Hell Bent

This is me

This is pretty uncharted territory for me.  I’m not too sure how to work my way through it, so please bear with me as I make these faltering steps into an alien land.  

I’ve been trying to avoid writing about it for weeks now, but the synchronicities and situations have just kept building and the Universe is screaming at me, “Just go ahead and get it written down for heaven’s sake!  Why do you think you’re being shown this stuff?”  

So I will.

Deep breath.

If I were Hell bent…   If I were hell bent on lowering humanity’s collective vibration, on ensuring that people lived in fear rather than love, on making sure that they forgot that We Are All One, that we are stronger when we work together, that we are – every one of us – amazing, perfect, powerful aspects of The Unity, of All That Is, who need no leaders or advisers to enable us to live wonderful, connected, joyful lives, how would I go about it?

These are the things I would do:

• I’d fill the news media with fear-based, negative imagery.  I’d suppress stories of hope and kindness, of care and humanity and promote those that encouraged distrust, bigotry, anxiety and hopelessness.
• I’d flood  entertainment – sports, movies, TV dramas, soaps, documentaries, video games – with images of violence, anger, pain and strife.  In this way I’d brainwash the populace into craving scenes of animosity and destruction, conflict and heartbreak on a daily basis.
• I’d work to promote and increase the divisions between rich and poor.  I’d reward the rich and undermine the poor and disempowered, ensuring they had to fight so hard to survive, they had no energy left to fight me or my system.
• In time-honoured fashion, I’d use minority groups and immigrants as scapegoats.  It’s always worked, that trick – right through history.
• I’d use every opportunity I had to limit advances in free energy technology, natural healing, remedies for disease and anything else that eroded the profit margins of the multinationals.
• I wouldn’t fear business, because money talks there, and they’d be easy to buy off.  I would fear the caring professions though – people like health workers, educators and care workers, who put humanity above profit and gain.  I’d need to find ways to keep them down…
• I’d regulate them.  I’d impose systems of control so rigorous and heavy-handed that they would have to work all hours to complete the paperwork and thus fall short of the standards of care they could achieve.  Then I’d hold up examples of failure for public scrutiny, convince society that I was protecting them against these inadequate individuals and impose still more regulation and inspection.
• Doctors and teachers would worry me  particularly.  They are articulate and intelligent and tend to see the big picture to a worrying degree.  I’d need to think hard about silencing them.
• I’d increase working hours, then, for the doctors and blame them when they fell to the ground with exhaustion or tried to flee the country and work somewhere more reasonable.
• As for the teachers, I’d fill the curriculum with Junk Learning.  I’d insist the children were taught an unachievable and irrelevant mix of pointless and inappropriate facts and skills, leaving no room for critical thinking and creative endeavour.  I’d impose rigorous testing throughout the education system, changing it regularly and arbitrarily.  In this way I would exhaust and disempower the teachers, stress and break the spirit of the children and frighten the parents into putting pressure on both.
• I’d feel threatened by the New Children – the ones born with sensitivities, understanding  and awareness at a higher level than those who had come before.  I would label them, where possible – dyslexic, dyspraxic, ADHD, autistic, Aspergers… and convince their parents they were disabled and wouldn’t function successfully in my world.  Many would be medicated.  Others would simply fail, because of the way I’d ensured the tests and schools were organised.
• These and many things more I would do to maintain my status quo.

If I were Heaven bent, though…  If I were working to raise the collective vibration and help humanity to shift into alignment with its dreams of how Life could be, it’s simple:  I’d do the opposite of all the above.

Wouldn’t you?

 

Subtle energies

Every so often, my psychically gifted young friend William sends me another article he has written.  Recently, there has been one about the possible effects of electromagnetic radiation from phones, wi-fi etc. on subtle energies, such as telepathy and psychic skills.  In a second, he was trying to unravel the optimum conditions for successful remote viewing.  At some point, when I have enough, I’ll put his new articles together in Volume 2 of The Words of William.  (Volume 1 is still available in Kindle or paperback here.)

I can only think that the Universe had conspired to give us the answer to both of these lines of enquiry, using something along the lines of the law of attraction.

Last Sunday I was sitting, in the early spring sunshine, in a little courtyard within the Chalice Well Gardens, just along the road from my house.  We’d viewed in the grounds before, but never in this part of the gardens.  Will has never been there.  He was aware of the name of the place I’d be in, but nothing more.  He was, as always, in his home in London.  We’d arranged that at 2pm I would be in position and he would ‘tune in’ and try to pick up details of the place.  Fifteen minutes later, I would take a few photos and head home.  Meanwhile, he would be texting me whatever he had been able to view.

When I returned to the cottage, his words and a drawing were waiting for me.  Once they were received, I sent him the photos and some feedback.  Even by the standards of our most successful viewings, this one was remarkable.

He described features in great detail: A round central concrete structure with patterns carved around the sides, containing plants and probably water.  A green gateway or arch.  A large slab of concrete where he felt I was sitting. Two raised containers or flower pots full of plants.  Many overhanging branches.  The ground was tiled.  His sketch of the site showed all these items in relation to each other.  It was drawn from exactly the spot I’d been sitting in.

My photos showed the round well, surrounded by carved spirals and containing ferns and tiny damp-loving plants.  Water from the red spring trickled gently into it from an underground source.

The green metal archway and gate leading into this part of the garden was clearly visible from where I was sitting.  In this photo, too, the raised beds (his ‘concrete containers of plants’) and stone tiled ground can also be seen, along with the overhanging trees.

Set into the wall right beside my bench there was a large stone slab, drilled with holes for tea lights.  It’s an unusual feature, sticking out into the courtyard like a table.  Will’s ‘concrete slab’ was in exactly the correct position.

So why, I asked, had this worked so well?  He thought it could be because he’s known the name of the location and – even though he hadn’t ever seen the place – that helped him to home in.

Later in the week, though, I had another thought.  Usually we text when we’re ready, keep our phones handy and he texts as soon as he has all the information he can get.  The Chalice Well Garden is a phone-free zone, so we’d pre-arranged the time and there had been no messaging while I was at the site.  I wondered if that might have allowed us to focus better.

William had a further thought.  Perhaps, he said, the signals from our phones interfered with the subtle information passing between us.  Maybe the range of electrical devices in my home, for example, had been responsible for some of the fuzzy, less convincing viewings of objects done indoors over the winter months.

It was an intriguing thought.  I asked Koimul, my spirit guide, for some clarification.

I was told that everything – ourselves included –  has its own electromagnetic energy field.  These are very subtle.  Man-made devices, though, give off a far stronger – coarser – energy.  Koimul asked me to think of the difficulty we have trying to view the night skies with light pollution from street lamps.  The delicate twinkling of far off stars is concealed from us.  Once we are free of artificial light sources, though, the true radiance of the night sky can be seen.  The same is true, apparently, in our viewings.  We are attempting to focus on the subtlest of energies, and a blast of EM radiation from a mobile phone can easily mask almost all the signals.

It’s an intriguing thought.  Perhaps it goes some way to explaining how our ancestors were able to tune in so much better to the subtle energies of Nature.  I wonder if everything we make – not just the electronic devices, but man-made fabrics, buildings or vehicles – is to some extent masking our true ability to link to our planet, and even to one another.

Sweet Subversion

We moved house when I was eleven.  We left behind the comfortable, antiseptic house on a ‘private development’ (my mother would not allow the use of the word ‘estate’) on the edge of a Sussex town and took up residence in a ramshackle old shell with a huge garden in a deeply wooded nowhere full of rhododendrons and rising damp.

I missed my friends, the kids I’d played out with in the street, riding bikes and yelling and making dens in the copse down the road.  Our new neighbourhood had no other kids.  It was fairly short of neighbours generally.  As I look back I can recall those endless trees and bushes, with the occasional enticing, narrow driveway leading (presumably) to a house or two.

However, as new arrivals, we were invited to ‘take tea’ with Miss Roberts, who lived down one of the drives across the road and along a bit.  That event changed the course of my life.

Miss Roberts was, I guess, roughly my present age when I met her – sixties.  She had eyes that missed nothing and was unashamedly summing us up.  My mother, of course, was doing the same to her.  Neither was impressed with the other.  To me, though, Miss Roberts offered a glimpse of how life could be, if only one dared to let it.

My mother commented that we’d bought the house because of the garden.  Mum loved gardening.  She fearlessly cut lines and ovals into the turf and planted up successions of neatly arranged and carefully coordinated groups of bedding plants, heathers and conifers.  She’d already begun to wage war on the bracken-filled wasteland behind our new home.

“Ah, if you’re a gardener, you must come and see mine,” smiled Miss Roberts, and she lead us into a billowing, crazy, clashing mass of colour and texture.  A tiny stream wound its way through the overhanging plants.  A rough path moved towards then away from the water, crossing it once with a miniature bridge.

“Goodness, it must be a great deal of work,” ventured my mother.  Had we lived a generation earlier, she’d probably have had a fit of the vapours at this point.

“It’s the most beautiful garden in the world!” I announced, my voice almost breaking with passion, and Miss Roberts took note.

Indoors once again, she asked me about my interests.

“She’s always got her head in a book,” my dad replied, on my behalf.  My avid reading was something of an embarrassment to my parents.  They possessed books, plenty of them – books on golf and cars, gardening and cooking and my mother read some historical fiction of the nicer (pronounced ‘nacer’) kind.

“So you enjoy fiction?” Miss Roberts said.  “So do I.  While I pour your parents another cup of tea, why don’t you climb those steps and turn left at the top.  See what you think of that.”

She lived in a chalet bungalow.  The steps were something between a ladder and a staircase, leading to two attic rooms.  One was her bedroom.  The one I’d been directed to, though, was something more wonderful than I could have imagined – an entire room lined from top to bottom with books.  Paradise!

I can imagine, now, Miss Roberts’ delight and my parents’ consternation as my gasps of pleasure and excitement echoed down the stairs to them.  I settled with a copy of HG Wells’ The Time Machine on my lap.  Imagine being eleven years old and first encountering the following words:

“any real body must have extension in FOUR directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and – Duration. … THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TIME AND ANY OF THE OTHER THREE DIMENSIONS OF SPACE EXCEPT THAT OUR CONSCIOUSNESS MOVES ALONG IT.”

When the second cups of tea had been duly drained, it was judged the appropriate time to leave.  My mother was appalled by my lack of social etiquette as I begged loudly to be allowed to stay longer.  Smoothly, Miss Roberts intervened.
“Why don’t you take the book with you?” she smiled.  “You can bring it back when you’ve finished – and why not swap it for another?  You can treat my book room as your own private library.”

Loudly – to drown out my parents’ polite, ‘Oh we couldn’t possibly..’ mutterings – I thanked her profusely and said that would be wonderful.

So, despite my mother’s disapproval, began my frequent visits to Miss Roberts.  I worked my way through HG Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, EM Forster and George Eliot among many others.  We sat in her magical garden sipping home-made elderflower champagne and – ever so gently – Miss Roberts opened my mind to thoughts and ideas my parents would never have encouraged, or probably even imagined.

I owe so much of who I am today to the sweet subversion of those conversations.  I have tried, in my turn, to carry on Miss Roberts’ legacy by performing the same role in the lives of several of the children and young people I’ve encountered throughout my life – and continue to do so…

 

 

 

Playing with Dimensions

Sometimes the simplest things are the best.

I’ve long been fascinated by the Möbius strip.  It was one of those synchronous discoveries – ‘found’, if that’s the right word, in the same year (1858), in the same country (Germany) by two mathematicians working completely independently of one another.

Johann Benedict Listing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That’s strange to begin with, isn’t it?  Yet ideas often emerge spontaneously in different places like that.  One of its discoverers was August Möbius and the other Johann Listing.  So it might well have been called the Listing Loop (and perhaps it is in some alternate universe).

In case you’ve never taken the trouble to examine one, when you start with a long, narrow strip of paper, and lay it flat on a table, it has two dimensions – length and width.  The rectangle has four sides and one visible face.  There is, obviously, a second face underneath which can’t be seen until you lift it up.

If you pick the paper strip up and stick the two short ends together, forming a simple loop, and you have a 3D shape.  The new shape – a shallow cylinder – has two faces and two sides.  (There is a point to all this, bear with me.)

However – I love this bit – if you were to twist the strip before sticking the ends together, you would end up with the shape shown here:

It's a rather wonderful infinity symbol of a shape.  How many dimensions does it now have?  Still three?  It's certainly more complex than the loop, yet if you watch the animated ants there, you'll notice that the Mobius loop has only ONE side and ONE face.  Head over here to watch a short, rather cheery demonstration or (if you're so inclined) try making one yourself, then drawing a line down the centre, cutting it in half lengthways and so forth.

The point (finally!) is, the more strange and complex the shape we create, the simpler it’s geometry becomes.  Maybe it’s approaching Unity….

 

This is a short summary of the material on the Möbius strip in LIFE: A Players Guide.