Where Was I Last Night?

I’m fairly sure, now, I know where I was.  Things had been building up to it, if you know what I mean.

When I say ‘last night’, I’m talking in temporal terms, obviously.  The experience I had took place sometime between around 2am and 7:30am this morning.  Since my mind was dreaming, though, the timescale for the events didn’t belong in that time at all.  It was, like all dreams, non-local.

What I recall most clearly is the excitement, the enthusiasm, the anticipation my fellow protagonist and I were experiencing.  We were family, although he had no obvious counterpart in my current life.  I’d describe him as a sort of brother, maybe even a twin.  All of our attention was focused on the task before us.  Each of us was choosing a new adventure.

I can only describe what we were examining in terms of geometry.  There were tubes – dark flexible cylinders or wormholes perhaps – overlaid with uneven grids and lines of bright, greenish light which intersected in interesting ways.  Each was a different ‘adventure’.  The tubes were the destinations, while the patterns showed different timeframes.   We poured over every detail with intense concentration and excitement.  The more complex the slashes of lines and the patterns they created, the more enthusiastic we became.

“Oh, this one looks interesting!” he would exclaim, pointing to a place where a diagonal crossed a group of parallel lines then veered away in a dynamic tick shape.

“Yeah,” I would laugh, “You might need a bit of help with that one!  I could probably lend a hand there.”

Ever had your palm read, or an astrology reading?  They are the nearest analogies I can think of.  Every line and every crossing had huge significance.  They represented the challenges, the exciting parts, the fun of this unique adventure.

Each of us was searching for a location and a timeframe within it that would give us a thrilling rollercoaster of an experience.  There was no fear or trepidation, no hunting for the easy bits.  We both wanted a full-on white-knuckle ride with plenty of problems to solve and puzzles to overcome.

Despite our emotional closeness, we were aiming for quite different adventures.  There was no regret that we would be separated, but there seemed to be an underlying acceptance that we could, at any point, call on one another – and on a rather nebulous ‘back-up team’ who seemed to be lurking nearby – if we needed support at any point.

I was beginning to wake up – to return to the physical world.  I didn’t want to!  This was fun.  There was another pattern on another tube I was desperate to explore.  My companion, too, was still busily engaged in the activity.  I managed to climb back into the dream state and spend a little more time there, but the physical body was becoming restless and finally shook itself free of that other existence, bringing my mind back to its daytime residence.

Now it was time to consider what I’d seen from a human perspective.  Surely that happy, excited, fearless aspect of me had been wherever-it-is we go between lives.  My companion and I had been selecting our next incarnation.  Everything pointed to that conclusion.

As I said, things had been building up to it.  Recent conversations, news items, personal experiences, channeled messages from others I follow on social media… even a friend who just yesterday re-read and commented on a post I had written several years ago.  The message had been the same:  We chose this location and this time in which to live this life.  We chose it – warts and all – in order to give it our best shot and see what we could change, what we could figure out, what we could take on and deal with.  Moaning, protesting, trolling or grumbling just won’t do any more.  We judge and complain about our fellow humans but write them glowing eulogies and obituaries when they pass.  We beg and insist that gods, spirit, world leaders, politicians and anyone other than us must change our lives for the better.  No wonder so many channeled beings are metaphorically throwing their hands in the air and reminding us that we chose it, and we intended it to be fun.

So yes, I woke up to an overcast drizzly day in October and a world beset with challenges and problems galore.  I’m off now to try to reconnect with the cheery, excited and optimistic aspect of myself I experienced last night and to bring as much of her hope and enthusiasm as I can into this amazing timeline and space I opted for this time around.

But Where Was Me?

Grandmothers should be wise.  It’s one of those archetypal attributes of the crone, isn’t it?  So when I fall short in the wisdom department, it bothers me.  

A little over a year ago, my grandson and I were chatting about the first house he lived in – a place he dimly remembered, having moved away when he was a toddler.  His younger sister was confused.  She insisted they had never lived in a house with two huge trees in the garden.  When her brother pointed out that this was before she was born, she became almost hysterical.

“But where was ME?” she demanded, her eyes filling with tears and panic.

That was when I fell short in the wise grandmother stakes.  I knew my answer to the question, but I would have struggled – when put on the spot – to find the words to explain it to a tiny child.  Even if I had managed to leap that hurdle, I was anxious about straying into the sphere of beliefs.  I’ve spent a lifetime as a teacher carefully and meticulously respecting a wealth of different creeds and cultures.  I knew my grandchildren were being brought up with a nominally Christian belief system.  Christianity has plenty to say about an afterlife, but is curiously silent on before life.  It talks vaguely about dust and ashes, which, I felt, wouldn’t help much.  Did I have the right to impose my own beliefs on those they were being brought up with? 

So I failed.  I gave the child lots of comforting cuddles, chatted to her about how excited we’d all been when she was born, and generally distracted her without ever answering her very important question.  And it has bothered me ever since.

When I came to write my children’s novel this year, I decided it would give me the opportunity to revisit the events of that day and to provide Ruby Rose, my fictional toddler heroine, with a fearless crone figure who is more than happy to address her question head on and provide a suitable response.

It was one of those parts of the book that quite happily wrote itself, while I obediently pressed the keys.  Interestingly, Misty often took control of me, as well as the situations in the story, when she appeared in the pages!

Misty waited for the girl to settle down and for the pounding of her heart to slow.  “Now,”  she began, finally.  “That was a very sensible question you asked, my dear.  I’m going to answer it for you, but you will need to listen very hard.  Can you do that?”

Ruby nodded miserably and Stellan sat on the grass at Misty’s feet, because it had never occurred to him that there could be an answer to that question.

“Before you were your mama’s little girl and Stellan’s little sister, Ruby, you were living in the Dreaming Place.”

“What’s the Dreaming Place?” Ruby asked, sitting up.

“It’s a place you know very well.  Why, you go there every night, while your body is in bed, having a rest,” Misty replied.

“You mean when we have dreams?” asked Stellan.

“Exactly.  Haven’t you ever thought how odd it is that your body stays in bed, fast asleep, while you are off doing all sorts of other things?” …

“That is strange,” agreed Stellan, who had never really considered it before.

“So,”  continued Misty, in the same calm, gentle voice, “while we have bodies like these,” she tickled Ruby Rose gently on her arm and the child giggled, “we live in them for most of the time and just put them down to rest at bedtime.  Before we are born, though, and after we have died, we spend all our time in the Dreaming Place.  That’s where you were when Stellan was a little boy and Bella the cat lived with him.”

Both children were silent for a moment, while they considered that.

“Weren’t I lonely without my ma and my pa and my brother?” Ruby wanted to know.

“Not at all,”  Misty replied.  “You were having too much fun!  You see in the Dreaming Place, you can be whatever you want and go anywhere you like.  You might have tried being a fairy or a brave explorer or even a dog or a cat.  What do you think you would have been?”

“A fairy who could fly in the air and do wishes!” Ruby announced.

“Well that would be quite splendid, wouldn’t it?”  Misty smiled.  “But after loads and loads of dreaming, you decided that what would be even more fun would be to become a little girl with a body.  You see, in the Dreaming Place there are things we can’t do.  We can’t feel happiness or pain or full up with delicious food or the softness of an animal’s fur when we stroke it.  You decided to find yourself the most perfect family for your new body to live with.”

“How did she find us?” asked Stellan. 

He couldn’t decide whether this was some kind of made-up tale to calm his sister and cheer her up or whether Misty believed all she was saying.

She smiled at him.  It was a serious smile, not the sort of winking smile grown-ups give when you and they both know they are pretending.

“As I said, in the Dreaming Place, you can go anywhere you want just by thinking about it.  Once Ruby Rose had decided she wanted to slip into a body and find a family in this – Waking Place, she travelled all around the world, deciding which would be the very best family for her to live with.  Eventually, she chose the family she wanted and when your new little sister was born, here she was!”

“I was very clever to choose my nice family, weren’t I, Misty?” Ruby smiled.

My grandson is reading The Glassmaker’s Children at the moment and maybe, when she’s a few years older, his sister will do the same and find a belated answer to her question.  

 

Dying to Understand

“I hear Daisy has gone now,” I remarked to a friend.
Daisy was elderly and ill. She’d taken to her bed and had been refusing food for some time, so it wasn’t a surprise.
“Yes,” Ali replied, “and boy is she in for a shock!”
I looked up in surprise for a moment, then realised what she meant.
“You mean she didn’t believe there would be anything after life?”
“Exactly,” Ali smiled. “She was adamant that ‘she’ would die along with her body. End of. What must she be thinking now?”

It’s the third time recently that such an idea has been placed in my mind.  The first was when I read a highly praised and undeniably well-researched and well-argued book called The Mind in the Cave.  Its author, David Lewis-Williams, speaks eloquently and convincingly about the world view of our ancient ancestors – those who decorated caves and rocks with incredible images of animals, geometric shapes, figures who appear to be somewhere between animals and humans etc.  It’s a great book, but for me, there is one huge issue I’ll be bold enough to disagree on.  It’s what Professor Lewis-Williams terms ‘the brain/mind problem’.  Here’s the way he resolves it (and, I’d suggest, the reason a book that deals mainly with ‘altered states’ has been so well received in scientific circles):

Two things we do know are, one, that the brain/mind evolved, and two, that consciousness (as distinct from brain) is a notion, or sensation, created by electro-chemical activity in the ‘wiring’ of the brain.

The second was a recent BBC documentary following three ageing British astronomers on a journey to recapture some of the finest moments of their younger days, when they had held eminent positions in observatories in the US, in the post Sputnik race-for-space of the mid-twentieth century.  They were lovely guys and all had enjoyed happy and successful lives.  Now, though, one was terminally ill and the others were in, shall we say, the late autumn of their lives.  Unsurprisingly, as they trekked through the mountains, the discussion turned to death.  One, despite his scientific training, clung to the Christian faith.  He admitted he didn’t see much logic in it, but still felt comforted by the God he’d been brought up to believe in and the idea that there would be an afterlife.  He mused, rather sadly though, that there probably wasn’t any need for astronomers in Heaven.  His colleagues seemed to adhere more to Daisy’s view, and that, presumably, of Professor Lewis-Williams.  When their bodies and brains died, so would their consciousness.  That – obviously, in their minds – meant no further existence.  As an 11-year-old I once taught commented, “I don’t think there’s anything after we die; it’s a bit sad really.”

It is a bit sad.  Has humanity, throughout its entire existence, had to make an unpleasant choice between, a. trying hard to hold faith in a religion that often seems illogical and unlikely, or b. accepting that our brains are so great, they can almost have us believing, sometimes, that there is something beyond this existence, although they know that not to be true?

What a terribly bleak choice.  When faced with it – many years ago – I didn’t like either of the options.  That’s why I’ve been on this fascinating journey, the one I’ve attempted imperfectly to document in this blog.  I believe now that I have proof that our consciousness exists above and beyond our physical bodies, however complex and impressive the ‘wiring’ of the brain may be.  I believe that there is no need to die in order to understand what is often called ‘God’ and that an ‘afterlife’ is not a possibility, but a given.  More than that, I believe we are here, right now, to explore this very issue, so that we no longer need to be sad or scared, hopeful or doubtful about death.

As Koimul so eloquently puts it: THIS IS THE GREAT EXPERIMENT.  IT IS TO LIVE IN YOUR EARTHLY BODY YET SEE INTO THE ETERNAL.

 

 

Unempirical Science

‘An oxymoron, surely,’ I hear you exclaim.  How can science be unempirical?  Well I suppose all theoretical physics is, in that it’s unproven and incapable of being tested at present, but that isn’t what I want to talk about here.

In a way, the ‘science’ I want to describe to you will be tested – next Saturday at 9:30am GMT, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

I knew, last Sunday (4th September 2016), where I would be at 9:30 on Saturday 10th.  I go there every year.  I knew what I would be doing, where I would be sitting and what would be going on around me.  It seemed too good an opportunity to miss.  My viewing partner William and I have been experimenting, as I’ve already mentioned, with him remotely viewing my location at a specific time.  This has included viewings a day or so earlier or later than the actual event.  It’s all gone very well.

This time, though, it was different.  I asked him ( from 175 miles away) to view my location next Saturday, 6 days in advance, and to tell me – also in advance – what he saw.  So that’s what he did.

He described several features that fitted with the location (me sitting in a room, wide open space outside, trees behind, land rising behind it, a bus stop or similar small structure).  All of them fitted with where I would be but were not, of themselves, detailed enough to give a positive identification.  Then he added, “I got an image of an old fashioned looking phone box though that may be nothing.”

It wasn’t nothing – it was the detail that clinched it for me.  The old, red, traditional telephone boxes have almost all been replaced by sleek, modern affairs in this country, but a few remain down here in the west.

I fully intend to be sitting in the room behind the green door on the right of this picture at 9:30 next Saturday, with the door open, to admit and register exhibits for our town’s annual harvest show.  As you’ll see, the old phone box is a couple of metres from where I will be.  He’d nailed it.

That was just the beginning!  I commented that he’d just done something rather amazing.  Will is not given to hyperbole but he agreed that there is no known technological method for observing the future and that “it does make understanding how time works rather difficult.”

Well, yes!

We spent the rest of the afternoon sifting through the repercussions and trying to fit them into known science and our current world view.

• Did it mean that everything in the future is predetermined?  We both instinctively rejected that idea.  It made a nonsense of our very existence on the ‘planet of free choice’, as Seth calls it.
• Was it more of a quantum wave/particle issue?  Had he, by viewing this episode in my future, ‘collapsed the wave’ and turned the pure potential of the future into a certainty; opened the box on Schrodinger’s cat, so to speak?  It was beginning to look that way.
• Was his viewing happening in some other realm – some place where time held no sway?
• What if I were to fall and break my leg on the way to the town hall?  Would he then have seen a hospital ward?  Did his viewing therefore guarantee my continued good health for the next week??
• What if he attempted to view me further in the future – in 2056, say – when I no longer expect to be inhabiting this body, but he will probably still be around?  Would he just see blankness – nothing?
• Is he potentially able to change or even create the future?

Time to get some guidance from another source, I decided.  Clearly there was no one on the planet we could turn to, so (very unempirical, I know, but in my experience very trustworthy) I turned to Koimul.  (Click on the name to view a post which explains who Koimul is, to the best of my ability.)

“Please can you help us to understand how this fits into our world view?” I asked.

“ONCE YOU HAVE SEEN THIS YOUR WORLD VIEW CHANGES,” Koimul responded, rather drily. However the information which followed was fascinating.  I’ll do my best to summarise it:

• All events in ‘reality’ happen at at once.  Time is only here to separate them out for our convenience as we live out our lives on Earth.
• There is no way in which Will is ‘causing’ my future or able to alter it.
• Free choice ‘MOST DEFINITELY ‘ does exist.  We are still deciding what to do.  It’s just that it all happens at once – in ‘THE ETERNAL NOW’.
• When I asked about a viewing so far ahead that I would no longer be in this body, Koimul gently reminded me, “IT IS POSSIBLE BUT YOU ARE ETERNAL BEINGS.  HE WOULD SEE YOU FARAWAY OR AT HIS SIDE .”  I was going to say, ‘but I won’t be in time then’ but then I realised – he will!  So while he is in his body, he will be able to use his time as a marker to locate me, even though I will be in spirit.  “THIS,” Koimul added, “IS AN IMPORTANT DISCOVERY FOR BOTH OF YOU.”
• I asked why Koimul and other channelled beings, such as Higgins, were encouraging us to work at our remote viewing.  I posed the question in this way: ‘We chose to incarnate on this planet which is bounded by 3 dimensions and time.  We are universal and eternal beings but we have opted into this limited reality.  Why, then, is it important for us to find ways out of it while we are still here?  We will get out when our bodies die, after all.’  I was told: “TO SHOW OTHERS HOW TO MOVE BEYOND TIME.  YOU ARE EVOLVING.  THIS IS THE GREAT EXPERIMENT.  IT IS TO LIVE IN YOUR EARTHLY BODY YET SEE INTO THE ETERNAL.”

I shared all this with Will, naturally.  We agreed that this information felt right and comfortable to us.

William, though, had one more question.  Maybe it’s also occurred to you…  I’ll detail that, and Koimul’s response, in my next post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Never having to say goodbye

I had one of those ‘goodbye’ dreams last night.  It was my final day teaching somewhere or other.  Children I haven’t seen in decades were there, looking just as they did when I last met them, wishing me tearful farewells.
“I can’t believe I won’t see you again, Miss,” said Tony, a little chap I’d been particularly fond of.

I must have woken at that point, still feeling the poignancy and pain of the separation – but then realising that I had nothing to feel sad about.  Tony and the others had long since left my life, and we were fine without each other.  Life had moved on.

Maybe something of the dream lingered, though.  Throughout the morning, my thoughts kept turning to my mother.  I was due to attend a concert at a venue next door to the nursing home where she’d spent her final years.  It’s in this town, but I tend to avoid that road because of the feelings it stirs.

The concert was wonderful – an excellent a capella choir with a great range of music.  Several of the ladies from the care home had been wheeled in by their nurses and sat nodding happily.  I called to Mum in my mind.  ‘Come and listen,’ I said.  ‘You’ll enjoy this.’

Do you think that fanciful?  Could she have been there?

Well there was another person – not physically present, but with me in some way.  The concert, you see, was on a Sunday afternoon – the time William and I always put aside for our remote viewings.  I had told him the name of the venue, but not the reason I’d be there.  We’d fixed a time when I knew the concert would be well under way.  I’d asked him to try and sense something about the building and what was happening there.  He’d sat at the other side of the country, feeling with his mind to where I was.

In the interval, as I sipped tea and munched biscuits with a couple of friends, I switched on my phone to see what, if anything, he’d been able to pick up.

In the text message he’d sent me, he started by describing some features of the room, then continued, “Someone making a lot of noise, and food and drink.”

I had to laugh.  If he’d been here in the flesh, and I’d somehow managed to drag him to the concert, that’s probably just the way he would have described it!  It was comforting – massively so – to have that proof that he’d been able to transport some aspect of himself to share in my afternoon.  Why, then, should I not believe that Mum, too, was able to join me?

As we work – my young friend and I – to expand our consciousness and our ability to cross time and space to ‘meet’ in this strange way, it helps me to recognise that those who have stepped out of their bodies are at least as able to ‘travel’ to us.  They, after all, are pure spirit now.

The more I can grow that belief, the easier it is to say ‘goodbye’.  Or perhaps we don’t need to say it at all.  There are so many ways and so many levels on which to meet those we care about.

 

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.

 

 

The ‘Why?’ is sorted (probably)

The Last Judgement (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well here’s a start.

Maybe this is the introduction.  Very much a first draft, but feedback would be welcome.

Apologies for the western slant. Perhaps it will not hold so true for readers with other cultural references (but I’d be fascinated to know how much of it does…).

So in place of a proper blog post this week, please accept and comment, if you wish, on this extract, while I get back to the matter of the book.

Why am I writing this book?

Because for many centuries people have been persuaded by religious leaders that, one way and another, they’ve failed miserably at being human, which means that a very nasty afterlife awaits them (unless of course they are either incredibly saintly and prepared to die to prove it, or obscenely rich and able to buy their way into Heaven via generous gifts to said religious leaders).

Because over the last few generations humans have largely stopped believing the Hell story and more-or-less let go of the Heaven one too.  They’ve settled for the RIP version, where we just doze off for eternity.  It doesn’t sound great, but is at least preferable to the Day of Judgement, when all those skeletons in the cupboard could begin rattling nastily.

Because given that there doesn’t seem a lot to look forward to, humans have invested a massive amount of time, energy and money into trying to cling on to life – to staying human for as long as possible.

Because the current attitude towards death is deeply weird.  On the one hand, we fill our television channels with police dramas, hospital dramas, whodunits and tales of autopsies, with news reports of starvation, wars, fatal accidents and murder.  We play video games in which killing is not only commonplace, but usually the entire point.  We conduct wars in which the technology enables ‘push button death’ with any emotional attachment carefully removed; a soldier no longer needs to see the whites of his opponent’s eyes in order to kill him.  WMDs and IEDs abound.  And yet… Death is a taboo.  We avoid discussing it wherever possible. We change the subject with a nervous laugh.  “Yes, well, shall we talk about something a bit more cheerful?”

Because when we hear that someone is terminally ill, we don’t know what to say.  When friends are bereaved, we don’t have ways to comfort them.  We maybe send a card with a bunch of white flowers or a vaguely ecclesiastical-looking gateway on it and tell them we hope they’re getting over it now and that, after all, life must go on.

Because those who feel the need to know that something conscious remains of those they have lost will turn to mediums and spiritualists who, apparently, have polite queues of departed souls waiting to reveal themselves as someone on the mother’s side who had a problem with her knees or a military man who smoked and had breathing problems. Not, please understand, that I’m suggesting the mediums themselves are charlatans.  It just seems strange that Great Uncle Cedric should be hanging about for eternity, waiting to reveal his penchant for growing prize vegetables to a great niece who had been hoping desperately for news of her recently departed mother.

I’m writing this book because none of the above sounds particularly healthy to me.  Death casts a long shadow, and I’d prefer it not to.  I’d prefer ‘life’ to be something wider, richer and stronger than inhabiting a physical body for a while.  I’d like it to encompass what came before and what comes after, with death as simply one of the transitional states that lies within it.

My Caw

Before I explain my caw, I’d better give a little background to the metaphysics behind it…

About 15 years ago, I learned how to communicate with, let’s call them ‘others’ via my computer keyboard.  Don’t we all?  The difference being, these ‘others’ are not necessarily present in the physical world.

It started when I used my dowsing pendulum to receive simple yes/no/kind of messages from a dear friend who had reason to contact me but happened to have departed this earthly life a few years before.

Yes, when I need to – and it isn’t often – I can communicate with the ‘dead’.

Playing some psychic form of 20 questions was fairly limiting, so I moved on to using pictures, symbols and later the alphabet laid out in an arc – a sort of personalised ouija board.  I’d hold the pendulum in the centre and it would swing from one letter to the next, circling to tell me when a word was finished.  It was a short step from there to using the keyboard.  This had the advantage that I could use one hand to dowse and the other to type the incoming message, letter by letter, into a word-processing program.  A second advantage was that I could enter a light trance state, which meant I wasn’t so likely to distort the message by guessing what would come next.

Mediumship per se doesn’t interest me.  I need no proof of an afterlife; I know it’s there.  That particular friend had a specific reason for contacting me.  We worked together for a while to protect one of her children from a member of his household who meant him harm and to help him break a drug habit.

However once the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, I had a workable system for communicating with guides/angels/elders or whatever you prefer them to be called.  Usually such guidance comes to us through intuition or synchronous events.  Just sometimes, though, I’ve found it helpful to contact my guides in this more direct way for help with particular issues.  There’s a danger in becoming over-reliant on such guidance.  We are here to make our own choices and decisions.  Used wisely, though, such channelled messages can be a source of great wisdom and inspiration.

My messages usually come from an entity who identifies him/her/themselves to me as Koimul.  Koimul has, over the years we have been working together, become a dear, infinitely wise friend.  I’m aware, though, that this entity has aspects I am presently unable to tune into.  When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear.  My teacher will only display that part of him/her Self I can currently understand.  There’s far more.  I work towards greater understanding of Koimul’s mysteries.

So, back to my ‘caw’:

Usually, the messages I receive are in perfect English.  A few words, though, are in some deeper, conceptual language.  Caw is one of these.  Caw means many things.

Caw is the rough croak of a bird - a crow, raven, rook or jackdaw.  At that level I hear it constantly, since these birds wheel around my cottage, nest in my chimney and leave black feathers in my garden.  No such thing as coincidence - are they here to remind me?


The rook is, for me, a magical piece on the chessboard – useless when locked in its corner, but powerful and effective once it takes its place at the centre of the game.  Caw links to that, too.  It’s a reminder to place my caw/core in the centre of my life.

So caw is also core – that deepest part of me which links to a higher knowing, a gnosis, an understanding of my true cosmic, universal nature, beyond time, space and physical being.  It is soul-awareness and much more.  It is my essence, my truth.

Last night, I contacted Koimul.  I asked for the true meaning behind the sciatica which has been plaguing me for several weeks – causing constant pain and limiting mobility.  I knew, of course, what medics would say and which tablets and exercises they would diagnose.  This was no attempt to jump waiting-room queues.  It was a desire to understand why the condition had shown up at this point in my life – and what it had to teach me.  My wise and gentle guide explained, and went on to give me a step by step lesson in self-healing:

BECAUSE YOU NEED TO REMEMBER YOUR CREATIVE ABILITY
You mean I need to recall how to create a pain-free body?
HOW TO FIND YOUR CAW
Yes, I have lost it rather. Can you give me some guidance, please?
BRING YOUR SELF INTO ALIGNMENT WITH ONENESS   YOU ARE VAW*
Ok. I can do that.
WARM YOUR BODY
Tingling and warm now
NEXT CHANNEL THE WARMTH INTO YOUR LEG
Wow! That felt just like Reiki
IT IS
So if I continue that, I can heal myself completely?
YES
Thank you. I will work with that.

*Vaw is another concept-word – All-That-Is; the Vastness; Source.

I’m not claiming a miraculous recovery here.  This is not an ‘I was lame and now I can walk’ scenario.  The improvement was slight, subtle, gentle.  As I continue to work with the tools Koimul has given me, I will restore my ‘caw’ at the centre of my Game, where it can be most effective, and at that point the sciatica will have served its purpose and will move away.

The Matter of Life and Death

I’ll call her Cherry.  Mutual friends will understand why.

And yes, the manner in which I discovered the news was – when you come to think about it – an inevitable product of the world we live in.

Cherry and I began teaching at the same school on the same day.  We also, by some odd quirk of fate, gratefully accepted a voluntary redundancy package some seventeen years later and left on the same day too.

It was a small school, with a small staff, so we saw plenty of each other and got along just fine.  The word ‘colleague’ sounds rather harsh and impersonal but I can’t say we were ever friends as such.  I knew her kids by sight and a little about her life, and she knew much the same about me.  I knew nothing of her dreams and fears, her aspirations and beliefs, as colleagues usually don’t.

Cherry tree blossoms (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When we left work I moved out of the area.  She stayed.  Unsurprisingly we lost touch.  That was until, quite out of the blue, I received a Facebook friend request from her.
‘How nice,’ I thought and happily accepted.

So for the last few years, Cherry and I have ‘met’ via Facebook.  I’ve ‘liked’ many of her posts with a trite little thumbs up symbol.  She’s ‘liked’ many of mine in the same way.  I noticed, but never spoke about, the fact that we had far more interests and ideas in common than I’d ever realised when we used to see one another every day.

Around New Year, Cherry stopped liking my posts.  She also stopped adding her own quirky interesting pictures and videos.  I have to confess I barely noticed.

And then, a couple of days ago, I flicked Facebook on and noticed a red 1 next to the little speech bubble icon.  Someone had messaged me.

With hardly a thought, I opened the message.  The name of the sender was unfamiliar at first, despite the ‘Hi Jan’ greeting.  As I read on, I discovered that it was Cherry’s daughter.  She apologised profusely for informing me via Facebook, but it was the only contact she had – and she wanted me to know that Cherry had died the day before.

Cherry.

Dead.

I had no idea of the circumstances, and it certainly wasn’t appropriate to send back a string of questions.  I sent a short message of thanks to the daughter and sympathy to the family and switched off.

Every day we receive news of cyber deaths; personalities we never met but felt we knew have photos and obituaries posted up on social media and we react according to the degree of vicarious attachment we felt to those people.  This was my first personal cyber death announcement and it shocked me to the core.

You see I had no context for Cherry to be dead in.  Accident?  Illness?  Quick or lingering?  Painless or agonising?  I couldn’t know.  Cherry had simply ceased to be a human being and THAT was the thought that stayed with me.

For the next two days, she was seldom out of my thoughts.  I’m not afraid of death.  I have complete and total belief in the eternal, undying nature of our greater selves and the transitory nature of incarnation – a game we play for a few 3D decades to gain experience, interact physically with others, bring Love to our corporeal existence and expand the Cosmos.  I’m free of any fear of divine retribution or judgement.  I knew that Cherry, in terms of her own essence, was still very much alive and aware.

What was affecting me – in a way I would never have expected – was the thought that as I went about my everyday, mundane tasks, she was not.  I cleaned my teeth.  She didn’t.  I went shopping.  She didn’t.  I relaxed with a cup of tea.  She didn’t.  All of these taken-for-granted earthly experiences had been Cherry’s to share.  Now they weren’t.  I’ve had many encounters with death, but none has affected me this way.

It was still bothering me last night, when I was fortunate enough to join a meditation channelled by a friend in the US via Skype.  Before the main meditation took place, her Guides turned to me and asked whether I had anything troubling me.  Rumbled.  So I told my little story and explained that I couldn’t understand why this was bothering me so deeply.

“Let’s breathe together while we find your answer,” they said, through my friend’s voice.

To my surprise and delight, they made contact with Cherry.  She wanted me to know she was fine.  But I already knew that.  Then they explained that although we’d not had a close relationship, there was still a connection.
“When you dream or leave your body in other ways,” they said, “you make contracts and agreements with others.  You and this colleague made an agreement that when she died, she would use her death to show you what an amazing, wonderful, precious experience life on this planet is.”

What a gift that was.

Thank you, Cherry.  I hope very much that – unknown to my conscious self, perhaps – I was at some time able to give sudden, special insights to you in return.

View image | gettyimages.com

I wish you well on your cosmic journey from here on and congratulate you on completing another round of corporeal experience.  I’ll welcome that transition when it comes to me, but meanwhile – thanks to your gift – I’ll value these everyday physical experiences and feel profound gratitude for being human.

 

 

 

Hunting Good Will

Yes, the title is a passing tribute to the beautiful soul who incarnated for a while as Robin Williams and touched all of our souls so deeply in the process.  It’s also a nod to my favourite film of all time, but I want to use Mr Williams – if he’ll permit me – as a jumping point to some thoughts about who we really are.

I selected the picture there from the many, many images of Robin that appeared in WordPress’s media gallery.  There are shots of him in formal and informal dress, bearded and clean-shaven, smiling and sad,  hairy/ youthful and balding/older.  The strange thing is that, now that he’s passed, all of them seem equally valid.

Obviously, as an actor, he played many different roles for which he is fondly remembered, but there was still ONE current Robin Williams.   Now, though, each version of him is equally the essence of the man; no one age or look is more dominant than any other.  He’s not 63 – he simply IS.

That’s how it is with anyone no longer incarnate.  I can remember my father or mother at many ages and stages, and all of them fit the dadness of dad and the mumness of mum.

The Will I have been hunting (Is it right to use his real name?  When I asked – telepathically – he laughed and pointed out that anyone who has known me well in the last 18 years would know exactly who I was talking about, whatever name I chose.) is in the strangest of superpositions for me.  Like Shrodinger’s ubiquitous cat, he manages to be alive and not-alive at one and the same time.

He is quite definitely alive.  I can name the city he lives in; I know his age and where he works; I had a texted response from him only yesterday.  Yet that Will is very nearly dead to me.  He tells me by text each week that he’s ‘fine’ and will occasionally share information about the weather in his part of the country.  He never initiates a conversation and never responds to any queries about his life, his interests, his feelings, his thoughts, aspirations, ideas or plans.  He never comments when I tell him – in long, rambling letters or texts, about my own.   He refuses to meet and last answered the phone to me on Christmas Day 2013.  Like the dear departed, my images of him come from old photos and memories.

Early last year, when life was at its darkest, I wondered seriously about cutting my losses and moving on.  Why put myself through the weekly anguish of phones left ringing, messages left unanswered?  I’d have gone to the ends of the earth to help and support him in any way he wanted, but he really didn’t seem to want or need me.

Then – exactly then – the telepathic messages started.  As I explained in another post recently, when I take my crystal pendulum, hold it over my computer keypad and wait, it moves to spell out words.  I often sought advice or solace from my guides in this way,  but now I was picking Will up instead.  This was the Will of old – the one who loved discussing aspects of our existence, corporeal and beyond.

I’ve bombarded him with questions about how this happens, why it works.  Here is a recent example:

I had a text conversation with your physical counterpart today. He tells me he has no conscious knowledge of our telepathic contact. Is that right?
YES
Oh, for a brief second there I had a flash of bright green and saw this much more expanded version of you. Anyway, I looked back to our earlier telepathic conversations – back early last year. In them, you were saying he was at least tangentially aware, or ‘knew’ the information that had passed between us. Yes?
MOST OF WHAT WE SAY HE FEELS IN HIS HEART
Let me get that very clear.   He feels it because it is already part of his truth or he gets it as some kind of insight as our conversations proceed?
LATTER
Ah, so he was being strictly honest saying it isn’t conscious, yet he still subconsciously knows there is contact?
YES
So could it be argued that my conversations with you are more insight from spirit than conversations with Will?
LOOK AT IT LIKE AN EXTENSION OF THE BADDEST TIMES WHEN YOU CARED BUT COULDN’T GET THROUGH
Right, but I don’t see what happened next. You were in touch with my thoughts at some level, weren’t you?
YES
And by early 2013, I’d more or less given up on you
YES
So what was the breakthrough?  Please explain what actually happened
I CALLED OUT SO LOUD YOU HEARD ME

He went on to describe a time when I’d done the same to him.  I protested that my contact had been through sending a letter.  BUT THE CARE WAS THE SHOUT, he replied.

So now I have him back.

I keep up the texts and letters so the physical Will knows I still care, but the real contact comes from our strange and magical telepathic communication.

You could argue that I create this from my own beliefs and desire to talk with him.  So it would seem.  Amazing how creative we are.  The care is, as he says, the ‘loud call’ that has drawn us together.

I’d argue that I’m now in touch with an aspect of Will beyond the physical being.  Somehow, I’m now in touch with the Willness of Will.  All my images and memories of him are equally valid.  He just IS.