A Talk by Kevin Ryerson—First Impressions

Quite a heady evening yesterday at the Association for Research and Enlightenment, the Edgar Cayce center in Virginia Beach, where we went to hear, with the purpose of covering (for Port Folio Weekly), a talk by Kevin Ryerson, celebrated psychic channel. I was welcomed quite enthusiastically with press passes for Jala (photographer) and myself and took copious notes and, in a sense, reconnected with my metaphysical self, who has been somewhat in remission of late. No better time for it, either, than New Moon in Scorpio, which is now void-of-course all day today, giving us an opportunity to absorb and digest. (I’ve still got to talk to Allen Chester, the Templar Tarot artist, about his work now on exhibition at the Heritage Center.)

It was a little confusing last night, though, because, first, the thing was advertised as starting at 7:30 but was underway when we arrived at 7:20, and, second, the man facilitating the proceedings way up at the front of the hall (the place was packed) didn’t look anything like the publicity photo of Ryerson, so I figured it was someone else until I began to listen to the content and realized it had to be he. But what a contrast between the youthful, somewhat degage guy in the photo and the actual man—a large, fat, bald guy of probably 60 or so! Anyway, what he had to say soon—but not too soon, as at first he repeated stuff I’d already read in Venture Inward (the ARE membership mag) and on his website (kevinryerson.com)—transcended his physical appearance, which, anyway, was so far up front from where I was sitting that it hardly mattered.

Most interesting of all, of course, was his channeling, when he slipped into trance and delivered messages from two of his entities. They were a little arcane, the one talking about meditation and general spiritual perception in Egypt around 1350 BC, the other, far more brief, promising a soon-to-dawn new age of world unity, a position Ryerson also takes and which is refreshing to hear after too much time spent (by me) absorbing world news.

In fact, Ryerson was quite upbeat in his emphasis on what is reshaping civilization positively rather than tearing it down to an anarchistic core. Interestingly, he assembled the 4 Horsemen of Revelation to show that, the 6 o’clock news notwithstanding, we presently have the capability and, on some promising fronts at least, are on our way to eliminating famine (with innovative, green agricultural approaches), pestilence (as in the neutralizing of AIDS), death (by increasing longevity and decreasing fear through psychic awareness, for instance), and war (people are tired of it). He spoke of undiscovered resources perceived by psychics like himself, such as great lakes of fresh water yet to be discovered under African deserts. In that sense, the evening was quite renewing.

As for his metaphysics, most of it I’ve heard before and can appreciate but not entirely swallow all of it. He’s down on the ego, for instance, but I like Seth’s idea (as channeled by Jane Roberts) more, that it’s not like a bad potato to be eliminated from the sack but a helpful interface between the world and the inner self which, however, needs to be tamed and retrained because in most of us it has rather tyrannically taken on more than it can handle. You could say George Bush and Richard Cheney reflect this on the mass level, a pretty effective mirror when looked at that way. But to eliminate it seems like tearing out something that was put there for a reason. Is it like a residual organ, an appendix—once functional but now useless in our present stage of evolution? That’s possible, I suppose, but I’m not ready to buy it yet, either.

Or is it like Myrrha—too many problems to survive in its present form? (See Thinking Dog, Oct. 21, 2007.)

Lots of questions! But no sure answers.

By the way, in his expansive physical form Ryerson reminded me a lot of Rob Butts’ portrait of Seth, reproduced in the book Seth Speaks.