Another Look at Reality

In my last post I floated the idea that even if we were able to somehow travel back in time and communicate freely with people from a bygone age, there would only – at best – be certain aspects of shared experience.  This, I argued, is because ‘truth’ or what we term ‘reality’ is a subjective interplay between a person’s mind, brain and the objects and events that form to produce each person’s perceived world.

‘Aha,’ you may say, “If that were the case, how would you and I share a common view of a scene before us?  Even a short discussion would prove that our vision of what lay around us was identical.  We could even take photographs to demonstrate it!’

Well certainly we citizens of the 21^st century share a common perception of the objects and events around us.  Perceptive reality has strong links to social cohesion and the ‘training’ we were given in infancy. 

Our culture has a slightly strange take on sharing our World View with new arrivals.  A rich mythic tradition is passed on to our children – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, giants, goblins, elves and trolls appear in huge numbers of their storybooks and the bedtime tales we share with them.  Talking animals and fabulous beasts abound.  Then, as the children mature, these wonders are, one by one, consigned to a scrapheap of untruths.  Those stories, they are told, were ‘just pretend’.  Now they are expected to cast away such childish delights and focus on a world that can be seen, prodded and proved to be ‘real’. 

“So are dinosaurs real?” asks the confused child. “What about dragons?  What about Father Christmas…?  Why did you lie to me?”

Parents and carers struggle to justify their actions.  They are doing as their parents did.  They are rearing their young in the way our society dictates.  Once they reach the age of 7 or 8, even the child who knows she once saw fairies in the garden or glimpsed a fiery dragon from her window has put such things aside and conformed to the accepted and shared idea of how reality looks and feels.  Mostly.

Of course there are still different perceptions within our common perceptual framework.  If we imagine a hypothetical twenty people standing and regarding Stonehenge in the 2020s, all would probably be in agreement as to the size and bulk of the stones, the green of the grass, the colour of the sky, strength of the wind and sound of the passing traffic on the A303.

One observer, though, might be hugely excited at the sight of a military aircraft flying over the scene – an aspect of the experience missed totally by others.

Another of the people might be high on a hallucinogenic drug or have what is currently called a ‘mental illness’.  That person might be seeing quite different colours strobing and wheeling around the stones and hearing sounds or voices the rest of the observers would not be aware of.

A third might be a synesthete.  He or she might be tasting or smelling the colours and textures in a manner quite alien to the rest.

Perhaps two or three members of the group might have psychic sensitivities which allowed them to see spots of bright light or hazy halos surrounding certain stones or perhaps glowing crystals buried deep beneath the ground.  They might even perceive shadowy figures from other times.

As is the custom in our age, more or less all these visitors would take out their phones and photograph the scene before them.  If they then compared the results, all the images would show the grass, the stones, the path and so forth, yet some would include mysterious orbs or thin coloured arcs of light.  Depending on their personal World Views, these would be variously interpreted as aliens, angelic beings, reflections of light from mundane sources or pieces of dust on the camera lens.  Each, of course, would be entirely correct, according to their World View.

I would further suggest that if the group of 20 people were standing around Stonehenge in c2500BC, their perception of what lay before them would be markedly different to that of the 21^st century visitors.  Their common take on ‘reality’ would link to their shared prior experience and social conditioning and their society almost certainly perceived the world around them in markedly different ways, with senses responding to stimuli in a manner that we could not grasp.

Clearly, I have no way of demonstrating this.  Those ancient people standing on a wind-blasted plain in southern England left us no written record or clues as to what was going through their minds and how their world looked to them.  They simply, for their own reasons, created a massive structure that survived into our age.

Fortunately for the curious among us, not all World Views are as poorly recorded.  Next time I’d like to take you to a culture that has been meticulously documented by its people, in a language we can read and understand.  In certain ways it is markedly similar to our own, but in others quite, quite incomprehensible.

Dragons and Rats and Realities

Right.  This is complicated.  Before I start, there are a few bits of background you’ll need:

• For those who don’t know, I spend a fair bit of my time making steampunk miniatures.  Recently I have been making ‘time dragons’ – an ecclectic mix of papier maché, modelling clay, old watch parts, intention and creativity.
• Steampunk, for those not familiar with the term, is an imaginary retro-futuristic existence, something like the sci-fi worlds created by HG Wells and Jules Verne.
• As well as this, my metaphysical pondering blog, I also write one called Steampunk-Shrunk, which contains whimsical back stories about the models I make.
• Finally, you need to know that I live in an end terrace cottage and my neighbour has recently had a problem with rats in her loft, so her landlord called in pest control.

OK.  Now for what happened.  I’ll try to put it in chronological order, but I suspect time is somehow absent from parts of it.

As I said, I’d made these strange model dragons.  It was fun.  I then wrote a rather dark little story about them to publish on my other blog.  It said that they formed out of the rubbish that collects in corners and crannies of steampunk inventors’ workshops, coalesced into living creatures and flew away to inhabit caves in an undiscovered canyon, where they had started to breed.  (If anyone wants to check the story, it’s here, but there’s no need to unless you’re so inclined.)

The following day, the pest control man came.  I heard him chatting to my neighbour in our shared entrance hall, heard him head upstairs and wished he could have been some magical pied piper … but rats are rats.  I’d had them in my roof a few years back, heard them gnawing purposefully at who-knows-what and although there is a fire wall up there between the two lofts, I’d recently heard the occasional brief scuttle above my bedroom, so I wasn’t sorry to hear that they were being dealt with.

That night I went to bed.  I’d been going through one of my frequent spells of insomnia, so was not really surprised to find I was still awake at 3.10 in the morning.  Having looked at the clock, I sighed, turned over yet again, and tried to lie still.

Then quite suddenly I found myself sitting on my sofa downstairs.  I was surprised, mainly, and disorientated.  What was I doing here?  How had I got here?  Was it real?  I checked the sofa.  Yes, definitely mine.  The colours of the fabric were the same, I could feel the cushions against my body.  This still surprised me.  I couldn’t work out what had happened to propel me here.  My coffee table was just in front of me, in its accustomed position, yet something was wrong.  I felt – I honestly did – as if I’d entered some place that was and yet wasn’t in my home.

The room was fairly dark; not (now I think about it) as dark as it should have been in the middle of the night, but there was a dimness about the whole place, as if space acted slightly differently here.  The rest of the room should have been visible, but I was only aware of this one area.  And yes, there was a difference – my model time dragons were under the corner of the coffee table, which is definitely not where I had put them.

As soon as I became aware of the dragons, I noticed that they were moving.  That was WRONG.  Now I was genuinely scared.  They were making a scuffling sound and suddenly, as if at some unseen signal, they erupted into the room, scuttling and flying outwards and upwards in all directions.

Immediately I was back in my bed, eyes wide, heart pumping and body shaking.  A split second later, in the loft space above my head, there was a stampede of rats.  There must have been at least five or six of them.  I heard them race across from one side to the other.  Then silence again.

 

So what was that all about?

Yes, the most ‘rational’ explanation is that I’d finally fallen asleep for a few moments and the scuffling of the rats had woken me.  In my dream state their noise had become the noise of my dragons taking flight.  I’d then heard the rats running.

A few things didn’t fit, though.  Why was I so disorientated if I was dreaming?  We normally accept whatever reality we encounter in dreams quite comfortably.  Even before I noticed those dragons (and yes, as it happens they are roughly rat-sized) I felt uncomfortable, as if I’d strayed into one of those many-worlds/ alternate realities.

So now I’m left wondering.  Was it ‘just a dream’ or had I strayed – or been taken – into some alternate world where my ‘words became flesh’, so to speak?  Is there a reality out there now, in amongst all that strange dark matter, where my little dragons have indeed taken on an existence of their own?  Did I pay that world a fleeting visit, just to discover how ‘creative’ I really am?  Did (as my guides are suggesting) the same psychological trigger event occur in both worlds, causing the time dragons and poisoned rats to erupt into a frenzied movement at the same moment?

The time dragons here are quite inanimate now and so too, it seems, are the rats in the loft.  Strange, though, and interesting to ponder…

 

The Impossible Dream

If I had to fall back on accepted logic, I’d say that what happened last week, in terms of dreaming and waking experience and the link between the two, is impossible.

Fortunately, I don’t.

‘There are more things…in heaven and earth…’  And in my philosophy, they are dreamt of.

I’ve written before about some of the odd, precognitive dreams I have from time to time.  Last week, in the latest, I was given a salutary lesson on why I should never ignore them.

Each of us is at a unique place in our journey.  We have read books, had conversations, listened to the wise and received guidance in myriad ways, all of which places us at a certain level of awareness of those ‘more things’ Hamlet was speaking of.  Once we have accrued this level of knowing, we try to move back into comfortable oblivion at our peril.  We simply can’t un-know our knowledge.  That is what this dream experience taught me.

So what happened?

First, some background:
Several times a year, I need to traverse England, from my home in the south-west to be with family living out near the east coast.  I don’t drive and the public transport infrastructure here is expensive and poor.  After much experimentation, I’ve found a slow but steady and inexpensive method.  It involves catching a very early coach (there is only one a day) from my town to Heathrow Airport, where I have time for lunch and a rest, before catching a second coach to my destination.  It takes around 8 hours all told, but it’s comfortable and I can read en route.

Three nights before I was due to embark on one of these journeys last week, I had a dream.

I’m with a woman.  We are travelling together and although we are companions and get along on very familiar terms, she is the guiding figure, in some way.  We have luggage.  We have made careful plans.  We are sitting on a bench and nothing particular is happening around us, but suddenly she turns to me with an expression of shock and says, “We’ve missed the coach!”

We stare at each other with a mixture of disbelief and horror.

I could FEEL these emotions at a very deep and conscious level.  I heard her voice and tone with absolute clarity.  These are the aspects that separate this type of dream – the precogs – from normal everynight dreaming.  I woke knowing I’d had a precognition and I felt rattled.

A brief word about precognition and the future, before I continue to the (almost) inevitable conclusion:
There are, as my wise friend and teacher William has taught me, an infinite number of possible futures for any event.  They range from the virtually impossible to the virtually inescapable and cover all points in between.  A precognition is a foretaste of what is – at that moment in time – the most likely outcome.  It is not written in tablets of stone.  It is still possible to make changes and alter the future event, given sufficient intention and effort.

What I should have done, then, was to check and re-check my travel plans until I found the glitch that could result in missing the coach.  The guide-lady in my dream was providing me with an opportunity to do this and to avert the problems which would follow.  Instead, I merely thought through my plans and convinced myself that as I had only to rely on an alarm clock and a half-mile walk to the coach stop, I had no reason to worry.

So on the day of my journey I got up in plenty of time, prepared myself for travelling, put my folded ticket into the top of my bag and walked the short trip to the coach stop.  I arrived at 6:20, congratulated myself on being ten minutes early and sat on the bench to wait.  At 6:25, I casually took out the ticket and unfolded it, to check what time I’d be arriving at Heathrow.  That was when I saw it:

Coach departs opp. town hall 6:15

Exactly that feeling of disbelief and horror from my dream swept over me.  As in the dream, nothing changed around me, but I knew I now had a huge problem.  I’d been so sure of the 6:30 departure time, I hadn’t bothered to check.  My dreamtime companion wasn’t there in body, of course, but I suspect at some level she was watching to see how I’d get myself out of my self-inflicted problem.

I won’t bore you with all the details of my ensuing journey.  Suffice it to say that every connection (bus, walk, train, second train, race across the length of Heathrow terminal 3) was made with minutes or sometimes seconds to spare.  The mobile website I bought my train ticket on went down just after I’d paid so that I was almost refused entry to the platform and I finally reached the bus interchange at Heathrow seven minutes before my second coach left.

The oddest thing was that all the time I was engaged in this nightmarish journey, it felt as if it was playing out in these very specific ways to teach me a lesson.

“Yes,” I thought ruefully, as I stood squashed against poker-faced commuters on the train out of Bristol, “I needed to learn this lesson. I will make my connection, but none of it is going to be easy.”

Somewhere, in a dimension I couldn’t see, but could just about sense, the guide-lady from my dream watched and smiled, not unkindly, and nodded.

The guides may not be as accessible as they were once, but they are still here, always checking that I have held on to all they taught me, and chiding me gently if I try to put their wisdom aside.

As William told me, when he was just 12, “What’s important is the journeys – all the changes and where we go through and the different trains are the main thing.  You know that really.”

 

 

 

Taxonomical with the Truth

Taxonomy is something I’ve been thinking about recently, because it very much underlies our current world view.  Everything is classified and sub-classified so that it can be put into a tidy little box, marked neatly with a (preferably Latin) name and declared separate from everything else.  We do it with flora and fauna, obviously, but that mania for neat, clear, unambiguous boundaries and definitions has become a mainstay of life in general.  It’s how we understand and make sense of things – their features, their purposes, their very existence.

At times, the classifications have to be tweaked.  Poor old Pluto is downgraded from Planet to Big Rock; some garden plant suddenly gets a new name and all the garden centres have to readjust their labelling.  And don’t even get me started on the labels they use and change around in medical and psychological diagnoses…  Basically, though, humanity clings to the concept that everything that is, can be labelled, and that this is a Good Thing.

Was it always so?  We know our Greek and Roman forebears were keen on this organised labelling idea, but if we go way back to the people who made those strange and wonderful structures that seem to evade neat classification and confound the theorists, I suspect a very different world view was in place.

We are told by the experts that these creations were burial chambers or astronomical observatories or temples or meeting places or whatever the latest fragments of archaeology suggest.  They dig in the dark and assume that a few pieces of charred sheep bone or potsherds will allow them to make a classification.  The truth is, though, we don’t get it.  We, as 21st century humans, simply can’t see why so many people would work together and go to such enormous lengths to create massive, perfectly aligned and painstakingly constructed edifices such as the Giza pyramid complex, Gobekli Tepe, the Stonehenge landscape or Teotihuacan for ANY of those purposes.  The nearest (relatively) modern equivalents we can find are the great Gothic cathedrals of mediaeval Europe or intricate mausoleums, so, for want of better data, we decide that’s what they must have been ‘for’.

Deep inside, though, we know there has to be more to it than that.

What if our distant ancestors lived in a world where classification was considered counterproductive or, at the very least, irrelevant?

Think of all those folk tales and ancient religious texts where a name was considered to be a dangerous thing – so powerful that it was only to be used by initiates, and then only in the direst of circumstances.  That suggests that categorisation per se was not the way their minds worked.  Did these people see the world, and indeed the cosmos, as something so integrated, that to divide it into its constituent parts would be to destroy, weaken or pollute it?  Was it, indeed, a form of heresy?

What if, instead of saying, “Hey, guys, let’s build a gigantic temple to the gods here,”  or “Oh, this would be a great place to build an observatory,” those wise and distant people would perhaps work together to build something that was not this or that or the other, but something that was this AND that AND the other AND all that they could possibly create as a microcosm of the universe itself?

The current mainstream science-based world view is that everything is a fortuitous accident – evolution and climate, gravity and the tilt of an axis here or there somehow randomly resulted in all this.  As such, it’s very fragile, very likely to dissolve back into chaos and we need to impose order on it, if we are going to make any sense of it at all.

If we can imagine a society where such a view does not hold sway – a society where the skies above us, the planet we inhabit, the plants, creatures and all of us exist as a conscious, intelligent, unified whole, with each aspect relying on the rest for its existence, there would be no need to separate and divide it.  On the contrary, all that could be done to celebrate its perfect symmetries and unity would be a job worth doing well.  I suspect that such a society would have a language based in something that expands naturally, like mathematics or perhaps musical notation, rather than words that label, define and confine.  Perhaps such a language, were it ever rediscovered, would help us towards an understanding of our mysterious ancestors, and our cosmos.

 

Vitruvian Lines – Part 3

In the previous post, I spoke of how well the role of an ‘outlier’ would suit those who fit within the square, rather than the circle of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man – the sensitive people who are more comfortable on the fringes of a society.

It would seem highly likely that the ancient outliers held a position of very high status within nomadic or migrating groups, since they were responsible for everyone’s safety and the success of the journey.  What happened to them, though, when the travellers decided to settle and build permanent homes?  I suspect that they retained their revered status within the tribe.  There is a small but important piece of evidence for this.

Within the last year – so I learned from a recent BBC archaeology programme – it has been discovered that Avebury – the world’s largest stone circle – originally had a building at its centre, and that building (which predates the stones) was … a house.

At first, this seems something of a let-down.  For years we have venerated and romanticised these stone structures as the site of religious rituals, meaningful astrological observation or sacrifice to pagan gods.  Are we now to believe that they went to the huge effort of building a stone circle, a series of elaborate avenues and other complex structures to honour a simple house?

I suspect that is exactly what they did.   The symbolic importance of the first settlers’ homes would have been immense.  This was the starting point for a new way of life – a new beginning for their society.  In myth, traditional stories and legend, the House of a clan, family or tribe is revered – not the building itself, so much as the dynasty it represents.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that our distant ancestors chose the site of that first home to build their stone circles as a gathering place.  The interesting thing about stone circles, though, is that they very often have outliers – stones placed at a distance from the main structure.  Often these stones mark a particular view, such as the only position from which a sunrise can be viewed in a gap between distant hills on the solstice.  They can also mark the beginning of a causeway or avenue leading to some other important place.  I think the idea of a central gathering place was hard-wired into these people, but so was the need and reverence for the outliers.

So does the structure of a settled society render outliers/ ‘square fillers’ obsolete?

Absolutely not.

In many primal societies people with this special skills-set – heightened senses, an ability to link telepathically to other times or places, other dimensions, even, and a degree of separation from the everyday life of the society – are appointed as shamans, healers and seers.  Their role can be to travel between worlds, to care for the psychological health of the group, to look into the future or past to provide the answers they need or to uncover the reasons for sickness or misfortune.  They are the psychic equivalent to the outlier – visiting regions the rest can’t reach and feeding back necessary information.

Humanity is always journeying forwards.  We have seen that these talented and unusual individuals are not particularly popular with leaders and experts in our society’s structure.  Some, though, manage to have a profound effect despite officialdom.  When they do, they are responsible for creating the huge shifts in perception that move society into new areas.  The Einsteins, the Teslas and the Newtons are able to access insights and understanding simply not available to the common man or woman.  These people work silently, compulsively, alone and – for reasons we’ll see later – are able to make huge leaps to a higher level of understanding of how the universe really works.

I’m fully aware that so far I’ve written well over 3000 words on this subject and not yet addressed the core issue I promised to discuss – an explanation of how autistic perception works.  Stay with me.  The first few sections were an overview, showing how our present Western society isn’t structured to encourage or promote autistic perception, while others apparently are or have been.  They have also demonstrated the persistence of autistic perception and touched on its value to society.

The next section will begin to look more closely at what it involves, while after that, I’ll attempt to draw in research from three very different disciplines so that we can finally examine what autistic perception is, how it works and the benefits for the population as a whole.

The Answer

This morning.

Very early.

I’d been dreaming – a comfortable, satisfying dream featuring people I love doing useful, good things.  Each action, although there were separate little scenes, linked to the rest and I was feeling as if we were really getting somewhere.  It was a continuation of the dream I’d had the previous night.

And now I was no longer asleep.  Whether I was fully awake, I couldn’t say.

I was – waiting?

That was how it felt.

Waiting for pieces of a puzzle to drop into place.  There didn’t seem to be anything I needed to do other than lie there, in that extremely relaxed state and wait for something very wonderful to happen.

Slowly, a delicious glowing sensation began to flow through my mind.  It spilled over into my body.  I could actually feel those pieces dropping into position, and as each one joined the others, I began to feel better and better.

This was perfect.

This was the answer.

I was buzzing now with a gentle excitement.  I knew, with absolute certainty, that the puzzle was solved and I’d been left with the answer to the question that has been my obsession for so long.

“Is that it, then?”  I remember thinking, curiously.  “I’ve done it.  I’ve achieved my soul purpose for this lifetime.  Do I die now?”

I didn’t die.  I looked at the clock.

02:54

“No, of course I don’t die yet!” I chided myself.  “I have to write it down.  I have to get this down NOW before I fall asleep again.”

Realising how close to sleep I still was, I forced myself to sit up, switched on the bedside light and picked up the pen and journal that always wait patiently beside my bed, for just such a moment as this.

I jotted down everything that had entered my mind.  The writing was rough and jerky, but it would do for now.  A neater, fuller copy would follow later.

I turned the light off, rolled over, smiled and waited for sleep to return.  Instead, my whole body started to radiate the most intense heat.  A cold November night, but I flung off the bedclothes and sizzled.  It wasn’t unpleasant – just a rush of intense energy.

How long I stayed like that, I have no idea.  By 5am I was relaxing again.  The next time I checked the clock it was almost 9.

A teaching day, and the house to clear up for my family coming at the weekend.  I grinned to myself.

After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.

All day I’ve worked.  Now it’s night time and I’m tired, red-eyed, needing to sleep.  Still there’s nothing to show for this morning’s adventure beyond the hasty scribblings in my journal…

…and this delicious feeling that this most precious of jewels now sits here inside me.

One day, my friends, I’ll find the right words to share it with you.  For now, this must suffice.

 

 

Unempirical Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O Brave New World

I love the Flammarion engraving.  Its an image that feels hard-wired into my mind.  It is, quite simply, my mission statement.

Yesterday I sat for many hours with a dear friend, engaged on one of those rambling metaphysical discussions that sometimes go round in circles and sometimes find a new, untrodden path.  I’d like to share what happened with you – my wider community of dear friends – and would welcome your comments and ideas on the implications of what was suggested…

So, specifically, we had agreed on several points:

• That there are certain places on our planet – sacred sites, as they’re commonly known, and certain artefacts – usually behind glass in museums – which in some mysterious way hold a key to piercing that veil (see picture above) and accessing the akashic realms.
• That it’s possible to enter an altered state and reach this akasha in the presence of these places or objects, but equally possible to be totally unmoved by them.  It appears to depend on your state of mind.
• That the ideal way to approach these sacred places and objects, should you wish for the enlightenment they may facilitate, is what’s known as ‘A-thought’ (see here for a fuller explanation of this concept) – the state of mind we enter when following synchronicity or remote viewing, for example.
• That it’s difficult, sometimes, to enter that state at will, as we so easily get sucked back into the ‘common sense’ world of cause-and-effect and logic.  That’s why so many seekers have used ritual, psychotropic substances, drumming, dance or sensory deprivation to jump-start such an experience.
• That we could do with a bit of guidance before we next set off to hunt down the hidden realms and the treasures lurking there.

“We could try asking my Guides,” I said.

Koimul, the guide I can sometimes channel, has, as regular readers will know, taken a recent interest in my explorations of metaphysical realms.  It felt like the right sort of question to ask.

As we’d hoped, Koimul was right on the case and happy to discuss our questions.  It soon became clear, in fact, that Koimul had been tuning in to our conversation and made several references to it in what followed.

We were told that certain sites we’d considered visiting  ‘WOULD ATTUNE YOU TO THEIR ENERGY’ and provide ‘ESOTERIC KNOWLEDGE FOR REACHING WHAT [YOU] SEEK.

We asked for a definition of what – exactly – we were seeking. (It’s so easy to get mired in obscurity when discussing these numinous ideas.)  Koimul called it ‘MAWDEN’ and defined it as ‘REALITY BEYOND FOUR DIMENSIONS’.

Next we asked about the ‘sacred’ sites and artefacts.  I’d read in Seth’s books that no place is, of itself, more sacred than any other, but is made so by the energy placed there by those who use it.  I’d always wanted some clarity on that, as certain places certainly ‘feel’ more special than others.  So were these places and objects some kind of ‘tool’?

‘NOT OF THEMSELVES,’ Koimul explained, ‘BUT THEY LEAD YOU TO THAT WHICH YOU SEEK’.

Okay, so how, exactly did that work?

We were told, ‘VISIT THE SITES.  LEARN WHAT THEY HAVE TO TEACH YOU AND FOLLOW THE PATH THEY LEAD YOU ON VIA SYNCHRONICITY’.  Koimul explained that the sites were not sacred or special in themselves, but that the knowledge that humans can’t always access is encoded or – literally – crystallised within the stones or artefacts in these places.  It becomes possible for us to access them if we are in the right frame of mind – that A-Thought state we had already identified as important. 

With amazing clarity, Koimul went on to tell us how each member of the group who will be going on this trip has particular abilities to contribute and added ‘COMBINE YOUR SKILLS WITH WILLIAM’S SIGHT TO MOVE TO YOUR GOAL’.

That was unexpected.  William, my remote viewing partner, will not be joining us in person, but he usually gets involved remotely and views places we visit, sometimes seeing things we don’t.  This time, though, Koimul had a new role in mind for Will:  ‘WILLIAM WILL VIEW THE SITES IN ADVANCE AND HE WILL LEAD [YOU] TO THEM’.

The more I think about it, the cleverer Koimul’s idea sounds.  It seems to me as if what we’ll be doing is reversing cause-and-effect.  Normally I go and hang out somewhere and give Will the time or location (the cause).  He then views where I am (the effect).  Reversing it, though, means the effect – what Will ‘sees’ – is established before the event that ’causes’ it – us going there – has occurred.  We only arrive there because he says we have done so, even though it won’t have happened at that point.

Have I got that right?

Koimul appears to be preparing us to enter whichever locations emerge, having by-passed time and cause-and-effect and having neatly defied logic.  That should certainly put us in the correct frame of mind to be open to whatever synchronicity unfolds…

 

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?

 

 

 

A Small Step for Me-kind

What is me-kind?  Well in my philosophy – gleaned mainly from the Seth Materials and backed up by the intuitiony bit inside that says, ‘Yeah, that feels right,’ – the overarching personality that I understand as ‘me’ has had/ is having/ will have many lives or incarnations.  These all, obviously, take place in different historical times and geographical locations.  I’m reasonably sure I have, for example, had ‘past’ lives in Egypt as a slave girl, Europe as a survivor of a Viking raid, Atlantis as a teacher and Glastonbury as a mage and Ice Age chieftain’s daughter.

I’ve encountered these alternative ‘me’s in dreams, past life regressions and psychic readings.  I’ve discovered individuals who play key parts in my present life cropping up in those lives too.  All this is fairly standard reincarnational theory as it tends to be interpreted here in the West, in metaphysical circles, at any rate.

Seth takes it further though.  From a vantage point beyond physical existence, Seth takes time out of the equation.  Past, present and future lives, from that perspective, not only happen in the one, unfolding eternal moment beyond our Earthly concept of time, but affect one another.  A discovery in one life can and will affect what happens in another.  An intractable problem may cause us – with help from our soul family – to set up another life, with the express purpose of finding a solution.  Slightly mind-bending, I’ll grant you, but worth considering.

Auguste Rodin: L’Âge d’airain (The Age of Bronze), life-sized plaster cast, c. 1876.

Take my feet, for example.  Well don’t.  You wouldn’t want them – honestly.  They have been causing me grief and problems for many years.  There’s nothing physically wrong with them, but they’ve usually felt numb and icy cold, or they could ache and burn and the skin just felt too tight.  In recent years I haven’t been a confident walker.  I’m scared of slipping or falling on uneven ground; I tend to shuffle rather than stride.  Most of all – and this sounds terribly strange, I know – they just haven’t felt as if they belong to me.

 

Now over the last few weeks, I’ve been attending Reiki healing sessions with a lady who wanted case studies for her Reiki 2 training.  I’ve had some strange experiences during Reiki sessions in the past, so I wasn’t altogether surprised when she asked whether I’d ever broken any bones in my foot.  I hadn’t.

“It’s odd then,” she said.  “I had this very clear image of just about every bone in your left foot being smashed and broken.  Horrible.”

In the time between that and my next healing, she’d been back and discussed this with her teacher.  He’d told her not to share random visions and images with clients, as all sorts of things could enter the mind whilst giving Reiki.  He instructed her only to talk about them if they kept reappearing throughout the session and were particularly strong and persistent.

“But this one WAS,” she explained to me, at the end of our next session.  “This time I saw your feet bound – really tightly.  It was like those poor Chinese women, you know?”

I shuddered.  Yes, that would explain every one of the painful and uncomfortable sensations I’d had in my feet.  It would explain my difficulties with walking and my fear of falling.  ‘Past life?’ we both wondered.  It seemed very likely.  Seth talks about ‘bleed-throughs’ from one of our lives to another.  I needed more information.

As usual, I went to discuss it with Koimul, my ever present and patient Guide, whom I can reach via dowsing over a keyboard.  Here’s the discussion we had, partly dowsed and partly received telepathically:

Do I have a ‘past’ life in which my feet are bound, as in Chinese culture?

YES

That explains so much about the way they sometimes feel, but why are those pains bleeding through into this life? I’m assuming it has something to do with being controlled and dominated?

NO YOUR FOCUS IN THIS LIFE WAS TO BREAK FREE

And I’ve done it, yes?

YES

So why does the foot pain persist?

SO THAT YOU COULD RECOGNISE THE GREAT STEP YOU TOOK

And now I have done so…

YOUR FEET WILL BE FREE

Was D my husband in that life?

YES

Hmm. It explains so much. Can what I’ve done in this life help the ‘me’ in that other life?

NOT PHYSICALLY

But in her dreams she can know freedom and walk in my feet?

YOU HAVE UNDERSTOOD PERFECTLY

May I know her name?

XANG

Interesting, eh?  One final synchronicity:

I went to bed that night wondering about Xang and her life.  Just before I feel asleep, I saw a very clear image of a building with a low stone wall in front and a small dog running along outside.  It was so vivid, I was fully awake and wondering what it meant.  I immediately saw the same vision again.  The next day, I decided to Google bound feet.  The first link I clicked on was a video made by a lady who had travelled to China and found some elderly women whose feet had been bound as children.  The opening scene of the film was exactly the image I’d seen the night before.

And yes, my feet are feeling much better now.