By Celia Coates

Elmer Green had what he called “vision dreams” which were both dreams and visions. They were views of another level of reality. Many years ago he dreamed about a friend, a guy who worked with him as the foreman of a group at Minneapolis Honeywell that was manufacturing telescopes for the Army. In the vision dream Elmer could see the friend going around and around the Earth. Then, all of a sudden, the friend could hear Elmer say to him, “Now it’s time for you to go vertically instead of round and round.” That is the kind of advice Elmer would offer when he was fully awake as well as when he was in another state of consciousness.

Two years later, once again when he was “dreaming,” Elmer could see that his friend had finally turned and gone up and away from the planet instead of circling it endlessly. Elmer taught that we must “go vertical,” which means that we must advance spiritually and stop our unceasing round of entanglement with the material world.

Elmer had the advantage of learning that other realities exist when he was three years old. Here is how he described his experience in THE OZAWKIE BOOK OF THE DEAD,
“…(A) striking event happened when I was three years old which created the most vivid and indelible memory of my life – and even today, it seems as bright as when it happened.

I was sitting in one of those old stuffed-leather armchairs with my back up against one side, one shoulder somewhat turned against the back of the chair, and my feet straight across the seat, not quite touching the other side. What a comfortable chair, I thought. And then I remembered thinking, with great self-awareness, ‘This isn’t such a bad place after all.’

That thought had hardly crossed my mind when the opposite wall of the room began to brighten with a golden hue, and as the gold increased in intensity the curtains over the windows, and the windows too, and all the furniture in the room, vanished. How surprising – and interesting. I’d never before seen such a thing. Even the ceiling and the hanging light fixture disappeared in the gold light.

As I gazed in wonderment at this transformation, I became aware that about 100 feet away, beyond the upper corner of the room, which was approximately 30 degrees up and a little to my left, a group of men were gliding toward me. They were dressed in shining soft-white belted robes. In a few seconds they arrived in the golden room and stopped a few feet away. The leader was a tall figure with a black beard. He wore a white turban or long headgear of some kind that came down to his shoulders along his cheekbones. A circular band of material held it in place on his forehead.

Looking down at me, he smiled and said some words that have remained forever engraved in my mind, ‘We are here. You are there. And you have been successfully  planted.’ Astonished, I said nothing. Merely watched as the group and the golden light slowly faded, and curtains, windows, and walls reappeared.

The event produced a deep knowing in me that, (1) Other worlds existed. (2) They were populated. (3) People there were concerned with what happened on Earth. Also, I knew deeply that I ‘belonged’ to an enterprise of some kind and would have something to do.

Following that experience, years passed without a single additional occurrence of that kind. In other words, I was planted, and then allowed to grow up in a normal way, suffering the pangs and tribulations, and joys, of my karma, learning to live in the world like every person.”

Later, the enterprise to which he “belonged” began to become clear and he made a series of choices on the way to the “something” he was to do. He continued his spiritual studies, received academic degrees, married Alyce (his partner in the enterprise), and went on to become one of the founders of clinical biofeedback. Biofeedback is one of the gateways to the higher states of consciousness that can provide glimpses of the dimensions of reality that Elmer learned about when he was three. Future posts will discuss that, but for now I’d like to get back to his advice to “go vertical.”

Elmer was given the gift of knowing about ‘verticality,’  the extended levels of reality, when he was very young – but how can those of us not given extraordinary experiences like that learn about the subtle dimensions? That is what Elmer’s life enterprise was about – teaching us about the range of states of consciousness and how to experience the the full nature of reality for ourselves.

It’s useful to look again at the statement by Aurobindo (WINN, April 14, 2017) about the continuum of energies that go from “the densest physical matter to most rarified spirit.” To advance spiritually, to be able to perceive the most subtle or rarified dimensions, we have to stop our unceasing round of entanglement with the distractions of the material world.

Our emotions create one of the most powerful forms of distraction. What is called for is not to deny or suppress them – the capacity for a great variety of emotional and physical experiences is one of the glories of being human – but we have to master them so that they are not too strong, too all-consuming. Then we can begin to look away from our material existence, to look up, and to “lift off” so we too can experience the less dense levels of being. Managing our emotions makes for a good first step towards going vertical.

Print This Post