The Beginning Of A Story That Began In Another Time - Part VII
In a story that began in our May issue, I started out by going into a past life experience that took place over 700 years ago. This month’s installment features the players from the previous incarnation, and the vicissitudes of fate and Karma that have placed all of them in their respective roles, this time around. (If you have not read the first three installments, click here for PT: 1 , click here for PT: 2 , click here for PT: 3 , click here for PT: 4 and click here for PT: 5 and click here for PT: 6
The rest of the day got swallowed up by Slim’s errands, my passport, and the need to make it back in time for him to do his Friday night introductory talk. People had already started to arrive. Aside from the 15 people who would be renting rooms in the local B&B’s, there were three guys who were supposed to be staying at my place; Jon and Jerome were driving up from Bedford, New York, and a guy named Hans was on his way down from the Northeast Kingdom. I had never met any of them before.
When we pulled into the driveway there was a stranger pitching a tent on my lawn. He turned out to be Hans, a hipster/merchant/father-of-four, who sold jewelry in a Kiosk up on Burlington’s Church Street. My first impression kept the jury out for the next 12 hours. It took me that long to decide whether I wanted to like this guy, who turned me off at first because he had dollar signs in his eyes, and his ego was bigger than China.
There were always two different kinds of people hovering around Slim. Some of them were there for all the right reasons. Others were there to cash in on his technology, suck whatever they could out of his brain, and take everything he had to give to further their own interests. At times it was hard to tell who was who.
The ones who were there to exploit the situation were posers who made a point of broadcasting a burning desire to “heal the planet”, while their evil twin was already in the counting house, adding up all money there was to be made at the end of the day. If Hans appeared to fall into that category, Jon and Jerome did not: they turned out to be a couple of angels who spent a good deal of their time working for nothing, planting Harmonizers all over the planet, and pouring their heart and soul into Slim’s research for the next four years.
We waited till the last minute for the boys to show up but they didn’t blow in until Slim was a few minutes into the lecture. Looking like a couple of Hippies, and a good 20 years younger than the youngest person in the room, Jon and Jerome moved to the back of the class and sat down next to me. Pulling notebooks out of their knapsacks, once they got their bearings, they settled in and started keeping a record that in four years time gave birth to tomes of information on the physics and metaphysics of planetary healing.
If memory serves, Slim was talking about his life when the boys walked in. His introductory talks were always mind blowing. They were supposed to run from 6 to 8 but it was more like from 6, till whenever the questions came to a halt. That night we didn’t make it home till around eleven and the conversation kept going until well after 3 AM. Slim was on a roll. It was in the middle of that pow-wow that I realized how lucky I was to be in his presence, and from that day on I kept a written record of everything that came out of his mouth, just so that I could preserve it and pass it on.
In less than a year the notes that were recorded that night grew into what later became the first written record of Slim and his research. Those diaries formed the basis for a biography that was allowed to go out of print soon after he died. Because that story is no longer available, and because it can only be purchased at a very high price, I am going to reprint a portion of it here, so that you can get a feel for what it was about Slim Spurling that made him so special.
What follows is an excerpt from what he always referred to as “Ring I”, the first chapter of “Slim Spurling’s Universe”. Please note that these words were transcribed from a series of taped conversations between the two of us. I bowed to Slim’s way of telling the story because I loved the way he told it, and was too awed by him to think I had any business changing a word.
As you will see, the language is folksy and unsophisticated with a hint of something that I still can’t put my finger on. My aim through all of it was to give the reader a chance to hear Slim tell it and make them feel like they were getting it, straight from the horse’s mouth:
“There is a child inside all of us. And this part of our being is still pure and innocent enough to believe that we can change the world. Years of conditioning by our parents, our teachers, and the culture at large have silenced our inner child so that we can’t hear it anymore. Over time, doubt and skepticism replace innocence and faith. We are taught that certain things are impossible, and we obediently decide to accept that idea.
When someone like Slim Spurling comes along and says he has developed the technology to change the world and return the planet to a state of peace and harmony, it sounds too good to be true. Everything we have been taught tells us things like this are impossible. After all, the problems of the world are too big, and no one has the answers. Even if some small voice inside wants to believe him, it is easier to hand over the microphone to the doubts that we use to defend ourselves.
But when a person is open enough to listen and hear about some of the things Slim has done, the child inside wakes up again. It begins to see that – yes, there might be a glimmer of hope here. The Earth is in too much of a crisis for any of us to keep feeding our doubts. When the house is burning down, does it help to be skeptical about the guy who climbs up the ladder to save you?
To really understand Slim’s work it is essential to understand who he is and where his roots lie. The flesh and blood human being behind the research is as miraculous as the research itself. Slim’s life story is a testimony to what comes out of a man who listens to his higher guidance. So, we’ll begin at the beginning to get a feel for this totally unique and amazing Being. As incredible as his inventions, and discoveries sound, and as hard as it may be to believe that he has created a technology that has the power to change the world, there is nothing the least bit fantastic about it. It is all as down to earth and as loaded with common sense as he is.
Slim was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1938 at the tail end of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Slim’s ancestors on his father’s side of the family emigrated from Wales in the early 1600’s and his mother’s roots went back to Norway and Sweden.
Why would any woman in her right mind name her only son “Slim”? Margaret Spurling didn’t. She was a distant cousin and big fan of Gary Cooper, so Slim’s given name is Gary, after the famous actor. By the time he was fifteen, however, “Gary” was six-foot-three and weighed a hundred and forty pounds wringing wet. Years later, a guy who worked loading hay with him nicknamed him Slim and it stuck. He’s still skinny as a rail.
When he talks about his childhood you get the feeling the Spurlings were pioneers.
Everything was done the hard way or the old way. It was not a fine and fancy situation. What he learned from living that simply is very much a part of who he is now. As a kid he remembers standing at the door of the family house and seeing nothing but mounds of dirt blown into piles as high as the top of the fence posts. The only living, green thing was prickly-pear cactus.
He went to school the way everyone did, but he played hooky whenever he could get away with it. Early morning walks with the dog gave him the opportunity to get on the wrong end of a skunk, and the stench bought him permission to stay home from school and roam around the woods instead. It also gave him time to read whatever he wanted to read on his own without being bothered by bells, changing classes, or repeating by rote what he already knew. Slim was a bright kid and his mind could handle much more than reading, writing, and arithmetic.
It seems as if the appetite for knowledge, which evolved into a Thirst for Truth, was there from the very beginning. He haunted the local library. The librarian was liberal enough to let Slim go over the five-book limit when he checked out, and by the time he was in his teens he had read every book in the place. Time spent reading and studying was balanced with farm chores, tending crops, fishing, hunting, and exploring the nearby hills and valleys.
Guns are part of the scenery growing up on the farm. Slim had a .22 rifle, and was out hunting game for the family table by the time he was eight years old. His grandfather Thompson, an expert hunter and outdoorsman, was his hands-on mentor in the outdoorsman’s arts. He gave Slim a .22/410 over-and-under, rifle-shotgun for his tenth Christmas, and this piece remained in his possession until the mid-nineties. Slim took it to a gunsmith for repairs, and the unscrupulous man sold it out from under him to an unknown party.
With this little firearm Slim had the perfect reason to expand his explorations and become even more of a student of the natural world. Time spent hunting in the wilderness tuned him in to his surroundings on many different levels. Long before he knew what their names and scientific classifications were, he recognized every tree, shrub, vine, and herbaceous grass on sight. Slim connected early to nature. He grew up knowing that he was part of it.
His grandfather Thompson ran a mercantile operation that served as a trading post for the Native Americans near Phillips, South Dakota. He spoke the native dialects and knew sign language as well. Slim picked up on a lot of this and understood intuitively what the native people were about. The fact that the US government treated them unfairly did not escape his notice, either.
Slim’s mother taught school to the kids on one of the reservations, and every night at the dinner table the family heard a lot about what she witnessed. The injustices meted out to the Native people by the government agencies appalled Margaret Spurling, and the horrible living conditions of the native children broke her heart.
This early exposure to the Native American people and their ways had a big impact on Slim. Long before it became fashionable to know about earth-based traditions, they were part of his everyday experience. His mother and grandmother used Native folk remedies to doctor everyone in the family. Their expertise with herbal healing methods made a lasting impression on Slim. He soaked up all kinds of information just by watching what these women did. They taught him to keep his eye on wild things too. The Spurlings needed no weatherman to tell them which way the wind blew. Slim learned to read the weather just by observing the behavior of birds and animals.
From the sound of it, his parents and grandparents were high-principled, honest people who knew what “doing the right thing” meant. Whether integrity is a quality that develops when children absorb the behavior of the people who raise them, or if it is something one is born with, Slim is loaded with it. Is it over-romanticizing him to say that he is a walking, talking example of whatever it is about the American “Pioneer Spirit” that we wish hadn’t reached extinction? Anyone who knows Slim would not see it that way.
If he is some sort of anachronism it is probably more accurate to say that he is a “two-way” anachronism. Because the old ways that have been lost to most of the civilized world are still alive in Slim, and they fund visions of the future that no one has even dreamed of yet. It must be interesting to be filled with a full sense of what has come before and yet have a finger on the latest clue to the new direction at the same time. Slim’s spirit seems to be loosely draped between the past and the future.
The Spurlings moved from South Dakota to Morrison, Colorado, when Slim was seven, and they started farming there. When it came time to go to high school, Slim attended Colorado Military Academy and Mullen School for Boys. The Mullen School for Boys was a Catholic institution, and even though no one in the family was Catholic, his parents sent him there because they knew he would get a good education.
As far as religion goes, Slim did not get a heavy dose of it. While his grandmother was a devout Methodist and his mother attended church regularly, they were not Bible-pounding fanatics, so he did not get stuffed with fundamentalist guilt or visions of eternal damnation. Grandma may have been a Methodist, but according to Slim, her early upbringing in Malmo, Sweden, gave her so much reverence for nature that her daily practices had more of a Druidic flavor.
For some reason, countless Sundays at the local church left no mark, and by the time he was eleven, Slim had had his fill of fire and brimstone. He knew without a doubt that God could be found anywhere but inside the head of the horse-faced woman who preached to the devotees at “The Pillar of Fire Congregation” so he left the flock and never went back. When he was older he got into Mormonism for a couple of years but, as it turned out, The Latter Day Saints did not have the answers he sought, either. By that time Slim realized that God had very little to do with dogma or organized religion. Somewhere deep inside he knew that Mother Nature held the key to whatever his spiritual purpose was.
Prior to college Slim served for two years as a Petty Officer Third Class in the Navy Air Reserve. He passed all of the tests for Officer Candidate School with marks that would have qualified him to move up in the ranks and provide him with a free education. He was not interested in being a military man, so he declined the offer. At that time, what he really wanted to do was study forestry.
During his stint in the military, through a chance meeting with the navy commander at the base barbershop, Slim was excused from having to attend monthly reserve meetings. Slim’s excellent reserve record and his grades at school impressed the commanding officer so much that he immediately wrote a letter exempting Slim from his obligatory monthly reserve duties.
This conversation in the barbershop turned out to be a key event in Slim’s life. The very next month all of the reservists were flown to their meeting in Olathe, Kansas, and the plane went down in a storm. Everyone on the flight was killed in the crash. Unbelievably, the following month the same thing happened.
The grief and horror he felt for his friends was lessened by the awe of knowing that, for some reason, his life had been spared. At this point Slim realized for the first time that his destiny and his whole purpose for being here were being guided by forces that have a much larger perspective on the tapestry that weaves itself out on the world stage. Without a doubt the gods had other plans for him.
When Slim decided to go to college his forestry dream was still alive. He spent eight years off and on at Colorado State University. Chemistry, biochemistry, and all of the Natural Sciences were included in the Forestry curriculum, and it was during this time that the scientific side of his mind really got fired up. He majored in Forestry with a minor in Biochemistry.
As soon as he realized that a degree in forestry would relegate him to a life spent working as a Yes-Man for some bureaucratic government agency, he became disenchanted with completing the degree. Slim’s eyes were wide open, and it had become clear to him that “Timber Management” was in reality timber and ecological mis-management, much more destructive than fire. He consequently transferred to the Botany Department, majoring in mycology, with a desire to go into research and interdisciplinary technical writing.
Mycology is the study of fungi and mushrooms and it is widely known that mushrooms were sacred to the Druids. Nowadays Slim is often referred to as “Merlin”, or, “The Merlin of Geobiology”. One could debate the significance of this, but there are no accidents, and it is noteworthy that the most Druidic branch of the natural sciences became more of a passion for him than anything else.
Slim had to take periods of time off from school to work for a logging operation and while he was out in the woods, he came across several species of mushrooms that had not yet been officially discovered. He also found a species of morel that grew far above the Colorado tree line, something that was not even possible according to his botany professors.
It seems as if Slim was tuned into the mushroom world on a whole different level, because one day as he was taking a break from his tree work, he was privileged to bear witness to a spore release. He describes himself sitting in the forest, hearing a little “popping” sound, and watching as a Jew’s Ear mushroom dropped its spores.
What kind of person notices these things? When Slim told his professor about the spores, the teacher readily acknowledged that it was the first time he had ever heard of such a thing. Perhaps it was a mycological or even a Druidic rite of passage!
There is no doubt that mycology is another one of those things that Slim knows inside and out. Right before he would have graduated from Colorado State, Slim was researching the chemical nature of a red pigment that occurs naturally in almost every specimen of the Acer negundo species of maple trees as a response to a particular fungus. The technical paper written to document this research earned him an offer of a full scholarship for a three-year Master’s Degree program funded by what was then known as the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and what is now known as the Department of Human Resources.
When he examined the criteria for the program, the proposed research would have required Slim to search for and develop a chemical substance from the fungus world that would:
- Be produced in enormous quantities (like Penicillin)
- Be cheap to produce (like Penicillin – about fifty cents a gallon)
- Have no side effects except a possible mild euphoria
- Could be introduced into any consumable product with no labeling requirement
- Would lower the threshold of suggestibility in humans (a mind control drug)
- Would be effective in microgram doses
It was more than obvious that the explicit purpose of this research was for control of the population. The kind of control and the population were unspecified, but this was the era of the CIA’s LSD experimental program, and the government kept a hidden agenda.
Slim was totally incredulous that the powers that be would use their influence this way. Whatever they were up to, he wanted no part in contributing to anything that would result in the enslavement of people through such nefarious methods.
Out of curiosity, however, and just to prove to himself that such a substance did indeed exist, he consulted with one of his professors about the proposed research. Slim found a likely species in one of the families of soil fungi and cultured a sample from the professor’s library. It took him three days to complete the research for what would have been a government funded, three-year program. After ingesting a few micrograms of the culture and experiencing its effects, he knew more than he wanted to know.
Utterly disgusted by the insidious offer, Slim immediately declined the scholarship, refused to take a diploma, and decided not to participate in the graduation exercises at Colorado State. He threw up his hands with the scientific and academic communities and walked away from it all, vowing never to go back. Unfortunately prostitution takes many forms, and it is likely that someone confused about “doing the right thing” took the bait and was willing to barter a soul for a free education.
When Slim walked out on the scientific and academic community, he walked into a twenty-year career as an artist-blacksmith. In those days forestry work required a full knowledge of mechanics, forging and welding being the basis of all things mechanical. He had been exposed to both skills as part of his training at Colorado State, and he knew enough about working with iron to make it a trade. The spirits must have been watching over him because he came across a complete forge set-up that someone had junked and bought the whole thing for two hundred dollars.
Two hundred dollars worth of “junk” turned out to be a priceless gift. By that time he had a wife and two sons to support, and they were living in a renovated trapper’s cabin way out in the Colorado wilderness. When living this close to the bone, blacksmithing is not just an interesting hobby, it is a fundamental survival skill.
Since they heated and cooked with wood, Slim spent his days chopping timber and splitting it with his own hand-forged tools. He made every axe, wedge, hammer, and countless nails in that old forge. Making ends meet required a lot of effort in those days. Slim spent his nights working on an oilrig so he could support the family. But in his “free” time, when he wasn’t chopping wood, he taught himself what he did not yet know about blacksmithing.
Blacksmithing has played a huge part in everything Slim has done since then, and as much as it was his trade, maybe more importantly it was his first introduction to alchemy. Working and playing with the four elements, fire, earth, air, and water, and being deeply involved in the creation process are things people just do not do anymore. What he learned about controlling these forces centered him physically, emotionally, and spiritually, so completely that his consciousness was able to merge with and go “inside” the iron.
Standing over a bed of coals with a desire to turn a cold piece of iron into something beautiful or useful seems simple enough. If it’s so simple, why do blacksmiths rank right up there with magicians in the collective consciousness? According to Schwaller de Lubicz, the Egyptian God, Ptah, was the ultimate, cosmic blacksmith. After Ptah conceived and birthed himself, he brought fire down to earth and created every imaginable form with it. In de Lubicz’s work, this hairless, chubby-looking deity is not portrayed as just any old god. Ptah’s alleged abilities with fire may be why creation, special powers, and blacksmithing have come to be associated.
A blacksmith must be 100% tuned-in to a lot more than just the elements in order to take fire and birth anything with it. The person bringing it all together must be able to hold his consciousness in a place that allows him to be a vessel for what is essentially an alchemical process.
One day at the forge Slim got so immersed in his work that his entire Being slipped into the iron and became one with it. He experienced the whole creation process from inside the molecular structure of the metal he was hammering. From that moment on he “understood” about iron. What he learned definitely had to do with blacksmithing, but more than that, it gave him a deeper understanding of the spiritual force behind life itself.”
(To be continued)
If you would like to know more about Slim Spurling and his life, a free copy of “Slim Spurling’s Universe” will soon be available for download at www.calgarrison.com
Cal Garrison
Is a practicing astrologer with 40 years of experience. An author of five books to her credit, Cal is well known for her affiliation with the late Slim Spurling. A single mother with three grown daughters, Cal lives happily in the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. She can be reached at cal.garrison@gmail.com