Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.06.2009, Qupperneq 12

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Issue No 7 – June 5 - June 18 – 2009
A multitude of masked anarchists has been raising hell in Reykjavík since well before COLLAPSE-times, attending civil
disobedience courses while the rest of us were busy refinancing our mortgages. Now, they’re raising the bar for direct
action. The group that's not a group tells Grapevine who they are, what they are and what they're not. PG. 18.
The Tragic "Privatization" Of Iceland's Banks
Five Dudes To Turn You Gay (unless you already like dudes)!
Marc Vincenz Seeks The Spirits!
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Profiling Iceland's
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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2009
12
Transcendental Iceland | Part 2: Almost Walking on Water
Radio to the other side.
In Search of the Real McCoy
Guðbjörg Sveinsdóttir explains to me that although she had seen spirits when she was a little
girl, her mother put a quick stop to the
nonsense, told her to pull her socks up
and get on with a real life. It wasn’t until
she was thirty-seven that she truly came
face-to-face with the other side.
‘I was here in the room in the now,
slumped in my chair, yet really not aware
of myself in the present; meanwhile my
conscious-self was somehow in the body
of an old woman. I was scolding my
nephew somewhere out in the country;
it was forty years earlier. I told the boy:
You’re not allowed to go up the stairs
today; you could fall, just like you did
before. When I came back to my own
body, into the present, the boy was once
again a fifty-year-old man standing in
front of me. His chin had dropped to his
chest. The doctors had only just cut his
cast off a few days before.’
This experience is what psychologists
refer to as an OBE, or an out of body
experience. They are, it appears, quite
common, even among the run-of-the-
mill while sleeping, in dreams. Quite
often the affected will fly over the
countryside and visit their friends or
relatives, returning to their own body
before dawn. Only normally, you don’t
enter the body of another, you don’t go
back in time, and it’s not the middle of
the day.
Guðbjörg refers to herself and her
spirit guides (and there are many, but I
will get to that) using the royal ‘We’—
much like Queen Victoria’s infamous:
‘We are not amused’.
It’s as if They are entirely a part of her,
and she a part of Them.
‘As you will discover,’ she says
cryptically, sipping what looks like a
normal cup of coffee, quite normally: ‘We
are all one.’ (I assume she’s talking about
the human race.) ‘But, first things first.’
To simply call Guðbjörg a trance-
medium would be doing her a grave
injustice; as she says herself, ‘If your
main purpose is to contact someone
dearly departed, then we are clearly
not your first choice. There are other
mediums who do that very well. We
are about providing answers: answers
to questions, big questions about the
nature of life, the universe, but also the
mundane, everyday human things.
We call ourselves Ásgeir. We are
Information Power.’
‘It’s not easy being a human in the
physical world we call Earth. Not easy
at all. So, we help, we help people find
answers to things that are troubling
them; and yes, we do, on occasion,
provide a channel for the deceased; but
mainly, we help them come to grips with
their time here on Earth in the now, so
they are better prepared to face all its
challenges, take in all its wonders.’
Guðbjörg looks very much like your
typical mother of three. She doesn’t gaze
into any crystal balls, she doesn’t need
a dusty scarf from your grandmother or
your uncle’s old watch to find answers
to any of your questions; all things are
answered by her spirit guides, clearly,
concisely and with the very best of intent.
But these are only hints, suggestions.
‘We provide information. Decisions are
not ours to make, those are entirely up to
you.’
Guðbjörg likens herself to a kind of
astral psychiatrist; and right now, smack
dab in the middle of this kreppa, she is
fully booked. You’d need one month’s
notice to get an appointment.
So who are They? Well, it’s a
very Jungian concept, and it slips
in somewhere between the Hindu
Upanishads and Tibetan Buddhism,
only it approaches things from a modern
perspective, referring to Them as
departed human souls, rather than gods
or bodhisattvas. ‘We are a collective of
spirits who once lived on Earth, but have
reincarnated so many times that we have
entered another phase of life, where life is
pure energy. Ásgeir is everywhere in this
cosmos, within you and me, these walls
and out into the Beyond,’ Guðbjörg says.
They are as one, but many; she is
their host, their channel to the physical
human body here in Iceland, and
They have come to advise. During my
research, I come across trance-mediums
in the UK and the US, and find the
concept of a collective consciousness
guide quite popular—almost too popular.
The British clairvoyant and self-professed
‘renowned’ spiritual author, Stephen
O’Brien, calls Them part of The Great
Spirit of Life.
Yet, it’s not as if gods talking as one,
Nirvana, or reincarnation are some
things we haven’t heard of before.
Perhaps it is the familiarity of these
concepts that makes them easy—easier
to believe…and fall into love with.
Guðbjörg herself says ‘Ásgeir is what
we are called in Iceland, but in the US or
the UK, other spirit collectives may be
called Michael or Abraham.’
When she becomes Ásgeir, she
simply snaps her fingers and transforms
into another persona. Her face contorts,
she sniffs as if she has a cold, or has been
smoking too much (she gave up smoking
recently) and speaks in the gritty, rumble
of an old man—many lives led. Looking
at her, you wouldn’t think this was the
same woman. Talk about hair standing
on the back of the neck isn’t even in it.
I stumbled across one medium in Hawaii
who maintains his own spirit guide is
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: the very same
who fell for the Cottingley Fairy hoax (see
Transcendental Iceland Part 1). Lilian
Bailey, also classified as a deep-trance
medium, was known to work for the
Queen Mother; she even received an OBE
(this time I mean the one on Sir Elton
John’s mantelpiece) for channelling the
spirit of King George IV. Others, such as
the controversial American psychic Silvia
Browne (convicted of investment fraud
and grand theft in 1992), speak with
single spirit guides. Browne maintains
that Francine has led more than forty-two
lives on Earth, one of them as an Aztec
princess.
Guðbjörg says, ‘Everything seems
confusing, complicated, because were
are always trying to intellectualise
things. Things are not like that. The
universe is a simple thing. It’s hard to
put into words, because words could
never describe what’s out there. Try
and describe a colour to a blind person,
and you will see what we mean. God,
life, the universe are not things you can
find by scientific study. You need faith,
perseverance and open-mindedness,
but more than that: open-heartedness.
Open your heart, embrace the spirits,
the energy of the universe, and you shall
receive; close your mind and trap down
the road like a horse headed for the
market, and all you see is a very, very long
road.’
‘Everything is energy,’ she says. ‘It
all comes down to the same thing. From
the very depth of your DNA strands, your
individual cells, to the very nature of God
and the Cosmos. Absolutely everything
is energy. If you can start to understand
that, then you can achieve almost
anything.’
These are certainly inspirational
words.
By chance, or perhaps by destiny,
Guðbjörgs’s daughter, Helga Maria,
walks in as we are talking about cosmic
beings. She sits down across from
us, her feet drawn up into the large
armchair, and every once in a while
a wry grin flashes across her face; it’s
mostly a sparkle in the eyes. Of course,
she’s heard this all before. Perhaps
she’s waiting to see if I can come up
with something new that might faze her
mother.
Guðbjörg explains that contacting
her spirit guides is akin to tuning in a
radio: ‘The spirits are all energy, working,
living on different vibrations. Imagine
tuning in to a radio programme, turning
the dial, moving from one clear passage
of music to the next. In between is
static, occasionally you pick up a few
garbled words, but when you hit the right
wavelength, you’re there, and they’re with
you. The only difference, of course, is
that the spirit radio is a two way radio.’ I
imagine late night American truckers
talking to each other on their CBs.
‘Yes, it’s something like that,’ she
says, smiling. Then, I realise I haven’t
uttered a single word. ‘If you like, I can
show you,’ she says. ‘Next week I have
a training session. Ásgeir and I help
people to contact their spirit guides. Why
don’t you come?’
I consider this for a moment—
actually for a long moment, but I can’t
really find any reasonable excuses to say
no. ‘OK. Why not?’ I say.
‘Be prepared to be amazed,’ she says.
‘After this, you will never be the same
again.’
Words
Marc Vincenz
Ever wondered what upside down
coffee cups are doing cooking on
the radiator? If you’re Icelandic,
you probably already know. If not,
remember stories of gypsies read-
ing tealeaves? Since most of us
don’t use tealeaves anymore, we
reach for the next best thing—the
dregs of filter coffee. Icelandic
housewives will tell you it’s just
a bit of malarkey. But believe
me, there’s real methodology to
it—apparently each dribble is just
like a reading line on a palm. Once,
not so long ago, there was no TV
and no Internet; it comforted you
through the long winter, and fore-
told the early arrival of a brighter,
warmer spring.
1. Exploring the mind's depths.
Marc Vincenz keeps delving into Transcendental Iceland.
Next issue: I am introduced to my spirit guides Johann, Big Owl and Joseph.
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