The French Cook

Carola and I decided to have lunch at the Chateau one fine day. We went there, found our way to the café, and sat down. As we sat there, I was aware of heat coming from a source to the left of and behind Carola. As I looked at what I thought was the wall, I began to make out what it was; the massive kitchen cook stove of the Chateau from when it was a going concern. It was painted over with the same color as the rest of the room and almost indistinguishable. It had been cold for a very long time, not used for more than 180 years. Yet, as we sat there I felt the heat of it. Not that it was unbearable, it was tolerable heat but more than warmth; it was the heat of a cook stove.

Floods of visions went through my imagination, there were spectral figures bustling about, all on a culinary mission of some sort, and this went on for some time. Carola called me back to reality but in the background there was this frenetic activity all the while we were there. I didn’t feel threatened or even uncomfortable, as it was I felt quite at home there; as if I was supposed to be there.

This feeling of belonging wasn’t new to me; I’d felt it from the day I made the right turn out of the forest and voila! There was the Chateau du Chantilly staring me in the face. It was larger than life, an apparition. After that, I made that trip frequently, it was one of a variety of ways I could get home from work in Leplessis-Belleville, but this was the only time the Chateau loomed larger than life before me.

Then I could never be without knowing my way around the ville. Although the grounds of the Chateau were strange to me, I was not a stranger in the city and felt even more at home in the older parts than on Avenue de Montmorency where we lived. In the forest and at the Grand Ecuries, there was never a time that I felt in a strange place.

There have been other familiarities for me. One that was also strongly felt was on Maui in Hawaii. I went to a little whaling museum and it was the same type of experience as was Chantilly, especially when I read some authentic log entries and heard “Thar she blows!” with the inflection that was undoubtedly authentic. Then later that night, when walking down the main street of the little tourist trap, I had the feeling that I was there 150 years before and the crowd was not modern day tourists but ships’ crews making a night of it ashore. The feeling was very strong.

I’ve been to hundreds of places throughout the world and have had these feelings only a few times. Others that I can recall as I sit here are: on the Great North Road at the Mount Pleasant Hotel near Doncaster in England, the roadside graves at a location in France on the way to St. Dizier, in Pompeii, at the Harbor in Sydney Australia, on the Newport News Point railroad dock at the foot of 23rd Street, sailing on the Chesapeake Bay off of Old Point Comfort, and generally in San Francisco to name most of them. One can see that the number is small by comparison to my travels. The Chantilly, Pompeii, and Maui experiences were the most significant, although the others were strong enough to get my attention. The question is; what’s going on?

One explanation was that these represent for me some previous existence/ lifetime but now I’m not so sure. Could it be that there are unfinished lifetimes hanging around out here waiting for a sympathetic being to allow them in for completion of a sort? I say hanging around because when I saw the roadside graveyard in France, I was aware of a group of soldiers sort of hanging around in a desultory fashion as if they had nowhere to go. I got the impression that they were lost in despair. So too could other unfinished lives be hanging around the vicinity of their untimely death and when a vulnerable or even cooperative Master chances by they can jump on and work their way to some sort of completion.

Completion for me means permanency. That is to say the Master that inhabits this brain-body works to develop himself to the point that when the brain-body dies, he moves on to another higher plane of existence in the spiritual world. I don’t know if this is a possibility for all the brain-bodies I see walking about but I firmly believe it is for this one and for numerous others.

This Master seems to have more than a modicum of strength/power over this brain-body. He is confident in what he does and it is possible that there is room in here for more than one; i.e. the Chantilly cook may have hooked on and is here for the ride. I don’t feel like the others are. Yet the Master is going about his business of becoming permanent without regard to his little French friend or maybe in spite of or even in addition to him.

In order for an inhabitation to take place there may be some prerequisites. It would seem that there have to be some sympathetic qualities existing between the one needing a ride and the Master. How many of these hitch hikers can one Master abide? At some point the hitch hiker may opt to get off and anywhere along the line another might be picked up. Yet there is a Master working on permanency who may have inhabited this brain-body early on, or who at least is the strongest to have climbed aboard thus far. I am close to concluding that inhabitation can take place at any time during the brain-body lifetime and not necessarily inspiration at first breath as I have previously thought.