OCCULT VIEW

On June 24 Lillian was out to buy her weekly lottery tickets.  Lillian is an elderly mom living in Chicago.  She was going to cash in a Lotto ticket worth $3 and buy her weekly $5 worth of Mega Millions and Lotto. 

While she was at the convenience store, she heard a voice that said “Play 7 9 0”.  She looked around and there was nobody near her.  The voice was not in her head, but clearly audible as if someone was talking next to her.  She thought it very strange.

At the cashier, she bought $5 worth of tickets.  But instead of playing her usual lottery, she asked to play the Pick-3 game, where three numbers are chosen.  She bought 5 Pick-3 tickets, all with 790 played straight.  The cashier asked if she was sure she wanted all 5 tickets with the same number, since that was apparently unusual.  Yes, Lillian wanted all the same number.

These tickets were for the mid-day drawing, and she was shocked when later the winning numbers were 7-9-0.  Each ticket was now worth $500!  Wow.  The odds of winning are 1,000 to one, but what are the odds of picking 5 tickets with all the same number based on a tip from a disembodied voice?

Lillian decided to give all 5 winning tickets to her adult children.  With the bad economy some of her sons and daughters were in some financial trouble.  They needed the money more then a long retired mom, which was not exactly true, but what gives a mom more joy then being a blessing to their children? 

My good friend Ted told me this story Friday night, the first time I heard of it.  He said he argued with his mom on the phone, that he didn’t want the ticket and she should keep it for herself.  But Lillian insisted.  All of her five children were getting one of the tickets.  It made Ted’s mom happy to be able to help her kids.

I discussed this event with Ted and his wife.  What did Lillian think about what happened?  Ted said she was as baffled as everybody else.  She had not clue how or why this occurred.  Ted had asked her mom if the disembodied voice was male or female.  She said it was neither.  Which is intriguing, since angels are said to be genderless. 

Ted’s mom had incidences in her past where she sensed a family member was in trouble or dying.  He said Lillian seems sensitive to these things.  Was this disembodied voice her own psychic intuition speaking to her?  Or could it really have been an angel whispering in her ear, giving her a gift?  The fact that she gave away all of her winnings might be a clue.  Had she decided to keep the money for herself, this disembodied voice might not have given this suggestion to begin with.  But because it was for her family’s benefit, perhaps this was really a blessing from an angel, for reasons and purposes we can’t comprehend.  It really is a mystery.

World War II

My grandparents were born and lived in Lithuania before World War II.  In 1940 communist Russia occupied Lithuania, and then Nazi Germany took it over.  Near the end of WW II the Russians came back and reoccupied the nation.  There was a lot of fighting between the Russians and the Germans with Lithuanian collaborators on both sides. 

Eventually my grandparents with their children fled Lithuania, never to return.  My grandmother had a strange story from those days, the time before they became refugees.  She considered it divine intervention by a guardian angel.

When there was fighting in the local area it was obvious by the sound of gunfire in the distance.  The family would go into the basement of the simple house where they lived.  The basement was more a hole in then what we’d think of as a basement.  But when things were quiet again, everybody would return upstairs.

One quiet day grandma was sitting in the house chatting with some family and neighbors.  According to grandma, she was sitting on a couch by herself when she suddenly felt something invisible nudge her, pushing her on her right side.  There was nobody there, but she got up anyway and moved over a seat on the couch.  Literally seconds later, there was the sound of gunfire in the distance, and a stray bullet broke through the window and landed in the couch seat right where grandmother sat just seconds before.

Everyone was startled.  They checked to see if grandmother was ok and she was fine.  Had she not moved, that bullet would have ended up in her midsection.  Back in those days, there were no emergency room to run to. She would have died.  They checked the couch and found the rifle bullet embedded in it. 

Guardian Angel

She thought this incident was very strange and for many years kept that bullet as a good luck token.  Since she was a deeply religious person, she believed it was an angel that saved her by pushing her to move out of the way of a random stray bullet.  God saved her life.

Did a guardian angel save her life?  Or did grandma have a life saving premonition?

I have a problem with the idea of God directly intervening in a person’s life.  It is the problem of divine favoritism.  In a war, many people suffer and die unjustly.  Why would God favor one person to live over another?  Is that fair?  Why would God spare my grandmother’s life but not countless others?  The answer from some would be God works in mysterious ways.  Perhaps so.

There is another possibility that removes the problem of favoritism.  We are our own guardian angel. 

There is a belief in esoteric thought that we all consist of different levels of existence: physical, mental, astral, and spiritual.  This spiritual aspect of our existence exists outside of time and space as part of the universal Divine.  We have no direct contact with this version of our self.  If we encountered this aspect of our self, it would seem as if it were a separate entity.

Yet this guardian angel, our higher self, does interact and communicate with us through our intuition.  Insights, premonitions, answers to problems, the correct path to take are often available from our higher self if we listen to our intuition.   Everyday our higher self tries to guide us if we are open its messages.

Grandma’s life may have been saved by a premonition, which she acted on.  It was her choice to move.  Life changing intuition happens to many people many times. If divine intervention is essentially in our own hands, then life is fair.  We can’t blame God anymore.  We have to listen to the quiet voice inside us all.