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.  

 

A Window into Consciousness?

There have been two concepts – probably closely related – occupying me recently.

One is the idea that the ‘stuff’ around us, visible and invisible, is all conscious.  That’s a fairly large idea to get my thoughts around.

The second is a wondering about perception – what it is, where it is and how reliable it might be.  I think that’s where I’ll start.

Here I sit, pretty much still apart from my fingers moving across the keyboard of my computer, whilst knowing that I’m being held in position by gravity to an oblate spheroid (aka The Earth) spiralling through space at an eye-watering speed.  My perception in no way matches that reality, yet I put it aside and carry on with my daily life.  Why am I not aware of travelling so fast?  Good grief, I get travel sick in a car going round the M25.  Is it something I’ve adjusted to?  And if so, when – at birth, in the womb, at the moment of conception?  None of those seems right.  It’s as if the physical mechanics of the universe and the physical reality of life on the planet don’t mesh.

Of course, as we all know, even physical realities don’t mesh.  There’s a macro reality for the universe, with a set of rules that seem to work fairly well; there’s a micro reality down at the quantum level, that works quite differently but, again, seems to follow its own logic.  The TOE that should be able to combine them is oddly elusive.  And somewhere between the two, there are our perceptions of what-is-going-on which seem quite often to be at odds with both of these realities.

We are a pragmatic bunch, us humans.  Most of the time we are more than happy to bumble along accepting trade-offs – the compromises we make with the world about us so that we won’t be confused and troubled by the way things are.  It’s comfortable to see the sun rising and setting, rather than ourselves spinning around it, or to look out to sea and see a straight horizon rather than a slight curve.  It’s convenient to see a desk or a dinner plate as a solid, static object, rather than as a combination of extremely active (and conscious?) subatomic particles blinking in and out of our reality.

So these are some of the simple concessions we make, despite knowing the physics that gives the lie to them.  Sometimes, though, our perception can get completely messed up, without us having the slightest idea why.  Spare a few minutes to watch this little video.  It may not be the slickest production around, but – if you watch it through to the end – it packs quite a punch and deals a rather crushing blow to our reliance on our senses.

‘Optical illusion’ somewhat underplays what is going on here.  Our eyes and brains aren’t just playing a little trick with us – they are forcing us to believe a completely false set of perceptions.  Certainly it’s harmless enough, but doesn’t it make you wonder about all the other ways we are being lied to by our senses?

I’m not suggesting a Matrix-type scenario, with some evil force going out of its way to fool us for its own nefarious ends, but I am seriously considering the possibility that the everyday world around us is not at all the way it seems according to our sensory perception.  If something as simple as a sheet of card can mess with our minds that way, what else is going on?

I think the only answer is that we have – collectively and individually – a set of perceptual constructs which give us the parameters within which we can view the world.  There are common agreed mass perceptions and personal ones.  That’s why some people see danger and menace where others don’t.  Some see the world fragmenting while others see the dawning of an age of true enlightenment.  Some see ghosts, aliens, the fae…  In other words, perception is subjective.

So if there isn’t any objective truth out there (or in here) what, exactly are we perceiving?  Why are some things the same for all of us, while others differ so much?

In The Seth Materials, channelled by Jane Roberts in the 1960s and 70s, we are told that there are Units of Consciousness – CUs – which are the infinitessimal building blocks of physical existence.  (Seth states that to a CU, an atom would be the size of a planet and that scientists have yet to discover them.)  These Units are particles of electromagnetic energy – incipient consciousness, which is volatile and imbued with infinite possibilities.

Now for the really exciting part.  “No objective reality exists but that which is created by consciousness,” Seth tells us.  “Consciousness always creates form, and not the other way about.”
So here we are, us conscious beings with thoughts and ideas of what we are perceiving, and swirling around us is this mass of conscious electromagnetic energy, just waiting…  These CUs coalesce around our thoughts, ideas, emotional responses, reactions and events to form matter.  The stronger and more intense the thought, the faster and more convincing and real (if I dare use that word) the manifestation.

Clearly ideas and beliefs we share have enough intensity to hold true for all of us.  Thoughts of a more indeterminate or nebulous nature, held to be true by some, yet refuted by others, will not result in matter/reality perceived by all.  For some people, though, they will be as real as any dinner plate, any desk, or the sun setting outside my rectangular window.

 

Cosmic Cheating

I felt bad when I got back my physics homework, with phrases like, ‘Good understanding’ or ‘Clearly explained’ written in red pen and random ticks in the margin.  I felt bad because I had cheated.

Each week I sat in the school science lab and made some slight effort to understand what the poor man was trying to teach us.  Not one word of it made sense to me.  I diligently copied down the homework assignment and stared at it for a while.  Nothing.  Then I did what I’d always done.  I went to my friend Cathy’s place and asked her older brother what I should write.  He told me, in simple language, and I wrote what he said in my own words.  Then I handed it in and guiltily received the accolades I did not deserve.

As soon as I could, I dropped physics classes and took no further interest in the subject until I was far older and wiser, and by then it was too late to make up all the lost ground by anything approaching conventional means.

For me to sit here now and plan to write about the cosmos and its composition – to explain dark matter, the many worlds interpretation, parallel universes and dark energy, then, would seem to be the height of stupidity.  My ignorance of such matters is palpably clear.  My credentials are non-existent.

Certainly I have worked my way through many a volume of what bookshops call Popular Science, but I’m not foolish enough to believe that this qualifies me to be an expert.  No.  I’ve cheated again.  I’ve done exactly what I did over half a century ago.  I’ve sought out an authority on the subject and written down their wisdom in my own words.  At least this time I’m admitting it up front, though.

So, you are wondering, where would she find such an authority?  Can anyone explain these things?  There are theories, of course, but truth…?  The greatest minds in physics are still arguing and pondering.

 

All that is quite true.  When I was a teacher, I told my classes I was not going to teach them all they needed to know, but I was going to teach them how to find it out.  I did my very best to do that, although I stopped short of teaching them my own particular method – mainly because it would have seen me instantly dismissed from the profession.

I discovered my method by what I would call ‘chance’ if I believed that anything in life is random.  You may believe me or not as you wish.  I shall simply set down what happened.  In my next post, I’ll share the cosmology and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

 

At the end of the last century a dear friend of mine passed away, leaving me with instructions to watch over her little aspie son who at that time was a pupil of mine.  I did my very best.  The child was at times a true delight: brilliant, fascinating and eloquent.  At other times he was silent, angry, sullen and secretive.  And there were – especially as he reached adolescence – times when he sought to numb his pain and loss by engaging in dangerous and frightening habits.

I knew my feeble efforts weren’t enough.  I needed back up.

I consider myself to be the most fortunate of individuals.  I only have to put out a strong desire for assistance and the Cosmos provides.  It so happened that I was experimenting with dowsing around that time.  I quickly discovered that, with just the right degree of concentration tinged with an ability to relax into whatever came to me, I could pick up rudimentary messages from the child’s departed mother, from spirit guides and even from angels.  The messages from the mother were easy to verify.  Those from spirit less so, but I gradually came to trust them and to rely on the guidance I was given.  By modifying my methods, I learned to pendulum dowse over a computer keyboard so that I could record my questions and the answers.  I began to read White Eagle, Conversations with God, Seth and Jane Roberts and realised that I was doing something called channeling.

Meanwhile the child had grown into a young man with astonishing insight and an inner knowing quite as profound as the material my guides offered.  When he was inclined to interact with me, he shared his knowledge freely and we experimented fearlessly with metaphysics, wrote books together and pushed the boundaries of our knowledge.

Quite suddenly though – a couple of years ago – he returned to his silent, brooding self.  The conversations ceased and I all but lost touch with the extraordinary young man I’d watched over and learned from for so long.  My guides and angels, too, seemed to withdraw.

As if on cue, the vacuum this left in my life was filled by a family disaster.  Unexpectedly, I found myself whisked across the country to support my child and her children.  For a year my focus was firmly fixed in the physical world of survival, all thoughts of cosmic wonders pushed aside.  It took me the best part of another year to recover from the horrors of that time.  It wasn’t until September of 2019 that I turned once again to my pendulum and sought some guidance from spirit.

I had little idea what I was searching for.  I just had a few questions I wanted answers to.  The answers to one deceptively simple enquiry took me on a wild and wonderful journey, deep into aspects of reality I’d barely dreamed of, although – when I looked back – that very special young man had left me a trail of breadcrumbs to follow.

So finally I’m ready to share some of my new-found discoveries here.  Next time, I’ll explain the cosmology I’ve been given and after that…  Who knows?

It’s good to be back.

It’s All Electric…

Yes, I’ve had conversations with ‘dead’ people from time to time.  I certainly don’t seek them out, but there are times they need to share information, and the fact that we are currently on opposite sides of the veil doesn’t seem to matter much in my case.  I’ve never heard from OZ before, though, so the fact that he’s now keen to chat is rather intriguing.

I call him OZ because those were his initials.  In life (well, his most recent one) we didn’t see much of each other, despite the fact that he was my paternal grandfather.  He is a shadowy figure in my memory.  I have one clear image of him bending down, laughing and holding out his arms to welcome me into his home as a very small child.  I hear a soft, gentle voice with a mid-European accent.  I have old black and white photos of him cradling an infant me in his arms or standing proudly in family photos.  I have his writing desk and a much-loved pastel portrait of him as a young man, which hangs in my living room, but that’s about it.

His origins were shadowy, too.  He was a barber-surgeon (amongst the tools of his trade was an amputation saw, which my ex-husband now uses for joinery!) and as far as I know, he grew up in Bohemia, or modern day Czechia/Czech Republic in a small mountain town very close to the German border.  As a young man, he emigrated to London and married a policeman’s daughter.

When I was a child we visited his home often enough, but my brother and I were always left outside in the car, as apparently OZ was too ill to cope with children.  I often wondered whether he wanted to see us as much as I wanted to see him.  The snippets of his life I managed to pick up fascinated me.  I heard how he’d take my dad and his brothers foraging in Epping Forest, always knowing which mushrooms were safe and delicious.  I learned from Dad his way of using hands-on healing to cure migraines.  In fact, I learned so well, that I was one of the few people Dad would trust to touch him when he was suffering from one.  Apparently I ‘had the touch’.

My mother once told me of a strange healing machine she’d seen OZ use.  She said he would turn lots of dials and knobs on some electrical contraption and could even cure people at a distance.

Oz died when I was 8 or 9.  I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral.

I’ve always felt we’d have got along well.  Like him, I’m the family weirdo – a bit of an embarassment to the rest with my interests in all things numinous and metaphysical.  Maybe they kept us apart for a reason…

 

So anyway, last week I received an email from a friend who is deeply interested in diet and its effects on the body at all levels.  One phrase in the email stuck in my mind: “It’s all electric – PH.”  I thought I’d written back, asking for clarification, but apparently the message wasn’t sent.

A few days later I was listening to an hour-long video talk from an American sound healer.  It was basically a sales pitch for an upcoming course she’ll be running; the usual stuff, with long, rambling introduction and minimal amounts about the modality itself, because she wants you to buy into the course.  There were nuggets of information in there, though.  She was talking about subtly altering the resonance of the electrical field around the body.  “It’s all electrical,” she said, pointing out that we even use electricity to jump-start a body after a heart attack.

‘So THAT explains the tingling/fizzing I get in my hands when I practice distant or hands-on healing,’ I thought to myself.

I don’t use a tuning fork or Reiki symbols.  I just feel into that elecrical field and let the fizzing pour into it from my hands until it feels right.  Sometimes it feels too ‘acid’.  Sometimes it’s very weak.  I don’t do much.  I just let it flow until things feel like they’ve stabilised.

Recently my daughter, who is a relaxation and massage therapist, has found that many of her clients ask if she’s doing Reiki on them, because the energy she sends out through her hands feels therapeutic.  I laughed when she told me and said she must have inherited her great-grandfather’s healing hands.

 

Well it seems I was right.  Just as I’d had that mental jolt of the phrase ‘It’s all electric’ being given to me twice in a week and had that thought that it connected to the healing my daughter and I can do, I found my head moving until I was eyeball-to-eyeball with OZ’s portrait on my wall.  He was looking at me.  He was saying into my head, “Yes.  That’s it.  That’s exactly how it works.”

The next day, he gave me the name of his mysterious healing method with the machine: radionics.

I checked it out.  No idea how the machine itself works, but the concept and methodology sound ridiculously familiar.  The UK association offers two-day courses explaining the basics of radionics.  But, warned the site, you can’t attend unless you are an experienced dowser.  Well that won’t be a problem!  I’m off to book myself a place on the next course, and I can be sure OZ will be there with me.

 

The Randomness of Bees

I was 17, and happened to be sitting next to that girl – Gail or something – who was generally considered by the rest of the class to be a bit weird.

“I mean just look at bees,” she said to me.
This was a conversation opener, apropos to nothing.  We weren’t even doing a biology lesson.
“What about them?” I said warily.
“Well just THINK about it!” she exclaimed. “I mean how can anyone – ANYONE – argue that life is random, that everything just happened to evolve the way it did by a series of chances. So stupid!  Think about bees, Janet. (I hate it when people use my full name, but Gail wasn’t the sort to shorten it, the way everyone else did.) Think about the way they live… the patterns… it’s all just SO perfect.”

She drifted off into a blissful reverie, religious ecstasy temporarily quenching her evangelical zeal. Gail was a fundamentalist Christian.
I grunted and began focusing hard on my work.

The fact that I can recall that rather odd snippet of conversation fifty years later, though, goes to show the effect her comments made on me.  I’ve never forgotten that incident and as I continued through my life, my mind often travelled back to Gail and her bees.  Were we, and all that we share our planet with, really the result of some fluke of natural selection?  It merited consideration, certainly.

If you’ve just done the maths, you’ll have deduced that I was educated in the shiny black and white op-art sixties.  Science was at its zenith.  It was the new religion.  Scientists knew everything.  They could send rockets to the moon.  They could explain anything that needed an explanation.  Other points of view were rudely brushed aside as superstition or ignorance.  To disagree with the concept of life emerging from a rather fortuitous combination of chemicals, temperature, light and moisture in primeval swamps was almost heresy.  It meant you had to be a Creationist – someone who, like Gail, believed the beginning of the Bible contained a factual account of the beginning of the World.

Decades rolled by and I kept thinking.  I became increasingly disillusioned with the pomposity of the scientists who were more than happy to sweep inconvenient truths under their lab benches and persuade museums to hide away artefacts that didn’t fit their version of events.  On the other hand, I remained unconvinced by Gail’s merciful-but-actually-pretty-vengeful God and his six day fix on the bottomless void.

Fortunately for me, life is more nuanced these days.  The growth of digital information, multi-culturalism and alternative ways of thinking and being, mean that despite the continued persistence of some purists and fundamentalists on all sides, terms like Consciousness and Awareness and Intention have gained sway.

It’s no longer either/or.  Even scientists are discovering that we influence our lives, our bodies, our wellness and our experience through our thoughts and expectations.  For me, God has drifted away from being a strict headmaster with a hippy son to become a benign Intelligence, of which all Life is some kind of infinitessimal part.

Understanding the implications of quantum science removes the barrier between living and non-living.  We know, now, how much energy, how much LIFE there is in even the most apparently inert object.  Everything is, well, ert.

So OK Gail, I’ll give you that one.  There is no randomness in bees.  They are a pretty wonderful example of that Divine Intelligence playing out.

And now, I’ve got one for you:  eclipses.  Is it random chance that when we stand on this one little planet, amongst a mass of celestial bodies, our Moon (which is, in astronomical terms, tiny but very close) can exactly block out our view of our Sun, which is far bigger but far further away?

If Life didn’t randomly evolve on this planet, then do the positions of the heavenly bodies need to be viewed as random, or is there a Divine Intelligence at work there too?

Can we listen again to the music of the spheres?  Can we begin to understand why the ancients built megalithic structures with such care and precision, aligning them to star patterns, compass directions and equinoxes?

We are all hard-wired to love pattern, to reach into it and to understand and reproduce it, whether we are humans or bees.

And there’s this….

 

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.

 

Trying to Re-Member

There’s a group I attend from time to time here in my town.  Each week they provide cups of every kind of herbal tea you can imagine, biscuits or cake, and a speaker.  The talks range over many areas and subjects, but they must always be positive.  That seems to be the only rule.

I’d never heard of that night’s speaker, but his subject was ‘The Eight Elements’ and partly because I’d been pondering on elements for quite a while and partly because he was speaking as a follower of Krishna – a Truth quite new to me – I decided to go along.

The gentleman stood calmly before us, looked around the room at the sea of faces and announced, with total certainty, “I’m not the only person in this room who has been to the breaking point.  I’m not alone in having reached a point in my life where everything I lived for, everything I believed, everything I cared about was swept away, leaving me lost, broken and utterly alone.”

All around the room, heads nodded slowly, solemnly, mine included.

The talk was excellent.  Krishna’s take on the elements was oddly familiar and linked in well with the Egyptian, Greek, Shamanic, Medieval and alchemical ideas I’d been reading and thinking about.  What I was left with above all, though, was that idea of the breaking point – the need to go through what feels at the time to be a crisis, a disaster, a destruction of all you’ve held dear.  It is the tower card in the tarot – the card I used to fear above all others, back in the days when my life was settled and sorted (although very far from perfect).

I thought of the many friends and family members I’ve seen hit that point, whether through a sudden incapacitating illness, a financial meltdown, a job loss, a relationship breakup or what’s commonly called a nervous breakdown.  Often – as in my own case – it’s a mixture of several of these.  Like the body of Osiris, we are broken up, hacked into pieces and scattered in the waters of Life.

There follows a time of the most awe-ful emptiness.  We shut down.  We exist from moment to moment, day to day, with no clear idea of how or why we are still functioning.  This is the time we need to hide away, to withdraw from everyone and everything, knowing at some instinctive level that we require peace, and that healing will eventually flow from this.

Despite the kindness and ministrations of others, there’s ultimately only one place that healing can come from.  It comes from within.  It comes from our soul-selves – the part of us that is, and has always been, whole and complete.  Slowly and painfully, we begin to re-member ourselves – to put ourselves back together.  This time, though, we will be different.  We will have shed the limiting beliefs that we are not complete without money/ health/ family/ possessions/ career/ home/ friends or whatever we relied upon for stability and identity in the past.  That’s not to say we won’t regain or rediscover some of these, but they will no longer take centre stage.

Now we will have re-membered who we truly are.  We will recognise that we are whole and complete in ourselves.  We are not – primarily – parent or employee, partner or owner.  We are infinite aspects of the great I AM and as such, we have no limits.

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.”

Kahlil Gibran: The Prophet

 

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.

 

 

Sense and Sensitivities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was curious.

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

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

That was what I’d suspected.

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

Tornado

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

On the Shoulders of Giants?

Quick trawl through the internet to find the derivation of that idea:

Coat of arms of Sir Isaac Newton

Well Isaac Newton, yes.  I knew that one.  With typical modesty he wrote of his work to Robert Hooke in 1676, saying, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Not original though.  Newton apparently found the metaphor in the writings of one John of Salisbury – a twelfth century author and theologian who rose from Anglo Saxon roots (not easy in Norman-dominated England in the early 1100’s) to become Bishop of Chartres.

Impressive.

Still not original, though, for John was quoting Bernard, a colleague of his at Chartres, who was the chancellor of the cathedral school there in 1124.

Chartres Cathedral(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here, via John, via Wikipedia, is Bernard’s idea:

Bernard of Chartres used to say that we [the Moderns] are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants [the Ancients], and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter. And this is not at all because of the acuteness of our sight or the stature of our body, but because we are carried aloft and elevated by the magnitude of the giants.

At this point I could easily waffle off into an appreciation of said Bernard.  Hadn’t come across him before, but I was rather taken by some of his philosophical ideas.  I’ll resist the urge for now, though.  I want to get back to those giants.

Let me start by making it plain that the ones Bernard was referring to were almost certainly classical philosophers – Neo-Platonists by the look of it.  The ‘magnitude’ he spoke of was intellectual rather than physical.

The giants I’d like to meet have left a more cryptic legacy.  Sadly, Wikipedia won’t be able to help me to reach them.

Popular culture has two very different views of our far-distant ancestors.  Firstly there is ‘Stone Age Man’ – and Woman, obviously.  Anthropologists will lead us back through fossilised bones, carefully carbon-dated, belonging to African ancestors clutching lumps of stone and animal bone, and beyond them back to tree-dwelling ape-like beings.  Wind the clock back still further and our ancestors are seen crawling from the seas and originating in a potent slime on a planet poised to bring forth life.

The second concept of the Ancients, though, is as different from the above as could be imagined.  Instead of our modern, technologically advanced society being viewed as the pinnacle of an evolutionary process, we look back to the Giants – the ancestors who held knowledge and yes, even technology which would put ours to shame.

They could be another, now-extinct species whose flowering ceased in one of those cataclysms caused by comets, say, or volcanoes, leaving only tantalising remnants – physical giants with huge bones or strangely elongated skulls, hidden away in museum vaults by those who fear spoiling the story.

Perhaps they are our own ancestors – people like us who evolved to reach a golden age in Mu or Atlantis before sinking, almost without trace…

They could be incomers from other stars, other dimensions: the gods perhaps – worshipped and depicted by our ancestors as they swooped down from high Olympus or interstellar craft to intervene in human affairs and perhaps human genetics before flying off and leaving us to find our own paths.  I have to admit to a personal preference for this story.  It seems to fit, and channelled sources are supporting it.  See, for example, this comment in answer to a recent query I put to the Guides who wish to be known as Higgins in Cheryl Jensen’s Ask Higgins blog:

There was a time when the race that created mankind lived alongside you and they taught your predecessors how to utilize the positive and negative energy of the Earth’s magnetic field

Whoever they were, their presence in our folk memory and mythology is persistent.  They are a very real part of our heritage.

We stand on their shoulders – you and I, Isaac, John, Bernard, his Greek philosophers and whoever inspired them…  Do we see further than they did, or are we elevating ourselves too high?

Should we climb down and search more carefully amongst the clues they left for us – the carvings and structures, folk tales and mythology, or trust that access to their knowledge lies within us all, if only we have the confidence to reach for it?