CLOCKS STOPPING and GOLDEN LADDERS TO HEAVEN by Ed Augusts
…….. T h e I n v i s i b l e M a n s i o n s, T h e "M a n y M a n s i o n s"
One of the suburbs of Las Vegas has a golden ladder that comes down from the ceiling and offers people an exit from the pains and cares of their old age. This ladder, and others, in Henderson, Nevada, going upwards to a better place, perfectly compensates for the pathways going down to a kind of hell in other parts of the Las Vegas Valley.
I'm sure the Las Vegas Valley isn't the only place on earth where the elderly have seen the Golden Ladder phenomenon, though. But her seeing it when she did, with me standing by, sure brought it to my attention, so now, I can bring it to yours.
My mother was not the first or last elderly, bed-ridden person who thought she saw a golden ladder ascending up and up, right through the ceiling of her room. She could barely speak, and what she did say was confused. But several times she did point out this ladder, in great excitement, as she stared in amazement at it. She gestured with her hand that I go look at it, so I went around to the foot of the hospital bed and stood there. But all I noticed was a tingle as I stood on the carpeted, approximae spot where the ladder was. . I couldn't see what she was seeing, but I wasn't her. I wasn't in her state of mind. Notice I'm not saying she was in teh throes of dementia (which used to be called 'senility'), because she saw things — circles of her family, for instance, and angelic beings who wanted to know if she was ready to go away with them — that I don't know if there was anything 'demented' about her visions at all. Don't people develop
unique, new talents and abilities at various times of their lives? Doesn't a baby, at a certain point of development, recognize its mother and father, and smile? Doesn't a child, tween or teen, suddenly make a break-through into the land of "adulthood", however it s you wish to understand my more precise meaning? One person's adulthood might be another person's mere childhood if they are even older and more experienced than adulthood and if a whole new world is opening up to them, partly inside and partly outside their minds. We adults, however, not recognizing it as a new level of being, can't participate in it, don't want to be drawn into it or even hear about it — so we try to medicate it away. mixing the daily meds into a glass of creamy tasting chocolate drink at $3 a can, often with a "Sleep, Mom! There, there!" as she gaspingly sips away at it.
The first and second person to whom I mentioned this incident of the LADDER VISION, startled me by agreeing with Mom about the existence of the golden ladder — her parents had seen a golden ladder, too. Is there a conspiracy of the elderly about Golden Ladders and Angelic beings? The first time she saw it, Mom was quite agitated, the vision upset and puzzled her. What was a golden ladder doing in the middle of the room, close enough to stand upon and high enough to make a point of exit from the whole scene, from tthe time and space of the room she was in, the whole situation she was in? No doubt she could have gone somewhere if she'd wanted to, and it would have been a nice climb to a better place.
My brother, who is the world's biggest scoffer and skeptic, mentioned it unbidden at the very start of my mother's incapacity when he said: "Whatever you do, don't listen to the nonsense she's going to say as she lays there. We went through this with my wife's parents. They will say the most incredible and stupid things, and if you listen to them, you will start believing them yourself! " He was clearly terrified of the visions the elderly often see. . "Did either of them say anything about seeing a golden ladder." "A golden ladder? Listen, if you pay attention to all the nonsense they're going to say in that condition, you'll be trying to climb up a golden ladder yourself!"
Gvido ably represents the 'scoffer' view about golden ladders. But there is a more accepting view, and I think I know what it is because I am open to the suggestion of such a ladder existing.
This life is full of dreams. We spend a third of our lives sleeping and our days are embedded with daydreams. The daydreams are nothing less than visions. I see no reason to feel that the visions of the elderly as necessarily bogus. I think we should listen and take notes, because someday we are going to be seeing visions like the elderly do.
Our lives are also full of MAGIC and what may be inexplicable to us adults may be seen in a clearer vision when we are in the so-called, much maligned, state of "senile dementia". When my Father passed away, it was a few minutes after 9:00 p.m. We got a call at 9:30 confirming that fact. How did we know he'd died a few minutes after 9:00? Because an ancient green wind-up clock, the clock he'd used to wake up on the 12-hour, 7-day shifts he used to have to work when I was a little boy, stopped at 9:04 p.m. The day before it had been working fine, the next morning I notice it had stopped. Times of Death are evidently VERY significant on some incredibly basic level of Time and Space. As an astrologer I do believe a clock stops ticking, so-to-speak, when we are born, for that is the moment used for all subsequent Natal Charts. I guess that "clock" that starts ticking at birth stops again at the moment of death. I have good
personalal confirmation, albeit second hand — that is, it wasn't me that died. But I was certainly there to see it happen. Mother died right at home, withni view of an electruic clock that hung on the wall of the adjacent kitchen. When she passed away, that clock didn't just STOP —- it fell right off the wall, right off the nail that I thought held it in place. The clock hadn't fallen in six years that we spent in that house, but it fell to the ground the same night that Mom passed away. Some unknown force took a slap at it, I guess, because the clock and the nail both came down from the wall at that moment.
That would go straight into the "Strange & Unusual" file for a book — not a scary book, not a book about ghosts, but a book which suggests Life at the End of the Tunnel, and Awesome Abilities for Humans as they have once and for all advanced from childhood to adulthood, from adulthood to a state of masterful old age, not senile dementia but senile adventure, New Geriatric Understanding of the Ways of the Universe, and beyond it, at that moment, not to "Death" and "being Dead", but to a spiritual and incorporeal state during which either clocks stop around them, as if influenced by angels, or they stop clocks on purpose to try to send us a message on their way out. What IS the message, though? What message would a soul, a spirit, be trying to give us, when they knock a clock off the wall? Or, when an old Grandfather's Clock comes to a sudden stop at the moment of death — I've heard of THAT happening from several
people, as well, and if I want them to believe my far-fetched story about clocks stopping, then I am inclined to believe their unusual stories about Grandfather Clocks stopping, as well.
Clocks stop all the time, but how often do they fall off the wall? That clock in Mom's kitchen hadn't fallen off the wall in 5 or 6 years, that's 365 x 6 = more than 2.100 days. When DOES it fall off? That one ouf of 2,100 days and nights when Mom, who owned the clock, passes away. And my Dad's does the same, and my friend with the Grandfather clock — it does the same when his loved one dies, as well. What are the chances of any 3 people that I happen to know, out of, say, a thousand people in all, having their parent's clocks stop or fall off the wall at the same time they passed away? Well, couple the odds of the clock stopping on a given day, with the odds of someone passing away at all on a given day. I think you could MULTIPLY one by the other.
You would come up with a statistical abnormality, an anomaly. And that's what these incidents are — anmalies of time and space, of life and death. Life goes into Death — and the "thing" we use to MEASURE time — stops also! What DOES this mean? "Time doesn't exist for me as of this moment!" (clock smashes to the floor). "Here, let me stop this clock for you, the passage of time is abhorrent." Or... "The passage of time is ultimately nullified. The passage, the marking of time, is meaningless!" (Clock stops ticking suddenly!).
What if the Golden Ladder is true? Such a view implies that our homes are connected with other places. Or, that elderly humans in a profound visionary state which we incorrectly assume is "senile dementia", are in contact with another reality, a different world, a different Plane of Being, a place frok outside the whole concept of Time as wll as Space, a world reachable by mental exertion (because they're not strong enough to grab and climb the ladder physically) or perhaps mental relaxation. Faith. Maybe Faith is required. The golden ladder is there. Reach for it now, before it fades away again. Was she seeing Paradise? Or another room of the mansion, a bigger mansion than the house she was living in? Is there a throne, a golden street, pearly gates at the highest point of this golden ladder?
I have come, more recently, to believe in 'many mansions', but through a 'back-door' kind of way. I have not entered a mansion. But I find myself IN a mansion. This is a most unusual kind of vision, and when I have the feeling, and see the sight of being in a larger mansion than the home or studio I'm lying in, then I DO sense that there's a world which we usually don't see at all, have no notice of or contact wtth, but in the visions, I am right in the middle of this mansion. Or mansions. It is actually mansions because when I lived on the 9800 block of E. Holmes I found the walls and ceiling transparent and revealing that I was in a hundred foot high lodge, a lodge that blended regional Native Ameircan with Viking or at least Nordic construction and decoration. The main building was wood-beamed, and everything, reddish-brown. But on the 400 block of East Speedway Blvd., the vision was of being in a classical structure made of marble, and with niches and statues, decorations of all kinds. It was like being transported to a quiet corridor of St. Peter's basilica. Hundred foot-high ceilngs again, if not higher still… and a feeling of formality, of a Saturnian gravity, of a bit of loneliness and austerity. Was I just beyond the portals of heaven, or of hell, when I saw that vision? The night before I'd had a vision of a semi-transparent floor and gears grinding, big gears slowly grinding away, right UNDER the house I was in. So there are different things toward the different compass ponts, not just in everyday reality, but in real life, as well. I honor the compass points. I figure we are all somewhere on this 'grid' which is the earth. We are all our own special distance south from the north pole and our own special distance West of Greenwich, or, one might call it something more poetic, like "West of the Sun and North of the Moon." I almost said "South of the Moon", but that wouldn't be true, because the Moon passes just south of the celestial apex, not north. Not here in the Northern Hemisphere, at least. , No doubt if we went north far enough, the Moon would be lower in the sky. And we are West of the Sun except at the end of the day, when the Sun is defniitely to our West. So the phrase is not really accurate, it is just SOMETIMES accurate. The true saying would be: "East or West of the Sun and North or South of the Moon". How's that? Now we include all the people in the Southern Hemisphere, as well! Welcome!
In what we Euro-American based folks call the "Eastern" religions, heaven is everywhere and inside everything, heaven is parrt of the Matrix of the World we're living in. No apocalypse is necessary, in fact, an apocalypse would bring an end to heaven, for heaven is here on earth. . Like I saw in a meadow in Golden Gate Park, when I could see heaven in the dew on the grass, or in a daisy in my hand. I looked at my fingertips and saw the vast whorls and swirls of my fingerprints. I'll agree with you, YES, I was HIGH on something that day… But I can't remember what it was or any other circumstances about that day, just that moment. The cosmic moment stands out even when the normal worldly connections are forgotten. A photograph exists dating from the day of this experience in 1975 or so.
Heaven seems like a fantasy when it is someone else's vision. The Paradise pictured in the Muslim Koran is lush and lavish, the very opposite of the lives of the first Muslims. They did not live in a land of "milk and honey" like the Jews did after conquering the Canaanites. The heaven which put the first Muslims into a rapture, an agreement to believe, is silky, plush, well-appointed wih all which they most want and most lack in their day-to-day real lives in what is now nothing more thna an oasis in the desert of Saudi Arabia. So Heaven for the Muslims is an oasis of life-giving fresh, green, lush, rapturous Life Forces amidst what is otherwise a dessicated, ferociously hot, waterless and vast desert that stretches beyond the horizon… what the realm of both this world and the next world must be like to them — with the Heaven of Allah and its dozens of willing virgins as prizes for those to whom Allah will grant life in such a place..
There is no concept of afterlife in Buddhism, it is a concept of re-birth. We keep coming back and get to try again. Why would we want to go someplace else when we die? Why wouldn't we
want to come right back here and live another lifetime in the United States of America? But by the time grown-ups turn into the elderly and begin seeing spectral visions of Golden Ladders and lush valleys, they are no longer interested in staying in North America or anywhere on this planet. Other worlds start to beckon!
Belief in Hell is declining like crazy in America, almost nobody believes they are going to go to Hell. Universal belief is growing that everyone is going to go to heaven — somehow, sooner or later, at the end of this life or at the end of some future life. No more sulphur-toxic eternal lifestyles in the Realm of Hades. Do you have to BELIEVE to be SAVED? Or do you have to DO GOOD WORKS? That choice is just on ONE of many paths to God. The KINGDOM is NOW, This is spelled-out by Jesus. But if THAT's true, then how do the Golden Ladders fit into this idea? I guess they are offering people a way up and up, from one Reality to another, from one MANSION to another... And in his father's house there are many mansions. I'm sure I've seen some of them already in my own visions… they're just a hint of things to come!
Yet I still love life, I love the planet, I love nature, I love the sea, the sky, the old movies I've saved on videos. How sad that in organized conservative religion, the ultimate goal of Christians is to die. A lot of Muslims feel the same way, especially if they will arrive in a lush, verdant heaven filled with nubile and willing virgins. (That's for the guys. Don't you wonder what kind of heaven is anticipated for female Muslims?)
Is death the goal? No! That is wrong! Perhaps the ultimate goal is to mature, to develop from the chrysalis or cocoon of adult life into the butterfly of senility, the dragonfly of dementia, which surely will zoom a person off into other worlds, like some natural, non-addictive, non-threatening psychedelic substance. the "Eat Me!" of Alice in Wonderland. Eat Me and see the world, the next world. A Golden Ladde that may lead you up into Other Mansions, lodges, palaces, or cathedrals, may one day be shown to you. If it is, try to use the ladder to get to the other mansion! That's what it's there for! Best, —–Ed
