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.

In Your Heart

Here we are in March, getting on for a quarter of the way into 2019, and I’m getting a feel for what this year is all about – for me, anyway.  This seems to be the Year of the Heart.

When I first moved to Glastonbury (known in some circles as the Earth’s Heart Chakra, although I didn’t know that at the time,) ten years ago, I’d neatly packaged my heart away – stuffed it deep inside myself and decided that just surviving from day-to-day would be a major achievement.  In those early days, it was.  I’d been – I felt then – betrayed, abandoned and let down by just about everyone and everything I’d given my heart to and for the first few months, those betrayals just kept coming, thick and fast.

I remember renting a tiny annexe behind a shop with my fast-dwindling savings, rooting around in the short-dated reduced items at the supermarket and having no income, no prospects and no friends here.  It was a true dark night of the soul which lasted well into 2009.

Eventually I stopped wallowing in self-pity and reached out to others for help.  I found a lovely, intuitive life-coach who helped me to heal my dried-up, fragile, damaged heart, to begin to love myself and to expect and accept the love of others.  That turned my life around.  Soon I felt resilient, hopeful and learned to put out to the Universe for what I needed and wanted.  Paid work, new opportunities, acquaintances and friends soon appeared.  By the end of 2009, I was in a better place than I could ever have imagined and life was good.

It was around New Year of 2018 that I agreed with the Universe that I was now stable enough and ready for the next phase – for new challenges.

They arrived.

It was not an easy time.  I needed to stop sitting in front of my computer pondering metaphysical conundrums and to get up and deal with very physical problems.  It was all lower chakra stuff – root survival and safety for people I loved, followed by the gut-wrenching sacral issues connected to parenthood and the deepest emotional ties.  Depression and anxiety ricocheted around my family.  Gradually issues of power and control surfaced.  I worked to establish and maintain a safe and fair life for those who had lost everything, helping them to regain their inner sun.  It took bravery and resilience I didn’t realise I’d built up, but that’s the way life works.  We don’t get the challenges until we are ready to cope with them.

Then it was back to Glastonbury – back to the heart, in every way you can imagine.

Two people very close to me have had their lives changed by heart disease in these past few months.  In both cases it was very sudden, very unexpected and is throwing up massive challenges to their lives.  It brings up issues of mortality, of independence and dependency, of life-changing choices and ways of managing day-to-day.

At the same time, a friend and I have been working our way through Gregg Braden’s ‘Human by Design’ book and some workshops based around this.  It’s all about using the heart’s intelligence – the ‘little brain in the heart’ – and aligning it with our mental processes.

Then, as the final piece to the puzzle, I realised (as I said in my last post) that my ‘muses’ – the spirit guides, channelled messages and special intuitive humans I’d come to rely on for answers were closing the doors.  I tried one last time to contact Koimul, the Spirit Guide/s who helped me through so many difficult times.

JAN YOU CAN PICK UP ALL YOU NEED IN YOUR HEART

I was told. And when I asked why they were all moving away and leaving us alone, I was simply told,

YOU HAVE ALL YOU NEED FROM US

When I asked if they would return, there was no answer.  The crystal pendulum swung in a wide, empty circle, indicating that there would not be a reply to that.

So we lovingly took our leave of one another.  Now I need to trust that my heart and heart chakra are ready and strong enough to move me on through the twists and turns of this new chapter in my game of life.  They are, or I wouldn’t have brought myself here.

Equinoxing

I revel in the magic and symmetry of the equinoxes – those two occasions in the year when darkness and light occur in absolutely equal quantities.  They mark a shift, a subtle but important tipping point in the year.  Here in England, the Autumn Equinox that falls today is the time when we shift from more-light-than-dark to the reverse.  From tomorrow onwards the days will be shorter and the nights longer.  They won’t equal out again until next March, when the spring equinox heralds the start of the long summer days to follow.

And so, today, I find myself equinoxing – pondering the wonder and timefull/timelessness of this seasonal ebb and flow and the perfection of this perfectly poised day when neither night nor day holds sway.

For me, the six months since the last equinox has been a time of special significance.  In late March, I was packing my bags to move across the country to be with my child and grandchildren at a time of great need.  Now I’m starting to pack again, ready to leave them in their new home and return to my own home in beautiful Somerset.

Here in the East, life simply goes on from day to day.  Few people remark on the changes beyond a shake of the head and a comment on how the nights are drawing in.  Back in Glastonbury there is no shortage of people wishing to mark each nuance of the natural year – from robed and garlanded goddesses, through drum-bangers, chanters and pipers to those who will joyfully strip off and cavort in the buff around sacred groves and hills.

Me?  I’m somewhere between the two.  Equinox is a time to stop, to take stock, to consider the lessons, blessings and memories of the past six months, when Summer ruled.  It’s a time, too, to contemplate the darker months that lie ahead; long evenings curled up beside the log burner with candles twinkling and a good book, peace and quiet after the frenzied activity of the summer and a chance to dream myself into the next phase of this amazing little drama that is my current ‘life’.

Equinox greetings and blessings to all.

 

Old Friends – sat on a park bench like bookends

J and I met in our teens.  We enrolled as student teachers together, we lived just across the corridor in hall, we learned the realities of teaching kids in tough London schools, we partied, we got drunk and we hitchhiked around the country at dead of night.  One of us owned the Bookends album.  We’d listen to this track and feel uncomfortable at the lyrics – How terribly strange to be seventy… 

We passed our exams and got our first teaching posts.  We shared a flat for a while, then I left to get married and move somewhere rural.  She was my bridesmaid.  I had children; she didn’t.  We met up a few times, then just exchanged Christmas and birthday cards and hastily scribbled once-a-year notes about how that year had been.  Hers would tell of exotic holidays on far-flung islands; mine would tell of family budget ones in Devon.

This year, as I wrote her birthday card, I added a note to say I was back in the East for a while.  We were both retired now, and living not too far apart, after all, so might we meet up?

What a crazy idea.  We’d lived a lifetime apart, doing different things.  College was a distant memory.  Would we even recognise each other now?

Yesterday, we met.

Yes, we did recognise each other.  It took a moment to work our way past the portly bodies, the white hair, the sensible shoes and wrinkles, to spot the familiar old friend who shone from behind all that.  Thirty years, we worked out, since we’d last met.  The thirty years of experiences, pains and joys we had gained from life flowed between us.

Not quite seventy, but only a very few years off.  So were we the old people Paul Simon had imagined in his lyrics?  Perhaps – to any twenty-somethings passing by, that was how we’d look.  Those lyrics, though, are a young person’s idea of old age.

We did share a park bench for a while, but not quietly.  We talked of what we’d done, children we’d taught, how we railed against the education system with its focus on exams and fact-learning, fought for the rights of the kids and parents, struggled to open the young minds and encourage free-thinking and creativity.  We spoke of how we’d shared our ideas and experience, mentored young teachers.  We spoke sadly of how the government-controlled education system had finally driven us out, as the job we’d loved and devoted our lives to was subsumed by paper-pushing and statistics.  We’d both taken early retirement and headed off to educate in different, freer ways.  And now, we decided, was a time for pride and reflection, a time for relaxation without clock-watching, but not – oh so definitely not – a time to stop learning and wondering, thinking and discovering.

The Master Builders

I’ve been talking again – to Koimul.  Koimul is something – someone.  I couldn’t tell you, with absolute certainty, whether Koimul is a higher version of myself, a spirit guide or some sort of mixture of the two.  In a sense, it doesn’t matter, since at some level we are all One.  All I know is that when I enter into a dialogue with Koimul, I am reaching into the Akasha and picking up understanding that I didn’t have before.

Maybe you’d like to listen in.

I was asking why ancient structures, built by so-called ‘Stone Age’ people are so wonderfully made and have such perfect geometry and later the conversation strayed into ‘living resurrection’ rituals.

Koimul’s responses are in large case.

THERE WAS POPULAR UNDERSTANDING OF THE SOUL’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY AND TO THE EARTH.  THE EARLY BUILDERS EXPERIENCED THAT CONNECTION THROUGH HARMONY AND SYMMETRY.  THEIR EVERY ACT WAS DESIGNED TO LOCALISE THE UNDERLYING SYMMETRY IN THE PHYSICAL. 

That is beautifully explained.  Thank you so much.  So like an early monk or nun, in our historical terms, for them every action was an act of worship: in a sense – an act of re-creation, by grounding spirit into the physical.  Is that roughly right?

EXACTLY. 

I’m getting the feeling that those people, who were so intimately connected with their souls and the greater akasha, had no need to undergo rituals and rites, because they were already fully aware and connected to spirit.  Yes?

YES.

So what happened to change things?  I know that, as the timeline developed, the connection with the physical became so deep and absorbing that the conscious connection to spirit was weakened.  Is that the point at which the rituals were introduced?  A connected priestly caste attempting to reconnect those who had strayed too far from their origins?

THIS WAS THE CASE IN SOME CULTURES.  

What society would now call ‘developed’ cultures?

YES. 

Ok, I see this is becoming a very far-reaching discussion with many implications.  The general theory seems to be that those who were still connected to spirit – call them priests or shamans – devised rituals that involved stripping back the physical experience to almost nothing, to enable those who had become mired in physicality to once again connect with spirit and re-member their connection.  Is that how it worked?

YES. 

A highly ritualised way of saying ‘go within’?

YES.

So what was the need for all the elaborate ritual and mumbo-jumbo that was involved in the process.  

THE PROCESS WAS ELABORATE BECAUSE PEOPLE VIEWED IT AS A MYSTERY.   WHEN A NEW LEADER COMES TO SAY IT IS SIMPLE, THE PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE THEM.    

The Illusion of Ordinary Life

I wanted to tell you about my weekend.

That simple intention has taken me on a brief but fascinating journey this morning, so I’ll probably end up telling you about that, too.

Let me start by saying that both the weekend and this morning’s journey have involved little more than sitting in a chair.  As we all know, huge and wondrous journeys can be experienced that way.  We sit in chairs and watch screens, read books, listen to speakers, and new worlds open up.  Then – for the majority of us, at least – the desire to move beyond this vicarious existence kicks in, and we feel the need to head away from the chair and to once again immerse ourselves in ‘ordinary life’.

I’ve spent two solid days sitting in a darkened hall at a conference, listening to a glittering array of speakers – academics, field archaeologists, explorers and the odd metaphysician, all immersed in the study of ancient megalithic sites.  They had devoted huge portions of their lives to the meticulous observation and measurement of structures, carvings and rows of standing stones and now they had gathered to share their discoveries with us.

Again and again we watched aerial images upon which intricate patterns of geometry had been superimposed.  The golden mean, perfectly dissected circles and squares, Pythagorean triangles and Platonic solids hung ethereally above and within structures created – who knows how? – in times at least as far distant from Pythagoras and Plato as those gentlemen are from us.  We were shown how only by building at that exact latitude could this or that angle exactly mirror the one created by the sun, the moon or some other significant heavenly body with the Earth at a given time.  We marvelled at the accuracy, the deliberation, the sheer effort made by our ancestors to achieve this perfection, only now clear to us thanks to the devotion and vision of the researchers, aided by Google Earth, drones and sophisticated software programs.

I was hunting for a title for this post, and found it in the name of a fine art card I’d purchased at the conference – a sublime piece of artwork by one of the speakers, Nicholas Cope RCA.  I’d love to reproduce it here, but didn’t gain permission, so please momentarily click on The artwork to take a look.

This beautiful image sums up the content of the conference I’ve been discussing here rather well.  However it was the title which intrigued me even more.  It encompassed an idea that had been tugging at my consciousness – just beyond reach of words – throughout the weekend.  ‘Where does the idea come from?’ I asked myself.  That led to this morning’s journey.

I typed ‘The Illusion of Ordinary Life’ into the search engine and found myself reading an article by V Susan Ferguson, based on the work of one René Guénon.

Yes!

I’d never heard of him until today, yet here was this French Catholic, turned Sufi, metaphysical intellectual, writing back in the 1940s and encapsulating the very idea that had been nagging at me:

We are devoted to measuring the endless surfaces of what we imagine to be solid matter.

The full article (well worth reading) can be found here.  I suspect I’ll be getting better acquainted with Monsieur Guénon over the coming weeks.

You see there were hints – tiny subtle numinous ones – throughout the weekend nudging me towards that utterly obvious idea.

There was the speaker who marvelled that many of his measurements of an ancient artefact came out at an exact, and significant, number of centimetres. (Did the ancients use centimetres??)  There was the story recounted by one of my companions of a sarcophagus in Egypt which – she’d been there and experienced it – despite being solid granite was an exact fit for everyone in their party who lay inside it, from a guy 6ft 5 tall to a lady of barely 5ft and all in between.  There was a symbologist who  showed a dizzying array of connections between words and symbols from widely different cultures and time-frames which could be meshed together to create a perfect whole, with each element adding greatly to the gestalt so formed.
“What’s real,” this lady told the audience, with a knowing smile, “is the space between the forms.”

So, if I can tear myself away from the magical information technology that seamlessly brings me together with concepts, images and ideas from other times and places via electromagnetic waves in the aether, I’ll head off to the garden, to ground myself in the ‘ordinary world’ – the sensory feedback that is integral to my physical experience.  As I do so, though, I won’t fall into the trap of pondering the wonders I’ve been shown in the past two days in terms of physicality alone.

We have far more gnosis available to us, far more ways of connecting to the Ancients and their megaliths than with software, tape measure and protractor.  Just as the archaeologist’s meticulous drawing of a ground plan gives us only a limited idea of the 3D structure, so that physical structure, as we perceive it in terms of length, width and height, gives only the smallest hint of its full conception and significance.  For that we have to relinquish our addiction to the illusion of the physical and move into realms that are not governed by time and space; move into realms more like the ones we connect with on our computers, yet very different.

Stone on Stone

John Aubrey, courtesy of Wiki

I have ‘Rosie’ (author of the brilliant La Tour Abolie site) to thank for introducing me to Ruth Scurr’s wonderful biography of John Aubrey.  It is, as Philip Pullman says on the cover, ‘Irresistible’.  I’m quite certain that if we hadn’t inconveniently lived 350 years apart, Mr Aubrey and myself would have found many common interests to converse about.

We share – across time – a keen interest in antiquities.  His discovery of the Aubrey holes at Stonehenge, his insistence that this structure was NOT a council chamber built by the Danes but dated back much further and his devotion to preserving what was left of Avebury before local residents could demolish any more of it to build their homes and walls are well known.  His jottings, meticulously collected and compiled by Scurr, though, tell so much more of this indefatigable gentleman.

He was not a meticulous diarist like Pepys.  He charted the English civil war, the rule of Cromwell, the Great Fire of London and other major events almost in passing.  There is a brief account of the Restoration of King Charles II, for example, but at that time, Aubrey had something more pressing on his mind.

In March 1660, you see, he acquired a ring containing ‘a curious Turkey, or turquoise stone’.  This stone fascinates him for years.  When the ring breaks, he decides not to have the stone remounted, in case the heat should cause damage to the crystal.  Why the fascination?  Well this is where the story – and time itself – become rather fuzzy…

As synchronicity would have it, I too acquired a curious crystal – in March of this year.  It’s the one I found mysteriously sitting on a path in my garden.  Three hundred and fifty-seven years apart, both Mr Aubrey and myself found ourselves pondering our respective stones with much interest and surprise.  We both noticed that areas of the stones which had been cloudy became inexplicably clear, while other areas clouded.  Our ponderings continued independently of each other until I reached the point in the book where he had made this discovery: a day or two after mine appeared.

Strange, I thought.

In the July, Aubrey records:

My turquoise ring has changed again.  Now the cloudy spot in the north of the ring has vanished entirely and the one in the south has lessened.

By October:

(It) has become cloudy again in the north and a little speck has appeared in the middle.

The following February he finds a halo has formed around the northern cloudy spot and determines to take it to Mr Robert Boyle, no less, who has an interest in ‘movement within stones’.  Sadly, there does not seem to be an account of this meeting, if it ever took place.  I’d love to have known Mr Boyle’s opinion.

So now, not only did I have my own curious stone to watch and contemplate, but Mr Aubrey’s turquoise to consider as well.  How could these solid objects go through such obvious changes?  Were we imagining it?  Was it simply dependent upon the light in which we viewed our respective stones?  And if it WAS happening… why?

Bubbles!

Then, last Friday morning, I woke to find the most amazing transformation in my stone.  There is a face, roughly the shape of a parallelogram, which had been a diffuse, swirling, misty purple.  Overnight, though, it had transformed to contain countless tiny, and very clear, bubbles.  Almost all of them contained a central tiny circle or dot, several of these being a deep red colour.  Some seemed near the surface while other appeared as if deep under water.  It resembled a clump of frogspawn, and gave me the distinct but illogical sense of new life forming.

It continues to change.  The ‘bubbles’ are still visible, but are gradually fading into the mists again.  I wonder what its next trick will be.

At the weekend I asked my friend Will to try a remote viewing of the crystal, asking him to search within it and hunt for impressions beyond the physical.  As he focused on it, he didn’t see the stone at all, but gained some clear impressions of shapes, colours and a landscape – a vast desert with hills or mountains in the far distance.  He also commented that time, and especially the future, felt relevant.

So what do you make of all that, dear reader?  Comments would be most welcome.

I’ve long felt that the distinction between living and non-living is wrong.  I subscribe to Seth’s view that all matter contains consciousness.  When I consider the enormous discoveries made by the late Masaru Emoto about memory in water, I wonder if we are on the brink of discovering similar properties in crystal.

How I wish I could chat this through with Mr Aubrey.  But then, who is to say I’m not doing so already, at some level of consciousness?  After all, I’m unable to account for how this pristine crystal appeared in the middle of my garden.  Maybe it was sent to me, or left by a passing etheric gentleman on horseback…

 

 

Warning – nudity and flashing images

Oh dear, sorry about the gratuitous title, but there may be some readers who will find the image shocking or upsetting.  I’m certainly not sharing this to shock or arouse.  It’s just that it helps me to tell a most interesting story.

Last Wednesday was Imbolc – February 1st: the celebration of the first stirrings of the Celtic year.  Such events are taken seriously here in Glastonbury, and I’ve always thought it a lovely festival, with the promise of renewal and springtime to come.  Be that as it may, on this particular Imbolc, I wasn’t feeling at my best.  There was a keen wind, the usual grey cloud cover and I’d been to the doctors (something I only do when absolutely necessary – about once every 3-4 years, on average) as I needed medication to clear up a persistent infection.

As the sun was getting low in the sky, I started the ten minute walk home from the town centre to my cottage, which is on a busy road leading towards the famed Glastonbury Tor.  Although I’d stopped to admire a garden full of snowdrops, I couldn’t claim to have been celebrating Imbolc in any sense.  One of my fellow pedestrians, however, had chosen her own unique way to do so.  I heard the light slap of feet on the pavement behind me (feet, mark you, not shoes) and was overtaken by a completely naked woman, jogging lightly towards the Tor (or maybe Chalice Well or the White Spring – they’re all clustered together).  She appeared calm, intent and focused, not in any distress and quite comfortable with her condition.

My first thought was how cold she must be; I was huddled in my padded waterproof.  My second was how easy, comfortable and confident she must feel in her body, to allow the world to see her that way.  My third thought, I have to confess, was that this incident would make a most interesting remote viewing subject for Will.

Consequently, the following Sunday, I suggested he tune into the street outside my house (which he has never visited) at 4.15 on the previous Wednesday, to see if he could locate something incongruous and unexpected.  This was his response:

Got strong feeling of a large animal like an elephant or hippo, a large flat high visibility reflective-like board or screen. Generally a lot of bright colours across the scene. Weaker feelings of a lot of brightly coloured balls moving around.

Right.

Well the large wild animal made me laugh, obviously.  As you’ll see from the video below, the poor lady was by no means hippo-like!  On the other hand we are very rarely exposed to so much bare skin outdoors – especially in an English February – and there was something of the wild animal about her, but not one with fur (and as Will pointed out, the wild animals you would expect to see are far smaller than humans, which could be why his mind gave him a large animal).  As chance would have it, someone had taken this video of her walking past my house in the other direction, earlier in the day and posted it on You Tube, so I was able to show Will what he saw.

But the bright lights and coloured balls??  That had me foxed completely…. until later in the day, when I was mentally replaying my journey home from town in my mind.

Suddenly it came to me. Moments before my encounter with the lady, an ambulance had gone screeching past – a riot of bright colours and high-vis yellow, momentarily lighting up the grey day.  Its signal lights flashed on and off – balls of light appearing and disappearing.  To William, viewing the scene remotely some days later, the image of the vehicle would have moved across the scene so fast it would have appeared like a screen flashing past.

When I shared that information with him, Will commented:

Yes that fits well.  I only saw it from the side but did wonder if it was an ambulance.  Not usually very good at identifying specific objects unless they’re something that can be expected, due to the scene.

For me – and I hope for you – it was a fascinating insight into how visions are interpreted by the mind.

A Journey into Consciousness

Scientists now say that energy and matter are one.  They must take the next full step to realize that consciousness and energy and matter are one.
Seth – Dreams, ‘Evolution’ and Value Fulfillment Sept 25th, 1979

Are we there yet?

Quite a huge leap for us isn’t it?  Especially, I’d guess, for scientists.  By and large, they don’t seem to like Consciousness very much.  I suspect that’s because Intelligence gets in the way.

But I digress.  Already.  Before I’ve even started.

Re-finding that Seth quote yesterday, I discovered that – while it had gone right over my head the first time I read it – I was now ready to look it squarely in the eye and at least attempt to see what it was showing me.

I’ll start by travelling, figuratively, inside my body.  Here I can locate a cell.  It’s very small.  I’d need a microscope to see it.  However I know it’s there.  At this very moment it’s busily doing whatever it is that cell is supposed to do, in order to keep my body working.  The cell is matter – definitely; it’s part of me.  It is also energy; if I could look deeper, I’d see all the electrons and photons and so forth whizzing around it – pure energy.  And is it conscious?  Yes.  I’m happy to accept that ‘my’ consciousness is spread around my body, not lodged in my head or heart, for example.  I’m also aware of the concept of Cellular Consciousness, as proposed by Bruce Lipton, which is gradually taking hold in some areas of science.

Right, so my cells are conscious units of matter/energy – every single one of them.  Are they conscious of the entity I call me?  Maybe, dimly.  They certainly work very hard to keep me in shape, to repair me when bits get injured or protect me when I’m ‘under attack’ from other conscious bits of energy/matter.  Perhaps somewhere in their consciousness they have a blueprint of the organ they are part of – the lung or kidney or nerve.  Possibly their consciousness extends to the physical body that contains all those organs and substances – the one encased in skin – the one I’m accustomed to define as ‘me’.  Or not.

Where shall I go next?  I’m tempted to start scrabbling around hunting for the consciousness in my pen, my mug, my keyboard.  They all have matter, after all, and thus energy.  And I think I’m just catching a glimpse of the consciousness inherent in them, but to find it, I need to head off somewhere else first.

Let’s go here:

Oh I love fractals!  They make it all so easy.  So that – if we think in terms of pure consciousness – could have been me heading into my body and finding an organ, and then a cell, then delving into that cell and finding other stuff that is also a perfect replica of all the rest.  Similarly, the ‘me-body-thing’ could have been somewhere in the middle of the zoom and ‘my’ consciousness would be out there in something far vaster and wider.  Am I aware that I am a part of that something?  Maybe dimly…  Maybe a bit more so than I was a year ago.

Like the scientists (and others) I get ensnared in Intelligence.  I start out wondering how conscious something is, although I never ask ‘how matter’ or ‘how energy’ it is.  That’s because I’m linking consciousness to thinking and knowing.  I may know things a cat doesn’t and think things it can’t, and vice versa, but I’m no more or less conscious than it.  When I can shake off the intelligence thing and accept that consciousness simply IS, it becomes far easier.

I’m all caught up in ‘I think, therefore I am’.  But where am I when I stop thinking?  When am I, where I stop thinking, for that matter?  It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, I’m no place and no time.  I’ve moved beyond them and beyond my physical body, yet ‘I’ am still conscious.

Regular readers won’t be surprised to find remote viewing popping in here.  I’m quoting it because it’s a state in which logical/intelligent thinking seriously gets in the way.  My viewing partner and I find that frequently.  Sensations arrive from the location or object to be viewed, whether that is in the past, present or future, but then the mind starts to suggest something like, “Ah, well if I’m viewing a railway station that must be the platform, or the buffet…” and then you lose it.  When the intelligent mind has nothing much to latch on to (the location of a specific person a week into the future, for example) the viewings tend to work best.

In a recent post from Ask The Council, I was given answers to a question about how RV works.  Here’s a small portion of the reply:

The Council says when you are able to do remote viewing, you are very connected to your higher spiritual self. They say because we are all one, in a spiritual sense, someone who is able to view remotely is theoretically able to know anything about anyone, anywhere.

The Council says remote viewing works as we become more than our human selves. With the belief in remote viewing and by trying to accomplish this, you open up part of yourself that’s ready to see what you choose to view remotely. Because we are all connected and all one, when you view remotely you are really looking at an expanded version of yourself that includes others you are connected to.

Is ‘c’ the speed of enlightenment/consciousness?

So Consciousness:  We have it at cellular level and beyond, and those of us ‘evolved’ enough to be able to, can expand it outwards to where time/space/physicality is no longer a barrier and connect with those with whom we have a conscious connection.  Beyond that, of course, we’re connected to everyone and everything – even my mug and my pen…

 

Stone Mullions

A lovely word – mullions – don’t you think? And the sheer romance of having stone mullions (window frames) was one of the factors that induced me to buy LIME Cottage.

Of course they’d been painted and were yellowing and peeling when I first saw the house, but my meticulous builder and his lads cleaned the outside windows back to the original stonework, even going to the local quarry at Doulting (from where the original stone came, all those centuries ago) and bringing back stone dust to mix with the filler for any cracks that needed repair.

The results were fantastic.  I was delighted.

Then I began decorating the upstairs front room.  Without a thought I started removing the flaking paint on the window frame, expecting to sand it down and paint over it.  That was when I discovered that with minimal effort, I was revealing the stone on the inside too.

Exciting!

I beavered away with the paint scraper – some parts were easier than others, and had soon exposed a decent sized chunk of stone.

My Man Monday arrived the next day.  LIME Cottage and I like our Man Monday.  He’s a wonderful, intuitive odd-job man who adores old buildings and knows exactly how to treat them.  He comes on Mondays because that’s his day off from running his organic wholefood restaurant.  He was as thrilled as I was to see the stonework and agreed that it had to be cleared.  He showed me how to use various parts of a chisel to remove the paint and buff up the surface.  A YouTube video taught me how to re-putty the glass (surprisingly easy and fun – like playing with Plasticine) and I was happy.

I suspect the stone had remained untouched for centuries.  Then someone – probably in the 1950s, judging by the materials used, had skimmed a layer of plaster over the stone and covered it with a thick golden lacquer of some sort.  I remember the front door of my parents’ new-build house, in 1956, being covered with this same material, and my father’s deep delight and pride at having this new state-of-the-art finish applied to it.  Maybe whoever was the cottage’s custodian back in those days was equally proud of their work.

The next layer – in the sixties perhaps – was a very pretty pale turquoise – just the colour I probably would have chosen myself, had the mullions not decided it was their time to breathe again.  A few coats of ‘brilliant white’ gloss topped things off, but sun and many years of neglect had worked their magic, providing cracks and crannies for my chisel to get a hold.

I’ve left flecks of the earlier coats here and there.  They are, after all, part of the cottage’s rich history, as are the dents and chips in the stone.

Sometime in the future, no doubt someone will decide to cover the stone again, with some new technological breakthrough.  That’s fine, and as it should be.  History doesn’t stop.  The cottage will do as it’s always done, adapt and change with the ages.

The stone mullions will continue to look out on the road below, The camper vans and hatchbacks, delivery lorries and tankers, tourists and neo-pagans added to their store of memories.

I love to imagine black-clad puritans and straw-chewing ploughmen passing beneath them; earnest men with pitchforks and muskets rallying to Monmouth’s rebellion; gents in curly wigs, smoking long clay pipes; ladies in lace and sprigged muslin frocks; farm carts and haywains; ponies and traps; horse-drawn coaches filled with journeying Victorians, keen to view the Abbey’s ruins; Dion Fortune and her retinue heading to secret ceremonies at her house, just down the road; eager young farm boys hurrying to sign up to fight in the Great War; heartbroken parents heading to church to mourn for them; hippies with flowers in their hair off to climb the Tor…

My beautiful stone mullion windows have seen all that and more, and caked as I am in stone dust and lead paint chippings, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my intimate encounter with their story.