The trip to Germany was pretty much what I thought it would be - a fun adventure with synchronicities that connected me to another lifetime in Germany and beyond. I have often seen a portal opening returning me to the labs allowing me to move through not only that timeline but to the Point of Origin when time stops and all Fades to Black.

The day after I returned home, I received a call from Mallory, a long-time client and friend. She shared two meditations she had shortly after I left. In both cases, she saw me in a deep forest with several people. She recognized Pat, but insisted that Pat was not important in what took place. She saw me with someone else doing something that brought great change to the destiny of the planet having to do with the sequence of time. She called to verify her visions which happened with Andy in the Black Forest when we physically heard gears adjusting time.

My friend Marcus emailed

Welcome back!

When you were in Germany I kept feeling you pass in and out of the Simulation. Normally I am aware, at least at a subconscious level, that you are here. It is sort of a reminder in the back of my head, or peripheral vision, that sort of thing.

However, there were a few times that suddenly you were no longer in that little spot, it was as if you simply didn't exist on this, or any other, plane. They never lasted that long, but there were just moments here and there where I basically lost track of you, so to speak.

Over the past week I have been staying up very late, much later than I would normally...something just compelled me to stay awake in my time zone. Though there was one particular day that I feel asleep very early, and was out, a VERY deep sleep for the entire night.

Robert wrote ... Hi Ellie, Welcome back!

I saw spiraling vortexes while you were in Germany.

I have attached my meditative work concerning the idea of the time warp. It all started when I bought a music CD by Philip Glass. On the cover was a picture of a spiral/funnel. The music was influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe -- A Descent into the Maelstrom.

This lead me to a website about Poe and the 'metaphysical code' in his work of science fiction. This is the story, of a man caught by an enormous natural force, who uses his knowledge of science to escape death. It is an exemplar of the rigorous methodology of hard science fiction at its best. It is also worth noting that it is a sea story.

Sea stories have a very long history, dating back to Homer's Odyssey and before. Because of this, sea stories have a highly codified interpretive framework -- all the elements of sea voyages have a conventional meaning, sometimes allegorical.

On the other hand, since throughout the history of sea stories, real people have made real sea voyages, returning with marvelous tales of their adventures, sea stories insist upon their literal level, despite the conventional meaning of virtually every element of the sea story.

This story is then a founding document of the whole science fiction approach and attitude of the Golden Age and its vision of a great dangerous natural object, the whirlpool, is perhaps the ancestor of such "black hole" stories as Poul Anderson -- Information Behind Poe's Code.

Poe's Maelstršm: A Space-Time Singularity -- Poe composed a story which symbolically describes the process. The story has two narrators, a primary and a secondary. The primary narrator has employed the secondary, as a guide to usher him to a mountain top where they shall observe the Moskoe-strom.

The secondary narrator, to all appearances, an old man, is quite familiar with the strom; for he and his two brothers had used to daredevil fish the regions, which at certain times of the day are ruled by the strom's powerful currents.

As the two perch atop the highest crag of the mountain Helseggen, small whirlpools begin to subside into larger pools until the maelstršm assumes "a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter." (Poe 129) The whirl is defined by a circular belt of spray gyrated outward from the strom itself.

Narrator One describes the interior of the strom's funnel, a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven. (Poe 129)

The old man, having demonstrated to his younger companion that the gigantic maelstrom actually exists as a phenomenon, requests that he get lee of the crag so that he may relate his harrowing confrontation with that whirling cataract.

Once when he and his brothers were fishing in the vicinity of the maelstrom, they missed the slack time of the currents, were besieged by a colossal hurricane, and then, were caught in the mighty currents that drew their fishing vessel into the maelstrom.

The initial blast of the storm claimed Narrator Two's younger brother, for he had been lashed to the mast, which broke off from the boat. He and his elder brother then entered the whirl of the maelstrom. Believing that all was lost, the fisherman transcended the terror which surrounded him.

As events unfolded, his acute observations and reflections regarding natural laws which ruled the objects captured by the strom, saved his life.

He observed, first, that objects of greatest mass plunged fastest toward the frothy vortex. Also, cylindrical-shaped objects descended more slowly. After endeavoring in vain to shout to his brother the plan for saving their lives, he lashed himself to a barrel and abandoned ship.

From the barrel Narrator Two watched their boat, carrying his brother, whirl its way to destruction; but he and his barrel descended more slowly. Before the barrel reached the vortex, the strom abated and his life was spared. But he emerged from the maelstrom an old man. He had related from the story's outset:

Not long ago ... I could have guided you on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years past, there happened to me an event such as no man ever survived to tell of--and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul.

You suppose me to be a very old man -- but I am not. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and I am frightened of a shadow. (Poe 126)

The old man's account of his accelerated aging process indicates that the maelstrom which he describes constitutes much more than just a gigantic whirlpool. Here we encounter more of Poe's mystification; we enter the realm of allegory.

Poe's storm contains a time warp within its funnel, just as one would expect a space traveler to encounter as he enters the maelstrom of a black hole.

As the fisherman approaches the vortex of that watery gyre, he brushes shoulders with Death itself, and in a period of six hours, he ages many years. He also witnesses in the destruction of their boat and in the death of his elder brother, the power concentrated at the vortex, where individuation is lost, just as all matter loses its particularity in the Oneness of the primary particle.

Then, too, in this story the reader witnesses Poe's obsession with the tendency to death; he allows this fisherman narrowly to escape death so that he may return to describe Poe's own concepts of transcendence.

The transcendental aspects, within the context of a collapsing cosmos are also manifest both in his choice of the maelstrom as the symbol of destiny and of the vertiginous pattern which the maelstrom assumes. Its form matches precisely what Poe needed for an allegory of the cosmos he envisioned.

Evident is the similarity between spiraling universes and galaxies and the swirling motion of a maelstrom.

In "A Descent Into the Maelstrom," Poe has exploited quite well his symbology, describing the affinity possessed by all matter for its own dissolution. We can readily perceive Poe's bias again at work, observations shaded by his belief that unity is the posture which the universe longs to assume.

Poe's whirling maelstrom displays nature in what would appear to be her ulterior motives. Interestingly, Poe chose also a hurricane, another cyclonic fury, to enhance the maelstrom's intensity. Had Poe lived in the American Midwest, he would probably have been enchanted by tornadoes, which also wreak havoc at the vortex of their writhing funnels.

In his examination of the universe, or, for that matter, of all of Nature (including the human psyche), Poe reveals the horrors of losing individuation.

His vision of collapse constitutes a remarkable consistency within the body of his writings. He speaks to his readers' conscious and unconscious fears, which were, too, the poet's own fears -- fears, which, in his genius, Poe illumined through the symbology of imagination -- fears which occupy the mind of contemporary man much more than did they interest the public of the 1830's and 1840's. "Poe anticipates the special hell of modern man.

Poe endows the imagination with Godlike power, but...is...an epitome of our own condition--historical, unfitted, deracinated, suffering." (Hoffman 17)

In reflecting upon "A Descent Into the Maelstrom," an image comes to mind--that of the luminous star spiraling into its invisible companion, a black hole.

Like Poe's maelstrom, the black hole consumes whatever happens to be within its event horizon, only this on an astronomical scale. In the story, Poe reveals a concentration of matter-energy at the vortex of the maelstrom -- as in the vortex of a black hole -- the intersection between the natural and the supernatural, between body and soul, between time and space.

In the mist above the vortex of the maelstrom "hung a magnificent rainbow -- the only pathway between Time and Eternity." (Poe 137)

To traverse that path is to die. Poe believed that no amount of material, intellectual or spiritual scaffolding can prevent the return of all matter to Oneness, our inexorable dissolution.

Shortly after I returned from Germany, I read that Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal died at 96. Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice, died Tuesday at the age of 96. Wiesenthal died in his sleep at his home in Vienna, Austria. His passing happened two days before the Autumn Equinox in 2005. The Jewish holidays Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were in October that year.

"Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust," said Rabbi Hier, "When the Holocaust ended in 1945 and the whole world went home to forget, he alone remained behind to remember." Wiesenthal, who had been an architect before World War II, was born on December 1908 in the Ukraine. During World War II he was assigned to a forced labor camp, but eventually managed to escape. He changed his life's mission after the war, dedicating himself to trying to track down Nazi war criminals and to being a voice for the 6 million Jews who died during the onslaught. Wiesenthal spent more than 50 years hunting Nazi war criminals, speaking out against neo-Nazism and racism, and remembering the Jewish experience as a lesson for humanity. Through his work, some 1,100 Nazi war criminals were brought to justice."

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After my last reading today, I relaxed and looked out at the lights of the near full moon over the Verrazano Bridge twinkling on the water before me. As I sat there, I returned a call to my entertainment lawyer, dealing with Sarah and Alexander, which centers around July 4th. Suddenly my attention was riveted to a fireworks display by the water, somewhere between my house and the Statue of Liberty, but closer to me. I am not sure if the fireworks were set off from a boat or the esplanade that runs along the water, as the trees were blocking my view, nor what the occasion was. It was not a major fireworks display, just enough to illuminate the night sky, reminiscent of souls crossing over.