Chapter Three: Jasmine

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

– Carl Jung

For many modern families, knowing the history of the land you grew up on is probably not common. We are a mobile society, dispersing ourselves with each generation as we seek out new opportunities and experiences. Often, there’s no easy way to know what might have happened outside your back door in years past. Sometimes though, for Jasmine and her family, the lines between the living and the dead seemed to blur and shift like the shadows at dusk. 

Growing up in a farmhouse in small-town Ohio, with three generations under one roof, it seemed everybody in the family had stories of seeing or hearing strange things. On one occasion, Jasmine’s nieces, who were about five or six at the time, were playing in the woods behind the house. They came running back in, terrified, saying they had seen men who were dressed like “toy soldiers” walking through the woods, covered in blood, one of them on horseback. 

Jasmine’s grandmother Maria had an uncannily similar experience, seeing several men dressed in bloodied Civil War era uniforms, walking the perimeter of their property. Were they stray re-enactors walking back from an overly-realistic event? Or were they the spirits of long-dead soldiers, still making their way back home from Camp Denison a century and a half later? The soldiers seemed to her to be a real, physical presence, but sometimes she also saw what might be described as spirits or ghosts drifting across their property. With family roots stretching back to the Philippines, where their Catholic faith was mixed with folk traditions, belief in spirits was not out of the norm. Even so, Maria didn’t like talking about what she had seen. 

When Maria still lived in the Philippines, one of her sons went off to fight in a war, far from the province they lived in. One day he showed up at home unexpectedly. He told her he couldn’t stay, that he’d just stopped to say goodbye. 

“What do you mean? You just got here! Don’t be rude. Come on in. It’s so good to see you.” 

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” he replied, and then as suddenly as he had arrived, he was gone. 

Moments later a telegram came with the news that he had passed away a week earlier.

Jasmine herself hadn’t seen any soldiers returning from war, but she did get a hint early on that many strange and inexplicable things were going to be a part of her life. One of the first clues came during childhood, as she was walking past a big picture window in their living room. The house had a detached underground storm cellar, with large, heavy doors. She didn’t like the dungeon-like cellar, and glancing out the window, she noticed the doors to the cellar were open. She’d have sworn they were closed only moments before. The doors were so bulky, it would have been impossible to open or close them quickly or quietly. And yet, the next time she passed by the window, the doors were open again. She felt as though she was being pranked, but she couldn’t make sense of how or why. 

She and her family started hearing and seeing things regularly. The sound of a crying baby echoing through the house became a regular occurrence, though the family had no baby. Once, as Jasmine was coming down the driveway, she saw the curtains in the big picture window get swept to one side, then swept closed again, only to find that no one was home once she went inside. She would often hear the murmur of conversations coming from the attic above her room, but over time she became so desensitized to these experiences, she just brushed them off. 

These uncanny experiences shaped her worldview –  a crack in the façade of the mundane through which the light of a greater reality began to shine. And yet with that light, there was an accompanying darkness too. It was in college, a hundred miles away from the creaking floors of the old farmhouse, that Jasmine came face to face with that darkness. 

One afternoon, as she lay alone in her dorm room, she opened her eyes to see an eight-foot-tall, slender shadow looming over her. She looked for what could be casting such a shadow, but found nothing.  She saw a disturbing, dark shape start to move toward her, with strange, unnatural movements. Jasmine's heart pounded in her chest. Her Catholic upbringing came back to her, as Hail Marys and Our Fathers tumbled from her lips. She peeked out from under the blanket, only to see the shadow being right next to her. She continued to pray until the entity was gone, leaving behind a residue of icy fear.

In the aftermath, Jasmine reached out to the one person she thought might understand - a new friend, a kindred spirit whose path had intertwined with her own. He told her he had a weird experience of his own to share. When they met the next day, her eyes widened as he told his story before she told hers – he had been visited by a terrifying shadow being, the day before. It was a mirror image of her own story. It was a moment of profound, unsettling synchronicity.

Slowly, acceptance grew within her that these experiences were not random, not coincidental. She had some connection to “other.” She decided to enroll in classes designed to help her test, explore, and improve her abilities. In one class, the assignment was designed to test remote viewing skills. The instructor had a number of sealed envelopes, each containing random photos clipped from magazines. Each person in the class was to take an envelope and try to visualize the photo enclosed within it. When Jasmine’s turn came to share what she had envisioned, all she had come up with were some obscure objects and fragmented words. The instructor opened the envelope and told her she was way off. Nothing she described related to the photo. She was feeling discouraged, until the instructor noticed that everything Jasmine had described was on the back side of the clipping. “Well that’s a first,” said the instructor. 

As her awareness continued to expand, Jasmine learned to navigate the shifting currents of her own strange abilities and experiences. She dreamed of catastrophes before they happened, sketching out the grim tableaus in her mind's eye - the twisted metal of a train derailed, bodies in places they didn’t belong. The knowledge sat heavy in her bones, a burden she could never quite shake.

Jasmine's gifts grew stronger, but so too did the weight of the visions, fragmented glimpses of tragedy and loss. She saw the faces of the missing and the murdered, felt their final moments like a physical ache in her chest. It was a burden that threatened to pull her under, a responsibility she never asked for and didn't know how to bear. She started journaling about her dreams, writing and sketching what she saw. These vivid dreams, often about death on a large scale, seemed so real, though she wasn’t always sure what to make of them until later.

One of these visions was a crystal clear overhead view of bodies strewn about on the ground at an intersection near where she lived in Toronto. Not long after, a man rammed his van through a crowd of pedestrians at the very intersection she had envisioned, killing ten people. Another time, a flood of imagery came through, and in her journal she had sketched people inside very large pots. She couldn’t make any sense of it until later, when a news story broke about the capture of a serial killer named Bruce McArthur. McArthur, who was charged with, and later convicted of eight murders in the Toronto area, had worked in landscaping, and many of the victims’ remains were found in large landscape planters around a property where he had been working.

“I had drawn all these individual people in these pots, and I didn't know what the hell that meant. Stuff like that where I get the validation later in the news is very unsettling,” Jasmine said.

It has taken her time to fully come to terms with her abilities, but she feels the repeated confirmation of these visions is a way of letting her know the things she sees are more than just imagination. She talked about how she’s learned to navigate the often disturbing nature of the information that comes to her.

“I feel like it's very discouraging for me just because it is, to a larger level, just out of my hands. It's just me really observing, even through my dream state, remote viewing what's to come. There are always probabilities around that, so I don't ever want to say, ‘this is your fate, this is your destiny,’ and it's not for me to try to change that. I try not to go around warning people, ‘hey, don't do this or that,’ because then it just invokes this fear. So unless I'm one hundred percent sure that there's something that's going to happen, I won't say anything, as was the case for when COVID struck. I was given that information – I didn't know what they were going to call it, but I was given the information a year ahead of time, and I held on to the information for a very, very long time. And then I just couldn't resist anymore. I remember taking about a half a day to contemplate whether or not I was going to send the email that I had created. I ended up doing it, and of course 99 percent of my network was like, ‘you're crazy.’ But then all of a sudden it came true, so then I finally heard the feedback. They're like, ‘my God, you were right. That's insane.’”

Through it all, Jasmine has learned to trust the language of her soul, the wordless knowing that hums through her veins like some ancient song. She follows the threads of her intuition, unraveling the mysteries of her own past lives. In the streets of Portugal, the mountains of Peru, and the forests of Mexico, she caught glimpses of people she had once been, and loves she had lost. She sees recurring patterns in these memories. She has memories of often having to flee from some threat while at the same time preserving some important knowledge or person. She also has multiple memories of being in solitary, spiritual roles, such as a priest, shaman, or nun. While touring the Sacred Valley in the Andean highlands of Peru, she was so overcome with emotion and memory that after the tour, she sat with her tour guide and cried, though she wasn’t quite sure why. While on another tour in Guatemala, she had a tour guide who looked almost exactly like her deceased grandmother, and again, the places they toured seemed very familiar. She fell into a dreamlike series of memories about the place. 

“I remembered being part of a convent there in that space, and I had never felt so sick. There was such sadness that had happened there. I was physically ill for an entire day as a result of that. I wasn't prepared for that.” She didn’t think anything terrible had happened there, just that her own personal experience in that place was filled with sadness, “as it was my own choice, and I was separated from family and friends and everything that I knew. I did it voluntarily, but then when I did that, it was almost a sense of immediate regret. It just really sat with me, and then just turned into this despair. I was not allowed to leave after that, so that was a very sad recognition.”

While negative experiences seem to come to, or through, her regularly, not everything is scary or disturbing. She has come to have a very positive and upbeat approach to life. She loves to help people develop their own skills and become better versions of themselves. She lets them lead her to what they want to learn, or where they want to explore, and guides them when she can.

“It's really part of my everyday experience now. I'm not intentionally going into the bathroom like, ‘Okay, I’m having a conversation with Spirit now.’ I have kids and a family too, and I gotta do this life, too. But if I put my intentions out there, I know that I can use it for good.”

Jasmine knows that she will never be finished learning. There will always be new shadows to confront, new thresholds to cross, new depths to explore. She has come to understand that her gifts are not a curse or a burden, but a sacred contract, a promise made, to serve as a bridge between worlds. She feels the presence of her guides and allies, the unseen ones who have been with her all along, helping her to remember. They speak to her in the language of synchronicity and symbols, leaving breadcrumbs for her to follow - a snippet of song lyrics, a phone number glimpsed on a billboard, a book falling open to just the right page. It is a dance of the divine, a cosmic game of hide-and-seek that has filled her with a fierce, wild joy.

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