I would never use, and then within hours I come across the phrase in my reading,” she further explains by e-mail. “I always ask to be guided to what I should learn through the books I read, so when I pick up a book I’m drawn to read and find there what came through in the inspired writing earlier that day, this is always very evidential to me that these are non-physical minds working with my mind and guiding me. Additionally, I have had friends give me personal questions to ask of the spirit guides and poets. The poems that result have revealed childhood traumas and other circumstances which I knew nothing about. I recently sat with a friend who is going through difficulties. She asked for advice and I had no idea how to help her. I apologized for not knowing what to say, and we simply sat and prayed together. I went home and sat in meditation and asked my guides for advice. Their answer came in a full page of advice specific to her situation, stated in beautiful prose which I later shared with her. She told me the advice was spot-on and brought her the first true peace she’d found in weeks. I can take no credit whatsoever for that kind of writing.”
Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
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