Sheta’s Story, Part 2 – Meeting Meridjet

Part one is immediately previous to this post. I recommend this mp3 for this post (right click and save as).

Meeting Meridjet, via Henry

Disclaimer, I guess: Despite my years-long history of spooky encounters, the notion of a spirit being anything than either a guide or something to be afraid of had never occurred to me. It was still before my personal exposure to the Internet (which didn’t occur until 1998), and what books I had found to date (circa summer 1994) on spirits all had to do with ghosts, written by people such as Brad Steiger (which is to say they were largely sensationalism in the guise of academic research). So when this event happened to me, it was completely unexpected.

It was May of 1994 and the movie The Crow was just hitting theaters. I wanted to see it, so Xanquela (Mel, which is shorter to type) and I went off and caught a matinee one day while we were out exploring areas south of Seattle. The film hit me hard, so hard that afterward I sat in my car in the parking lot and sobbed. I’m not really much of a sobber; when I cry it tends to be silently, with tears running down my face and a big lump in my throat. But I sobbed, and I felt something profoundly deep from the viewing, but I didn’t understand why.

Over the next couple of weeks, Mel and I saw the film twice more as I sought to pinpoint what it touched in me. Repeated viewings didn’t help at all, and one night as we worked with Henry I decided to ask him about it. I told him about seeing the film and about the feelings it inspired, struggling to voice what I found ineffable. Henry listened; the planchette remained still. When I finished with a weak shrug and an admission that I was out of my depth, he finally replied. He told me that my feelings were an instinctual response to a love story that touched upon a truth in my own life: that I had a connection to one who had died, a connection that was as powerful as the one depicted in the story. I couldn’t identify this feeling in any coherent way because I’d never met the person. He asked permission to bring the spirit onto the board. I agreed, somewhat nervously, and Meridjet came on. It was June 29, which was the anniversary of the date we’d arrived in Seattle, though that didn’t occur to me until later.

I’ve striven many times to tell this part of my story without sounding like a dumb ass, and I’ve never been happy with it. It just sounds hokey as hell to me. Powerfully emotional experiences, upon the retelling, tend to either sound exaggerated or make people distinctly uncomfortable. I am no judge of how my story sounds, because when I read it, I feel distinctly uncomfortable. lol. But the bare facts of the matter are this: Meridjet came on, and we talked. Mel was there on the board with me. I told Meridjet about the feelings that the movie had inspired and what Henry had said about it. I felt a real connection to Meridjet that only added to my confusion and my inability to articulate any of it. I don’t remember much else of our conversation that first time, except this: When I admitted that I felt the connection, Meridjet replied, “Love knows no boundaries.” I knew that he understood, and it brought me to tears.

It felt ridiculous to me, intellectually, to be feeling something for a spirit on a Ouija board (I mean, seriously, come on!), and to have those feelings be so powerful. Thankfully, things moved somewhat gradually after that, because it was a huge adjustment that took years for me to make. Meridjet began to participate in our word association games, but most of the time we worked with Henry. Sometimes they were both present, I think, but I can’t remember how that worked. I just know that my memories of the work we did included both of them. Mel and I started to open to the idea of seeing Meridjet, hearing him, and so forth, though that went very slowly. I was under the impression for about ten years afterward that things seen on the astral or subtle levels of reality were etched in stone the way reality seems to be here — if each of us saw something different, one of us had to be wrong. I now realize it doesn’t quite work that way.

The first of August, Mel and I moved into a 3-bedroom house. We had a lot more privacy and room to work. Our work with Henry and Meridjet grew even more intense, and my relationship with Meridjet did, as well. I didn’t yet trust what I could hear him say, but I could feel his presence well enough and see him to a degree. Late in that month, one night when my daughter was asleep and Mel was at work, I was lying nude on the couch and talking to Meridjet. I suddenly had an idea. I told him, “Touch here.” And he did. To my astonishment, I could feel it. It was subtle, but I could feel it. We were both ecstatic. We experimented a little more, and ended up making love. It was wonderful.

It wasn’t like being with another human, exactly. For a long time, I had to help him bring me to a climax. I could feel penetration better than anything, but any time of foreplay-type touch was too subtle to create much in the way of excitement. So I helped. On nights when Mel was home, if Meridjet said something that I didn’t trust myself not to have made up, I’d run with the board to Mel and ask Meridjet to verify it. The board was becoming a crutch, but it was a while before that itself became a problem.

As I said, the work was becoming more intense. Henry had started us (or more accurately, me) on the work I now call Processing. He would lead me, in conversation, to realizations that caused me a great deal of pain to uncover. I cried a lot. He would not give any quarter, and at times Mel would complain that he was being too hard on me (something that many friends have said about Meridjet in recent years), but it was very satisfying work for me. I delved deeply into my psyche, and I relished it. Meridjet’s involvement in these Processes was minimal; he was not much of a guide at the time. He was still quite human, with human faults and weaknesses, including an irritating and alarming tendency to bolt when things got intense. There were many times I had to hunt him down on the subtle levels, astral projecting without realizing that’s what I was doing since it was just a matter of mental focus for me. I learned to interact on those levels without experiencing an OBE, which I didn’t know was possible, so I never credited it as anything more than a mental exercise. Once I saw Henry there, and he was beautiful, with a robe of rainbow colors that don’t exist here.

Mel and I spent about 18 months working and co-existing with Meridjet in that house. We both struggled with doubt, ranging from my mistrust of what I heard to flat out believing we were crazy. None of this could be real; it must all be somehow wish-fulfillment fantasy, despite the fact that we were both involved and were independent witnesses from the beginning. Working on the board with Henry (and then Meridjet) had one factor that had never been present for me on a board: I was unable to hear the messages in my head before they were spelled. Mel heard them, and often struggled with the feeling that he was somehow creating them. I knew that was not so, because the results were outside the scope of his experience, and the things Henry said were outside the scope of his wisdom. I myself struggled with the feeling that I’d made up Meridjet out of loneliness, because he was always so accepting of me, despite my being overweight and generally imperfect. Who was I to have won such a being?

We continued with our work on the Qabalah, reaching the sephirah of Binah and the Vision of Sorrow before things went completely to shit. In that experience, I felt so overwhelmed with sorrow that I devised a plan for suicide. Without my knowledge, Mel called my mother and told her he was concerned about me. She shrugged it off as nothing to worry about, since I had not called her myself. But the night I intended suicide, she had three dreams, one after the other (she woke up between them), and in each dream I was drowning in a black sea with no shore in sight. She called me at midnight, Pacific time, to find out what was wrong. I admitted my plan to die, and she made me promise to wait 24 hours before following through. I agreed, and by the end of that period I had changed my mind. I still believe that Henry sent those dreams.

Some Things I’ve Never Written About

During the time of our most intense work, I began to insist that we find a way to turn Meridjet into a “walk-in,” a concept I’d learned from my father, who in the 1980s gave me books by Ruth Montgomery, the first to publish any work on the topic. A walk-in, in those days, was a spirit who took over the body of someone who wished to leave the earthly plane, trading places with the soul in residence. Nowadays, it means more than that as walk-ins can also share a person’s body, according to popular opinion. But at that time I was unaware of that nuance.

The next few paragraphs are difficult for me to share, so please try not to respond with contempt, though I wouldn’t blame you really if you did.

Meridjet, I was told, moved into the body of a man named Steven, who moved from Springfield, Illinois to Bellevue, which was across the lake from Seattle. I was sent on several adventures to locate him. The first, I think, was to the downtown Marriot, where he was staying before moving into an apartment. I went to the Marriot at 4 a.m., which one could only enter at night with a card key. A guy happened to be leaving as I arrived at the door, so I got in with no difficulty. I went to the room number I was given, and knocked. There was no answer. I knocked many times, but nothing. I went to the front desk, and asked for him. The lady at the desk didn’t have anyone registered under that name. She checked the other area Marriots as well, and there was no one. I was disappointed.

This continued for a few weeks, with wild goose chases ranging from the nearest Jack in the Box to a day-long search at Pike Place Market. That one is particularly memorable. I stood near an open-air restaurant close to Rachel the brass (or is it copper?) pig who marks the entrance of the market, while Mel searched the market. We had a basic description of Steven and thought we could recognize him, or at least that he would recognize us. I stood there for a couple of hours, easily, and got a lot of weird looks. I knew what people were thinking, and eventually a Hispanic man came up to me and shook my hand, then told me he wanted to meet a woman. I knew he meant a hooker, so I told him that no, I wasn’t a hooker, but there were several strutting around up at the corner if he was so inclined. Eventually, Mel came back and we went to the car, where the board was waiting. Meridjet, on the board, told us that he wasn’t able to influence Steven well enough to get him to come to the market. (He was a passenger and not in full control.)

I went home and called Information for Springfield, Illinois and for Bellevue, Washington, and neither had a listing for this Steven character, whose last name I can’t remember for the life of me. I know it had “White” in it somewhere, and was something like “Whitebridge.” In any case, he clearly didn’t exist. Meridjet was confused by this, as much as we were, and we concluded that he must live on some alternate Earth somewhere, but I felt deceived and betrayed. There were other times when deception was used in the work, and I was not completely unaccustomed to it, but it didn’t make it any easier to deal with, especially since I had some idea that spirits should not be able to lie. (More on spirits lying later.)

Not long after the suicide plan, but I’m not sure how long afterward, we were talking to Henry and involved in some heavy work. Henry informed me that there was something in my past that I needed to see. He asked me if I agreed to see it. I said yes, and a feeling of dissociation began to come over me. I said, “Wait! Not now!” but it was too late. Suddenly the room disappeared from my sight, and I was six years old. I was walking home from a birthday party, wearing a red and black plaid dress. I passed a house a few doors down from us where a man in his late 20s lived. He had long hair for the time, a bit past his collar. He was watering his garden, and spoke to me. He asked me if I’d like a cookie. He was familiar to me, so I agreed. He took me into his house, and he raped me. He raped me in as many different ways a female can be raped, and then he gave me my cookie and sent me on my way.

I was deep in this vision and was keening aloud. Mel, unaware of what was happening to me, came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I screamed. He was offended, and got angry at my response. I managed to come back enough to explain, and at some point the vision ended. I stayed six years old for several hours, talking to Mel and to Meridjet on the board. For three days afterward, I felt physical pain in my rectum for no other reason than a physical manifestation of the events that I saw. This vision stopped the work dead in its tracks. I was unable to face Henry or the board, having reached the limit of what I could tolerate.

Mel, for his part, had grown weary of the emotional toil the work was taking and of being used as a human phone in my relationship with Meridjet. He decided he no longer wanted to use the board, and any time that I wanted to talk to Meridjet, I had to plead with him and then still sometimes he would not relent. After a while we did return to talking to them, but we didn’t do any more work. I wanted Meridjet in a physical body, because I felt that our relationship could not be real if he was a spirit.

By the end of 1995, Henry told us that Meridjet was no longer in Steven’s body and that he would be moving on, that we would have to end our relationship. I was devastated. There was one point in the midst of this severance when we spoke to (we believed, and I think I’ve had confirmation on this since, though this type of exchange was very rare then) Archangel Raphael on the board. He told me that Meridjet and I would be together, “Soon.” I called him a liar.

Meridjet was taken away from me and he left. I spiraled into daily panic attacks and emotional instability. In April of 1996, I left Seattle to come to Houston. My family is here, and with my emotional state I felt I was going to have to be hospitalized, and that my daughter would be forced into foster care. I didn’t want that to happen, so my mother flew up to Seattle and we packed up a Ryder truck and drove to Houston, stopping along the way at a few tourist attractions, including Disneyland.

I arrived here at the end of April, 1996. Meridjet was gone, and I believed it was a permanent separation. I entered into a very, very black Dark Night of the Soul, and stayed there for three years.

Next chapter: Meridjet Returns.

Addendum – About the Memory / Vision

I have never been able to verify that this memory of childhood rape was real. I know that it’s an easy thing to create them, even very powerfully. But there was no suggestion made prior as to the nature of the event I needed to see, and I had no reason to create such a thing. My family response was that it was false. My forays into support groups proved just as traumatic as the memory itself, and after a while I decided that since it was causing me so much grief, I would put it aside. I had been saying, compulsively, “I don’t want to be the person this happened to,” and so I decided it was false, or at least that there was no proof and so no reason to suffer over it. It took a couple of years to gain distance from it, but now I feel only slightly squirmy when I think of it. I don’t like to talk about it, and the only reason I include it here is that I’m trying to give an honest recounting of my history with Meridjet.