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.

The Day the Muses Died

They’re not truly dead, of course, those Muses.  They are immortal – even the ones who consider themselves to be human.  They’ve gone though, for now at least.  Another one left this morning.

Have you noticed?  Are you missing them too?

There was a time when they reached so close, touched our thoughts, answered our tremulous questions and inspired our imaginings with a generosity of spirit and a wisdom so deep and wide that we felt nothing was secret, nothing was hidden from us.  All we had to do was to wonder and they would be there with a sign, a comment, a synchronicity that proved to us that we were heard and supported and – yes – expanded by their inspiration.

We were such a sensitive, anxious bunch, back then in the years surrounding Y2k and 2012.  Was the world going to end?  How would that look?  Were we ‘birthing a new Earth’, some kind of parallel planet where we would be gods?  Would there be the fires, the floods, the earthquakes and famines that had ended previous ages?  Did we really have to go through all that again? Reawakening, rebirthing, rediscovering our true selves… re- just about anything you could hold a candle up to.  What did it all mean?

We needed answers.  We needed to know the things religions had never seen fit to share with us, the things science hadn’t addressed, the things Hay House and Gaia and the Shift Network tantalisingly offered to sell us, if we had enough $$$$.

That was when the muses arrived.  They were quiet, gently spoken.  They answered our questions with courtesy but rarely initiated the conversations.  Each utterance was filled with a Knowing of divine proportions.  I would listen with reverence, take their words and wrestle with them until I could make some sense of what I was learning.  Then I’d pour those words into my blog or my coffee shop conversations with trusted friends.

Now, save for a very few, they have gone.  Did they answer all the questions we needed to ask?  Perhaps.

I miss them, that’s for sure.  But maybe they shared all the Knowing they needed to before moving on to other missions.  For those we know as fellow humans, those ‘other missions’ may be happening in some part of their greater selves which is not currently visible to us at all.  For those who came to us through channelled voices or spiritual guidance – well – we can’t even guess.  All I know is that during those magical years, the Muses gave us precious gifts, and I will always be so very grateful.

The Quietness is sad and deafening, at times, but I take comfort in the thought that, like the legendary Arthur, who sleeps beneath Albion, ready to awaken when he is needed, they will return when the time is right.  One of the Muses – the one who left today – instructed me to “Trust the Silence.”

I will.

Loved

Looking at it from a purely personal and intensely human perspective, what I really didn’t need, after the agonies of the past year, was for another horrible, heartbreaking tragedy to affect one of my children.

He’d had a tough few years, with broken trust and unrequited love and affection and then the pain of watching his sister, nephew and niece go through all they’ve been through and by mid summer, he was deep in the abyss of anxiety and depression.  He worked so hard to pull himself out – therapy, counselling, even meds, when all else seemed to be failing.  Then he announced that he’d found a solution.  He would get a cat.

Now we’ve not been a pet-owning family.  There was the rabbit, when they were kids, but none of them took much notice of it, once the novelty had worn off, and it was left to me to care for it.  Still, he was set on this plan and duly acquired the most adorable little kitten.  He lavished money and endless affection on the little scrap and the kitten adored him back.  The pain and darkness left my son’s eyes and he positively quivered with the love he felt for his tiny pet.  We all remarked on the change it had made to his life.  The urge to care for something small and helpless was so strong in him – the parenting urge, if you like – that, once it was fulfilled, he threw himself back into his job and his life again and was the happy, resilient young man he’d been before.

Was there some seed of doubt and concern lurking just below the surface in my mind?  I watched them playing together and thought, “Oh I just hope that cat lasts a long, long time.  He’s such a central part of my boy’s life.”  But as I thought it and willed it to happen, I couldn’t visualise it.  I couldn’t see the kitten as an adult cat and the two of them moving together into a contented middle age.  That was the seed of worry that wouldn’t go away.

Then, last week, my son called to say the kitten wasn’t well and seemed to have some sort of infection.  The vet gave antibiotics, but was concerned enough to do a blood test.  Each day my son would phone me, saying some new problem had emerged; the cat was losing weight rapidly.  It culminated in an emergency night-time dash to a specialist vet hospital, many miles away, where he was told the infection was a deadly virus that was destroying one organ after another.  My son said goodbye to his kitten – only five months old – and embarked on the long journey home by himself.

While the brief illness lasted, I’d begged friends to send prayers, healing and positive, healthy thoughts to my son’s pet.  I’d tried so hard myself.  I worked and worked to visualise the cat healthy, the cat fully grown, the cat alive, but the pictures wouldn’t come.  All I could see was the little kitten, skinny and with huge, wide eyes.  I believe, one hundred percent, that we can affect the future.  It isn’t set in stone.  There are myriad possible outcomes for every situation.  With sufficient focus, we can nudge towards a better-feeling future.  So why, having managed similar things so many times in the past, could I, and all those working with us, not encourage this little creature to live?  Is it that some ‘probable futures’ are just so improbable – like the cat growing wings or learning to play cricket – that we can’t move into them, and an adult life for this kitten was one of those?

I asked my Guides and was told there had been a ‘contract’ between the man and kitten.  It had come into his life to show him that he is loveable and utterly deserving of love.  I asked why that very happy and beneficial set-up couldn’t have lasted longer and the short, brutal response was that it had been achieved and the cat’s job was done.  Now, I was assured, my son would be able to recognise and feel and accept the waves of love that would come to him from others in his life.

I’m trying to take comfort from that.  Maybe my boy is, too.  But it still feels so harsh, so cruel.  Now I’m working on visualising a happy, fulfilled and love-fulled life for this very special young man.  Join me.

 

Personal Reality – More of That

I’ve been quiet recently – for me.  In that cogitating, contemplative space patiently (fairly patiently) waiting for answers to emerge to new questions.  Probably really old questions, phrased in a slightly different way, but I needed some new answers.

I asked someone I didn’t know that well, but respected.
“Ho’oponopono,” she told me.  “It changed my life.”
I groaned.  Anything but that! I’d first encountered it at a symposium.  A young female speaker standing before us, tears flowing down her face, urging the whole audience to repeat with her, over and over, “I’m sorry.  Please forgive me.  Thank you.  I love you.”
I had no idea what I was supposed to be apologising for, nor yet who I was apologising to or claiming to love.  We were given no context, just and hour and a half of wailing and weeping.  I wasn’t moved – or impressed.
Nevertheless, I agreed to read the book my adviser suggested: Zero Limits by Dr Joe Vitale.  The writer seemed genuine and convinced, but all he said left me cold.

Confused, I turned to Koimul, my Spirit Guide.
IT IS A VALID TRUTH, I was told, BUT IT IS NOT YOUR TRUTH.  IT WILL NOT SERVE YOU.

That was a relief.

Then, gradually, I became conscious that some words had appeared in my mind: The Nature of Personal Reality.  They kept repeating until I finally took notice and wondered why they sounded familiar.  Eventually it dawned on me that it was another book title.  Not a book I’d read, but one I’d heard of:  one of Jane Roberts’ Seth books.  Instantly, I put in an order for the book.  It finally arrived yesterday and because I was inspired to find it, I know it will help.

Koimul hadn’t finished dropping clues in my path, though.  I was led to explore a post on a scientific website.  It was about an article that has recently been published in a peer-reviewed journal called, promisingly, NeuroQuantology.

I like it when scientists clamber nervously out of their little boxes and start trying to join things together.  After all, we’ve gone over 100 years now with ‘mainstream’ science insisting that the rules of quantum science apply only to very small and – OK, grudgingly, it seems – to very big things but not to the everyday stuff in between that works fine with good old Cartesian Newtonian principles.  Seriously?

So anyway, this magazine is apparently exploring ways of mixing neuroscience with quantum theory to study the vexed matters that conventional science has no answer to: The Consciousness Question, for a start.  About time, one might venture…

The hero of this tale is one Dr Kirk Meijer, working at a university in The Netherlands.  A cautionary note here:  As a non-scientist, all I have to go on is a very brief overview of his findings, as reported by someone on a website who had read his article.  I could attempt to read the original, but I’d probably fall at the first sentence, such is my lack of scientific knowledge.  What follows, then, is the briefest summary of a summary of a summary of this man’s cutting edge work, but it fascinates me.

Consciousness, Dr Meijer seems to be saying, resides in a field surrounding the brain, but in another spatial dimension.  This field can pick up information from anywhere and transmit it instantaneously to the brain – the whole brain, not just certain areas – by a process called Quantum Wave Resonance, a wave pattern that encompasses all neurons.  It’s then down to the brain to interpret what consciousness has passed to it, along the neural pathways it has established.

Wow!  Finally a theory that is starting to sound right.

It follows, you see, that because each individual ‘mental field’, aka Consciousness, can access other fields, this could allow for the existence, so long denied by mainstream science, of what the article calls ‘anomalous phenomena’ – remote viewing, telepathy, déjà vu, dowsing, channelling and the like.

Best of all, the article I read gives this utterly delicious quote:

Consciousness can be regarded as the most basic building block of nature and consequently is present at all levels of the fabric of reality.

Just think of the progress humanity will make when the brilliant minds of scientists are unleashed to encompass what spirituality has been telling us for so long.  Zero limits indeed.

And maybe my ‘mental field’, linking as it does to all others, can go by the name of Koimul.

The Back Door

There was only one way in or out of my cottage when I bought it – the huge, ancient black wooden door that opens from the street into a shared hallway.  At the end are separate doors leading to my home and the one adjoining it.  A lane runs along the side of my back garden, but there was no access to it.  I decided I’d feel safer if there was a second way out, just in case…

‘No,’ said the man from the planning office.  Due to its great age and architectural interest, my cottage is Grade 2 listed, which means the planning office can stop me changing anything in the building or the grounds.
‘Boundary fences must be left as they are,’ he told me.  ‘If they break or fall down they must be replaced by identical fence panels.  Any changes would have to be subject to Full Planning Permission.’
He then told me the cost of Full Planning Permission and I went very quiet.

There are ways around these things.  I asked a skilled craftsman friend to construct me a lockable gate that, from the outside, is completely indistinguishable from a fence panel, but which opens perfectly from the inside.

Why, you may ask, am I prattling on about my invisible back gate?  It’s because of a wonderful analogy I just discovered in the writings of Jane Roberts.

The book has taken weeks to arrive.  I had to order it in from the US, and it was far from cheap.  The title would be enough to put most people off: The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James.  I had to have it though.

You see, I trust Jane Roberts.  I’ve been to so many talks and workshops where channels stand at the front in long, wafty, pastel-coloured frocks and proclaim something like, ‘The Angel Ganneril is here with us in the room.  He is pouring his pale mauve energy on to each of you.  He is telling you to hold love in your hearts and to care for the animals.  Feel the tingling down your spine as…’ and so forth.

Fine.  Such people speak their truth and reach many, but they don’t reach me.

Jane Roberts is a very different character; hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-bitten and as cynical as you like.  Faced with a new situation (in this case, unexpectedly receiving messages from a famous, but dead philosopher) she does what I’d do.  She files it away and ignores it totally, on the grounds that the whole thing seems way too unlikely.  The messages keep coming and Jane feels increasingly uncomfortable, as they don’t fit her world view and she wishes they’d stop.  Finally, she realises that she’d better find out what is going on, and why.  She interrogates the evidence, chats it through with Robert, her husband and eventually asks Seth for guidance.  Only when she is wholly convinced that her world view needs to expand to incorporate this new information, does she decide to write it up and publish.

So anyway, the gate?

Well, I’d had a long and busy day yesterday.  I arrived home after dark, to find the package containing my new book waiting for me.  I grabbed some food and a cup of tea and flicked through a few pages.  The first section was – intriguingly – called Front-Door People, Back-Door People, and World Views.

Her analogy runs thus:

We all have a conscious mind – what she calls a ‘house of awareness’.  This ‘house’ has a front door, the one we open to the world for normal business and interaction, the one all messages are supposed to come to.  But – she continues – there is a second door, ‘a secret back door from the time of our childhood’.  This is a ‘magic’ entrance, one that opens to other worlds.  Sometimes we can see it; sometimes it’s invisible.  Jane speaks of the half-sensed messengers who sometimes call there and of the strange packages and papers left waiting there for us to find.

It made me smile, as I thought of my physical sometimes-there-sometimes-invisible back gate and what an apt way that is to describe the place where I can receive strange, magical information that comes to me.

The front door of my ‘house of awareness’ was very busy yesterday, but so too, in its quiet yet insistent way, was the back door.  Just as I have all the information in Jane’s book to read and understand, so I have other, more numinous information which has come to me from other sources to sift through and contemplate.  I’ll settle to that now.

 

Didn’t know I had a petard, and here I am hoist with it

I had to look petard up: a small bomb apparently.  As for being hoist on/by/with it, we have Shakespeare to thank for that one.  All I knew was that it meant, roughly, to fall into one’s own trap, and that I’ve certainly done this week.

Embarrassed, but trying hard to be authentic, so…

Allow me to explain.

A few weeks ago I was asked to take on a pair of new students – young brothers who shared a genetic condition with their mother.  “Multi-systemic” I was told, so the effects of this syndrome involve skin, joints, brain and just about any part of the body you can think of.  The words ‘complex learning difficulties’ were also mentioned.

To be honest, I was almost at full stretch before these lads appeared on the scene.  Planning two lots of lessons in maths and English tailored to their particular mix of strengths (very high intelligence) and challenges, as well as homework each week would, I knew, take at least an entire day.  Then there was the teaching itself, which I could only just slot in amongst my other young pupils.  Everything logical in my mind was screaming, “No, don’t do it!  What about that work/life balance you wanted?  You are past retirement age, you know.  And this lady wants you to work on right through the summer holidays.  When will you get to see the family?”

But the kids were lovely.  Finding ways of working around their difficulties would be fascinating – previously uncharted territory, the type of challenge I thrive on.  They weren’t fitting into schools.  Their constant pain and exhaustion, as a result of the syndrome, was too much for them when combined with a normal school day.  The mother, though, was being threatened by the authorities for not providing sufficient education.

I said, ‘Yes’.

Of course I did.

For a couple of weeks it went fine.  Yes, I did end up doing lesson prep all through the weekends but they seemed to be progressing well and I was enjoying working with them.  Then this week they appeared full of smiles but without homework.  A casual ‘lost it somewhere in my room’ from one and ‘I didn’t realise you wanted me to do that’ from the other.

Inwardly I was irritated.  The homework sheets had taken me ages to prepare.  The work I’d planned for this week followed on from what they were meant to have done.  Their mother had particularly requested homework.  It was meant to protect her from being taken to court… and blah, blah, blah.

Outwardly, I smiled, suggested mildly that maybe they could try to get it done for the following week and carried on.  The lessons went fine and I went to bed that night feeling very happy.

Oh I know at least one of my readers knows exactly what’s coming!

I woke up the next morning to a text from the children’s mother.  Both of them had told her I was ‘grumpy’ during their lessons.  She wondered what was wrong.

I was mortified.  The lessons had (I thought) been lovely – lots of laughter and progress.  Was I just a delusional old bat?  Had I ended up like those elderly lady teachers I remembered from my own school days – miserable and past it?  Was it time to stop and give up – to sit in a rocking chair knitting all day?

I flashed a quick message back, saying I had been disappointed that they’d not bothered with the homework, but wasn’t aware of being grumpy about it; that I’d tried hard to keep the work lively and enjoyable and so forth.

Then I sat and thought.

Why was I choosing to be so upset by this?  Why had this incident shown up in my life?  What did it have to teach me?

The reply came almost at once, in a further message from the children’s mum.  She hadn’t wanted to upset me.  She just felt she had to be authentic and tell me their reaction.  It wasn’t my words or actions they had reacted to, it was my feelings.  They were, she added, extremely sensitive and picked up on the energy people projected.

Ah.

Got it.

That heart-based telepathy thing.

So I thanked her – and the universe – for providing me with that reminder.  I told her about my last blog post, on exactly this subject, and promised to attempt to be more open and authentic in future.

See what I mean about being hoist with my own petard?  This communicating-from-the-heart business is not easy.  I’m glad to have these two young teachers.  Like all good teachers, they’ve appeared just as the student is ready 🙂

 

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.

 

 

Reality is … where, exactly?

A little over a hundred years ago, a man called Arthur Bulleid lived here in Glastonbury.  Arthur’s story has always fascinated me, so let me share it with you.

Arthur was a well educated young man from a wealthy family who had always had a passion for archaeology.  He went on a trip to Switzerland, where he was able to visit the remains of prehistoric lake villages, built on timber rafts with causeways to the mainland.

Arthur had a moment.  What would you call it – inspiration, intuition, remote viewing, hunch…?  Whatever it was, Arthur Bulleid ‘knew’ there would be villages like this close to his native town, so he came home and began searching for them.

I should explain that Glastonbury is a former island (the Isle of Avalon), since it was once all but surrounded by watery marshland which has since been drained to form the Somerset Levels.  That is really the only vague similarity to the topography he was seeing in Switzerland, yet, as I’ve said, he knew a similar village would be found here.

He set about excavating the slightly bumpy but otherwise unpromising field shown in these two pictures, which is a mile or two out of the town.  The finds soon began to appear – dugout canoes, cooking pots, jewellery, animal bones, knives and spears, weights from weaving looms… in fact every type of artefact to prove that a thriving community lived on the site, along with the remains of the wooden raft bases and the stakes they rested on.  Arthur had discovered exactly what he expected to find.

Strange, don’t you think?

Somewhere – I wish I could remember where – I heard a quote from a British archaeologist who had noticed a strange phenomenon.  He said that when they began a dig expecting to find Roman remains, that’s what they found.  When they expected Viking finds, these duly turned up, as did Saxon, mediaeval, Celtic and so forth.  He insisted that this was not because they already knew what was there, but seemed to link in some way to their expectations.

Perhaps you will have heard the strange and wonderful recent story of Philippa Langley, who ‘knew’ that the bones of King Richard III would be found buried beneath a car park in Leicester.  Her story can be found here.  Once again we have a person with a passion for history and a conviction that somehow she knows the truth.

The first trench put into that car park revealed human bones.  Their dating fitted.  DNA tests linked these very bones conclusively to Richard’s remaining relatives and a curvature of the spine was noted which would have given rise to Shakespeare’s (somewhat biased – he knew which side his bread was buttered) depiction of Richard as a hunchback.  The facial reconstruction made using the skull’s measurements was eerily similar to this portrait.

There’s another Glastonbury story that fits here.  Most people dismiss it as a scam invented by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey to generate huge amounts of income, but I’m not so sure…  In 1191 a group of monks digging in the grounds discovered an oak casket – ancient even then – containing the bones of two people, along with this little cross bearing an inscription which reads:

Here lies interred in the Isle of Avalon the renowned King Arthur.

Arthur and Guinevere!  Obviously this caused massive interest.  The English King and Queen attended an elaborate re-interment ceremony and pilgrims flocked to the Abbey, making it one of the richest in the country.  Just before Henry VIII’s thugs sacked the Abbey, the tomb, bones and cross mysteriously disappeared.  No one, presumably, wanted Arthur’s remains getting into his hands.

I’m sure you can see the thread running through these stories.  It all comes down to cause and effect.

It sounds a ridiculous thing to say, I know, but I have an intriguing question to ask.  What came first – the desire and determination to make these discoveries or the remains themselves?  Were Arthur and Philippa, the thoughtful archaeologist and the mediaeval monks, the creators of this reality or the discoverers?  Did they somehow cause the objects of their intention to be found right there, right then, or was it some instinct and knowing beyond time which drew them to the correct sites?  Or both at once?

I have a personal reason for musing upon this; one which I may share at some future date…

From ‘What the Bleep?’, to The Secret, to the less hyped-up but nonetheless brilliant and revealing words of The Council  and Higgins, we are told that we create what we wish to have in our lives.  I believe that the examples above are a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario.  Neither came ‘first’.  The remains and the creator-discoverers simply came together as a result of a powerful emotional desire sent out by these individuals.  I’m not sure that I believe any more in an objective reality.

A few years ago, I was inspired to write a book based on this idea.  It was called Life: A Player’s Guide.  I’d like to finish this post with a paragraph from the final page of that book, which, I feel, links rather neatly back to Arthur Bulleid – and the rest of us:

Be The Creator. Be all-powerful and create your own life. Getting rid of the doubts and fears and the million and one reasons why you can’t follow your dreams takes patience and determination. But the potential is there. Maybe that’s why your God/self arranged for your character in this particular game to discover this book. Maybe your narrative in this lifetime-game is the story of the hero who ‘comes home’ to find the hidden treasure. You already know how those stories go. Main characters set out on their quest. They travel far and wide, cope with all kinds of trials and tribulations and have all manner of adventures and experiences. Eventually they return home, only to discover that they had what they were seeking in their possession all the time, although they needed all those apparently incidental experiences to enable them to find it. Once they’ve made that discovery, they are able to share the treasure with those around them.

Crystal Clear – Part 2

As I explained in the previous post, I had become the owner of three very lovely Andara crystals, along with a forth, which appeared to be destined for my young friend Will, who lives across the country from me.

Before sending his crystal to him, some strange impulse made me hold it for a few moments in my hand with each of my own crystals in turn.  I suspect this was because I’d just been reading a book which spoke about quantum entanglement, and I ‘knew’ at some level, that my crystals and his needed to become acquainted with each other.  I noticed in passing that the convex face on his stone fitted rather neatly against concave faces on each of my own.  Hmm.

Over the week or so after I’d sent Will his crystal, a rather wonderful idea began to grow in my mind.  As a child and adolescent (I’ve known him since he was six) Will frequently amazed me with his psychic abilities, although in recent years these have stayed firmly buried – from me, at any rate.  More ‘knowing’ was coming to me.  I asked him whether he’d be interested in trying a small experiment.

You need to know – before I go on – that Andara crystals, apart from being glass-like, have almost no other common features.  They are found in all colours you can imagine, and some you’d probably have to hunt for words to describe.  They range from clear to opaque,  Some resemble sea foam, some have milky inclusions, others are more quartz-like.  (If you’d like to admire their beauty, I suggest checking this gallery.)  I’d told Will nothing about mine except that I had three.

The experiment ran as follows:

At a pre-arranged time, I would, on a signal from him, focus all my attention on one of my Andaras.  Holding his own crystal, he would attempt to pick up any information he could about it telepathically.  When he had enough he would text me the information he’d discovered and I would give him feedback and send a photo.  It was the first time either of us had attempted remote viewing.

The first subject

I sat and stared and concentrated.  It’s very easy to lose oneself in these beautiful stones but I tried to ‘beam’ my awareness to him.

After 8 or 9 minutes my phone warbled at me.  There was a text from Will.

 pink purple    rigid sides

Um, yes, actually!

I took this photo and sent it to him, explaining that the crystal wasn’t as blue as this image made it appear and the purple he’d seen was more accurate.  I asked whether this was how he’d pictured it.  He said it was – and that he’d also seen the wooden background behind it.

Goodness.

That was the weirdest feeling – knowing that some part of his conscious awareness had defied space, travelled over 150 miles instantaneously and entered my living room to see what I was seeing.

We decided to have another go the following week.  I was nervous.  What if the first viewing had been a lucky guess?  At the last minute, to try to rule out telepathically sending any advance information, I selected my black iridium ‘philosopher’s stone’ Andara.

Second subject

We proceeded as we had the week before.

There was a short waiting time and then his first message arrived:

black and smaller than last time

I told him it was indeed black but slightly larger than the pink crystal.  Then I asked if he could provide any other information.

Maybe cylindrical rectangular shape

I looked at the crystal as it lay on the table and that was just how it appeared – a rough cylinder shape with the upper face looking rectangular.  I took this photo of it and sent it over, asking whether this was what he’d seen.  Bear in mind as you read his reply that during the initial viewing I’d been holding it in my hand and turning it around slightly, looking at the different facets, but when I’d asked for any further information, I had placed it on the table in the position you see.

Admittedly not at first, when I said it was smaller, but it’s pretty much an exact image of what I thought when you asked about any other impressions.  I saw that flat diagonal face on the left as well.

By now I was totally convinced that he was actually viewing my crystals remotely.  Will simply doesn’t make things up or exaggerate.  In fact he always plays down his successes and is highly self-critical.  The odds against getting the colour and even aspects of the shape right on both occasions by chance must be ridiculously high.

There was for me the added bonus that Will and I had discovered a new interest in common and were able to have long discussions about the stones.  He seemed pleased to discover that I also saw landscapes and images in the crystals, telling me that he saw scenes with mountains and water.  I told him of a strange carved gateway I’d noticed in my black Andara. Our text conversations bounced back and forth for most of the afternoon.

Naturally, we were both expecting to work on my final Andara the next opportunity we got, but Life (and my granddaughter) had other plans.  What happened instead amazed me even more.

To be continued…

In another life…

I wonder which side of the fence you’re on.

‘Past Lives’ is one of those subjects that tends to divide people pretty squarely into those on the one side who roll their eyes and mutter, “Oh yeah – always Pharaohs or Native American chiefs.  Why never a road sweeper from Luton in the 1920s?”, and people on the other side who are more than eager to discuss their latest regression to a lifetime in days of yore.

Me?  I’ve been on a knife edge between sceptic and believer.  I’ve always had sympathy with the non-believers, and their point is a valid one.  You never DO find mystics who regress you to road sweeping or pig-farming days, and statistically, there must have been far more of these over the centuries.  On the other hand, I’ve been convinced by too many personal experiences and trusted channelled messages.  I do believe in reincarnation and while I don’t go off hunting my other lives out, they do tend to find me, once in a while.

In the last week, it finally dawned on me why the ‘past’ lives we hear about take place at some pivotal and celebrated point in the world’s history.  It’s so blindingly obvious, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure it out.  Never mind, I’m there now, so what follows is my explanation.

Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) was a psychic of the 20th century and made many highly publicized predictions.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recently bought a slim and elderly book entitled Edgar Cayce on Atlantis.  It was written by his son in the 1960s and claims to bring together all his comments on the fabled land, mostly from his ‘entity life readings’ – what would now be called channelled past life information.

The sceptic in me raised a quizzical head when I read in the introduction that over 50% of the people he did readings for had – according to Cayce – past lives in Atlantean times.  As I read on through the book, I noticed that almost all these lives were said to take place around times of huge upheaval – just prior to, during or after one of three cataclysmic events in which vast parts of the Atlantean lands were destroyed, apparently by weaponry or technology invented by the inhabitants.

Cayce’s subjects all seem to have belonged to one of two warring factions.  A sizeable proportion were priests or priestesses, while most of the rest were what would now be seen as engineers, technologists or scientists of some kind – many personally associated with the building or maintenance of the weaponry which caused the destructions.

Obviously we have all heard the legends of the sinking of Atlantis and some will have read other accounts of scientific experiments or technology being tragically misused in various ways in those far-off times.  It seemed to me rather odd, though, that all these people – living in the first half of the 20th century – should have such similar past lives.

Then I thought on.

Has everyone had other lives? How many have we had?  This is the reply Neale Donald Walsch received in Conversations With God, Book 1:

“It is difficult to believe there is still a question about this. I find it hard to imagine. There have been so many reports from thoroughly reliable sources of past life experiences. Some of these people have brought back strikingly detailed descriptions of events, and such completely verifiable data as to eliminate any possibility that they were making it up or had contrived to somehow deceive researchers and loved ones.

You have had 647 past lives, since you insist on being exact. This is your 648^th. You were everything in them.  A king, a queen, a serf. A teacher, a student, a master. A male, a female. A warrior, a pacifist. A hero, a coward. A killer, a savior. A sage, a fool. You have been all of it!”

That makes sense to me.  Given this plethora of past lives to select from, then, and the era in which Cayce was working, it’s unsurprising that these particular lives were pulled out of the psychic bag.  In the twenties, thirties and forties, weapons technology was developing at an alarming pace.  The first WMDs were created.  Of all the lives these individuals had experienced, surely the cataclysmic destruction of a civilisation provided them with exactly the warnings they needed.

There is no way for us to know whether some of the people Cayce spoke to in his ‘sleep’ went on to avert another series of catastrophes, but I like to think they did.

If there is any value in hearing about our past lives, surely it is to find the events that can help us to make positive and informed decisions in our current lifetime.  That has certainly been the case for me.