Electronic Letters to the Editor December 2021

Letters to the Editor—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, December 2021

Brent, this looks like a great issue. I’ve now read Dan Erickson’s 7 pages with the photo images. I do feel a sense of a natural essence between our tales of the deer. I wonder about his friend’s anxiety about the deer not being deer. I was moved by his descriptions but in the gap about the image manifest and joe’s fear and wanting to drive away from the deer so hurried to be away, I wanted to know more. From my own ancient explorations and moving beyond that early shamanic encountering I identify with deer as symbols beyond my regular life. Hence, my drawings I enclose.

The owl separates one doe from another but different details of the latter three. In encounters they served the same function by preparing me for encounter. Especially when first arriving on the Sewanee mountain. Three stoic deer together approached me before an encounter. The really large owl flew down in front of my van coming home one night causing me to stop and park.

The deer appear as a unit in threes. I intend to add a buck in the near future. The buck is in the center and they are aligned in standing at the edge of the road with a wooded area on both sides. They don’t move, almost as if stationary sculptures. I came soon to realize that when they’d appear suddenly as I drive past that I may experience an encounter that night.

I add too that under hypnosis I recalled an occasion of reincarnation that began with my exploring a small dark pyramid room that held an empty sarcophagus. Behind the open coffin (the heavy lid was on the floor) was a bright green triangular neon light. I crawled into the sarcophagus, lay there as it started to move toward the green light and fearing that I was being drawn into and through that triangular shape, my fear being the Box and I was too large and I was unsure what was happening.

Then suddenly, I was thrust to the outside of a mesa. I equated the mesa with the pyramid. I was then fourteen years old, browned skin, shoulder-length black hair. I knew where I was at this point and walked to the edge of the mesa to a path downward to a cliff floor jutting outward and stood near the edge perhaps 20 feet up from the desert floor.

I was to be taught by a small Buddha-like being who sat in a lotus position on the sand. He spoke with waves of colors as the embodiment of his speech; these were flying out of this small being’s mouth. (Seated, He was about two feet high from desert floor to the top of his bald head). I stood above him on the projected rock cliff floor. Seated below me the Ancient One ejected from his mouth in various directions a variety of hues. The waves of color were looping and circling - the message being that this was my final time with him, that I was to go forward as a teacher with his imminent death. A wind storm arose and he deteriorated into sand blowing and fusing with the desert.

The hypnosis then found me exploring the world beyond the mesa-pyramid and desert. I was then kneeling in silence by thick mountain laurel and rhododendron bushes and looking through an opening to observe a mother doe giving birth to two fawns. I was in awe. I remain in awe both as to that event and to living and working and the abundance of nature in my midst daily.

The deer of these various encounters were to me miraculous beings. My journey indeed had started. I appreciated Dan’s commentary.

James E. Carlos, Ph.D.
Sewanee, TN
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