Journeying Beyond Dreams and Death

I was born – prematurely in 1937 before antibiotics and child care – so I was weak and dying. Because my systems were not developed to breathe or digest properly, I existed between life and death. So I knew death and was reaching for life. This book is about my findings in these two worlds and what lies beyond them. See Bed of Pain

Because I was two months premature and born dead – not breathing – the doctor threw my lifeless body aside and told my mother that I would be a weak child and she could have more children. However, my grandmother witnessed this and carried my body off and bathed me in hot and cold water and got me breathing. I owe her my life, she was my resurrection. The name of that resurrection was love. My grandmother had given birth to 13 children, some of who died. I have a sense of her bearing an old and deep wisdom passed on through generations of women.

What I missed out of the story was that the gap between my thrown aside body and my grandmothers resurrection was that I had a near death experience. That because my lifeline, my umbilical cord, was cut early and I was not breathing, so the delay led to my dying. I know many people cannot believe that a baby can remember such things. Well true they cannot remember as we do with words and images, but all life forms have enormous emotional responses and are known to experience a conditioned reflex. Whatever it was caused my baby self to remember, the experience left me with the desire to share the experience, to communicate to others about the wonder that we all are, about health of our body and amazing world death reveals to us. See The Baby Who Became Tony

It took ages to realise that I was born a runt – a small or weak person – that could not function as normal healthy people can. I didn’t realise the extent of its influence until I journeyed to Australia and had to have  a full medical examination to enter. The woman doctor, a very efficient and straight-out person, asked me did I know I was born prematurely? I said I did and asked her how she knew. She said, look at the roof of your mouth, it shows your body never completed its growth.

I am one of the unborn. I have maintained a level of awareness that is natural in the womb, but that most people leave behind before they are born. This enables me to do things in my mind that are not easy for other people. The so called religious seers are freaks, people like me who maintain unusual levels of awareness. They look at life through different perspectives. I look at life through the eyes of the afterlife, or the prebirth, but it fucks up my ‘normal’ life quite extensively.” See Mind of a Newborn

Contains –

Huge World of Dreams

Why do we need sleep?

What can one do to become whole?

Beyond Dreams

Lucid Dreaming

Going Beyond

You Are Everything

Why can’t we know

Going Beyond Death

I’m Dead – But I’m Still Alive – How Come?

What is Body Soul and Spirit?

So What Happens When I Die?

How do we transfer from our body to the universal?

Going beyond our boundaries

Getting ready for the voyage of death

Adventures in the Inner World

Great Learning Opportunities

Gods and Humans

Beyond the Beyond

The Return to a body

Journey Beyond Dreams and Death

Tony Crisp

The ability to allow the process of dreaming to be experienced consciously has gradually shown me a totally different view of life and death than is usual in today’s world. Of course this knowledge has been known in the East for far longer, but it has been expressed in language that is often not really understood in the West, or is taken in a very mystical or mysterious way. But expressed in today’s language I feel we can gain either direct experience of it or see how it is part of our everyday experience. See The Waking Lucid Dream

So I will start with something we are all aware of but have not seen the enormous possibilities of – your waking experience. An obvious part of your waking experience is your breathing. Now I was taught that our breathing is part of the biological and almost mechanical workings of our body. It is just an automatic response, so when we exert our body our breathing automatically adjusts. It is an aspect of the homeostatic/self-regulatory process of our body. We have a certain amount of consciously controlled will and so can speed up our breathing or slow it down. In a similar way we move our hands, our head, our body consciously. I call that ability our Conscious Will. See Self-regulation

But that movement carries on even when asleep or knocked unconscious. That movement I call the Life Will, because without it we would not be alive. The same applies to our heart beating, and the thousand and one movements our body makes spontaneously to keep us alive. The Conscious Will I describe as movement we make by deciding to make them. I know that is not a very accurate, but bear with me. The Life Will moves our body spontaneously without us even being conscious, it is the process that created our body in our mother’s womb.

We now know that when we sleep and dream all our brain signals to the voluntary muscles are stopped. This is known as Sleep Paralysis, at that point the Life Will is in control, and at times people become aware at some level of what they are experiencing and are often frightened. See Sleep Paralysis

 Example: ‘It starts as a dream, but I gradually become aware that I cannot move. The harder I try to move the worse it gets and I become very frightened. I can neither move nor wake myself up. Sometimes I feel as if I am leaving my body. But to deal with the fear I have learned – it’s a recurring thing – to stop struggling, knowing that I will eventually wake.’ Susan Y.

The strange thing is that if we analyse what has happened in these situations we realise that we are frightened or even terrified of the processes that keep us alive.

So we have a waking experience and a sleep experience during which a powerful Life process takes over. Mostly we are not aware of the working of this Life Will because we are asleep/unconscious. Why?

We need to remember that the human personality – the You that you call yourself, with a name, is only a tiny thing. It is moved and tossed around by all manner of drives, ambitions, emotions, fears, temptations, worries, love and desire with its pains and hopes; it is something we take so seriously and get carried away into awful situations. But we have to remember also, that having a personality with self-awareness is a very new thing and has only existed for a short time. Before that we were like animals that lived only in the Life Will – what we usually call instincts. So the development of self-awareness was an immense step, and left us very vulnerable, and still does. So it is important to realise that our waking self is only partly aware of the tremendous forces or processes that are all a part of being a living, breathing, self-aware human person. In fact, most of what constitutes our being alive is beyond our normal awareness. See The Unconscious

Many people if their waking awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own ‘sleep’ world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die.

The question why has a reasonable answer. Of course there are many whys. Why is our being split into a small conscious self and huge unconscious self? Why do some people wake up in the sleep world? Why do we need to sleep?

Why do we need sleep?

Dream researchers William Dement and Charles Fisher of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital were the first to show that we sleep in order to dream, not for physical rest alone. In their “dream deprivation” experiments, subjects were awakened whenever a dream began and were not permitted to go through with the dream. No dreams were allowed for up to six nights, nor were subjects allowed to nap during the day. In their waking lives these subjects became more and more anxious and irritable, and their judgement in decisions became poor and less in accord with standards they would normally have. Subjects drank more, smoked more, and overall showed more and more hostility, resentment, and disintegration of the personality.

‘Allan Rechtschaffen and his co-workers in Chicago have convincingly demonstrated that sleep loss can be fatal. Sleep-deprived rats fail to regulate their energy and literally consume themselves metabolically.’ If rats were deprived of sleep, they would naturally be deprived of dreaming, so what is the important issue, dreams or sleep?

Waking a person each time they dream quickly leads to psychological breakdown. Animals died when this was continued. We can therefore say that dreaming is not simply random firing of the brain. It is in some way vital to physical and psychological health.

Scientific opinion has not reached a conclusion as why this is so, but my own and other researchers have a more certain explanation.

After the first and second world wars, hundreds of ex-soldiers suffered recurring nightmares about battle scenes. The dreams re-presented the original experience, often accompanied by the original body movements made to escape the horror being faced. Charles Rycroft, in his book Anxiety and Neurosis, describes the observed results on people of unexpected disasters such as earthquakes and train accidents. Among other things they have a tendency to ‘waking actions and dreams in which the traumatic experience is repeated.’ He goes on to say that these repetitions in dreams or actions can be ‘thought of as manifestations of the healing process. By repeating the trauma, the traumatised person is, as it were, trying to get it in front of himself again so that he can anticipate it, react anxiously to it and then assimilate or ‘get over’ it in the way he would any other distressing experience.’

Working with such dreams leads to the view that there is a self-regulatory process within our psyche, which attempts to find healing through the presentation of such traumatic incidents in dreams. Jung and Hadfield in particular supported this view of dreaming. My view and experience of this is explained more fully in Life’s Little Secrets also Nightmares

 Most of us have some understanding of self-regulation in our body, but few have any real experience of it in their personal life. For example, if the self-regulatory processes of your being ceased its action you would be dead in a very short time. Even a brisk walk causes such enormous changes in the body it would kill you without the action of self-regulation. The production of lactic acid, unchecked, would destroy the system. Also the drop in blood sugar, unless balanced by the release of glucose from the storage in tissues and liver, would result in collapse.

The level after level of safety factors built into our system are nothing short of incredible. For adequate functioning our blood pressure needs to be at about 110 to 120 (i.e. it displaces 110 millimetres of mercury). It can drop to 70-80 before a critical situation arises in which tissue may die because blood is not reaching it. If we lose a lot of blood, even as much as 30 or 40 percent, the self-regulatory process maintains adequate blood pressure by constricting the blood vessels. This action is controlled by a part of the brain. If that brain area is injured or destroyed, other centres take control. If they are eliminated, ganglia in the sympathetic nervous system direct the action. If they too are eliminated the walls of the arteries and veins themselves regulate their own activity.

This does not to me suggest an automatic and random action. It suggests an overall and insightful activity. And if we look at self-regulation of the personality, the ego we can see the same. But I need to remind you of what has already been said, “So it is important to realise that our waking self is only partly aware of the tremendous forces or processes that are all a part of being a living, breathing, self-aware human person. In fact, most of what constitutes our being alive is beyond our normal awareness. Many people if their waking awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own ‘sleep’ world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die.”

Also, as was remarked, “The strange thing is that if we analyse what has happened in these situations we realise that we are frightened or even terrified of the processes that keep us alive.”

The obvious reason is that most men and women in today’s society are completely unaware, out of touch with, frightened of the power within them that constantly tries to regulate their being. To say it more clearly people are terrified of nightmares which are part of the self-regulatory process (By repeating the trauma, the traumatised person is, as it were, trying to get it in front of himself again so that he can anticipate it, react anxiously to it and then assimilate or ‘get over’ it.) Many people are terrified or cannot meet death or are traumatised by a family member or partner’s death. Millions of people are dependent on anti-depressants, alcohol or other powerful drugs such as nicotine to deal with everyday life. Yet death and change seen from the process of self-regulation is a natural part of our life cycle.

If you feel that is an awful or shocking thing to say, it is another sign that your self, your ego, is badly out of touch and misaligned with whatever gives you life. To quote from a response to someone’s dream, “First recognise clearly that some process, some force, causes you to exist. You can call this what you wish, it does not matter. It remains what it is. Next recognise that this process that you are causes changes in your life and its action is apparent as growth and physical changes as you age. Next, decide to go along with this process. Offer yourself as you are to it. Let things happen – allow changes to take place. You will be shown the way. See Opening to Life”

I feel that many people live in a powerfully defended castle, with the drawbridge drawn up in defence of anything that they feel will threaten their small personality, the ‘you’ call yourself, with a name, yet it is only a tiny thing. Most people have inbuilt mechanisms which prevent any spontaneous healing activity. It is natural to pull our hand away from a hot surface because of the pain. We do this ‘without thinking’, unconsciously in fact. Similarly, we unconsciously pull away from any painful or frightening emotions, even though it may be in our best interests to release or integrate them.

The non-release leads to physical tension; a massive use of energy to contain such emotions; and development of physical illness. Resistance may also be in the form of not wanting to change; fear of the new; feeling threatened by fresh views of life or any questioning of the values one has long lived by. To free oneself from such resistances needs a positive motivation and the learning of new psychological and even physical skills.

It is interesting that many of the ways life heals us are avoided by us or are felt as unpleasant. For instance, vomiting, a fever, a boil, are often fought against with pain killers or potions designed to cover up unpleasant symptoms – even sneezing is often stifled. And these ways of healing also apply psychologically, and can be allowed instead of stifled or run away from.

What can one do to become whole?

This has already been dealt with in Life’s Little Secrets and backed up by People’s Experience of LifeStream

But a great teacher of self-regulation was Carl Jung, so I quote his view of how to achieve wholeness.

“What then did these people do in order to achieve the progress which freed them? As far as I could see they did nothing but let things happen… The art of letting things happen, action in non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Master Eckhart, became a key for me… The key is this: we must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace. It would be a simple enough thing to do if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists solely in watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.

Nothing could be simpler than this, and yet right here the difficulties begin. Apparently no fantasy fragment is at hand – yes there is one, but it is too stupid! Thousands of good excuses are brought against it: one cannot concentrate on it; it is too boring; what could come of it? It is ‘nothing but’, etc. The conscious raises prolific objections. In fact, it often seems bent on blotting out the spontaneous fantasy activity despite the intention, nay, the firm determination of the individual, to allow the psychic processes to go forward without intervention.” Quoted from The Secret of the Golden Flower: Chinese Book of Life by Richard Wilhelm (Editor, Translator), C G Jung (Foreword)

Beyond Dreams

It seems a long journey to get beyond dreams and death, but if I went straight to the point most people would not believe, so I have to build a strong foundation upon which to state what I want to put forward.

If we are to go beyond dreams, we must first understand them and break through the surface symbolism into direct understanding. So a few facts about dreams are necessary:

Whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.

It is also important to realise that every image, every scary or terrifying thing, is taken place inside you, in your mind, as you sleep. This means that every awful animal, every scary thing or person, is created out of your own fears and must not be seen as outside you as happens in waking awareness. The problem is that we are often scared of or frightened of actually experiencing our emotions and so they confront us in our dreams. Avoiding them or controlling them is like running away from oneself – there is no escape.

In dreams seeds often represent your sperm or ovum; one’s children or feelings about one’s children; hopes for children; the collected influence and experience of the past; a new idea arising out of past experience; a suggestion; a possibility or potential; something that can emerge in your life. 

A single cell, which is a seed from which all life forms evolved from, doesn’t become old or die because it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it does  so it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. We all started from the original one cell, and we, you and I,  are the result of gathered experience.

No plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories, education and programming you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient self.

Finding this very ancient self, hidden as it is by all your personal thinking and opinions, you find you are free from all the painful emotions, suicidal urges and personal hurts. To explore it see Opening to Life

As adults we believe we are complete and whole. But what I sense is that we are only a phase, and out of us can emerge another being, carrying forward into a different sort of existence, all that can arise  from you. A seed is a return to the source of life and it/our beginnings under the sun. Consciousness on our planet started in the slime of creation, the slime we return to, to procreate. And from that slime which is a vehicle for our seed to exist in, our awareness goes through the whole process of evolution as we develop in mother;s womb, the dividing of cells, the forming of structure and organs, the creation of a creature with gills, and on to a human type form ready to breathe air, carrying your seed onwards.

As an egg and sperm we are tiny single celled creatures. The next two stages of development as the cells increase in size and number resembles the activities found in many simple living things such as plants. The twenty day old embryo develops four brachial grooves, which in the embryo of a fish grow into gills. At this point the formative forces which produce a fish are active, as were the formative forces of a plant at an earlier stage. These are then supplanted by forces which bring about features of the potential mammalian upright animal we could be. See Programmed 

Also, nearly always when people dream about someone they know or a strange new person or situation they automatically believe the dream is about that person, situation or animal. But when we think of our friend or partner our thoughts are not them – just our thoughts and feelings about them. So dream images are ways of communicating via our associations not actual things or people. In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects and places of our dream.

An important point to know about this relates to the growing use of virtual reality in daily life. Dreams are the greatest expression of virtual reality, and people are often frightened of going to sleep because of their dreams or nightmares. Yet it is provable that you cannot be hurt in your dreams. You cannot drown, you can’t die in a dream, no tiger or other animal can harm you. Of course you can feel feelings of dying, or being hurt, or drowning, but they are all images you create because you feel afraid and you haven’t faced up to your fears – but it is all virtual reality. See Avoid Being Victims; Dreams are Like a Computer Game

Here are a few examples:

Example: I was getting ready to leave and this dark haired guy told me I couldn’t leave, I felt scared and was going to leave anyways, he pulled out a pistol and shot me in the stomach, I fell down, but there was no blood. The thoughts in my head was, “OH NO”. Next thing I remember is that I was still on the floor in the same place and I got up and I remembered being shot but I didn’t seem to have any pain or blood and was moving normally etc. I started looking for a way to leave I was sneaking around trying not to get noticed so that I could get out of there w/o the shooter guy seeing me.

The interesting thing in the example is that even though she could see no hurt came from being shot, yet she was still scared of the guy with the shooter. And it is overcoming such fears that can release you from terror and hurts that haunt us. But here are some dreams where the dreamer feels no fear.

Example: I was trying to confront an extraordinary haunting that was influencing a man who was on a deserted bus, and then felt I had to confront whatever was the source of the ‘haunting’ that was pulling him into his inner mind in a form of Buddhist trance. I turned away from the man and saw just to my right a short distance from the bus an animal that was the ‘haunter’. It was a mammal of no particular type – a bit like a mixture of dog, rat and guinea pig. It seemed very ordinary and tame, and stood looking at me. I walked toward it and stretched out my hand. It was a tan colour with short fur and gave a feeling of being okay to approach, so I touched it to stroke. This was okay and I was thinking there was no problem when the creature leapt at my throat in a flash of movement and dived into my body to eat my insides.

This sounds disturbing but I simply observed this and thought to myself that stroking and trying to be friendly was no way of dealing with this thing. It was as if I was in command of the imagery so I simply formed another image of my body. The only way I felt that I might deal with the creature was to not feel panic at its attacks. In fact, apart from the gory imagery, there was nothing to be frightened of, as the creature was only attacking my dream image of myself. As I wasn’t identified with this, it couldn’t hurt me. That was the end of the dream.

The first example of the dreamer still locked in the feeling that the imagery of the dream is like waking life – so she remained scared. The second example is of the dreamer still locked in the imagery of the dream, but not feeling fear so he could be in command of the imagery.

Lucid Dreaming

In the last example the dreamer wasn’t lucid in any real sense, but he was fearless which enabled him to be master of his imagery. To dream with awareness that you are dreaming is called Lucid Dreaming. It is one of the most amazing frontiers of human life. It opens possibilities denied by our physical body. You then enter sleep with critical faculties, with active curiosity, and the ability to explore what you find. When you become lucid in sleep you carry the bright torch of personal awareness into the depths of your body and mind. This is a frontier only a few people have crossed.  Like the frontiers of sea and sky that past generations overcame, the frontier of awareness holds enormous treasures and benefits.  However, unlike the frontiers presented by the exploration of the oceans and space, the crossing of this frontier is open to us all.

I believe there is nothing beyond what is included in the polarities of waking and sleep. But usually we call sleep a period of unconsciousness, but in lucid experience we can explore to the very beginning of our being – what I call The Core. And that gives freedom of an extraordinary kind. In the waking world if you jump off a high building it would kill you – well, not really, but it would certainly mess up that body. But in the world of dreams, and especially lucid dreams, you can of course experience death- and you can do it again and again, because that it all it is, an experience. See The Core

What is so difficult for most people to grasp is that every dream is a real life virtual reality. But unlike those of computer games and computer generated versions you are firmly in the action and feeling it as if it were real. Therefore, if you ‘dream’ of falling you will usually feel extraordinary fear. And of course, if you dream of having a wonderful sexual encounter it IS wonderful, with depths of experience not usually available in waking life. To really understand dreaming and lucid dreaming you have to understand that you are in an experience without boundaries. I know that is hard for most people to grasp, locked as they are in their view of the world as being subject to time, space and what is usually called ‘reality’. So come with me into another world in which thoughts create your environment, and imagination is a tool with which you can create it. So most people who enter it usually create a world much like the physical world they are so familiar with – people with bodies, gender, up and down, houses and no connection between people except through words and body signals. Pretty boring when you know your way around the many dimensions you exist in. But their dream world is frightening or intriguing because it is so totally unlike ‘real’ life. I want to say here that I was also lost in an awful real world of terrors that I found my way out of through learning the things mentioned here. See Integration – meeting oneself

The waking world and the dream world are not separate, just like the mind and the body are not separate. What I realised was that dreaming, especially lucid dreaming is like dying. The old saying sleep is a little death is true. In lucid dreaming you realise that you cannot die, and the brain is not the final thing that gives you life. Here is an example of living in that world by Sir Auckland Geddes, an eminent British Anatomist, describes his own out of body experience, which contains many of these features.

Example: Becoming suddenly and violently ill with gastro-enteritis I quickly became unable to move or phone for help. As this was occurring I noticed I had an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ consciousness. The ‘A’ was my normal awareness, and the ‘B’ was external to my body watching. From the ‘B’ self I could see not only my body, but also the house, garden and surrounds. I need only think of a friend or place and immediately he was there and I was later able to find confirmation for my observations. In looking at my body, I noticed that the brain was only an end organ, like a condensing plate, upon which memory and awareness played. The mind, I saw, was not in the brain, the brain was in the mind, like a radio in the play of signals. I then observed my daughter come in and discover my condition, and I saw her telephone a doctor friend, and saw the doctor also at the same time.

The fascinating experience describes the timeless and space less quality of the experience – he was in two places at the same time, could observe the true nature of the brain, and could observe everyone and every place too. It also shows the ability to enter this condition without dream symbols – virtually every dream shows the dreamer in their physical body, which is a dream way of keeping the dreamer feeling safe.

But for those who think or say to themselves, “This a lot of nonsense as far as I’m concerned. I’m not interested in dreams or death, and I live my life by my own standards without ever trying to delve.”

Of course they are terribly misled. As Richard Tarnas, in his book Cosmos and Psyche, says of this trap we are all in, “As with all powerful myths, we have been, and many perhaps remain, largely unconscious of this paradigm’s hold on our collective imagination. It animates the vast majority of contemporary books and essays, editorial columns, book reviews, science articles, research papers, and television documentaries, as well as political, social, and economic policies. It is so familiar to us, so close to our perception, that in many respects it has become our common sense, the form and foundation of our self-image as modern humans.” See Archetype of the Paradigm – Programmed

We cannot help but be programmed in innumerable ways, and we take the programs that run our life as US/Me.

So travel with me into the world of directly knowing another person without the use of words or even a body; to an experience of the Earth and its wonderful tides and energies beyond the knowing we have through our eyes and physical senses; beyond our programing; come with me into the vast sea of knowledge where all that has lived is known and recorded. Or into the depths of your own past and ancestors, the evolution of you. For most people lucid dreaming is an adventure in the first level – symbolic dream imagery. See The Conjuring Trick

But there is also the awful propensity to be in control of everything in Western Society.  Something that needs to be said about this type of lucidity is that I felt lucidity can be a process, or a possibility, sought and developed by people who are basically inadequate in meeting the so-called real demands of life. Because of this, because they seek an alternative to what is difficult for them, they attempt to inhabit a sort of existence between worlds. I suppose I have called it living in the cracks of life. Finding an environment that is not threatening and where the usual rules of society and physical life do not apply. In this view I could see lucidity as a sort of drug to be taken to deal with stress, especially for lucid dreamers who insist in controlling every aspect of the dream, or who afraid of their own fears and will not face them. The world that one can inhabit and explore as lucidity was one of a type inhabited by dropouts, and others seeking an alternative way of being – but not in a positive dynamic sense. When meeting an awful and threatening creature they change the imagery to a loveable friend or something that doesn’t scare them. Moving beyond the image level, one knows there is more to lucid dreaming.

I said that the first level – of the journey beyond dreams and death – is meeting symbolic dream imagery. The second level is breaking through the trap of remaining in dream imagery and finding direct insight. An example of this is quoted from my book Lucid Dreaming is as follows:

 Example: In my dream I was watching a fern grow. It was small, but opened very rapidly. As I watched, I became aware that the fern was an image representing a process occurring within myself, one that I grew increasingly aware of as I watched. Then I was fully awake in my dream and realized that my dream (perhaps any dream) was an expression in images of actual events occurring unconsciously in myself. I felt enormous excitement, as if I were witnessing something of great importance.

I believe that this breakthrough into direct insight comes through consistently exploring your dreams, not interpreting them, but diving into them and experiencing what arises but using such techniques as described in Techniques for Exploring your Dreams. It comes through setting in mind the realisation that dream images are like icons on a computer screen – You have to ‘click’ on your dream images to make them come alive. Thinking about them doesn’t work. You need to open yourself to the magic of them. To make them into the wonderful gateways they are you may have to learn certain skills.

If you read again Example1 you will see that the dreamer was able to control his dream through not being afraid and achieving a level of lucidity. Even so he was locked into a symbolic experience of his dream. But later he managed to have a direct experience of his dream by learning to use Opening to Life, and while using it holding the dream in mind. Because we are all the time experiencing self-regulation, one of the aim of which is to move toward transforming insights, he experienced the following:

“Then sounds of struggle came from me – an animal struggling to be released. Then slowly the sounds of struggle became a torrent of curses and swearing. To sum it all up I was saying and feeling and recognising how my mother had hurt me in such a way that I reacted to it by becoming alone, a loner who struggled to be independent. That wasn’t news to me, but the connections with the wanting to be lost in a form of Buddhist trance were. There was hatred pouring out of me particularly toward my women partners. But it was deeply buried, and a form of long term anger and hatred, and I had learnt to enter a Buddhist meditational state to avoid feeling the torment of being eaten alive inside. I realised that I had never really given myself to any woman, but always remained separate inside. Then I would leave them as a form of vengeance against my mother instead of staying to sort out the difficulty. Of course I always had what I felt was a valid excuse for doing it. I realised also that I had been denying my self through the Buddhist method trying to get rid of one’s ego, I have found that instead of denying I had transcended and evolved my ego”

As can be seen, dreams can be a gateway to enormously important insights and an even more important, the releasing of pain, torment and anger that was held inside for years. Such releases have a radical healing effect and produce a healthier body and mind. We tend always to feel our ill health is a physical thing and can only be healed by applying physical cures, but a major cause of illness arises from our attitudes and repressed psychological pain and anger.

But you do not need to enter a dream to experience such release and insights, it can be done simply by learning and using Opening to Life and Water Wonderland

 Going Beyond

Dreams occur, as pointed out, when one’s conscious self, Conscious Will, has relaxed its hold on life and ‘sleeps’, and so dreams are an expression of the Life Will but are slightly mixed because we have to use images, scenes, animals and people from our waking life in an attempt to get a message through to consciousness. That is why our associations and feelings with dream images are so important, because without them we would have no links with our Life Will. See Working with associations

 I have noted that some people develop the idea that one should base one’s life on what comes from within. But as the example above shows, it is when the conscious self pushes for an answer and tries to break through the dream symbols that an extraordinary new faculty appears. The conscious mind needs the unconscious for without it one remains in an unfocussed condition as far as our inner world is concerned. The unconscious or Life Will needs the conscious mind for without it, it remains forever in symbols and cannot take the huge steps of personal evolution that it can achieve together with consciousness. It needs a questioning and investigating mind – it needs questions that pull out real important information

I hope I have made it plain that although dreams are very useful to explore, we do not need them in order to be in contact with our core self – our Life Will. By taking a passive and accepting attitude the dream process can express while we are awake. This is the height of consciousness and the unconscious working together. For a fuller explanation of this see – LifeStream and People’s Experience of LifeStream.

An example of this – “Also, for some time I have been experiencing an extremely stiff lower back. This is not a new problem but it had become very intense. Sometimes it took me half an hour in the morning to stand up straight. Yesterday when I got out of bed it was difficult to stand up properly. So as I used LifeStream and I asked for help with this problem, and for healing. A series of movements followed that I had never done before. It is difficult to describe the movements, but it was like a cowering down and at the same time bending to the left and twisting one’s trunk sideways and up. Then the same thing happened to the right. The sense I had of it was that my lower vertebrae were being opened sideways and twisting. Anyway, the pain of my lower back was immediately relieved, and this morning when I got out of bed there was no stiffness whatsoever. So I am continuing the movements. How wonderful that this sort of healing can occur, when so many people resort to painkillers to deal with such things.” Tom

But we can go deeply into oneself in this way, either in dreams or LifeStream. I know I have quoted the next example often elsewhere, but it is a wonderful description of what you can experience in this way.

 “I am in a landscape and notice that everything is brown; the whole world is brown and lifeless. There is also a feeling of solemnity or dullness. I have enough lucidity to wonder why the world of my dream is so brown and dull. As I ask this, I become more aware of what feeling the brownness expresses. It is seriousness — with no room for humour or fun. The feeling deepens, being real enough and clear enough to look at and understand. I see it is my father’s attitude to life that I have unconsciously inherited. I realize how anxious he always felt about life, and how I took this in. That is how I became a ‘brown person. I see too that I do not need to be either brown or serious any more. Then the landscape changes. There are trees, plants and animals in brilliant color. I wonder what this means, and the landscape begins to spin until the colors blend and shimmer. Suddenly my body seems to open to them, as if they are spinning inside me, and with a most glorious feeling, a sensation of vibrating energy pours up my trunk to my head. With this comes realization. I see how stupid I have been in my brown, anxious existence — how much life I have held back. The animals and plants are the different forces in my being that blend into energy and awareness. I feel I am capable of doing almost anything, like loving, writing a song, painting, telepathy or speaking with the dead. This sparkling, vibrating energy is life itself and can — if I learn to work with it — grow into any ability or direction that I choose. I wake with a wonderful sense of my own possibilities.”

Each person who learns to experience themselves in this way takes a unique path, for we are all unique and so our experiences will be our own. But we are all capable of experiencing a huge world full of experiences. Here is another one, going beyond time.

 “Suddenly, towards the end of the session, I leaped beyond anything I had ever experienced before. I knew, just as clearly as in ordinary life I know my name, that instead of being someone separated from everybody else, living a certain day in time, my real self was a river that flowed through all time. I had always existed and was involved in all history. With an amazing heightened awareness, I could see the influence from this timeless self flowing through all my present life, subtly shaping it. The things I had chosen to do, or work at, were all connected, and were a working out of ancient influences or an attempt to change them.”

I am trying to show some of the ways you can go beyond your everyday life. The reason is not to say how superior the going beyond is, but how much benefit one can get from what one learns there and brings back to everyday life. So will end this section with two more examples.

An experience I would like to describe. In 1953, when I was sixteen, and already deeply interested in the possibilities of the human mind, I took a course in deep relaxation. I practiced every day for three months, tensing my muscles, relaxing them, then passing my awareness over and over my body, dropping the feeling of tension. After three months I was quite proficient. One evening, after coming home from dining out with friends, I went to bed thinking I would leave my usual practice, but in the end decided to practice even though it was late. After going over my body several times I suddenly lost my right arm. I had no sensation of it other than space, hugeness. Then I lost my left arm, and – my whole body. It was like falling through a trap-door into the stars. I had no sense of having a body. Thoughts had ceased, except for a murmur apparently a thousand miles away. Yet in blackness, in immensity, in absence of thought I existed vitally as bodiless awareness. We think that we are our body because we have no other experience of our existence. So we identify with our body and so are terrified of dying – which in a sense is what we do every time we go to sleep and leave our sense of a body behind.

I felt at the time, and still believe it correct, that I had fallen asleep yet remained awake. Waking, critical awareness, had been taken through the magic doors of sleep into a universe it seldom ever knows – deep dreamless sleep.

But I want to move forward in looking at the journey beyond dreams and death. I hope I have described the experience of moving beyond dream images and perhaps shown how a person can move from the polarity of waking awareness to the opposite pole of being aware of bodiless consciousness. See Bodiless Awareness

Many years ago I went through several lucid experiences that clarified for me the way we see things when we are only looking through waking body awareness, and the challenging vision of another way of experiencing yourself. They slowly introduced me to a paradoxical world, one that does not work as an ‘either or’ version of the universe. For example, the illustration shows how we usually see things as one form or version of the world or another.

If you look at the top left hand line of the illustration, you can it as sloping down to the left, or sloping up to the right – it shows the paradoxical nature of our normal vision. It may take you a while to be able to switch from one view of it to the other view. I am using this to illustrate something I want to describe next.

If you look at the top left hand line of the illustration, you can it as sloping down to the left, or sloping up to the right – it shows the paradoxical nature of our normal vision.

It may take you a while to be able to switch from one view of it to the other view.

I am using this to illustrate something I want to describe next.

I mentioned several lucid experiences and will now describe the final of them.

 “I had learnt to move beyond dream images, which I saw as a half-way house to real understanding, and was seeing directly the working of my lungs. The attention was focussed on them because I had an infection influencing the function of my lungs. But in particular I was seeing the way my body was fighting the infection. It appeared to me like the circulation within a plant or tree, a fluid moving and attacking the infected area.

I watched this for a while and then realising I had switched from seeing such actions presented symbolically as in dreams to this direct observation. So I wondered if there were other levels in my being, and almost immediately experienced a changed level of perception. It was a completely different sense of myself because all imagery disappeared, there was no sense of a body, no awareness of shape or size, just consciousness of immense space without any sense of light or dark, suspended in infinity in which being existed without name.”

It seemed obvious that my awareness of existing had totally switched from a body awareness to a bodiless existence – a total move from one polarity to another. This is so often experienced by people who explore their inner world to show that it is a recognised everyday part of the mind/consciousness we all share.

“I dissolved into the Nothing which is Everything.

Transcendence.  In the transcendence, revelation.”

“I saw it as levels of attachments that you identify with. It was like being in a room but you are not a room having things in the room. But I am letting go of stories of my self. I am not the story but have lived through it. I realise with wonder that I am the energy of the Tsunami the energy of everything. The blackness transformed in this wonderful energy.”

“I entered into a place – a void of nothingness – it was space with only limitless pulsating black. It would not end and time had no meaning there.”

“Then I closed my eyes, surrendered, and seemed to collapse in upon myself – not in body but in consciousness. This was experienced as an intense entrance into formlessness, blackness and bodiless consciousness.”

But sometimes people approach this inner level without going through the stages and are frightened or even terrified, for they fear they or losing themselves – their ego. As someone remarked, “It is Nothing which is Everything.”

“I lay down and allowed myself to experience the feelings I feared. My body began to shake, and then waves of fear seemed to pass through me, like a convulsion. I felt tiny, very vulnerable, and in danger of destruction. The facilitator put her hand on my belly, where the convulsions seemed to have their origin. She also placed some cushions around me, in case I should thrash out. I felt as though I was inside my mother and ought to be safe, but I wasn’t. I was surrounded by fear and there were great waves of blackness coming at me from nowhere, without warning or explanation. I felt utterly powerless and terrified. I felt I was in danger of disappearing, simply ceasing to exist.”

One fears disappearing because you are entering a completely different view of yourself. At birth you start a completely new life, and if brought up by humans you develop a human personality and a new sense of self because of a new brain. But you have an unconscious awareness of a huge past, like a seed, which carries within it all past experience, otherwise it could not produce a human body. But the personality is a new and vulnerable thing, and generally only knows what it has been taught in this lifetime. See The Conjuring Trick

You Are Everything

So far we have defined that we are, as a human person, aware of being in one place at a certain time, and aware of only local surroundings except by using technical equipment like TV or cell phone/mobile phones. But at the other extreme we are like the Internet – or rather a consciousness that is the internet and knows everything at once, and growing all the time. But this aspect of our existence is beyond time and space, and does not focus on any one person, place or time. It is what people in the past called God – it is all knowing. In today’s understanding if quantum science it is call ‘non-local’ awareness, and is recognised as the basis of our existence.

As Grace Parks said in a lecture, “If you didn’t know it yet, the theories and their implications of modern physics are stranger than mythical stories.  There is less of common sense in its implications. It opens doors to things wilder than our wildest imaginations.  Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at CUNY wrote that scientists might have put down the absurdities of mythical stories, but they are embracing an even stranger religion (myth) based on curved space-time and quantum mechanics.  In this new myth, there are stories of time-travel, multiple universes, worm-holes that connect distant space and time.  All these theories are solidly grounded in mathematics and believed by the cutting-edge scientists.” See Modern Physics and Myth – A Dream within a Dream

Science now states that our beginnings were from the Big Bang, which created time and space, and with it the possibility of our human lives. So the very start was from beyond time and space, and obviously we are created by the very forces that are part of our universe. So we are not just totality – not in just our awareness of being a limited human but Everything.

I want to finish the story I told, “So I wondered if there were other levels in my being, and almost immediately experienced a changed level of perception. It was a completely different sense of myself because all imagery disappeared, there was no sense of a body, no awareness of shape or size, just consciousness of immense space without any sense of light or dark, suspended in infinity in which being existed without name.

The experience of this was extraordinary, and I thought I had reached the very end of my explorations of levels, but I then realised from within, like an intuition, that there was another level. The other level I then knew was that we are all the time connected and know not only our bodily local awareness, but are all the time connected to an infinite consciousness.”

David Bohm was an American scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed innovative and unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. He believed that the working of the brain, at the cellular level, obeyed the mathematics of some quantum effects, and postulated that thought was distributed and non-localised in the way that quantum entities do not readily fit into our conventional model of space and time. Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. Quoted from Wikipedia

 Why can’t we know

From my study of dreams I see that people are totally unprepared for knowing their own depths. Dreams take place in a virtual world where nothing can hurt you, but people in general are so locked into the belief that the world of their waking consciousness is all there is they meet every attempt to be shown their wider life with terror, fear, anxiety and running away. Instead they experience nightmares, horror movie type dreams, dreams of being possessed by evil being, aliens or the Devil, or even beliefs they can escape into a spiritual world by various ways of being or thinking. They try to escape as explained above, from meeting their own emotions – which often they are terrified of or repress. Yet there is no escape from being the whole and wonderful person you are.

Yet we are on the verge of entering a new phase of human experience – the technically created virtual world in which, instead of seeing and communicating with each other via Skype, Facetime or Facebook, we will meet in a waking dream of virtual reality. We will react to each other with all sensations and like dreams it will feel like real waking experience. But will you react with such fears and terrors again?

Going Beyond Death

I hope you have followed that we are a person in a body who experience a life limited by time and space, and also a being existing beyond any limitations. The two can often meet half way between these extraordinary opposite in their dreams or in what I have named LifeStream, but which has been known by various names through history, a way to experience waking dreams process.

In the long past there was and still is an approach in India called Shaktipat. Which has a very similar basis as shown in – People’s Experience of LifeStream. A person witnessing it describes is as, “I have seen many persons who practice Shaktipat enter a phase of intense energy flow in which breathing becomes rapid and involuntary and in which people begin with great rapidity to do postures they never knew and which they ordinarily would never have been able to perform.”

In Western society we know it as the Pentecostal experience, which at its start was spontaneous movements and sounds. Then Anton Mesmer used various methods to start the spontaneous movements and vocalisation. Mesmer understood health as the free flow of the process of life through thousands of channels in our bodies. Illness was caused by obstacles to this flow. Overcoming these obstacles and restoring flow produced crises, which restored health. When Nature failed to do this spontaneously, contact with a conductor of animal magnetism was a necessary and sufficient remedy. Also Qigong and Seitai were far Eastern approaches.

But in our own times Wilhelm Reich, as a doctor and with scientific background, helped people release their own self-regulatory process and work with it toward health and wholeness. As people learnt this they experienced spontaneous movement, trembling, changed feeling states and emotional and sexual release. The actual results, as compared with those already mentioned in this short history, were no different to those in Shaktipat or in Mesmer’s work. Nevertheless, Reich brought a new openness, a new technical understanding to the subject with his genius. Unlike Mesmer he did not rest until he had pinpointed clearly what released self-regulatory action into conscious operation. He did not stop, as Mesmer and the gurus did, in believing himself and certain other special men and women were the channels of a cosmic energy which healed.

I mention these historical facts to show that the ability to allow the conscious lucid dreaming, with its source in our core self has long been recognised and treated as a special faculty in the present and in the far past with often religious connections. When dreams are explored rather than interpreted I hope I have shown that one can know one’s core and its influence and entanglement with our waking personality. For the core self is deathless and our personality faces death at every turn – except when the two find a marriage.

So I want to state categorically that the experience of death is to swing over into the dream state fully. Our body dies – we all know that – and so the personality that formed in this body is under threat. But the dream state is, as we have shown, projected by our core self – the deathless self that was never born and does not die. See The Core

I wrote in part of The Core. “Most of us are suffering amnesia. Strangely, in our culture this amnesia is accepted as normal. It is normal to have forgotten our childhood, to no longer remember our birth and our life in the womb. Especially, it is considered normal to have forgotten our life in eternity. In fact, people who start to remember this are sometimes diagnosed as mentally unstable. This truly is a time of blindness.”

Then it came to me that I had to listen in deep stillness – not think, not seek to understand, not struggle, just listen. My whole being entered into silence, gently listening as one might listen to the rain falling on a lake. Then suddenly it was known – the feather blowing in the wind – the sound of one hand clapping – the essence of human existence. Open against the sky – emptiness – enormity.

This was truly an experience of enlightenment. All cares, all pain fell away from me. I had an incredible sense of freedom such as I had never experience before. Every moment of every day we are free – free to choose – free to create pain or peace – free to go or stay – free to live or die. This extraordinary experience of freedom, and of the dropping away of normal perceptions, lasted for three days. Everything looked different. I don’t mean it felt different. I mean it looked different. I remember seeing a bird flying across the sky and it was simply Bird. Maybe even that isn’t true. It was simply what it is without any name.

But that is an experience of going beyond the images of dreams, but the type people report in near death experiences is often still locked in ‘dream’ imagery. They usually describe their own body as it was in the life they lived, in dream like surroundings and extraordinary events. Or else they see themselves in their body but are touching the core self and so experience some of its timeless and space-less quality. As an example of this:

In his book Closer to the Light, Katie was brought to Dr Morse apparently dead.  A CAT scan revealed that her brain was abnormally swollen.  If not dead, she was certainly in a deep coma, and was placed on a machine and breathed for her.   Dr. Morse describes how Katie made a full recovery, and because he had to find out how Katie came to be face down in a swimming pool, Dr Morse had to interview her. To his amazement Katie described the operating theatre in which she had been placed while in coma. She also described the other people who were working on her and what they did. While this was happening she told Dr Morse that she knew what was going on in her family home and could described in detail what her brothers and sisters were doing. In fact, it seemed as if she existed in a different state of time and space.

Also my own experience clearly shows the dreamed of body situations.

When I was eighteen and living in German, I was woken from sleep one summer evening by a sensation of rushing upward in darkness and a release from pressure. When I could see, I was looking down on my sleeping body and experienced terror because something was happening to me I had no explanation for. Then suddenly I realised I had read that some people experience leaving their sleeping body. That is what was happening to me. I had left my body behind and was still conscious and independent of it. The terror disappeared and I found myself curled up with my arms around my knees, flying over the countryside, still light because of the summer evening.

But suddenly I was in my home in London, standing behind our couch. I felt more awake than I had ever been before in my life, was amazed at what was happening. I seemed as solid as ever, despite having no physical body, also I was dressed in civilian clothes despite being in pyjamas in bed and being in the RAF. My mother was sitting knitting, alone except for our Alsatian dog asleep in front of the gas fire. I was so excited I called to my mother, “Look what’s happening mum.” She paused for a moment but carried on knitting. This puzzled me as I seemed completely solid and real to myself and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t see me. So I shouted to attract her attention. She carried on knitting, but as I shouted the dog heard me, awoke and came bounding to me, barking and howling to see me. I later found out my mother had been alone that evening, and my dog – in the picture – had suddenly rushed to the back of the settee barking and howling.

 There are several things to note about this experience, the first is that it was corroborated by my mother seeing my dog barking at the time I saw her alone. Also I saw that my mother was alone in the house, which was not usually the case. That I experienced myself in civilian clothes and in my recognisable body, a regular dream feature. But of course if we do not identify with our body as us, we can go beyond it in dreams or in waking lucid experience. An important realisation is that after the experience of travelling, and then I was suddenly at home in London. In investigating this I saw that I had never left my body, and that calling it out of body experience is completely wrong, because I had consciously switched to the inner world of dreams and as such was in quantum condition where everywhere is here. So I had focussed on experiencing a small portion of the whole – my home in London.

The next examples link dreaming and bodilessness with death.

I now held her close as a deeper communion, and took her in my arms holding her across my lap as one might a child, cradling her head. Then I closed my eyes, surrendered, and seemed to collapse in upon myself – not in body but in consciousness. This was experienced as an intense entrance into formlessness, blackness and bodiless consciousness. I had become one with the woman and she also was taken into this experience. She cried out as it happened, “Tony! Oh no. No.”

Example: Now I begin to confront death more fully myself as I explored my dream. I remember the first meeting with death in seeing Maria have a heart attack when I was thirteen.

As I reached this part of the dream I began to feel it deeply. At some point in this confrontation with death, perhaps at the stage where I saw the vagina as the roots of religion, I experienced being an initiate led towards death. It was like being a monk amongst other monks who were leading me to the place of initiation. An inner voice told me, “You don’t need to do anything to be initiated. Not anything in particular, only to accept and love each other. That’s all there is, without any big doctrine or anything else.”

At this point I experienced death, bodiless sensation, the end. I had taken on the role of the one who explores death. It was such a simple, yet such a profound experience because of the realisation that it brought. I do not know whether I can capture it all in words. I was ready to die, to end, to suffer the defeat of extinction. I had found the dignity, the manhood of that acceptance. I met death. I died. There was an ending. I was still conscious – I Am Consciousness.

I’m Dead – But I’m Still Alive – How Come?

We have been bombarded by the idea that if our body or brain is sick or injured, we are dead! It implies that awareness, consciousness depends on and is created by our body and brain. But how then do people whose brain shows no sign of life managed, like Katie who had a CAT scan that revealed her brain was abnormally swollen.  If not dead, she was certainly in a deep coma, and was placed on a machine and breathed for her. Yet she was able to be aware of what was happening around her and at a distance. See Near Death Experiences

Older societies had another way of seeing human life, saying we have a body, a soul and the spirit. I know the word soul has gone out of fashion, but it is useful in context with the body and spirit/core self. Today people tend to say things like, “I want to be appreciated and recognised”. Or, “Nobody seems to care about me.” In doing so they are talking about their personality, which is not often an expression of their fundamental self – the old Bible saying, “Like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

The human personality, built as it often is upon shifting sands falls or fails. How many people need antidepressants to survive, or alcohol or drugs daily to face life, or who crack up or become murderers? I suggest it is because they have not been able to find the code to open up to their core.

We gain the code by living and not avoiding the ever-increasing information gathered through our life experience. If only we could put it all together. If only we could see the pattern of our life experience, our education, our relationships. And then, when we actually solve the riddle and uncovered the code, it is all so simple. So was the whole process of life and death.

The code explains every part of our experience. It is the common denominator into which everything else fits. It links opposites, it explains and resolves conflicts, and it shows differences as only different aspects of the one thing, other sides of the same coin. But of course it is not gained by floating through life without any self-awareness. See Self Observation; Programmed

Sentience, awareness, consciousness is, as I see it, the very basis of being. The body is like a mushroom, which has been pushed up from a massive mycelium, a mass of threadlike growth underground. A 2,400-acre [970-hectare] site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it. Estimated at 1,665 football fields in size and 2,200 years old. The mycelium puts up a mushroom or toadstool to procreate. So it is a good analogy of human life which extrudes a body to procreate and to gather the code of living – and especially to experience limitations and its lessons and thereby develop and explore our massive potential. See Jesse Watkins Enlightenment

 Another person’s experience of the huge behind the small.

 An experience which fascinated me while having a therapy session was that I wanted to go to the toilet, and stood and peed into the pan straight into the water. This created a lot of bubbles. As I did this I was looking at the bubbles. It was quite light in the toilet, and each bubble seemed to have an eye in the centre of the bubble. This seemed strange so I bent down to look, and saw the eye was a reflection of myself.

This was amusing because, if you think about it, I had peed into the water, and up had arisen all these countless little individuals, all living in their own little world. And they each had their own awareness. In a way they were all looking at each other and me. From their point of view, they were separate and unique. They could be thinking, I am Sue or Fred or John or Joan, but from my point of view they were all reflections of myself, and only had awareness out of my own existence. I was a sort of god who had given rise to countless beings out of myself. So it wasn’t lots of eyes but lots of I’s/Me’s.

Suddenly the realisation hit me, oh my god, I am myself a bubble! I have existence because behind all phenomena is this one big something that gives me life and awareness. And at that time it really frightened me. It felt as if I burst, like the bubble I am, I would disappear. It was quite threatening. But since then I have explored this. I have looked behind my own image of myself, and tried to get behind my sense impressions to see what it is out of which my existence arose. What I discovered is that my true identity is that everlasting changeless being behind the creation of the bubbles we call ourselves. This takes away all fear of death. It takes away the pain attached to the fleeting and illusory impressions of life we gain from our senses and thoughts. I had thought this meant a sort of losing of self, a death of self. It doesn’t mean that at all. It is really a gaining of everything.

What is Body Soul and Spirit?

The physical body is permanently under process of change. Its keynote is impermanence, and between its birth and its death stretch a continuous process of change.

At death it is no longer conscious in the same way as in life, or even at birth. This personal awareness, that is absent at death, and undeveloped or unformulated at birth, is the soul, our individual awareness. Just as the body feeds upon matter in the form of food, and thus gradually builds up a defined physical body, so the soul feeds upon the sense impressions and experiences gained through the body. With them it builds up a defined ‘body’ of perception or self-awareness. The sense impressions are in themselves impermanent. As soon as the smell of cooking bread is removed, the impression has gone. But the soul faculty of memory gives a certain permanency to one’s physical existence. Also the term soul has been used wrongly to mean one’s eternal being.

As suggested, with each new body born a new and unique soul/personality is developed. But the body is the result of millions of years of experience, starting with the single celled life form and ending with a body with billions of cell with much sophistication built upon countless years of animal existence – enabling it to achieve self-awareness, a new and vulnerable ability. The soul/personality is new and unique because the new body develops its own memories in the new brain. So the personality or soul slowly matures, but behind and permeating it is the long memory of the past that this personality is unconscious of. See Animals in your Brain

The spirit is defined in the dictionary as – A force or principle believed to animate living beings – A force or principle believed to animate humans and often to endure after departing from the body of a person at death.

The body gains form by repeatedly eating substance. The soul gains definition of consciousness by repeated daily experiences of sensory impressions, and feeding on ideas, feelings and actions given in books or other cultural products. The Spirit self defines its own realm by feeding upon the higher experiences and realisations of the soul, through repeated earth lives. These past lives are not remembered easily because the new soul that developed in the new body had no past connections and has a new brain. Such memories of the past can only be attained by a deep awareness of the spirit/core self. 

So What Happens  When I Die?

We are in the dream world because our physical life is now gone and so we are left with only our consciousness – no body. When we lose awareness of our body in sleep we dream, because dreams are the next level of consciousness we have developed apart from our body senses, unless we have done so in other ways. We actually have a huge range of levels of awareness, the swing between waking and sleeping can be seen as the extremes within the possibilities of our experience. For in waking awareness we have the sense of being in a body with only  a small range of perception, and feel we exist as an individual. But in sleep, apart from dreams we now longer are aware of being an individual with a body, but are  a bodiless consciousness. See an example in Bodiless  

Example: I started by considering the recent nightmare of the ‘thing’ at the foot of my bed. Gradually I began to feel tense throughout my body, with difficulty in breathing. The ‘thing’ seemed at first to be a woman’s vagina. There was a little feeling in this but not much. Then it slowly grew in intensity and I realised the ‘thing’ was death. Recently it is obvious from the mirror that my body is going through another period of rapid ageing. The dream was a dramatic representation of my feelings about this. Death was gradually creeping up on me, gradually overwhelming me and I was fighting it. As the feeling deepened I saw that in my feelings I felt that death had put its finger on me. The touch of death was like a disease though. Once touched the disease was incurable and gradually took over one’s body. I could hardly breathe as I experienced this, and I understood the sort of emotions that might lie beneath asthma attacks. This struggle with death went on for some time. It was not terrible but was felt strongly. I also recognised that my wife. Deb, has similar feelings about her ageing, and is communicating to me that her body is dying and unclean, especially her genitals, and this is off-putting. I see that when I shouted in the dream, ‘I will destroy you!’ in a way it is my fear of being destroyed that is behind the emotion.

I began to wonder what to do about the situation. The feeling was that death was claiming me. So, I wanted to face the truth about death, whatever it was. I wanted to walk right up to it and look it in the face and know whether death meant a final end. If it did I would rather know. As I approached death like this by imaging walking toward the THING, my feelings went through an amazing transformation. All the tension left me. I felt good, positive, easy to breathe and with a sense of hope about life and death.

This was so surprising and sudden I wondered what had produced it. I needed to be aware of how this change had occurred. So, I retraced my steps to look at death and try to understand why it had lost its power of fear.

At first I saw that my tension and sense of death being or giving a disease was due to a view I had of it. When we look at the world only through our senses, death is obviously a terminal sickness that claims everyone. Someone said on TV the other day – Life is a sexually transmitted disease that produces a 100% mortality. Seen in this way death is the rotting corpse, the skeleton. The path to it is disease or breakdown. But in looking it in the face I saw another view of it. I saw the dead body, the corpse, the skeleton, as a form left behind by the process of life. I saw that our body was not created by our mother, for no human mother could perform the miracle of being able to create a human baby.

so what was the creator of our body? When I looked at myself to see what ‘David’ is – I cannot separate myself from the process of life. That process is the great Creator and leaves behind shells, bodies, tree trunks, but it goes on creating other forms. So I am the Creator and the Created, I am Life.

Steps now feebly conquered, she enters her room tired. In too poor a state to undress for bed, she stands and totters in indecision: “I’ll pause for a moment and later disrobe.” Exhaustion has beguiled her will and brick propped, sagging bed temptation finds her lying back fully clothed. She lies awake, she lies awake, she lies awake. Books line the floor of the shelfless room. She lies awake, she lies awake, she lies, but then a new, other world she espies.

Unlike any dream environments she’s known, her mind feels clear, alert, and free. Is she awake, asleep, or somewhere in between, in this place that’s more vivid than previous reality? Her surrounding is cylindrical, vibrant, and vast; white light emanates with a strength that almost hurts. The only route is up the helter skelter stairs of this lightening bright, snow blindness light-house. Tentatively, so unsure she starts to ascend; round and round she coils windowless walls forlorn, until she reaches the top and it’s sacred platform.

Relief from the piercing light is achieved where windows open on to darkest space. Her anxiety easing, she approaches the central display: an exceptional, universal camera obscura. Far from static it reveals the whole world and with just one thought from the viewer’s mind, a place and a loved one instantly appear presented real time for one to observe. Standing mystified, a presence then joins her and informs her with seemingly no external voice at all: “This is the place where people come after death’s fall.”

With instant recognition of her self-mortification, she spontaneously utters: “Oh, so I’m dead!” The presence inwardly sighs: “No, you’ve misunderstood my intention: I’ve brought you here to show that each of the dead choose someone to guide and watch over on earth. And that you have a someone still loving you. Your self-destruction is unnecessary; you just need to give life a reasonable chance. Please think on this experience and what I have said; your duty is still to life, it’s not yet to death.”

Wide awake and bed room returned, she shakes her young head in disbelief. If it were but a dream, would she not be drowsy? But she feels as alert, as she was in the lighthouse.”

So, now you are in the dimension of the dream. As such you experience, as in dreams, surroundings and people and animals that appear as external and solid. You will usually see yourself in the body you experienced in the last life, but it may be younger without any illness, and you may feel as if you have woken for the first time because your mind, your awareness is super alert. Also, sometimes, people who had never known that you survive after your body has died, feel as if they are still alive in a body, and create dreams in those people they know, that they are still alive n their body, and a mistake has been made.

But you might also awake in a nightmare world – often called Hell. The reason for this is the same reason people live a hell of a tortured life –  they have not managed to deal with their traumas, terrors, fears and anxieties. Or some people who died suddenly do not realise they are dead, and need help to meet the change.

Example: My 20-year-old son, Max, died less than a month ago. I had a strong feeling when I first learned of his death that he had remained “earth bound”.

I can’t describe it exactly, but I felt very strongly that because his death was sudden and he wasn’t ready to go that he hadn’t moved on to the other side. I have prayed for a sign from him and he came to me in my dreams the past two nights.

The first night he said he wasn’t dead and I couldn’t convince him otherwise. He even said that he wouldn’t be ready to go for another “year and a half”. But I got to hug him and feel him and it was him. Last night he came to me at my house. He was sitting at the kitchen table and we just talked for a few minutes before I brought up the fact that he HAD to go into the light. He got a bit angry.

Then I told him that I knew about the drugs in Utah and he hung his head in shame. Then I told him he overdosed. At first he disagreed, I began to think about things that I could show him that would make him understand…like stuff from his funeral, but then he understood. Like he knew what I was thinking and was kinda like “don’t bother, I get it.”

I started to cry and we hugged and I began to tell him about all the books that I’ve read on the afterlife so that he wouldn’t be scared. He hugged me and asked me if our souls would always be together and I said yes, that if you’re close on earth that means the souls always stay together.

We left my house then and went to the other side. He was leery of going so I told him that once he got there he would probably see grandma Josephine and grandma Jean and that Baxter, his old dog, would probably even be there. I went further in with him, to try and find the souls he was meant to be with so that he wouldn’t be scared.

As we looked he began to feel more at ease. Drifting away from me and looking for himself. Then a crashing booming voice said something, I don’t remember what, but I knew I had to leave. So I went back to the tunnel that we had come in through and Max came, with another young man, about his age, they were wildly happy, riding what kinda looked like skateboards, but not. He took me back through the tunnel. He said he understood and that the other soul that was there with him was his friend and that they wreak havoc on the other side playing pranks and acting rambunctious.

I started to cry and he hugged me so tight and I told him I loved him so much and he whispered in my ear “I will see you soon”. He was completely calm and not upset anymore…like someone saying, “see you tomorrow” – like time wasn’t a big deal. I watched him skateboard away with the other soul and he turned back and gave me a huge smile and waved and I felt all over that he understood everything now.

The tunnel began to close in…getting smaller and smaller at his end of it so I had to turn around and walk through my side because I had to come back. I knew, even in the dream that I had helped him get there. Was this my sons spirit? Did I help him? I feel it was…and waking up today I feel better. I miss him terribly but I feel like he is safe and where he should be.

Example: My husbands 21yr old son died in a wreck 5 weeks ago. He came to see him in a dream last night. Complaining that he wrecked his truck and he had to call the insurance company. My husband said he looked at him a told him that he died in the wreck. He said he seemed very confused by that. He awoke, went into the kitchen and prayed that he could see him again. When he went to sleep his son appeared to him again, told him he loved him gave him a hug and disappeared again.

Example: For the last few years I have had dreams of being haunted. The dreams are always evil; I can feel the evil. Always about the dead, or ghosts. I am usually in a house or something, with these spirits that are trying to attack me. Sometimes I see a ghost in my dream, it looks just like what you would think a ghost would look like, with a perfect face. Sometimes they attack me physically, cut me, or throw my entire body around. I have even been in rituals in the dreams with a feeling of something more, like demonic. It is terrifying, it is so real, I have a hard time coming around after, it shocks me for hours at times, depending on the dream.

Example: I turned toward a zombie with a big sword, and somehow took it from him, and started killing zombies. When I was done, I looked around and noticed that everyone had died: all their arms and legs and jaws were cut off. It was gruesome. I started looking for my boyfriend and saw him in the distance, on the ground, his back covered in scratches. I came around, half expecting him dead. He was alive, looked up at me, and smiled. “You’re okay!” he said. I said, “I think I got scratched too” and started crying. He said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” (Scratched from zombies kill in my dream) and I woke up. I feel like there are so many symbols in this dream, like it’s really trying to tell me something but I have no idea what. Help?

Example: I had a dream about my father in law chasing me. I’ve had dreams about him since his death. Once I woke up terrified because I dreamt of him choking me to death.

Because you are living in a world that is created by your own habitual fears or wonder, you carry nightmares and wonder with you. But because your body is now lost and are in the dream world full time, you have left the physical body behind and are faced by an enormous change. You have entered the universal – in other words you are a creature created by the universal laws or processes of the universe.

As a tiny seed you grew in and through the Life in the most fundamental physical life forms and slowly you developed more complex bodies to express through. But like most seeds there comes a time to return to your core self through death, so that all your experience through physical life can be harvested, synthesised and become a part of your core/spirit. Your personality was only an earthly cloak of an individuality/core self – and is different from every other personality. Free will and predestination coexist in a person. His past experiences – his karma – limit him in probability and incline him in certain directions, but free will can always draw the sword from the stone. The personality created in the body is one of many that the core/spirit might have assumed. Its job is to work on one or several phases of the karma of the individuality. No task is undertaken that is too much for the personality to which it is assigned-or which chooses it.

It seems from people’s insights or experiences of near death that the personality is a spotlighted portion of the individuality, experiencing three-dimensional consciousness. The rest of the individuality remains in shadow, giving tone to the personality; urges, appreciation, tastes, avocations, and what is loosely termed “charm”- the background to which intuition responds.

One’s personality is shaped by three or four past incarnations, the parts of the past life experience on which the individuality wants to work – the things that were never dealt with during past lives. The emotions and talents of the present personality reflect these incarnations. Because as a personality we are largely unconscious of our core, and thereby unaware of the massive forces of the universe – the gods – that are behind our own existence, we only catch glimpses of our real self in dreams or visions. The dreams, visions, meditations – the deep, closely guarded self-consciousness of the personality are the pattern of experience among the other states of consciousness of the forces that we call the solar system. The intellect is, roughly speaking, from the stars: it is the mind force of the soul, conditioned by its previous experience of it awareness of the core and the creative forces of the universe which act upon our personality.

There is a drive within the spirit of humans that in the beginning of the development of self-consciousness took them downward. Because we so new to self-consciousness, and so aligned to instinctive knowledge – the unconscious – so they went from heavenly knowledge to mystical dreams, revealed religions, philosophy and theology, until the bottom was reached and we only believed what he could see and feel and prove in terms of his conscious mind. Then we began to fight our way upward, using the only tools he had left: suffering, patience, faith, and the power of mind.

In other periods of human development earlier races had full awareness of the physical and what we now call the invisible worlds. But as we developed we began to close that sensitivity as we became more material in our desires. So gradually those organs became vestigial. But it seems now as if many people are digging deeply into themselves and restoring them. Those vestigial organs still remain as groups of cells, and were receiving organs as our senses are.

Such visionary awareness is understandable when we realise a dream, according to Freud is an hallucination. While asleep we can create full sensory, vocal, motor and emotional experience in our dream. While dreaming we usually accept what we experience as real. An hallucination is an experience of a ‘dream’ occurring while we have our eyes open. The voices heard, people seen, smells smelt, although appearing to be outside of us, are no more exterior than the things and images of our dreams. With this information one can understand that much classed as psychic phenomena and religious experience is an encounter with the dream process. That does not, of course, deny its importance.

Therefore, our experience of such things shows we are slowly recovering our ancient abilities. So when our body is no longer a hindrance to the free expression of the soul-when the conscious mind had merged with the subconscious, and the atomic structure of the body could be controlled so that the soul was as free in it as out of it – the earth cycle will be finished and the soul could go on to new adventures

The belief that our body is a speck of dust on a small planet leads to the illusion that we ourselves are a small creation. The measure of the soul is the limitless activity of mind and the grandeur of imagination. So when your physical life is ended the personality vanishes as its pattern is absorbed into the core self, the limitless consciousness that we all are.

How do we transfer from our body to the universal?

It is a matter of survival, because to survive the switching from your three dimensional life in a physical body to the full time infinite, universal life of the dream, you could not survive with all the viewpoints many people carry with them. So a form of harvesting takes place – often straight after the experience of dying. It is experienced as a full life review.

In her book Coming Back to Life, P. H. Atwater gives the following account of her own experience during an NDE.

For me it was a total reliving of every thought I had ever thought, every word I had ever spoken, and every deed I had ever done; plus, the effect of each thought, word and deed on everyone and anyone who had ever come within my environment or sphere of influence, whether I knew them or not (including unknown passers-by on the street).

Here is another view of the same thing.

 I knew I was dying and it was incredibly real. So real I wept deeply because I knew this was the end of everything and I would lose my children. All that I had created in life would be at an end too. But there was nothing I could do about that and I died. Then I seemed to be at a slight distance watching my dead body, and I saw my father, who had died some years before, come and carry the body over a threshold into a heavenly meadow. There a resurrection took place. My dead being was given new life. And the new life came from all that I had given to others, and all I had received from others, during my life. That was my spiritual life that survived death.

If every deed you had ever done was cruel or grabbing, or you had never lived your life giving or receiving from others, there would be nothing that can connect with others, nothing to link your life with the universal. It would feel like hell, not as a punishment, but the results if what you had built with your life.

As a person, as a soul, we may be saturated with physical concepts, desires and impulses, which as they are, cannot be integrated into the core self, just as food, without an actual physical body with digestion cannot integrate. A purifying action takes place as the transformation into a fuller experience of our core occurs.  In life we can choose to act from the direction or impulse given us by our whole being, or spirit: or we can choose to act from impulses arising from just one aspect of self, such as the body, sexual desire, intellect, emotion etc.

The desire to eat, for instance, is basically an urge arising from our core self, as it wishes to take part in physical experience. But frequently we extend this urge and eat just for the pleasure of tasting, or being in company, through insecurity and so on. This also applies, of course, to sexuality, emotions and thinking. If our activities had arisen purely out of spiritual impulse, we would experience no purification. However, we have built into our personality, many longings and desires that can only be fulfilled through the body, which are out of harmony with having no body. There is thus experienced a period of burning desires; as these longings consume themselves in their own fire.

During this time of full life review, one lives again through memories of life, but only those that were out of harmony with one’s innermost nature. Not only does one remember such deeds and emotions, but also experiences them as happening to oneself. Thus pain given to others, destruction wrought in the world, loneliness and fear sown, are now experience again personally. As with all these experiences, many people go through them during life in therapeutic sessions, and are thus already cleansed.

In succession, similar cleansings occur in regard to one’s likes and dislikes, the idea of body and its form being oneself, and other connections with bodily life. Suicides particularly suffer such inner reactions because they took a life.

But as the negative aspects of self are burnt out, there opens depth upon depth of entrance into other beings. From within begins to emerge the flow of direct knowledge and love that we blocked by our dislikes, prejudices and desires. As the ideas of self-being a physical form drops away, as the realisation that lasting pleasure arises from within, and is not dependent upon physical objects or activities dawns, one begins to become and to see others as beings of light and tones. These streaming colours and sounds, one gradually realises, are not separate or distinct from all else. They begin to be seen as flowing from greater beings, or a greater being, than oneself, and flowing through all. But through one’s own activities, loves, and thinking, one has woven these tones and colours in a unique fashion. Barriers of separation between others and ourselves melt away, and real union and love exists at this level. We can then live in each other without that separation which all companionship must experience in the physical world.

Going beyond our boundaries

Slowly then you begin, if you are open to change and growth, starting to leave behind the image of yourself as the body you last occupied.

What is being presented is a description of the spirit drawing into itself the fruits of experience gathered in the body. The difference between sleep and death is seen to be that in sleep, the process is frequently interfered with by fresh bundles of waking physical experience. In death, there is an uninterrupted withdrawal into our Core Self. As can be seen, this consists of a gradual gathering of all the fruits – memories – a sifting and cleansing of them, and then a transmuting them into the universal and formless life of the Spirit. It seems that only inasmuch as we have built into conscious waking life, some experience of the spirit, can this be a conscious thing.

I want to quote from a couple of times I felt that I communicated directly with a dead friend, Shaun.

Shaun always did introduce me to firsts. I think someone I knew turned up with him at my house, and he adopted me. He used to call me his ‘old man,’ and each time I saw him after that he had a different woman with him. Gillian and I had plenty of rooms in the place – after all it was a converted dancehall – and Shaun would find a space and sleep with whoever was with him.

Over the years Shaun and I spent hours, days, weeks, gradually opening the door to accessing his childhood memories. Once we had opened the door, we gradually and slowly walked down the steps into the basement of his life. It was a very special relationship for both of us; I from a middle-class family, but with parents of mixed cultural background, and Shaun from a working-class family whose father was an alcoholic. Even so he was a strange mixture because although very streetwise, he also had a love of literature and the spiritual.  I suppose it might have been the Irish in him.

So I am sure it was from those shared voyages into the deeps, into the Hugeness, that the meeting on the hilltop occurred when he had died. Shortly after Shaun’s death I dreamt I was with him, walking along a road talking.  Shaun was sounding off as usual.  It was just like paying my rent again.  But this time his rant was about not being able to find somewhere to live, somewhere he could call home.

I interrupted his flow by putting my arm around his shoulders and said, “Shaun, you’re dead!  If you carry on with feelings like this, you are going to create a hell for yourself here.  Being dead is like being in a dream world, you create your environment by how you think and feel.  Come on, let’s build you a house.”

He understood very well what I meant because of our conversations about life and death, and our delving into dreams. As soon as I pointed it out to him he realised he was in what could be called a full surround virtual reality making creating an external world of his own internal processes.  So I asked him to imagine what sort of house he would like as a home.  As soon as he did this the scene immediately shifted and we were on a rocky but level ground on a small hill overlooking the sea.  Quickly we shaped, out of his desires and feelings, a stone built ranch style house, with a huge front window giving a view of the ocean.  We formed a paved patio, with exotic cacti and plants, and I left him their finishing his new home.

The dream was very real to me, leaving me with a sense of having shared a little of Shaun’s after death experience.  So when I experienced the conversation on the hill it felt like a continuation and confirmation.  His statements that everywhere he looked reflected who he was fitted fully into what had already been worked with in the dream.  But when he said he couldn’t escape meeting himself in his present environment, there was no hint of complaint in it.  What I did sense was his amazement that after death he was continuing the meeting with himself we had started during his life.  The difference being that after death meeting with self was continuous and easier to recognise.

Sometimes we are the last to recognise or understand why we were born with a limp, continually struggle with income, or fail to manage and maintaining a loving relationship.  Shaun, in a few words, was telling me that every shift in his feelings, his attitudes or his imagination, was shown as a corresponding shift in his surroundings now he was dead.  That must be a very mellowing experience.  It couldn’t help, once you were aware that shifts emanated from yourself, to fine tune the way you handled yourself. It sounded to me somewhat like the biofeedback machines that help you to deeply relax by showing your brain wave patterns. When you hit the right state you can see it and maintain it easier.

But what most of us fail to recognise that what Shaun said about his life after he died is absolutely true for our waking physical life, because Shaun told me in one of his after death conversations, that everywhere he looked it revealed him, what he was, what he had avoided seeing, was there before him all the time.

Strangely enough, quite a while before he knew he had cancer, he told me a dream.  In the dream an angel appeared to him and said to him, “Shaun, before you were born you lived a life without limitations.  Then you were born in to this life with its difficulties and restrictions, because there were important lessons to learn.  But when you die you will return to that world where there are no limitations and no restrictions.”

This led to this experience.

 What I saw showed me a continuum active in my life I had only vaguely been aware of before.  It showed me that each of us are involved in a huge continuum in which we are a unique thread making up the woven fabric we know as the past, present and future.  I was on the verge of beginning to trace my own colourful thread in its weaving. But as a thread we are weaving as part of a much bigger tapestry.

What I eventually understood was that death had entered Shaun into a more expansive way of experiencing himself than he knew in the body.  In this new life he was in a certain way a baby, a learner.  He was gradually maturing in his new life, just as a new-born baby slowly grows into its life outside the womb.  In doing so a baby develops through stages such as infancy, childhood, and adolescence.  Life outside the womb allows the baby the possibility of greater movement.  So it gradually learns to crawl, then walk and run.  The early limitations fall away as it grows. The wider possibilities of the life Shaun had entered meant that his limitations could slowly drop away.  But this meant the dropping away of the values, responses and way of dealing with events and people he had developed in his physical journey.

I was once more visiting in Devon to work there for a few days.  While there I met Zelda, a woman interested in dreams, Wicca and the inner life.  We walked up to the spot where Shaun’s ashes were spread.  Then Zelda sat while I became receptive to Shaun.

This communication was unlike any other I had experienced with Shaun previously.  I started by asking my usual question as to what he was meeting now in his after death life.  He told me that the process of losing himself had continued and he was now on a boundary, which if he passed over, he would no longer be the Shaun I had known.

I was trying to understand this and asking questions when suddenly Shaun was a woman, and engulfed me in wonderful female love.  This was so unexpected and beautiful I wept.  To be loved in that way by somebody I had known as a very masculine male was an extraordinary experience and very moving.

Gradually I recovered from the surprise and the feelings, and saw that Shaun was now male and female at the same time.  He had not switched to becoming a female, but had enlarged to being both male and female.  The losing of himself as he had been, and the adding of things that he could not experience while in the body, had led him to become this fuller very loving being.  Now, he/she was a whole person.

As I experience this I wondered what the border was that he/she was now ready to cross, so asked him/her if she/he knew what was over the other side.  She/he replied that it was very simple.  “It is a life without boundaries.”

Although those were the only words spoken, I received a flow of impressions or insights helping me to grasp something of a dimension of experience.  And as this was happening Shaun said something in a manner typical of him in life.  “And you, you bugger, have already been there before me.”

I could sense the smile and love in this, and understood what was implied and stated in the words.  Shaun was saying that during his life, and even since his death, I had been like a guide to him, making it easier for him to find his way in life and death.  He was also directly referring to a dream I had experienced. Quoted from House if the Ancestors.

 

Getting ready for the voyage of death

Every night you create a new drama. You conjure out of your own being the people, the creatures, the surroundings of your dream. Then you give life to what you create not only life but purpose and drama. You are a supreme dramatist, playwright, actor and actress. You are the great Creator in your dreams. Considering this, have you ever wondered why that enormous creativity does not flow into your waking life? You can see that some people have that creativity and are enriched by it personally and financially. Why not you?”

So our work as the dream watcher, the dream explorer, is to help you remember, help you find your way, to rediscover or uncover your creativity and problem solving ability. That creativity and ability to solve problems is always there inside you and is particularly important in the experience of death. That wonderful ability belongs to you, otherwise you would not have existed so long. So it is not for someone else to solve your problem or to find the way for you. It is for you to help uncover those possibilities within you.

Remember that death and the world of dreams are the same. Here is a description by someone who explored the world of death. William Lilley, was a spiritual healer. He lived an extraordinary life, uniting in his practice the use of ordinary medicine, herbs, massage, manipulation, sound therapy, vibration therapy, along with a clairvoyant ability to look into the body and diagnose sickness. He was able to consciously ‘leave his body’ and visit the ‘Inner World’.

His description of this is typical of many other people’s experiences – but he can describe it best:

 “When I am going into trance, I breathe in the Yoga method shown me by Dr. Letari. Immediately I get a sensation as though I am falling, or being pulled backwards. As this sensation comes to a climax, I seem to be travelling through space at terrific speed. I have opened my eyes many times at this point, but the only vision I have is of passing through a dense fog. Then, quite suddenly, the fog clears and I am at a stile. I climb over this stile and immediately there is a voice speaking to me over my shoulder. This voice is always with me, explaining everything I see and everyone I meet. The stile seems to be on the edge of a large field, which rises gradually to the form of a hill. I walk up the hill, and beyond it I visit many places. It is always the same style, the same hill, the same voice, and it just seems like a large country with so many different towns to visit.

The most interesting and remarkable experience I ever had during these visits happened before I went into trance. Several people had been speaking of consciousness. They had asked me to describe the world I experienced. Was it solid? Did I appear solid? I promised them that if I could, I would find out. I arrived at my stile, the voice came to me, and it evidently knew my desire, because it said “Feel the earth!” I did. It was solid. “Feel the grass beneath your feet!” I did. That was solid too, and even had dew on it. “Smell these flowers!” They were perfectly natural and had the usual perfume. In fact, everything around was natural. Then I was told, “Feel your body”. I did so. It was as solid as I am materially.

‘The voice then said, “Close your eyes; make your consciousness passive”, or as you would do when preparing for a trance state. “Now feel the earth beneath your feet!” There was nothing. “Open your eyes”. It wasn’t dark, it wasn’t light. “Feel at your body”. It wasn’t there. “Such is Spirit” said the voice. “Just a consciousness holding within it all experiences of your lifetime, all the joys and sorrows, your desires, achievements and failures, whence comes spiritual evolution. In your world of the material, you are able to examine matter; everything is matter. When you think of the spiritual, naturally you build in your consciousness another material world.” It is an amazing inner world which offers freedom. It is ours to create, and the very core of us is bodiless awareness”.

See if you can imagine or picture that. If you can you are well on the way to an enormous discovery. Also each of us create a unique inner world, and it can be anything, for we are the creators of our own world.

To meet the challenges, you will meet in death, you need to change your attitudes and beliefs about dreams to face the journey of death well. To start with, whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.

It is also important to realise that every image, every scary or terrifying thing, is taken place inside you, in your mind. This means that every awful animal, every scary thing or person, is created out of your own fears and must not be seen as outside you as happens in waking awareness. The problem is that we are often scared of or frightened of actually experiencing our emotions and so they confront us in our death state. Avoiding them or controlling them is like running away from oneself – there is no escape.

 Example: There was part of the music here that left a wonderful image in my mind of a great central flash of light radiating like crystals in patterns like a great cross with spokes. At the centre was the transcendent reality of life. As a transcendent reality life simply exists and shines out its being. It is forever beyond definition, yet is ever being enshrined or embodied in some form by the various religions of the world. They point to something beyond them shining forever. They collect around the central radiance like spokes or shapes that are not the reality of life, but which do take form from it.

When we experiment and realise that nothing can actually hurt you, you can learn to react to your death experience differently. This different view is a way of transforming your life.

Everything you see as outside you in your dream life is coming from you, your emotions, your fears, your beliefs, your joys and explorations are all you, clothed in the dream images and drama.

In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects and places of our dream. Therefore. our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene, something that haunts our memory shown as a ghost or demon. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream – our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the

Remember that the dream and death world is full of symbols. They will gradually diminish as you grow and learn how to survive in this world.

The real heroine or hero of the inward journey does not remain in this symbolised version of themselves. They do not accept the Devil as an exterior agent, or Christ as an outer and perhaps historical character. They do not accept their dreams at face value, but are ready to face themselves with the courage necessary. For it is an uncomfortable journey to actually see oneself. It is a demanding climb to have one’s awareness stretched and widened beyond one’s personal limitations in order to include a vaster experience of oneself. Therefore, there are inbuilt or personal resistances to actually having direct insight. It is easier to remain at a symbolic level rather than discover the wonderful or uncomfortable truths about oneself.

Things you need to practice to meet the changes life and death presents you with. Learn to relax your body, and when you are quite good at that relax your mind also. See Relaxation

 Having learnt to relax, choose a spot you can sit or lie down comfortable for a few minutes. Now I want you to imagine you are under water and learn to breathe naturally – remember you are in the dream world so can easily breathe under water. Continue with this, even if it takes several sessions, until you feel at ease with it.

Now take your time to work through these other exercises in the same way.

1.  You take off from the ground and fly by willing yourself to fly. At first some people need to run and jump gliding along. But gradually you will be able to take off and soar. Then try floating in mid-air, doing acrobatics while flying etc.
2. Choose a scary animal or thing such as a zombie or the devil, and see it coming for you. If it attacks you remember it is a dream image and so no harm can come to you. If you can allow it to come into you observing what you feel. If you can, actually completely identify with it. This needs to be practiced as most people feel the dream/imagined person or thing is something other than themselves and are often hesitant to become it. When you do this it usually changes the way your body or feelings are experienced. As this is done notice any changes in how you feel as that person – or object – speak as them in the first person. Do not say, “I feel as if this person is …” but say, “I feel I am and am doing ….” As this happens watch any realisations or insights that arise and explore the person or thing. Ask question of this dream character or thing until you feel you have realised what it is of you that is being revealed.
3. Next imagine you are standing on the edge of a massive hole or lip of a volcano, and when ready jump into it. Feel whatever you feel and remember that dreams, and such inner world images are all virtual.
4. You meet a wonderful partner and without any shyness you make friends with them and express yourself fully with them.
5. A wild animal comes toward you and without flinching you welcome it and it becomes your friend and companion – or at least that is your aim. So try for it.
6. A strange alien creature or creature from another level of existence stand before and want to approach you. Can you become a friend of even a pupil and as with number 2 identify with it?
7. A woman or man who appears like a ghostly figure and is slightly see through wants to merge with you. Can you allow it to do so with feelings and not either a frightened or a rigid and unfeeling human?
8. The abyss is the same as a void, suggesting the formless spirit of life lying within and at the core of all physical formed life. Therefore, it might link with the transcendental or the spiritual life of death. Can you surrender and lose yourself in the void or abyss? At some point in your journey beyond dreams and death you will confront it and practice makes perfect. If you are not used to it you may feel it is like dying, but you are dying to your limited self and becoming everything.
9. When we approach the enormity of what we are, we are often ‘naked’ and unprepared. Genesis explains this wonderfully well, but I have changed the word God which in many people’s mind means a father figure watching over us to the enormity – within us. And to make it understandable in terms of what has already been said I have altered some other pieces. For Genesis is about the genesis (birth of – creation of) of the human self-consciousness, the ego, which was very different to the animal instinctive consciousness it developed from.

And they heard the voice within them of the enormity which they felt as they walked the earth for the first time. And Adam/mankind (Adam is actually not a singular word when translated correctly) and his new awareness hid from being conscious of the enormity. And the enormity was felt by Adam/mankind to be asking, “Where are you?”

And the enormity was heard by mankind, and I was afraid, because they were naked; and hid themselves.

And the enormity said, Who told you that thou were naked – lost awareness of the enormity?

“When mankind first entered the state of life in physical bodies he would have no more idea of clothes than any other animal, for as far as his physical body is concerned he is an animal. It was the nakedness of his “human” qualities that he became aware of. He had been given faculties for the development of Thought, Reason and Will, yet immediately he acts on his own initiative he discovers that he has absolutely nothing in himself to replace the Omniscient Wisdom of Elohim, which had hitherto guided all his activities.

He acted on his own “impulse” and found that it was “blind” and “without intelligence.” As a “man” he was at the “zero” – point of human development. He had qualities far higher than any possessed by the animal world, but he had everything to learn in the use of them. As man he was far more helpless than the animals. “Instinct” provided them with everything they needed. Man, in order to be man, had to re­place instinct by thought and reason, and he was a baby” in knowledge.” Quoted from Ain Soph – The Unknown God.

Such a meeting may feel like falling into a huge darkness, and so it might help to actually practising falling into a pit of darkness. Obviously our personality or ego may feel threatened by this, so it needs practice.

Adventures in the Inner World

 Something you need to be aware of when you pass through into the inner world of dreams and death is the human tendency to believe they are the body they just left behind. This also means they identify with the pastimes, pleasure and habits of their past life in the body. It seems that many people never leave behind the life that is really gone for good, so to progress they go to sleep. The can create whatever they wish because of the ability we have in dreams to do many things, like surfing, sitting with friends in a café, and a million other pastimes.

So it is important to remember that in this environment or dimension you are capable of almost anything because you are at the quantum level beyond time and space. Because of that you could if you wished see other planets, visit alien races, discover your own amazing abilities, appear in a body of light, help or support those still in a body by your ability to influence them, to face the awesome core self. Or look back at the many lives you have lived as different people in different roles, and therefore see what your next assignment in life will be.

Here is a description by Markley about his experience of exploring possibilities.

“It was as though the dream I had been watching was a movie, and instead of looking at the screen on which it was being projected, I somehow began looking into the lens of the movie projector. As I did so, the energy of my gaze “melted” the movie that was passing through, which in turn allowed my gaze to penetrate deeper into the movie process, seeing where the movie came from. I knew that I was about to get an answer to some of my deepest questions about dreaming: What is the true nature of dreams? Where do they come from? What function do they play?

I was somehow able to see first the more superficial levels of dream process within myself, and then deeper levels, until the depth of my gaze revealed processes so alien that I was no longer able to understand them. At this point I returned my attention to the need to record the dream, and woke up. There were five categories of dreams in all. The function of the first type of dream process I saw was pure entertainment.

 The second reviewed current concerns and unfinished business, and the attempt to find solutions to problems therein.

The third process involved the reception of guidance from higher wisdom sources within the mind. At a superficial level, this guidance dealt with the concerns of the second type of process; but at a deeper level, it dealt with topics that came along with the guidance process.  These topics seemed to concern the future, and the evolution of the mind and soul both individual and collective.

The fourth type answered a question about the familiar assertion that “most of us use but a small part of our mental capacities” (some “experts” say we use only about 10 percent, others that it is as small as 2 percent). I had often wandered about this, thinking that in nature, if things don’t get used, they atrophy. If we have all this excess mental capacity that we aren’t using, why doesn’t it atrophy?

 The fourth mode seemed to be some sort of gymnasium, with a range of mental, psychic, and spiritual exercises to keep the brain/mind fit.

 The final type of dream content was totally surprising. As I penetrated deeply into my internal dream process, what I found can perhaps be best described as being visited by aliens.” The “foreground” resembled a resort hotel, a place for sightseeing and recreation. It was benign and human-feeling, although the visitors were anything but human! As I explored more deeply, however, things got so alien that I couldn’t understand them in the lucid-dream state.

 As I reluctantly turned back from this journey, I realised that I had an answer to yet another question about dreams that had long puzzled me: “Why are our dreams so highly symbolised? “

 I now understood why the deeper reaches of dream life must be camouflaged by symbols: the self-protective belief systems which dominate waking life are simply unable to accept the alien-ness of deep dreaming process; symbolic camouflage artfully bridges the gap.

 This last category of dream represents what I call “the L-Squared dream,” a lucid dream in which the dreamer is lucid about the process of being lucid. To become lucid in this way, it is helpful to imagine having a miner’s lamp on one’s forehead, a metaphoric “truth beam” that reveals the underlying truth of whatever is involved.”

Great Learning Opportunities

In many memories of near death experiences mention is made of great academies of learning.

An extraordinary man William Lilley, says of his own experience of these. “I have paid visits too, to the Halls of Learning, which seem to me more like the Acropolis at Athens.”

But Dr. Shafica Karagulla who is bril­liantly qualified to evaluate the creative frontiers of the human mind has written about these learning centers. As a neuro-psychiatrist with an outstanding medical and psychiatric background of search and practice in four coun­tries, including the United States of America, she can speak from wide experience and profound insight.

To quote from her book, Breakthrough to Creativity, “She explained that they are different from a dream in that the discourses given by the lecturer are in clear and orderly sequence. At times teaching aids are used or there are laboratory demonstrations. She goes to sleep and seems almost immediately to find herself on the campus or in a building or a classroom of the university. These have been the same buildings and lecture halls through the years. The architecture is simple but not like any building she has seen in waking consciousness.

The demonstrations or teaching aids are what she calls “thought forms.” The teacher or lecturer instantly brings into manifestation in the air in front of him, three-dimensional models which he can turn and alter at will. The models are instantly enlarged or reduced in size as the teacher desires for demonstrating some point in the lecture. When she attends lectures on the atom, schematic models are shown, also models that do not look like anything she has ever seen. These models may be in motion or may be stopped for observation.

In one lecture on the atom which she recently attended the lecturer discussed the neutron of the atom. He called it a “sound-binder” and said that the binding energy of an atom is what might be described as ultra-sonic in a very narrow frequency band slightly different for differ­ent elements. Vicky remembered twelve or fourteen people present in the class. The lecturer turned to two scientists present in the class who were Russian and said, “Since your country has made certain discoveries in this regard it is deemed wise to give this information to others. You lost several of your good scientists recently because they accidentally happened upon a frequency affecting the iron atom.”

The impression was that the others present were scientists from different countries. The lecture lasted for some time and when she awoke in the morning it took an hour to dictate it word for word. During the course of the lecture the instructor brought into visibility in mid-air a schematic model of a neutron in an atom of iron. He represented it as a spiral of a certain num­ber of turns with the two ends of the spiral forming a central line within the coil perpendicular to the plane of the turns of the spiral. The spiral was in the form of a cone, wider at one end than the other. Another model which he used for demonstration showed the neu­tron as two spiral vortices of this type with the small ends of the cones almost touching each other and the cones whirling in opposite directions.”

Of course that was one person’s experience, but there are other world colleges of art, music, self-knowledge and all human interests, all taught without words through direct sensing.

Gods and Humans

It is not simply alien worlds and the being on them we are open to, but also the gods. To remind you of Jesse Watkins statement, “I had feelings of gods, not only God but gods as it were, of beings which are far above us capable of, er, dealing with the situation that I was incapable of dealing with, that were in charge and running things and, umm, at the end of it, everybody had to take on the job at the top.”

Gods can be of different types. Here is a description of meeting one in the jungles of Japan.

“But suddenly both of us were stopped by the sense of a powerful presence. She reached out for my hand, and we stood experiencing but not seeing, something immense over and around the stones. I felt as if I had been privileged to stumble upon a jungle clearing in which a god dwelt, and it was around such the ancients built temples. This was a jungle god of death, related to the forces of the earth and the decay of vegetation and life amidst the trees. It seemed to me I was standing near something akin to a humming cable carrying enormous electricity, and I felt the same care and respect one would have in that situation.

For me, as I stood and felt the impact of this eternal yet decaying spirit of life, I understood that in some way it was created out of the energies of nature by the collective life experience and veneration of generations of Japanese men and women. It was the essence of their experience in regard to death and eternity, collected through the long years of human life in the jungles of Asia. To touch this god with consciousness as we were doing was to have the honour of sharing the collective wisdom of the Japanese spirit.

So far, what we have experienced has all taken place in the ‘soul’ world, the domain of dreams. But if we have realised in life or death that we have more of our self than our body, we will gradually pass into experiencing oneself and others as beings of light and tone. Here we break through to the underlying intelligence, power and love, in the creative forces of the universe – the universal.

Then we realise we are in the presence of the gods. The dogma of Christian teaching says there is only one God. But that is an untruth, for in Genesis 01:26 it says, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

God says, “Let Us”. Who are the others being mentioned? The word translated God in the first verse of Genesis is, (In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth) Elohim.

Elohim literally means “gods” – a word which we associate with almost any nation rather than the Hebrews. But what, really, were the “gods”? Well they appear to have been personifications of Divine Attributes, or the Forces at work in Nature. Around these “gods” the old mythologies were built.

The one God in Hebrew thought was ‘ain soph’ the unknown God and unknowable by human thought. Today scientists are still trying to find what was behind the creation of our universe and the Big Bang. They face the same problem – what began it all took place in a condition which is beyond human intellectual thought, even beyond time and space, for time and space came about through the action of the Big Bang. So what we have in the word Elohim is reference the many forces of creation that emanated from the ‘ain soph’ unknown god – and became the gods. But we should not think of the gods as having human form and running our lives like some crazy government. The gods are the immense and formative creative forces inherent in our universe. We perhaps can recognise them in the immense and universal processes of biological life.

Some people have a strange belief that they created their child or children. True they played a large part in creating the soul/personality of their child, but as for the miraculous, complex and even intricate formation of a child’s body from two tiny cells, all a parent did was to be a host. That may be why the Catholic Church speaks against suicide, because people state it as taking their own life. But whose life was it being taken?

Here is another man’s experience of the gods.

I had an amazing dream. In it I was walking home at night in the countryside, and I looked up at the night sky, and saw with wonder huge stylised figures made of thousands of stars dancing across the sky from horizon to horizon.

As I entered the dream I recognised them as what ancient cultures have called the gods. But they were in no way like the strange portrayals of the ancient gods we see in films and drama; powerful caricatures of human beings with amazing powers. These beings did not have human form with crazy quirks, angers and desire for power that humans have. I experienced them as the spectrum of fundamental forces and energies that work together to create the universe.

However, these forces that usually we take as somehow inanimate or without awareness, like the force of gravity or the energy pouring out of the sun, I experienced as having awareness and intelligence. I knew them as existing in the water we drink and the air we breathe. I knew them as our real parents, of whose body we take into us to exist. I knew them as the beings we are constantly hurting through our destructive relationship with nature. They explained to me that we have not yet fulfilled our role, a role that placed us as the custodians of life on Earth. 

In the inner world the enormously powerful can also be the gentlest or transformative when it touches us, Whether we call these beings gods, angels, spirits or giant forces, when we are touched by them we will know it. When we achieve greater awareness we discover we are not alone on this planet. There are beings we meet who have trod this path long before us, or are way ahead of us, and no longer need to live a physical life. Some of these being are so incredible to meet they are beyond what we can understand. To touch such wonders of what Jacques Vallee calls the Multiverse – the multiple dimensions of the universe – is to have a wider and nobler vision of life. It is to live within something with vaster possibilities than offered by the usual view of the universe and ones place in it.

Perhaps if you could really see and know what you are, it would be a wave in an ocean of energy, only having a sense of your independence out of your particular wave formation or movement. The wave is, out of its movement and form, a separate being. Yet at the same time it is inseparable from the ocean giving it existence. Today, here, now, remember you are in that ocean. Sometimes take off the clothing you wear created out of the images you have conceived of who you are and how you exist, and dive naked into that sea. Swim in it, play and be part of your natural surroundings.

When you are in the ocean that is your real home, look around for the others who swim with you. Feel the great currents that carry you along, and ask yourself where they are going, and where from. Look back on what you perhaps viewed to be your ‘real’ life and see it from this perspective. See it overall and find the seeds from which it grew, and what fruit it seeks to bear. And when you see that, ask for wisdom and strength to enable you to bring those fruits to ripeness.

Look for me there, for there is much more to share with you than can be expressed within the restraints of this small book. There I swim with you and am known as DreamHawk. If our paths have meaning together I will take you to meet some of those great beings who are to us like mountains we stand before in awe. There we will bathe in the waters of life together and be renewed.

So today, this moment, here and now, you can open to being more than you have ever been before. Recognise how limiting beliefs and thoughts create actual walls that close you in. Realise now that at this moment, if you drop away the views and beliefs so often taught us since childhood, you open yourself to a wider and more wondrous life. Now, at this moment, you can swim in that ocean of life and love that constantly gives you existence. No thunderclap needs to sound for this to happen. No lightning bolt needs to strike you to enable this. It is here, now, within the ordinary sounds and events surroundings you. Here it is, interwoven with all you think and feel. Why not open to it and let yourself know it?

Example: Suddenly I felt the presence of something or someone moving at tremendous speed, and as they passed they simply touched me. They had no body yet I felt them and the touch, and it immediately felt as if a great force or energy had entered me, and it had caused me to lose any sense if my body so I existed as simply awareness. The enormous energy passed through me, and the being communicated that it needed to use the energy to change something in our world.

Beyond the Beyond

When we look out upon the physical world in a way we are looking upon our inner world. For we are constantly creating, altering and playing with our enormous ability to shape the world and ourselves – for good or ill. The enormous forces that have shifted continents are in action within us to. These forces express quietly or dramatically, in cycles, seasons, constantly shifting through immense change; and we are a part of this amazing universe either working with it or living in ignorance of it.

Part of these cycles are the human birth and death and rebirth. And behind the changes are the eternal, forever living through the changes of human lives.

Many people still live as if they have to grab everything because death will wipe them out. Such feelings arose because we lived through a period where we saw only our physical structure which will be wiped out. Now science has seen that we are each fundamentally quantum – energy – and from this view they cannot find death. Ancient people saw the same thing and gave different words to describe it.

A new age is emerging from constant change – the quantum age. It promises amazing break through to things we cannot even imagine at the moment. It is still little understood; our knowledge is still far from complete.

I came upon it in my wildest moments, watching my friend move through the strange geography of death. He had passed through the terrain, over rocky places and over frontiers of the mind and of the soul, ever upwards toward the Spirit of it all. There are greater truths about nature, our human nature, still to be discovered.

I end this ramble through ideas with something I experienced when attempting to see if I could trace where my friend Shaun was.

I saw him spreading, reaching, no; Being everywhere. And it hadn’t been easy or without trial. And now here he was – Startling, immense, and being everywhere. He was felt rather than seen.

And what vision. For he was feeding on the stars, and entangled in the galaxies, tasting it all, and still wanting more. For he needed all the nourishment to form a new being; to form it out of all he had been, like an artist, weaving, moving, with his essence permeating it all.

He was exploring, living, the constant rise and fall of possibilities as they occur from cosmic change and human lives. As each possibility arises he compared it to see its harmonics, with all he held within himself, and all that exists in the worlds.

He was searching constantly for an interface that has harmonic concordance with what he needed. It would form a connection between the time, the place, the parents, and the possibilities for the life streaming into the future. The time is still not set, but is focusing on the turn of the year. Many are born now forming a power working toward forging a new society.

“Soon I will be with you to continue our love and work in the body”.

The Return to a body

At birth the ‘germ’ of the future personality and body, is clothed with physical substance drawn from the parents, along with inherited temperamental qualities. Working with these as materials is the essence of the past life and death experience. This spiritual impulse, takes the ‘model’ given by the parents, and works into it the pattern it brings from its central experience. So there comes into being, through life and death, another life upon the earth.

Just as there was a reliving of life at death, so just prior to birth there is a reliving of death. ‘He sees a tableau which this time displays all the hindrances he must remove, if his evolution is to make further progress. And what he sees becomes the starting point of forces that he must carry with him into a new life.

The plan for the soul was a cycle of experience, unlimited in scope and duration, in which the new individual would come to know creation in all its aspects, at the discretion of will. The cycle would be completed when the desire of will was no longer different from the thought of the Highest. The consciousness of the new individual would then merge with its spiritual consciousness of identity with the Core, and the soul would return to its source as the companion it was intended to be.

When the body was no longer a hindrance to the free expression of the soul-when the conscious mind had merged with the subconscious, and the atomic structure of the body could be controlled so that the soul was as free in it as out of it – the earth cycle was finished and the soul could go on to new adventures. This conquest of the physical body could not be attained until there was perfection in the other dimensions of consciousness in the system, for these made up, with the earth, the total expression of the sun and its satellites. Whichever state of consciousness the soul assumed became the focal point of activity. The other states of consciousness receded to the position of urges and influences.

Man is at all times the total of what he has been and done, what he has fought and defended, what he has hated and loved. In the three-dimensional consciousness of earth every atom of his physical body is a reflection of his soul-a crystallisation of his individuality. His emotional and nervous structures, his mental abilities, his aptitudes, his aversions and preferences, his fears, his follies, his ambitions, his character, are the sum of what he has done with his free will since it was given to him. So every personality – the earthly cloak of an individuality – is different from every other personality.

Every person’s life is shaped to some extent by karma: his own, that of his associates and loved ones, that of his nation and race, and that of the world itself. But these, singly or together, are not greater than free will. It is what the person does about these influ­ences and urges, how he reacts to them, that makes a difference in his soul development. Because of karma some things are more probable than others, but so long as there is free will anything is possible.

Selection of a body: coming situations in history, former associations with the parents, the incarnation, at about the same time, of souls it wishes to be with and with whom it has problems to work out. In some cases, the parents are the whole cause of a soul’s return-the child will be devoted to them and remain close to them until their death. In other cases, the parents are used as a means to an end-the child will leave home early and be about its business.

The personality is shaped by three or four incarnations, the portions of the earthly experience on which the individuality wants to work. The emotions and talents of the person reflect these incarnations. The dreams, visions, meditations-the deep, closely guarded self-consciousness of the personality is the pat­tern of experience among the other states of consciousness of the solar system. The intellect is, roughly speaking, from the stars: it is the mind force of the soul, conditioned by its previous experience in creation outside the solar system, and dimmed or bright­ened by its recent experiences within the solar system. Using ideas from Edgar Cayce