Dear Self…

I have a friend who is experiencing the most terrible of times.  She is heartbroken, flat, without hope, overwhelmed and filled with grief.  Her pain and suffering are not illusory (despite my continuing belief that life is a game – it’s real enough while we are playing it) and the problems seem insurmountable.

I considered writing a letter to this friend, suggesting how she might help herself emerge from these black times, but that feels wrong.  I haven’t walked in her shoes.  I can’t tell her what steps she should take.

So instead, I’ll write my letter to my Self – the Self I was in 2008: the year I had left my teaching career, my painful, trustless, crumbling marriage, my beloved grown-up children, my home and friends, and moved to London to care for my mother.  

She couldn’t acknowledge her dementia, couldn’t see why life was becoming uncomfortable and confusing, so directed all her anger, fear and spite towards me.

I’ll write to the Self who lay shaking and crying on the spare room bed, after dodging most of the vicious blows and scratches for barring the front door at 3am and not allowing Mum to ‘go to the hairdressers’.  The Self who had turned the gas tap off on the hob again, after finding it hissing, and was wondering how long before the house would explode.  The self who knew that – one way or another, even if she didn’t blow us up – we both had to be out of that house within the next three months because there was no money left.  The Self who had nowhere to go and no one to turn to.  Those are shoes I’ve walked in.

Dear Self,

I know how black it feels.  I know how heavy all those fears and injustices are.  I know it’s 3.30 in the morning and you’re at the darkest hour – in every way.

You’re asking yourself what you have done to deserve this.  The answer is: you have grown strong.  This isn’t retribution; it’s a rite of passage.  You have given yourself the opportunity to be tested as never before – and to overcome each and every difficulty, to emerge stronger and more confident.

You’re protesting that you didn’t want this ‘test’ – you want to go back to when things were easier: not great, perhaps, but easier than this.

It doesn’t work that way.  Your life has been moving towards this point for quite a time now.  It’s here, and I’m here to help you through it.

Me?  Yes, I’m yourself – one of the millions of Selves you create with your every thought and emotion.  The me who is writing this lives eight years in your future.  She’s happy, comfortable and lives a full and independent life, surrounded by like-minded friends, with a pretty home of her own, inspiring children to teach and learn from and a garden to tend.  She has all you now dream of and more.  I don’t expect you to be able to imagine that life yet, but it’s waiting for you, dear Self, once you get through this time.

You think you’re alone.  You’re not.  All your past and future Selves are there with you.  They send you experience, wisdom and inspiration.  They are as real as the Self you are, lying on that bed.  You are – how can I explain ideas you haven’t yet encountered? – ‘entangled’ with more other Selves than you can imagine.  Everyone you have cared for and loved, shared with and learned from is there with you.  Just like those little sub-atomic quantum whatsits you’ve read of in science books, you and those people – the ones you see as ‘living’ and the ones you think of as ‘dead’ – become forever entangled.  That means you only have to lie there in the night asking for support and comfort, and they will come flocking to you.  You know, already, that we are more than our bodies.  You know we are also spirit.  That is how they reach you, care for you and hold you up, if you can just allow them in.

Dad’s there – of course he is.  He knows exactly what you’re enduring.  Grandma, too.  She’s barely left your side.  Trust that they are with you.

Now I want you to look into your life.  Yes, I know, the one that totally sucks.  Only it doesn’t – not TOTALLY.  I want you to find something in there – and it can be a tiny, seemingly insignificant something – that is better-than-awful.

Your body, for example – it’s working pretty well, isn’t it?  Certainly the sleepless, interrupted nights aren’t helping and the IBS has flared again, but your senses work, your legs, your arms…  Take that body tomorrow – once Mum’s gone to the daycare centre – and give it a treat.  Take it to the park.  Leave the sack of worries at the gates.  Stroll in the sunshine and watch the squirrels and deer, the movement of the trees and grass, the ripples in the river.  Listen and smell and immerse yourself in nature and don’t allow yourself to give a single thought to the worries or fears.  This is your healing time.

When you get back to the gates – yes – the problems will still be waiting for you.  There will be a difference, though.  You’ll have created a piece of your Self they can’t get to.  Nurture that ‘safe’ fragment of you; spoil her rotten!  She deserves it – YOU deserve it.

You don’t need others advising you about what to do, or telling you how much you matter to them or protecting you.  You’re very slowly and wonderfully growing into the Self you can be – that strong, independent woman you were born to become.

It will keep hurting for a while, and there will be problems to overcome, but trust.  You’re going to come out of all this just fine – and it will be you (with a million Selves to back you up) who does it.

Love

Your Self   (please…)

Sense and Sensitivities

They’ve been showing up in my life far more than usual in the past week – the uber-sensitive young people who sometimes struggle to get along smoothly in this 3D world of ours.

The normally calm, cheerful and sorted 12-year-old arrives for her lesson clutching a cuddly toy, her face set and expressionless, her answers monosyllabic and robotic.  A mother of another child texts to say her daughter won’t be coming; she can’t face leaving her room today.  A teenager tells me how, when stimuli and situations become too overpowering, he climbs into his bed, pulls over the covers and dons a World War II gas mask – his own home-made isolation chamber.  “It’s the only thing that helps.”

Yes, all three have a tendency towards social isolation, anxiety and a certain rigidity of outlook.  Many home-educated children do – that often being their principle reason, of course, for coming out of school in the first place.  Why all of them together though, this week?

First week back to studies after the Easter break?  Possibly…  The obvious answer, though, from my perspective, is that they – collectively – have something to teach me, particularly since the ‘Version 2.0 kids’ have been on my mind recently, with regard to the ‘Deep Dimension’ I wrote about in my previous post.

So what is the lesson?  I sit quietly and wait until the nub of truth that these lovely kids have so painfully been leading me towards surfaces.  Something the sixteen-year-old said…

“When I’m stressed, all my emotions shut down completely.”

That was exactly what the girl had been showing me – no expression, no visible emotions.  I’d seen her do this a few times before.  I’d seen it in other sensitive young people, struggling to hold themselves together as they experienced sensory overload.  Change their routine, their environment or their situation and this is how they cope.

As I’ve mentioned before, Seth states that our thoughts and emotions create our Earthly experience.  For me, this connects closely to the Akashic Dimension proposed by Ervin Laszlo, as described in the previous post.  True, Laszlo has not suggested that emotions play a part, but he does describe it as a ‘Self-Actualising Cosmos’ and points out that we can consciously link to this hidden realm by entering ‘non-ordinary’ or altered states – the hypnagogic (between waking and sleeping), meditative or trance states, for example.

I was curious.

“When you engage in remote viewing [surely as non-local a link to the Akashic Dimension  as one could wish for],” I said to my friend William, “Would you say you enter any sort of altered state?”

He was quite definite that he didn’t.  He merely focused on the target, and it appeared within his consciousness.

That was what I’d suspected.

Could it be that our highly sensitive Version 2.0 people, whom we know to be ‘wired’ somewhat differently to the neurotypical population, do not – as Laszlo asserted – selectively filter out the quantum-level signals containing information which “for most people… is unfamiliar, esoteric, and vaguely threatening”.

Imagine, for a moment, that each of us arrives in the physical 3D environment with a ‘filter’ which not only allows us to block out unwanted sensory stimuli (background noise or distracting sights when we need to focus) but also – once we have been culturally influenced by our society – those ‘vaguely threatening’ other-dimensional stimuli.  In psychic circles, this filter is known as ‘the veil’.  Small children and pets, of course, often react to sights and sounds which most of us screen out.  Many of the children learn, within a few years which signals to respond to and which to ignore.  The imaginary friends and shadow people, the inexplicable fragments of knowledge and so forth become less frequent as they become immersed in the cultural values of their parents and peers.

Imagine now, a population of humans who are born with a considerably less dense filter – a kitchen sieve rather than a coffee filter, for example.  Not only do they resist adult intervention when told that they are ‘imagining things’, they often show unexpected and hard-to-explain skills and talents.  They are, I’d suggest, able to  tune consciously into a vast amount of the non-local, ‘esoteric’ information emanating from the Akashic Dimension.  These are the Version 2.0 people.

There is a downside, however.  They are also less able to filter out the everyday sensory information that the NT population can happily ignore.  A sudden unexpected sound, a smell of perfume from a shop doorway, flashing lights or even the strobing of a florescent tube can prove unbearable to them.  They pay a high price for this access to realms hidden from the majority of the population.

They become stressed.  And as my young students have been showing me, that makes them shut down their emotions.

Why?

I’d argue that it’s because our emotions are what create the world of matter around us.  They need ‘less world’ so they isolate themselves from the mechanism that creates it.  At an intuitive – maybe even a semi-conscious – level, they recognise the power they have over their surroundings.  We all possess that power, of course; we are all creators.  To be constantly aware of it, though, is quite a burden to carry.  What might they create, if they gave free rein to the emotions their stress could give rise to?

These words – an extract from The Words of William written when he was eleven – give some insight into the dilemma these very special young people face:

Tornado

I spin and destroy
Even though I don’t want to.
I see people become terrified in an instant from seeing me.
Maybe I should ignore my feelings
And destroy everything in my path
Using my spinning powers.

Under the Akasha Tree

A posthumous and timely reminder from Wayne Dyer has lifted me from my meditations beneath this glorious, overarching tree.

I’ve been here for some time, pondering deeply, wondering widely and dreaming deliciously.  Not a bodhi tree for me, nor even an acacia.  Mine is Ervin Laszlo’s all-enveloping Akasha.  It’s a glorious place to sit and think, but Dr Dyer’s words are ringing in my ears:

Don’t die with your music still inside you.

Not, I hasten to add, that I’m planning on ‘dying’ yet awhile.  Judging by my female ancestors, I probably have at least a further 30 or so years of pondering-in-the-physical stretching before me, let alone the timeless afterlives, interlives and lives beyond that.  Nevertheless, it’s probably time to dust off the blog and share some of the thoughts that have been drifting around the Akasha and into my mind.

Imagine a deep, deep dimension underlying everything.  This dimension is way beyond time and space.  It is the base of all that is – All That Is.  Laszlo calls it, appropriately enough, the Akashic realm.  Matter is in-formed from this deep dimension.  The Akasha is de-formed by matter.  Matter returns to and emerges from Akasha.  The information we receive from this realm arrives in the form of quantum waves – nonlocal and instant.  This means that, as well all the ‘normal’ perceptions that reach us through the five senses, we can safely include inspirations, hunches, intuitions and all those transient awarenesses we may glimpse fleetingly.  In short, to quote Ervin Laszlo, “our brain is imbued with the totality of the information that pervades the cosmos”.

It goes without saying that all but a tiny amount of that information is filtered out by our brains, in just the way that we filter out unwanted sounds or visual stimuli around us in a crowded street, the better to focus on what our companion is saying or the route we wish to take.  However, Laszlo says it is possible, through entering an altered state – through meditation, in a near-death experience or at a point between waking and sleeping, for example – to gain access to far greater parts of the ‘Akashic Record’ than is normally the case.

Now, perhaps, you’ll see where my ponderings beneath the akasha tree have been going…

For at least the last twelve years, I’ve spent much of my time exploring the outer reaches of perception – the places many dismiss as fancy or superstition.  Given that we now have an internationally respected scientist, with impeccable credentials, offering a carefully constructed theory in which such phenomena are not only tolerated, but expected, I feel deep gratitude and delight.

For millennia, now, either the Christian Church or – latterly – mainstream science have sought to marginalise, suppress or persecute those who were able to access this realm.  The reasons are not difficult to fathom.  Those who have experienced Akasha’s deeper knowledge – and been brave enough to share it – have been burnt as heretics, derided as charlatans or otherwise disposed of (except in the case of a chosen few who, by accessing the ‘right’ ideas at the right time, achieved veneration as saints or scientific geniuses).

Finally, the tide is turning.

I strongly suspect that it is turning faster than even Laszlo suspects.  More on that to follow.

For now, though, if you haven’t yet encountered Ervin Laszlo – systems scientist, integral theorist and classical pianist – I urge you to do so.  He is one of the wisest and most brilliant people I have ever come across.  His ‘music’ is to explain and share what he calls his ‘re-discovery’ of the Akashic realm.  I heartily recommend  The Self-Actualising Cosmos: the Akasha Revolution in Science and Human consciousness.