That Nameless Place
By Gary White
Not all travel takes place on the physical plane. I have a story to tell about that, but first consider this list of terms: Intuition, gut feeling, right brain, hypnogogic state, sixth sense, inner knowing, theta state, knowing. I´m not saying that these terms are all exactly the same, but I believe they are ways of accessing something, a “nameless place/state” we don´t have a word for. Hold that thought. I´ll get back to it, but first, let`s travel in time, back to 1945.
I`m an eight-year-old boy in Cedar Vale, Kansas, a cow town on the Oklahoma border in the USA. World War II is just over and some of my friends are seeing their dads for the first time in several years. Others would never see their dads again. We played “war” as often as we played “cowboys and Indians.” Both games were pretty much the same, but the characters were different. We knew that “atom bombs” had dropped but didn’t know what that meant.
Cedar Vale, Kansas
My home was always filled with music. My parents and I sang all the time and we listened to Bing Crosby on the radio. My parents had purchased a huge old upright piano and installed it in my bedroom. It took up nearly all the available space. I had told them I wanted to take piano lessons. I would slip out of bed at night and play the piano very softly to keep from waking them up.
That was when I met Bertha Kirby. Mrs. Kirby was a 70-year-old, badly arthritic widow of a local doctor who was one of two piano teachers in Cedar Vale. She traveled around town in her black 1930 Chevy coupe, coming to people´s homes to give lessons. She charged 25¢ per week, and if you were one of her good students, she would appear again midweek for a free practice session. I was one of her good students, so I saw Mrs. Kirby twice a week for several years.
Early on in our relationship, I decided to write a piece of music for her. No one told me that I shouldn´t write my own music, and Mrs. Kirby was surprised and delighted with my efforts. She related to my parents that their son was destined for fame as a composer. Encouraged, I wrote a piece for Mrs. Kirby every week. I would laboriously draw out the five-line staves in my red-covered Big Chief tablet and notate the piece, which I would play for Mrs. Kirby at the next lesson.
Fast-forward ten years. I am a freshman music major at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. In my music theory class (which they called “Harmony I”), we were required to compose little pieces and perform them in class. My fellow students hated and feared those assignments, but they came very easily for me. After all, I already had several years of experience as a composer. My theory teacher thought very highly of my pieces, and the word traveled through the faculty, resulting in an invitation for me to study for a Bachelor of Music in music composition. I thought about this and realized that would mean much more than composing little piano pieces, and I felt I would need some “outside help” if I was going to do that. I happened upon a paperback book entitled Self Hypnosis and learned to put myself in a light trance. I discovered that the music came much more easily to me when I was hypnotized, so I put myself into a trance whenever I began to compose. That was how I first found that nameless place/space I was talking about at the beginning of this story.
Fast-forward to 1994. I am retiring as Distinguished Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. I have won a number of prizes, have dozens of published compositions and six university-level textbooks with my name on them, all conceived and written with inspiration from that nameless place.
I had, by that time, spent nearly forty years traveling back and forth from this 3D reality to what I now call the “multi-dimensional realms.” It is as familiar to me as this everyday reality in time and space. I refined the early self-hypnosis technique into a whole cluster of strategies, including lucid dreaming at night and visualization in the daytime. I spend much of my time as an “imaginaut” and call myself a business traveler in that realm. I don’t just “daydream;” I bring back riches to this 3D realm.
After a few years of retirement, I began traveling to sacred places in Europe with my wife and companion, Elyn Aviva. We encountered places with so much power that I felt the need to study dowsing to better understand what we were feeling. In my first dowsing lessons with Dominic Susani and Sig Lonegren, I quickly realized that if I put myself in the “nameless place,” AKA multi-dimensional realm, that my dowsing was much more accurate. I even began to be able to “see” and sense some of the normally invisible structures that are either underground or not residing in 3D reality.
I don´t know whether to call the multi-dimensional realms a “mind-set” or a “place.” It has always seemed to me to be a place I travel to, so I speak of it that way. If you are more comfortable thinking of it as an altered state of consciousness, that works just as well. Want to see the universe the way I see it? I´ve just written a short book of instructions that will help get you there. Just look for The Dowsing Mind—Into the Multi-Dimensional Realms and Back. You are in for a wild ride!
Gary White had a successful career as Distinguished Professor of Music at Iowa State University. After taking early retirement, he dowsed and traveled extensively in Europe. He and his wife, Elyn Aviva, write and publish a series of guidebooks called “Powerful Places in . . .” These guidebooks and The Dowsing Mind can be ordered online from PilgrimsProcess.com. Gary blogs at www.FandangoLife.com.
