The Day I Met the Guides
/Illustration by Olga Antononoka
By Paul Crouse
“Don’t be afraid, Tony,” said the voice coming out of Tony's mouth.
“That wasn’t me! That wasn’t me!” said Tony in his real voice.
“Don’t be afraid,” the strange voice repeated.
I could feel Tony’s heart racing, under my hands. “Oh my God! Oh my, God! Oh my God!” he kept repeating.
“Just breathe,” said the voice. This voice came from Tony’s vocal cords, but it was clearly not his. And he wasn’t faking it.
Tony (not his real name) was lying on the tatami mat on the floor in my apartment in Kyoto, Japan. I had been giving him a reiki treatment, and it kicked open the door to a world I did not know existed, a world that suddenly came flooding in.
Tony had been one of the very first people I met when I'd arrived in Japan about 6 years earlier, sometime in the mid 1990s. At that time, he moved in a circle of friends, which included the women I dated at the time. We knew each other socially, but were not terribly close.
At some point he left Japan and eventually returned. A series of coincidences ended with him moving into an apartment across the hall from me. By that time, I had not seen him in years. We considered ourselves to be acquaintances, not friends.
Somewhere along the way, I had offered to give him reiki treatment. Reiki is a Japanese energy healing technique, which had been developed only a few miles from where we were living. Sometimes called hands-on healing, is a method of channeling life energy by placing one's hands on or around a person’s body.
For the treatment, I had him lie down on the floor, which is not an uncommon thing to do in Japan. I started out the treatment by placing my hands on the top of his head, over his crown chakra.
“That’s strange,” he said. “I can vividly see images in my mind. But they don’t mean anything to me.”
I had him describe the images. He saw a giant naval battle with hundreds of ships and airplanes between the Japanese and the Americans in the Pacific War. Then he saw American doughboy soldiers, climbing out of trenches and getting mowed down by machine-gun fire during the First World War.
There were many different scenes. Each seemed to go back further and further in time. At one point, he described prehistoric cave paintings and two men with very crude spears trying, and failing, to kill a very angry grizzly bear.
Finally, he began trying to describe a scene that was very alien to him. Something about translucent cubes with glowing spheres inside in a place that did not look like Earth.
I kept my hands on his head throughout all of this. He kept repeating that these images made no sense to him.
But they did to me. They were very familiar. They fit like an old pair of gloves. Later I was to learn that he was basically flipping through a giant picture book of my previous lives, in the way you might look at a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room.
When he told me that the images had stopped, I moved my hands down to his throat chakra, as is usual during a typical reiki session. Nothing happened there, so after a few moments I placed my hands on the center of his chest, over the heart chakra.
Quite quickly, I felt a jolt, a surge that went through his body, and then the voice started speaking. The voice itself is a bit difficult to describe, since it did come Tony’s vocal cords, but it wasn’t his normal voice. It truly sounded like another person and I could feel Tony’s heart racing. This was clearly freaking Tony out.
After convincing Tony to calm down, the voice proceeded to give me some important information that I needed to hear, personal information that I won’t share here.
After the voice gave me the information, it said goodbye and I felt another jolt pass through Tony’s body. I took my hands off of his chest.
“Wow, that thing left through my feet,” he said as he sat up. “Oh! Holy shit!”
As Tony sat up, he told me that we were surrounded by many, many beings, all of which really wanted to talk with us. It was kind of like a pack of reporters shouting questions at a celebrity leaving a courthouse.
Tony could see and hear this, but I couldn’t. He put his hands over his ears.
“There are too many of them!”
He looked up and saw the being that had entered his body and spoken through his mouth. This being, interestingly enough, turned out to be my main spirit guide. This guide told Tony that he needed to learn how to manage his new gift. My guide then acted as a gatekeeper. He told all of the other beings to shut up, then pointed at one and said. “Okay, you talk.” This being then gave us some information.
"Okay, now you’re next," the guide said to another.
Tony described all of this to me. It was like a press conference. That day we talked to a lot of guides who had information for each of us. This went on for a while. Eventually it came to an end and Tony returned to normal.
In short, my main guide entered Tony to give me an important message. He did this because he had the opportunity, although apparently it is not the easiest thing to do. This event activated Tony’s psychic abilities and suddenly he was able to see and hear the spirits.
This was not a parlor game. These beings gave us very specific and serious information. They were training us and teaching us how to heal ourselves. Over the next few months, Tony and I worked together as per the instructions we had been given.
This made for remarkable changes in each of our lives. For myself, I discovered the real reason why I had been an alcoholic (I had quit drinking several years earlier). Together, we worked to heal me from past childhood traumas I had been hiding from myself. I was able to release the pain and rage I had been carrying around.
And through this process, I learned about my own spiritual gifts, which are a bit different than Tony’s. While he can see and hear things, I tend to just know things about people, can channel guides and have the ability to make things happen, such as healing work and the expelling of the dark beings. I'll talk more about these things in future articles.
The world is a truly amazing place. There is a lot more going on than meets the eye.
This article was originally published in Star Nations Magazine.
Olga Antononoka is a Latvian artist and doctoral candidate living in Kyoto, Japan.
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