Where wondering leads…

Dream! (Photo credit: Melody Campbell)

Be careful what you ask for!

I finished my last post by wondering how ‘real’ a dream had been.

Since then, I’ve been bombarded with messages from all directions – messages ‘reminding’ me (as we all have the truth within us already) how the worlds we dream interact with the world we believe ourselves to be living in.
So huge thanks to Paul and Suzy, Rory and Sarina, Cynthia and Bob and all the others who have unwittingly handed me pieces of the puzzle and helped me to slot it together.

Same Place – Different Frequencies

This one turns up everywhere – the analogy of self as a radio, able to receive all kinds of messages on different frequencies, depending which part we tune into.

Seth, via Jane Roberts, insisted that we are living many different lives at once but as we’re ‘tuned in’ to this one, we are normally unaware of the others.  Sometimes they come to us as fragments in deja vu, dreams, ‘past’ life regressions and so forth.

As I say, I’ve been receiving many reminders of that over the last few days, so perhaps I’d been ready to start experimenting with twiddling the dial a little more than I usually do: I was willing to take a glance at those other frequencies.

Switching Channels

Last night I was re-reading an amazing channelled response I had from The Council via Cynthia and Bob Dukes on their blog Ask The Council.  It concerned an alternate/past life with a young man I’ve worked with during this lifetime.  Here’s an extract in which the council explain how we worked together to teach telepathy to children in that other life:

“He was a young child who learned very quickly this [telepathic] communication and was a bridge, in the beginning, of her communicating with…the infants. And so they worked together to reach these children and then begin to… surrounded by clear quartz crystals… to magnify their vibration [and] receive the communications with these children. And because they [the children] were so recently departed from what we would consider the spiritual realm, they were very aware of this [communication].” …

“By raising the vibrations in these particular places where they worked with the children… they used crystals, sound, and music to reach the infants… and again we say, because these children were so recently leaving the spirit world, they were very aware of vibration, and spirit contact, and mind communication.”

This all made perfect sense to me.  The young man in question has – in this life – had a deep love of crystals since early childhood, and as a small child in a class of infants with speech and language difficulties, he was able to communicate telepathically with other children and taught me (the teacher) how to use this skill.  I won’t say we developed the levels of expertise outlined above, but I was certainly often able to pick up their thoughts and emotions and respond to them in the same way.

The Council insisted that we’d chosen to work more on those skills during this lifetime and that one of my major life purposes is:

“…helping younger children… teaching them about reaching for the feeling of understanding they are more than this physical body.”

Back to Dreams

Now let me share with you the portions I can remember of the dream I’d been having when I woke up this morning.

Once again I was teaching.  My co-worker was young and male, although I didn’t get a look at his face.  We were doing an important activity with a class of very small children.  It involved working virtually one-to-one with them.  This meant that those who had finished were free to play in a huge sandpit with bright plastic digger trucks and similar toys.

One child seemed unhappy with this.
I heard his companion say, “But we’ve got all these toys.”
“Yes, but I want to do some more of the work,” he complained.

I told my colleague we had to give these kids some attention.  He reminded me how important our ‘work’ was and insisted he was going to continue, so I devised some kind of electronic sheet (the technology – though familiar to me in the dream – has no counterpart in our world) that allowed the children to recap on the one-to-one activity they’d been doing.

I was beginning to wake up at this point – still dreaming but able to recall images and ideas and bring them back with me to this life.
“So where does the energy come from?” I heard my dream-self asking the group.
“Our HEARTS,” they chanted, cheerfully.

I was sufficiently removed from the dream by this point to be able to observe – and be amazed by – the diagram we’d created.  In the centre was a bright red heart.  It was surrounded by a torus of energy lines.
Other, differently-coloured lines flowed out from this into the Earth and in other directions.

Back to Reality?

Then I was awake – here.  I was recalling remarkably similar diagrams produced by the Heart Math Institute.  I was wondering about the technology I’d been using, and whether it related to quartz crystals in some way.  I was thinking how young those children had been, and yet how complex the work they’d been doing with us.

What I wasn’t wondering, though, was whether that was ‘real’.

It was.

On a different frequency, certainly, but just as real, whatever ‘real’ may be!

When is a Dream…?

“I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?”

Chuang Tzu

Rather more prosaically, last night I dreamed I was a teacher, meeting a new class for the first time one September.  Most were younger brothers and sisters of children I’d taught years ago.  I smiled to see family resemblances.

I haven’t taught in school since 2008.  My last class of bubbly 11-year-olds has just finished secondary school and – to my fairly certain knowledge – those younger brothers and sisters are non-existent in this world.  In my dream, though, they were fully-formed personalities and I was working hard to get to know them, to decide which ones would need particular support and how I could best bring out their gifts and abilities.

So are the children in my dream class any less real than those in my waking classes?  Is the help I’m giving them any less helpful than the support I offered to their ‘this world’ siblings?

Just wondering…

Darth Vader enters my Reality Field

It’s all coming together – as indeed it should.

Two themes have been running through my recent posts: my unexpected ability to communicate with a friend who had passed over, and the ability we have to create our own reality.

The two are clearly linked; if we believe something, then it lies within our ‘reality field’.  If it’s within that field, we can access it.  If not, we can’t see or otherwise sense it – it doesn’t exist for us.

That explains why some people can see UFOs, angels or fairies while others can’t. It explains why some people can levitate or live for years without food.  It explains why some people can communicate with those beyond the veil by holding a dowsing pendulum over a board with the alphabet printed on it (or, as I do nowadays – over a computer keyboard)…

Last month, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, my elderly, severely disabled mother died.  I’d had to make the choice between sending her to hospital or allowing her to leave quietly in the comfort and familiarity of her lovely, nurturing nursing home.

Rationally, I knew I’d made the right choice; emotionally, I couldn’t be certain.  Maybe that wasn’t what she had wanted.  Maybe she had more to do here…

Gradually it dawned on me (I can be very slow sometimes) that if I was able to hold a conversation with the departed mother of a young boy, in order to bring him peace (see previous post), I should be able to use my pendulum to contact my own mum.

It wouldn’t be within most people’s reality field, perhaps, but it was there in mine.  So feeling like a character at a séance in some grainy old black and white movie, I sat down at my computer, held my pendulum in one hand and typed:

Mum, are you there?

Immediately the crystal started to twitch.  Calmly and smoothly it moved to Y…E…S then circled in neutral position.

That was easy.

So I asked some questions.  The replies flowed effortlessly and clearly.  I’d apparently done the right thing by letting her go.

She’d been using the dementia ‘TO LEAVE THIS CARE ASIDE AND RE DO THINGS I HAD MISSED’.

She was able to tell me some of the things I’d said during those last days at her bedside and she told me she approved of the funeral plans – even thanked me for it.

That all felt great.

Next I asked whether she had any message for my brother.  Predictably, she said he was working too hard and should take more time out to be with his wife.

Predictably!  That was my problem – it was all too predictable!  I was allowing those nagging doubts to start encroaching on my reality field:
Was I imposing what I’d like her to say on my pendulum?  Was it picking up my expectations rather than her words?

So I did what I always do when such doubts start to emerge – I asked for proof.  Could she, I asked, give me a message that would be meaningful to herself and my brother, but not to me?

The response was smooth and instant: V..A..D..E..R

Vader??  Well it certainly meant nothing to me, but I duly passed the whole message on to him and waited.

He picked my email up when he woke in Hong Kong, the following morning.  Later in the day, he sent me this response:

Having read this message quite early this morning, I carried on and got ready for a production meeting we were having in town for an event this week. The Vader reference from Mum I thought was going to be a sign for me to see, as I had no memory of Mum and I discussing the intricacies of Jedi ways or indeed Lord Vader himself! Eddie Izzard’s wonderful sketch about Darth Vader turning up in the Death Star canteen went through my mind but again I never remember sharing it with Mum!

I got on the train and went to my meeting. I arrived for the meeting which was being held in an amazing meeting room on top of the highest hotel in the world, The Ritz Carlton. It is often in cloud but today the clouds were passing quickly so every few moments they unveiled a stunning view of Hong Kong Harbour. ‘It’s a bit like heaven here sometimes with all the clouds’ said the lady who showed me to the meeting room.

The meeting started just after 10.  J_ the video man arrived late. He entered the room, apologised and sat next to me. I looked across as he placed his Mac Book Air on the table. On the top of his computer he had a large stencil of Darth Vader…………Hello Mum!

 

 

 

For more information on ‘reality fields’ and creating your own reality, see LIFE: A PLAYER’S GUIDE

Mother and Child Reunion: Part 3 of alternate communication

Etruscan_mother_and_child_500_to_450_BCE (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been documenting my journey into communication with ‘the other side’.  This is the third part of the story and my personal favourite, because it shows just to what extent Love will go, to get its point across.

If you’d like to read the story so far, part 1 can be found at this link  My Left Knee and part 2 was in a post called Dowsing with Death .

As I’ve explained, in some incredible way my friend Nina managed to get in touch with me several years after her death, in order alert me to problems within her family.

Initially, the communication was rather stilted, due to the limited range of symbols I was able to dowse.  It quickly occurred to me that if I could dowse symbols, I should be able to use letters to spell out her responses.

“Like some kind of Ouija board,” a friend commented after she’d read my last post on this subject.
Well yes, and it became even more so once I’d drawn myself out an alphabet board and become more skilled at following the pendulum as it wheeled about, stopping and rotating to mark the end of each word.

Did I have doubts about whether this was really happening?  Absolutely.  Most of the time, in fact.  I’d often try to find ways of proving to myself that it was genuine.  I recall asking about a relative of hers – a lady whose name I’d heard once or twice but couldn’t remember.  When the crystal swung to spell out the lady’s name, I had a ‘yes, of course/Oh my God this is true!!’ moment, but still the doubts wouldn’t quite go away.

Something was about to happen, though, that would clear me of any lingering questions about the validity of this communication.  I was about to be given the most incontrovertible proof.

 

We need to return to one of Nina’s children.  This lad, now in his teens, was not doing too well.  He’d taken his mother’s death badly and had been punishing himself for it ever since it had happened.

Yes, I know it was cancer and not in any way his fault, but children have a habit of blaming themselves for all manner of bad things that happen in their lives.  This was made worse in this boy’s case by the fact that during her final weeks, he’d been unable to bring himself to speak or respond to his mother at all.  Knowing, as a small child, that his mother was dying, he’d decided to see if he could block her out of his life – a sort of trial run at bereavement.

When he was told that she was very close to death, he asked his father to take him to the hospice so that he could say goodbye and tell her he loved her.  The tragic thing was, by the time he got there, she appeared to have sunk into a coma, and was unable to respond to him.  She died the next day.

Well you can imagine the guilt that youngster was carting around with him, believing that his mother died not knowing he loved her.

By now I’d joined a spiritual development circle and was starting to take a strong interest in this new life that was opening up before me.

After a few weeks, I confided in the group leader, telling her about my abilities and explaining that I wished I could find some way of reassuring Nina’s son that he’d done nothing wrong.
“I know she was able to hear him that day,” I said.  “She literally hung on until he’d felt ready to talk to her, then she left.”

“Well what are you waiting for?” she exclaimed.  “Don’t you see what you can do now?  Why do you think you’ve been given this gift, for goodness’ sake?”

I listened, dumbfounded, as she explained that I needed to go home, connect with Nina, ask her to dictate everything that had happened on the day her son had visited, type it out neatly and present it to the child.

This had never occurred to me and to start with I had some resistance to the idea.  It was the most private of conversations.  I’d feel like an eavesdropper.

Rolling her eyes, my tutor almost pushed me out of the door.  “So don’t keep a copy!  Just write it, seal it in an envelope and put that poor kid out of his misery.”

 

So I did exactly as she’d said.  The message was incredibly detailed.  Nina described everything the child had said and done.  She even spoke of hearing the boy’s father knock on the door and ask whether he was okay.

We’d never worked on such a long message.  When I’d finished, I thanked her, typed it up and sealed it in an envelope, destroying my rough draft.

That weekend, I called her son and said I had something to give him.  To my surprise, he agreed immediately to meet me.

As gently as I could, I explained the background and the reason his mother and I had made this letter.  He was already aware that I had been in contact with his mum, but had never taken much apparent interest in her messages.  On this occasion he grinned indulgently.

“What’s she been saying now?” he smiled.

I handed him the envelope, telling him to be ready for a shock.

He read it through carefully.  Then he turned aside.

I will never forget the look on that young boy’s face.  I know his life changed on that day, and so did mine.

 

Creating Your Own Reality

Creation (47/52) (Photo credit: Suus Wansink)

You the Creator

What have you made lately – a model; a cake; a piece of furniture; dinner; a mess…?  I’ll bet you’ve done quite a bit of creating over the last week or so.  And how did you do it?  You got some stuff; you changed it in some way – maybe shaping, or cutting, heating or cooling; you probably mixed it with, or joined it to other stuff and carried on changing or modifying it until your creation was complete.

OK, so you might be protesting that all you did was take a ready-meal out of the freezer, pierce the film lid and put it in the microwave, but you still created a hot, steaming meal out of a frozen lump.  You created something by changing stuff.  Hold that idea.  Hold it nice and tight.  We will return to it.

Dr Frankenstein, I presume?

Humankind has a tendency to blame itself for everything that goes wrong.  Once it was religion that prompted perfectly pleasant, law-abiding people to clamber bare-footed up the longest, steepest, rockiest slopes they could find, wearing nasty, itchy hair shirts, to get forgiveness for what they believed were their terrible sins, and to spend their entire lives in terror of the everlasting torment they felt was more or less inevitable after death.

To the rational scientists, and the philosophers who adopted their way of thinking about life, humans appeared to have all the most brutal and ruthless characteristics of the animal kingdom, without, apparently, any of the grace, wonder and beauty.

Today, we blame ourselves endlessly and exclusively for messing up the planet, despite the fact that climate change and species extinctions have been happening since long before matter started forming itself into humans.

We can find beauty and perfection in a flower, a snowflake or a sunset, but give us a mirror and we see only faults.

Maybe it’s just that we sense the hugeness of our own creative powers – and find them very scary.

Without doubt, our skills at creating have been quite awesome.  As you might expect when a few trillion holographic parts of God formed into something with tremendous curiosity, drive and intention – not to mention imagination – the creation really went into overdrive.  From the wheel to the microprocessor, people have created some pretty amazing new stuff.

What have you done?

Let’s move on now to some of the other things YOU created.  Quite definitely, you created sounds.  You might be a musician, who has recently composed a wonderful new song or symphony.  But then perhaps you hummed or whistled a tune or sang along to the radio; that’s still creating sounds.  Of course, your sounds might not have been musical.  There could have been a scream, a sob, a sharp intake of breath or spoken words.  Because we do these things all the time, we take them for granted, but once you stop and recognise how you manipulated and co-ordinated your breath, your tongue, your lips and your larynx to make each single speech sound, you can begin to appreciate what is going on here.

If you’ve used words, it’s more than likely that you have used them to create a situation – a persuasive argument, an angry outburst or an inspiring suggestion, for example.  Any of the above will almost certainly have created feelings – yours and other people’s.  Perhaps you ‘made’ someone happy, wistful, amazed, miserable or furious.  You might have ‘made’ yourself stop and think.

I hope you’re beginning to see by now just how creative you are, even as you jog along doing fairly mundane daily tasks.  You The Creator, as well as making physical stuff, interesting sounds, textures, tastes, and most certainly smells, are also creating ideas and thoughts, feelings and moods, fears and doubts, wishes and hopes.  You are creating them constantly in your own mind, and – by the things you say and do – you are helping to create them in other people’s minds, as well.

How do you do what you do to me?

So let’s stop for a moment and see if we can figure out what is going on while we are creating.  We’ve already discovered that we manipulate matter in various ways to make objects, sounds and smells.  We also recognised that we could create what are commonly called ‘states of mind’.  So what are we actually doing?

Well, all this creation involves using intention, does it not?  Perhaps things didn’t always turn out the way we expected, but we intentionally put the process in motion and caused things to happen.  We also used energy.  It takes energy to create a painting, a compost heap, a brilliant idea or a quarrel.

The way I understand it (and I’m no scientist, remember, so apologies for any bits I’ve got slightly wrong), while they are left to their own devices, the tiny electrons or photons inside your atoms have the potential to be either particles or waves.  Once the scientists start to observe them, though, the wave function apparently collapses; that is to say, they just start behaving like particles.

Let’s go over that one more time.  You start with minute little bits – tiny, tiny pieces of something that whiz about in very unexpected ways and have the potential to be particles (stuff) or waves (ways of transferring energy).  That potential remains intact until scientists use observation.  As we know, scientists are very keen on using observation.  They use physical senses and 3D measurements like distance, time and space to see what happens.  It’s not really surprising that their electrons all become particles – things that have mass and can be measured – is it?

Now let’s consider what might really be going on down at that sub-atomic level.  To do so, we need to return to your creative abilities.

Right.  So you are The Creator.  You are playing a Virtual Game which you have created.  By making choices, you are constantly creating your game as you go along.  You are also helping to create other people’s games.

Sometimes you create stuff – physical things made of atoms, which – of course – contain those minute electrons.  In other words, you intentionally move particles of that potential energy around.

Sometimes you create thoughts and ideas; ‘I’ve had a brainwave!’ you exclaim; or, ‘I was caught up in a wave of nostalgia’; or ‘he was overcome by waves of grief’.  You see?  Sometimes you create non-physical stuff – like feelings, desires or fears – by manipulating waves of potential energy.

So there you have it.  You have two creative functions available to you.  You can use particles of stuff as building blocks for physical creation – making stuff, or you can use waves of energy to produce thoughts.  Those hard-working scientists can observe for all they’re worth, but by staring down a microscope they’re not going to find emotions, ideas or dreams.  There is far more creative potential in those tiny chunks of energy than they have been able to find.

 

This post is an edited extract from LIFE: A PLAYER’S GUIDE by Jan Stone available from Amazon, from Feedaread.com  or through book shops.

 

 

 

 

 

Along Came A Spider: Manifesting for arachnophobics

spiders wallpaper (Photo credit: jelene)

Notice the picture.  There’s no way I could bear to put an actual photo of a real spider up here.  Even this one makes me ever-so-slightly jittery.

So why am I writing a post about spiders, if I’m so terrified of them?

Good question.

It’s actually a post about manifesting and how easily it can go wrong.  All will become clear…

A few weeks ago I read an interesting blog post by a lady called Pam Grout.  I found that she appeared to share my take on life and had written a book called E Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality.

Well to be honest, I don’t think I’d have bought a hard copy, since my tiny house is already in imminent danger of subsiding under the weight of volumes it contains, but there was my dear little Kindle sitting beside me, all light and portable, so with that all-too-easy one click, Pam’s extravagant claims were zooming through the ether into my machine.

I’m about half way through it.  It’s an interesting book.  The genre is midway between Wayne Dyer and Spirituality for Dummies; the style slightly High School Musical in places (I’m trying really hard not to judge the use of  ‘Daddy Alby Einstein‘, and failing so far) but there’s some excellent stuff in there and a brilliant range of quotes by all my favourites – William James, Fred Alan Wolf, Amit Goswami, Peter and Eileen Caddy and many more.

So, true to her word, Pam offers a series of simple-to use ‘energy experiments’ designed to banish any lingering doubts about the Law of Attraction.  I’m already a convert, but I decided it would be fun to work through them.

Number 1 involved finding evidence for what she calls the FP – an overarching consciousness of some description.  I had to give this FP a set amount of time to provide me with something great that incontrovertibly appeared out of the blue.  Sounded good, so I put the intention out and waited.

At the start of day two, as if by magic, I woke with not just the title, but the entire layout of my new book lodged in my head.  Neat – as Pam might say.  I rushed off to scribble it down and returned enthusiastically to my Kindle.

Number 2  was close to my own heart and something I’d written extensively about in Life: A Player’s Guide – the idea that you see exactly what you expect to see.  The method was slightly odd.  I was supposed to focus on seeing sunset-beige cars.  Beige isn’t a colour I readily associate with sunsets, so I was finding this one rather tricky to visualise.  Also I’m not a driver and struggle to take any interest in cars, but on the second day  I did have to step back hastily when a boy-racer in a beaten-up old car of a rather sickly beige hue came zooming round the corner as I was preparing to cross the road, so I counted that a success.

Number 3 was fun.  True, she called it the Alby Einstein Principle, but there was a very clear and well-written account of energy fields and the chapter culminated in using dowsing rods in a way I’d not tried before.

Then came Number 4: manifesting.  So now I was on familiar ground.  Feeling smugly confident, I read the chapter, nodding and smiling as I went.  Yes, this all made sense.

All was going brilliantly until I read her anecdote about a friend who had been so irrationally terrified that one day she would reach into a drawer and close her hands around a huge spider, that one day it actually happened. She’d used the ‘s’ word!  Worse yet, she’d used it in the context that whatever we give our attention to, we draw into our lives.

I started to remember how almost exactly that fear had dogged me when I first moved out of the family home and went solo, in my mid fifties – leaving behind a husband and two brave sons who had always done the spider-removing bit while I trembled pathetically in a corner.  Now it was down to me.

For the first couple of years, an inordinately large number of great hairy eight-legged beasts would appear in the bath, on the white tiled floor and – once – in my bed!
‘Of course,’ I nodded sagely as I read, ‘I was giving attention to spiders, so spiders appeared.  Then I got relatively used to removing them, the terror and attention started to subside and, well, I haven’t had one in the house for around a year now.’

Patting myself on the back, I read on and set about deciding what to manifest within the given two day deadline.  Recalling that book sales had been a bit flat recently, I decided to manifest three sales of ‘LIFE’ – paperback or Kindle edition – within the allotted time.

At the end of day 1, I checked to see whether any sales had turned up on Amazon.  Nothing so far, but there was another day to go.  I kept focusing on the sales.

Day two arrived.  Still nothing.  Then I went downstairs.  Sitting on the front door mat, grinning up at me was – you’ve guessed it – the most massive, full-bodied, terrifyingly angular looking spider I’d ever encountered.

Cursing the Law of Attraction, I fought to control the panic and brushed it out of the door.  Then I stood and shook for ten minutes.

The book sales didn’t appear, which taught me about where I’d actually been putting my energy: every time I thought of manifesting the sales, I thought of Pam’s book and that made me think of memorable parts of the book and that made me think of manifesting spiders…

I’ve probably ruined all hope of manifesting positive experience for huge numbers of arachnophobia sufferers now, unless, like me, they are able to use this as a salutary lesson in how often we allow our attention to rest on precisely what we DON’T want to bring into our lives.

I’ll plough on with the second half of Pam’s book, having learned a valuable lesson.

And by the way, I’m not too bothered about the two day deadline, so if anyone would like to purchase a copy of my entirely spider-free book on the purpose of life and manifesting your own reality, please feel free to use that handy one click and bring it into your life!

Available in paperback and Kindle editions

New Kids – The New Normal

Child 1 (Photo credit: Tony Trần)

Those of you who are familiar with my posts will know how much respect (bordering on awe sometimes) I have for children and young people.

On the surface, they seem much the same as ever, but increasing numbers of adults who, like me, have been working with them for some years are recognising that the ‘New Kids’ are different.

When I started teaching in the 1970s there was the occasional child whose insights, inner knowledge and spiritual understanding would blow me away.

As the years went by, the number of these special kids steadily increased.  Books like The Indigo Children started to appear and I realised I wasn’t alone in noticing the astonishing qualities these young people were bringing to the world.

The trickle of books became a flood and a certain sort of parent could be heard bragging about their children’s rainbow/indigo/crystal traits the way they’d once have boasted about their reading ages or gymnastic skills.

By the time I left the teaching profession in 2008, I’d recognised that at least half the children in every class were passionately interested in discussing cosmic and deep philosophical issues.  They knew and understood things we adults were struggling to grasp.

 

As I’ve explained elsewhere, the National Curriculum, with it’s top-down emphases seemed so utterly out of synch with what I wanted to explore, I left teaching and started writing.

The book I published a few years later – Life: A Player’s Guide, was largely based on understanding gained from the many and wonderful conversations I’d had with children and young adults.  It was also written in terms which, I hoped, would appeal to young people as well as an adult audience.  I felt it was time people started aiming information at them, rather than their parents.

Now I divide my time between writing and working as a ‘freelance educator’ – basically teaching where and how I want, which makes for a pretty near perfect life!

I asked a bunch of 10-14 year olds I currently work with in Somerset whether  they’d be interested in a philosophy club, to explore questions such as ‘What’s the point of life?’ and ‘Where did we come from?’

The response was instant.  Eyes shone; heads nodded emphatically.  We had our first session this week.  Most had never talked much about these issues before.  For about ten minutes they were shy.  Then one of the ten-year-olds started things going:

” I do believe in Hell – but I think it’s not somewhere else.  I think it’s kind of inside us.  Like when you get night terrors – that’s really Hell, isn’t it?”

A slightly older child took that up. “Yes!  In fact I sometimes wonder what’s real.  I have this idea it isn’t what we’re doing here.  I think maybe the real ‘us’ is somewhere else…”

“Yeah, because you get – you know – that thing where you can see your body doing normal stuff but you’re not in it?  You’re – like – looking down at it.  Anyone else get that?” another girl threw in, casually.

Several nods and eager smiles.  Out-of-body experience is clearly commonplace for their generation.

“And I wonder, when I’ve had a dream and I wake up – what’s real?  Is it what’s happening now or what was happening in the dream?”

I was, as I often am in such situations, a catalyst, but certainly not a teacher; a fascinated and privileged onlooker – one finger on the steering wheel.  The conversation meandered effortlessly between ghosts and UFOs to Buddhist reincarnation beliefs and Hindu deities; from Christian fundamentalism to Paganism and many other places besides.

Afterwards, they  grinned (“That was fun!”), waved goodbye cheerily and headed off down the path, checking their phones and planning trips to the swimming pool.

Normal kids – the new normal.

And I’m looking forward so much to the next session.  Who knows what I’ll learn…