Chris Campbell Interviews Tony Crisp

Tony Crisp explains his background by saying - During the forty years of seeking the wild wondrous beasts of the soul and spirit, I dared my own inner adventure. But I also travelled with other people, sharing their experience of fear and wonder as they unveiled and set loose their fountain of perception. I have trod countless dream pathways, traversed the timeless with those using drugs, and wrestled with the vitality of the body as it mimed and shouted its deepest intuitions through movement, dance and voice. The journeys, alone or with others, led into a realm of experience that comparatively few people know exists. It is a realm in which the world, our life and preoccupations are seen from completely new perspectives. Often named 'the unconscious', or the 'spritual realm' it is a dimension of experience that is incredibly creative, containing treasures equally as fascinating as any tomb of Tutankhamun. Having access to this realm enormously enlarges our experience of life and the understanding we bring to work and relationships. It is also a great transformer, in that the common cultural views of who we are, and what our life and death is, are torn down to be replaced by more inclusive views. Chris Campbell explained her reason for asking Tony to do this interview by saying, "When you talk to my son about physics or metaphysics or simply questions that life throws up, he has always loved the particular way you explain things, so I wanted to capture, as naturally as possible, your responses to questions that have come up over the years and to have a record of them .

Section Headings

A New Look at Enlightenment

Chris: So what do you think of people who are considered very enlightened or who have special healing powers that have proved to be valid?

Tony: I think they have simply grown a bit more than we have. We have very definitely grown from seeds -- the sperm and ovum -- and from what I have seen, general human life is expressing only a tiny fraction of what our potential is. So some people have managed to extend their growth much further than the rest of us, expressing more of what is latent in their seed.

I do believe though, that the word enlightenment is deeply misunderstood. I very much go along with the description given by Richard Maurice Bucke in his book Cosmic Consciousness. He says that at one period of time early in the development of the human being there was no self-awareness. The early human beings, or the prototypes of human beings, did not have self-awareness. This view is not one simply stated by Bucke, it is fairly general among people who tried to define the history of consciousness, or the evolution of self awareness. So Bucke says that early human beings had what he called animal consciousness. In other words they lacked self-awareness and the critical faculties that come from language and being able to use language to reason. So they existed purely out of their instincts and thereby had a spontaneous relationship with their environment. They could not ask such questions as, "Who am I? What am I? What is the meaning of life?" This means that they could not look back on themselves, or analyse their own behaviour, as we have the possibility of doing.

Bucke goes on to speculate about what it must have been like for the very first of the human beings who achieved self-awareness. Of course he is not alone in such speculations. Carl Jung has written about this also. What Bucke says is that the first human beings to achieved self-awareness probably did so in their prime, not in their childhood as we do. Also, to wake up to itself in that way must have been an extraordinary experience. It may even have been felt as a sort of possession by some spiritual being. Perhaps it was like a taking over of what had existed, what they had experienced, by this new impulse and awareness. It is interesting that the word identity has in it the word entity, because prior to self awareness there would have been an absence of a clear sense of identity.

We have some ability to grasp what this must have been like from the life of Helen Keller who did not attain self-awareness until she was 11. This because she lived in the untutored world of the deaf and blind. So when she attained self-awareness through learning language, she says that she was born on that day; that previously she did not exist as a person.

But the point I am moving toward is that Bucke says we now achieve self-awareness fairly early in our life. It is commonplace, and we can see the condition has huge variety. Because we are self-aware it does not make us Saints. It does not make us particularly wise, despite the attainment of this extraordinary type of awareness, there is still an immense variety in human nature. Bucke goes on to say he believes that when we achieve cosmic consciousness, or as we more frequently call it now, enlightenment, there will be just as much variety as there is in the attainment of self-awareness.

So the attainment of self-awareness was probably just as extraordinary an experience, a religious experience perhaps, as enlightenment is for someone today. What Bucke points out, and is one of the major themes of his book, is that just as self-awareness arose out of an evolutionary process, and was at first rare, and has gradually become commonplace, so enlightenment was at one time very rare, and is gradually becoming more common in our times. Nevertheless, it is, dare we say, simply a process of further growth, of another level of human maturity. It is to be doubted that it is the final step in human evolution, the final attainment of all that a human is capable of. It is also fairly obvious that the people we acknowledge as having attained enlightenment, are, as Bucke suggests, incredibly varied in the ways they express or live it.

The attainment of self-awareness brought extraordinary new powers and new abilities. In its wake arose all the arts and sciences, the self-examination, the philosophers, the religious beliefs, and the variety of human societies. With it came the ability to question, to explore, to imagine in a way that may have been impossible previously. Because of it the wonderful arts arose. Music came from the stress and awareness of individual existence, along with architecture and the written word. Those are extraordinary abilities that we perhaps take for granted today, but were certainly not open to our very early forebears.

So, enlightenment will also bring extraordinary changes in the way we see and relate to the world. It will bring abilities and powers and new forms of creativity and exploration. It must be remembered however that no one person has achieved any fullness of the human potential. In fact some enlightened beings such as Aurobindo, and also Edgar Cayce in his writings, suggest that we remain under development until we can completely transform the human body and the world around us. Christ's Ascension, according to this view, is a map of the way forward. When we can transform the body into cosmic existence, then we can begin to feel we have achieved some level of mastery in the physical world.

Therefore, if we see enlightenment as the extension of self-awareness through a further maturing of our individual self, just as adolescence arises through maturing of the child self, we will look to those around us who have achieved some degree of enlightenment as our older brothers and sisters. We will move toward our own enlightenment by working with our own processes of growth and maturing.

Treading the Spiritual Path

Chris: Enlightenment is usually seen as a fruit of the spiritual path or a spiritual life, so what do you see as the spiritual path?

Tony: Lately I have found another way of thinking about this or of explaining it. This is because recently I have written about, and therefore given much thought too, the process of lucidity and waking up in sleep.

This is such a huge subject because when we begin to think about sleep it poses such big questions. In fact it has been called the little death. So in the explorations of many past cultures into the meaning of life, they have seen the experience of sleep as providing some information about the experience of death. This is perhaps because, as we begin to penetrate the darkness of sleep, we begin to penetrate the deeper levels of our own awareness and have a sense that we are thereby touching the foundations of our own existence.

When we see the moon and it is not full, we can see the edge where there is very marked light on one side and darkness on the other. Human life is very much like that. There is a sharp and dividing line between waking and sleeping, between having self-awareness and being as we call it unconscious. Mostly, what we call the spiritual path is about crossing that line, going over that border, moving beyond that frontier in one way or another.

Rock carvings in an Irish burial mound

I know some aspects of spirituality are said to be about living a good life; about being kind, charitable and loving to others. Well, there may be truth in that, but I do believe that unless one achieves some level of awareness of one's own internal nature through whatever path one takes, there has not been any real awareness of the spirit. In fact I define the spirit as pertaining to what doesn't change, what does not shift in human nature, what remains as the foundations of existence. It has everything to do with something that stands beyond life-and-death. And that is why I link it to crossing of that border, that frontier between waking and sleeping. It is about exploring the dark side of the moon. In fact, one of the stated facts of what we have called the enlightened human being, is that they never sleep. By this is not meant that the body does not go into a state of what we call sleep. What it means is that while they sleep they have focused awareness still and do not lose themselves in unconsciousness. That is why lucidity is such an interesting subject.

Carl Jung describes the consciousness of a human being, with its experience of being awake and asleep, as like a sphere. He said that on this sphere, or ball, there is a small spot of light about the size of a pea in relationship to a tennis ball. This small spot of light, he says, depicts our experience of waking. It is a tiny part of our whole self, the rest and greater part lies in the shadows of unconsciousness, of sleep.

Of course, most of us have glimpses into that dark world when we remember a dream. Therefore, as Freud suggested, dreams are a royal road to the unconscious. But there are many other paths that have been developed through the ages. Most of them in one way or another are ways of throwing the spotlight of awareness into the darkness of that large sphere that is our total being.

Diving into the Depths of Mind

Chris: When you mention the unconscious, what do you mean?

Tony: Something that has struck me very powerfully over the years is how we as a people relate to what I am calling the unconscious or unconsciousness. In the teachings of Buddhism we are told that fundamentally there is only the Void. This Void we tend to think of as a huge nothingness, a vacuum in which the human personality will disappear. This can seem very frightening, that behind everything is a sort of nothingness. The amusing thing is that this is an everyday human experience. When we fall into sleep we lose any sense of self. We have dropped into that Void. Our personality has indeed, as far as we are concerned, melted away and disappeared. Yet the next morning we awake and all is well. We have survived the Void.

Even so, there is something that can take our breath away in confronting the unconscious. Perhaps this is understandable only if you have used snorkelling equipment to swim in deep water. Some years ago I was swimming along the edge of an island in the Mediterranean. I had my goggles on and was enjoying the view of the seabed about 15 feet below me. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, I swam over the edge of a sheer precipice under the water. I could not see the bottom of that precipice, and the water was very clear. It literally took my breath away and I scrambled back to shallower water. Then, only bit by bit, did I dare to swim out into that amazing depth.

That has great similarities to how it feels the first time that we consciously begin to enter into the deep waters of the unconscious. It is so huge, contains so much, sweeps so far beyond our vision that we feel very much like I did as I went over the edge of that precipice.

So the spiritual path is about some level of daring, of being explorative, of gaining a glimpse of or an experience of what lies under the surface of our individual life. It is, I believe, also a part of the spiritual path to gradually learn to live in those depths and express and create from what you find there.

It is the change from sinking unconsciously into sleep, and diving into those depths with awareness.

Therefore, when I talk about the unconscious, I mean it is an area of ourselves that for one reason or another we cannot yet see. This is understandable in that from an evolutionary standpoint self-awareness is a very new and quite fragile thing. It is very vulnerable and in our times and culture breaks down very easily. If we look around immense numbers of people need artificial aids to survive. They need medical drugs such as antidepressants; they need the use of alcohol, nicotine or caffeine to help them face their everyday life. We are fragile creatures. Therefore I believe we keep our eyes closed until we are ready to see the enormity of our existence.

This enormity, and meeting it, is what I see as the spiritual path. We do not exist without the universe. We have no existence at the moment outside of the earth. And our existence depends upon the energy of the sun, of being a part of the ecology of our planet, and of our whole relationship with what we call consciousness, which very often we link with some strange material processes of our brain. If we look at ourselves clearly we see that we are an undifferentiated part, a totally enmeshed part, of the huge biological and cosmic process. The spiritual path, the entrance of awareness into that dark aspect of our own being, is fundamentally a becoming aware of that greater connection, of that at-one-ness with the universe in which we exist. That is why Bucke called it cosmic consciousness.

The essentials of the spiritual path, I see as being very much the same as the essentials of going to sleep. In other words we cannot go to sleep while we hang on grimly to self-control or focused thinking. We have to let go of our conscious will. We have to surrender our waking self to that spontaneous action of sleep. We hand over to another level of will which expresses as dreams. That takes trust. It takes courage. It takes time.

Some teachings talk of it as surrender, a yielding to the divine. However, because the idea of a God is foreign to many people, I believe it easier to see it as a surrender to what is innate in oneself. This surrender is simply a form of stilling the conscious mind to allow other aspects of self to express. It is an opening of self to receive something that has not yet emerged into the small bright light of our personal awareness.

Some teachings express it as the stilling of thought. In traditional yoga one first trained the body to be still. Once the body had become strong and could sit for a long period of time then the mind was slowed down through breath control and meditation techniques. For a different type of temperament the process of love has been used. In this approach the love was a form of surrender in which one's feeling self was opened to receive something beyond ones conscious personality. As can be seen, there is a common thread in these approaches. Although they may appear quite different on the surface, they are all a form of opening the conscious self to something that it does not yet include. Fundamentally we can think of it as a letting go of preconceived ideas, concepts, goals and attitudes. A clearing of our mind and feelings so that something new can be born into the experience of who we are. Some people describe it as a state of unknowing, or an undoing of knowing.

Sometimes the spiritual path has been called the way of liberation. This is because when we begin to experience that wider self we look back and see that we were previously a sort of prisoner in a small world that we created out of our concepts and beliefs, our convictions and fears. This small prison cell of our ego, our personality, is what the wider awareness liberates us from.

See The Unconscious

Opening to the Spirit

Chris: How would you describe what happens when you open yourself in that way?

Tony: I believe that depends very much upon who you are and what you can tolerate. You can understand this by looking at any traveller who explores the world. Different people have different experiences because some are more daring than others, some are more studious than others, some limit themselves by their viewpoints or beliefs.

In general though a widening of experience occurs, and what is common to many people is a sort of cleansing taking place. The depth of this cleansing depends upon the factors mentioned above. In brief, the effects and perhaps traumas of the past are brought to consciousness to heal and integrate. In older traditions such as in yoga, this was thought of in terms of meeting ones karma, the sum total of ones past actions and inactions. The many things from the past that had not been understood, not dealt with, not healed, were faced during this cleansing.

Another way of thinking about this is to explain it in imagery. Opening to that inner potential is like allowing a spring to start flowing from deep in the earth. As its flow strengthens it carries with it any rubbish, any blockages that are stopping its flow. As it strengthens further and flows into a stream, the stream carries away debris that is in the way.

Christianity, in the imagery of the New Testament, gives us examples of healing when this inner being -- the Christ -- is met. So there is the healing of the blind man, the healing of paralysis and the resurrection from the dead. The symbolical meaning is that we have previously been blind to the real situation we occupy in the universe; we have been paralysed by not knowing really who we are; and life was not really flowing through us as fully as it might, so in that way we were dead.

But underneath the process is the movement toward growth. It is a movement toward flowering of the innate quality or potential within oneself. So overall we could say that it is a push toward realising yourself as one and the same as the essence of the universe. Mystics in the past called it at-one-ment with God.

This very much links with what has been said about enlightenment and cosmic consciousness.

Something that has become very apparent to me over the years in regard to the spiritual path is that there seems to be a big difference between East and West in some areas. For instance Buddhism and some of the great masters of the eastern tradition talk about getting rid of the ego. In Buddhism it is described as a blinking out, like a candle going out, a disappearance of self. Whereas with Christianity there is a much greater emphasis on the transformation of self, a renewal and rejuvenation of who one is. Sometimes this is spoken of as a rebirth and so implies a sort of death. So in a way there are great similarities between East and West. But even with those similarities Christianity still emphasises the personal survival of bodily death, and having a life in the being of Christ.

Psychotherapy and the Spiritual Path

What has happened in the West in recent years is, as far as I can see a sort of outcrop of this Christian view of transformation, and is seen in the development of psychotherapy in its various forms. This has become a very powerful influence in society toward the transformation of self. And I believe this is an amazing step forward. Although many psychotherapists will not agree with me, I believe that in the broadest sense psychotherapy is a tremendous tool and advancement in the process of spiritual growth.

I say this because as far as I can see, nowhere in the past was there a real meeting with the effects of life in the womb, the trauma of birth, childhood traumas, and the sexual dilemmas and pains many of us suffer. Today when we take the spiritual path, the meeting with these blockages and infant traumas is part of the cleansing mentioned already. The best of the psychotherapies looks at the whole of the human being and includes body mind and spirit in its approach to transformation.

What I have seen is that if you press far enough into the deep renovation of yourself you cannot help but confront a widening of awareness. That, after all, in the essence of the spiritual.

Chris: You used to talk about Grof a lot. How do you connect his work with what you have said?

Tony: Yes. This was because I see Grof as a leader in the field of modern psychotherapy. He encompassed an enormously wide view of the human being. He moved beyond the limitations of Freud and Jung, and gave a much more detailed and extensive map of the human being than we had previously. Of course he was not alone in this. During the period of his major work he was accompanied by other giants in the field of exploring the human psyche. (See the work of Dr. Frank Lake, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich).

Something that links with what I said in regard to the spiritual path and the addition that psychotherapy has made to it is that very often in the past the meeting with oneself often remained in symbols. Or to put it another way, the traveller on that path never got beyond the symbols of what he or she was meeting.

To give what is perhaps not a very precise example; the person might have a powerful vision or experience of being in a frightening cave, or of meeting the devil, or an animal; perhaps even an angel. What people like Grof did was to break through the symbol into the reality underlying it. For instance Grof clearly defined the various stages of the birth trauma often represented by the symbol of a cave, or being tortured or threatened by a devil.

An interesting insight into the avoidance of going beyond the symbol might lead to has been given by Ralph Frenken Ph.D. in his review of Christian mystics. He believes that, "The psychodynamics of mystics, their symbol formations and their actions are based on excessive early trauma. . . . There is evidence that medieval mystics were deprived and also emotionally and sexually abused as children."

There is still a great tendency to remain in the symbol with many people on the spiritual path today. However, when we do frequently have the courage to break through the symbol and meet the reality of our own experience, the reality of who we actually are. We are readier to confront our real history and experience how it shaped and wounded us. So I see the path toward growth and change is enormously enhanced. I believe this adds great power to social change as well as individual change.

Another aspect of Grof's contribution was that his early work involved the use of LSD as an aid to psychotherapy. From his observations of thousands of patients he arrived, after much questioning, to the realisation that human consciousness can transcend all the boundaries we usually believe limit it. He sums this up by saying, “There is at present little doubt in my mind that our current understanding of the universe, of the nature of reality, and particularly of human beings, is superficial, incorrect, and incomplete.”

To quote one example from which this conclusion was reached I quote from Michael Talbot's book Holographic Universe:

Beyond the Limitations of the Body

In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number.

The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. “After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues' jokes, had they found out,” says Grof. “I went to the telephone, dialled the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.'” Grof also gives examples of people remembering events that occurred to their parents or grandparents long before they were born and of which they previously knew nothing. Some memories seem to come from periods far in the past, and the patients were able to describe in detail events and environment they were remembering.

Past Lives or Collective Unconscious?

Chris: So, do you mean that they were remembering former lives? Or were they tapping into a collective consciousness?

Tony: I am not sure that Grof tried to carefully define a philosophy around these experiences. I personally refer to it in a very open sense. I think we can make the mistake of very quickly saying it is a past life, or it is the connection with a collective consciousness. There are so many theories about what these things mean. We are a long way from being certain of where they arise from. One serious researcher, seeing the universe and the mind as holographic, believes that dreams themselves enter into other dimensions of reality. So we need to leave such questions open.

What we can say with some certainty is that we are capable of extending our awareness far beyond the limitations that are generally accepted.

Expanding Mind

Chris: Under what circumstances or conditions can we do those things?

Tony: Looking back at the information that past cultures left us, it seems likely that early human beings at first accidentally stumbled on the possibilities of extending their awareness. For instance we still have thousands of records of near death experiences occurring to people in the past, and still happening today. One of the common features of such experiences is the person witnessing verifiable events occurring at a distance from them, or at a time when they appeared to be in a coma with their eyes closed.

There are also many records collected by anthropologists and also verified, of tribal people dreaming of particular herbal remedies to cure ills. Some of these dreamt remedies have been taken into the modern pharmacopoeia. Namely such things as quinine. Also, in the past and in today's world, sometimes dreams present information that the dreamer does not have, has not learned, has not heard, and has in no way taken into themselves from outside.

From such experiences older cultures gradually developed the concept of having a soul that could dissociates from or be independent of the body. Some cultures, especially those in India and the Far East, explored ways of purposefully bringing about such extended awareness. It seems as if at a certain period the human body and mind became a laboratory in which those cultures tried out all manner of things to see what the results would be.

Of course, some of the techniques used were quite crazy. This probably arose because the underlying principles were not really understood. For instance, fasting gradually reduces the physical and emotional energy to a point where the mind and emotions become very quiet. But the active principle, so to speak, is not the fasting, but the quietness of the mind and emotions.

It was also noticed that to really explore these further reaches of consciousness certain qualities were necessary. A certain amount of confidence and fearlessness were needed to meet the further reaches of mind. Some cultures, such as the native American Indians, also realised that if one could not meet a reasonable amount of pain, then you could not really dive very deeply into that wider awareness; if for no other reason than the wider awareness breaking through the narrow and limiting boundaries of the ego of personality can be felt as pain.

Methods of Awakening

So some of the classic ways of extending awareness are:

1) Repeating a word or phrase over and over. The aim of this is not so much to gain understanding of the word or phrase, although sometimes particular words were used because of their associations, but to keep the mind one pointed and to draw it away from wandering into thoughts and feelings. In essence it was a way of quieting the mind and allowing other levels of awareness to become known.

2) Controlling the breathing in one way or another. It was probably observed that people in sleep, and in altered states of consciousness, breathed differently. My own guess is that these different types of breath were copied to see if they would produce such states of mind and body. Rapid breathing for instance, if carried on for some period of time tends to break down the usual threshold that exists between the conscious and the unconscious. Whereas very slow breathing has the effect of quieting the mind and emotions until, as with the repetition of a word or phrase, great quietness exists allowing another level of awareness to be known. This is a little bit like the hibernation that some animals enter into. And in fact the consciousness, or the state of consciousness that it produces, appears to be very similar.

3) Because dreams are projections into waking awareness of the deeper layers of consciousness, exploration of dreams is one of the great methods of extending awareness into the wider ranges of consciousness. I am not talking about interpreting dreams, but of exploring them, as described in Peer Dream Work. 4) Drugs, such as plants and herbs that have mind altering effects, have been used from the very earliest times to transport awareness into other dimensions of experience. Again, these were probably discovered by accident by early human beings, and then felt to be holy in one way or another. Some tribal people such as those in South American for instance, and others still involved in the shamanic traditions, still use such herbs or plants today. 5) Almost anything that enlivens, excites, uplifts or stimulates the human being has the potential to introduce them to altered states of consciousness. Therefore such things as dancing, singing, athletics, dramatic performance, sex, can all at times lead into a very different experience of oneself and ones perceptions. Probably because of this, love, and the direction of loving feelings toward the unknown, the abstract, or a concept of God, have been used throughout the ages by worshippers in the various religions. I believe what this does is to lead the energy from an outward expression through the genitals or the body, up the trunk into the brain. Here it enlivens parts of the brain that were probably under-stimulated previously, and produces altered states of awareness. One particularly sees descriptions of this method in the writings about what is called in India, Shakti, prana and tantra or Tantric sex.

Art by Jacqui Mair, from Your Dream Interpreter.

6) A practice that one also finds used in various ways in many past cultures is one in which the conscious will is surrendered, and one gives oneself over to spontaneous physical movement, vocal expression, emotions and imagination or fantasy. When the practitioner has really learned to give themselves to this practice, what arises is very much like a vivid waking dream. In fact it is probably the dream process breaking through into consciousness and interacting more fully with the waking critical mind. This method, to act as a power to mature the personality, needs to be interacted with consciously. In other words one needs to penetrate the symbolism of what arises as one does with dreams. This approach is very obvious in early Christianity in the Pentecostal experience. It is also seen in Subud, Seitai, the form of yoga called Shaktipat, and in some forms of psychotherapy such as early Reichian work.

But surrender means just that - surrender of ones body, surrender of ones sexuality, surrender of ones hungers, surrender of ones emotions, surrender of ones vocal ability, surrender of ones thoughts, imagination and beliefs. Thus also the surrender of the belief in God or the disbelief in God. We exist in a state of unknowing to discover the mystery behind our existence. If we don't surrender, then we are saying we already know.

7) A powerful approach taken from Zen Buddhism and Indian traditions is to simply ask oneself the question, “Who am I?” Of course, this enquiry into self must be continued diligently until there is a breakthrough.

8) One of the oldest of methods is that of simple self awareness. I suppose you could call it non-identification. What I mean by this is that usually we deeply identify with our body, with our thoughts, our emotions, and often very deeply with our beliefs. By recognising the passing quality of your body sensations, your thoughts and feelings, you discover a freedom and spiritual life you were previously cocooned from. Usually the central fact of our awareness, the core of existence, is possessed by thoughts and emotions, or the idea that we are our body. That possession falls away as you simply watch your thoughts and feelings and recognise them for what they are. This is not a case of repressing or controlling them, simply recognising them and not being possessed by them.

I have not specifically mentioned meditation because there are so many approaches to it, and in the end they are very similar to the things already mentioned.

9) In the practices of yoga one of the paths is called karma yoga. I know that the fundamentals of this are described in the Bhagavad Gita. It is there talked of as a way of living without attachment to ends or rewards. But I would like to describe it from a slightly different perspective. The things I have been talking about revolve around the first subject, the origin of things. As explained there, every tiny particle, everything we see around us, is part of that fragmented body of the original state of things. Everything is an expression of that, holding within it the potential of the source of existence. Nothing arises that is not a direct expression of that almighty creative act. Nothing can stand outside of the impulses and influences that were set in place at the beginning. Therefore, everything in our life is part and parcel of what we seek in a spiritual quest. We do not need to travel away from the ordinary and everyday events and surroundings to come face to face with the holy. We can therefore meet each day with that sense of relating constantly to the divine - and that is a spiritual path.

Genesis - The Beginning of Things

Chris: How would you describe the origins of things?

Tony: The passions of my early life -- I suppose that's what were -- led me in the past to read an enormous amount of books. But gradually over the years certain things have happened to me that I have drawn a tremendous amount of information from. For instance I had an incredible experience during which I felt as if I had gone back to the beginning of things.

Nebula

I had been wondering about difficulties in my life. I could see that they were causal. They had arisen from relationships with, for instance, my mother. But those events in themselves had been caused by things previous to them. So I was asking myself what was behind those events. During the experience in question I felt I was at the very beginning of the universe. I knew and experienced that beginning of things as a huge awareness. There was no separation in it at all. I had the impression that prior to it a whole universe had existed that had gradually sunk back, melted, or synthesised into this single great ocean of substance and awareness. Although to be more precise I guess I should describe it as a whole condensed universe that was also consciousness.

So from a huge universe in which had existed all manner of life forms, what I met had gradually synthesised into an immense and unimaginable single awareness. I felt that this was what our present science has seen as existing prior to the Big Bang. But the description is mine not that of science. It must be remembered that present scientific theory sees that the condition prior to the Big Bang was beyond time and space. Time and space were created by the Big Bang.

This view of a consciousness, a type of being existing prior to the emergence of the universe is not of course a new thing. Hindu philosophy talks of the universe as expanding and contracting over immense periods of time. It also states that fundamental to all existence is a form of consciousness. They describe this expansion and contraction as the breathing in and out of Brahm. But I felt that what our own science has not stated, or perhaps has not yet found, is the awareness or consciousness underlying everything.

I saw, I experienced, I felt with great emotion, that this consciousness was alone. In human terms that is the only way I can describe it. It was one immense consciousness without division, without separation anywhere in it. Nothing could exist outside of it. Even if it imagined something other than itself, that would still be an undivided part of itself. But because of what I am calling aloneness, the being, the consciousness wanted to create otherness. It wanted other beings to share its existence, its wonder.

So the only thing it could do to enable the existence of others was to die, to destroy itself. Therefore, as far as I can put this into words, with the enormous skill, with great art, with an ability to plan and foresee the results beyond what we can understand, it set about its own death. It did this with enormous love. And that death and that love is what our present culture calls the Big Bang.

My experience was that the Big Bang was an act of enormously creative self giving. It did this so others might exist. It was the only way in which the possibility of other beings having an existence outside of itself could come about. It was almost like seeding itself.

Love Irradiates The Universe

What I saw was that the Big Bang utterly shattered the existence of what had been before. That ocean of energy and consciousness destroyed itself so beings such as ourselves might exist. And then, as it died, at the very last moments of its death, it shot out something to penetrate all that was coming into being. It radiated love. It gave us love as its parting gift so that if any beings got lost, if they were troubled or overcome in their experience of growth, they could reach out for that love and be helped. They could touch the love, the heart and soul of which was self giving.

The death of that being also meant that every particle of the universe and what has arisen out of its death is the very substance of that great creative being and its act of self giving. There is nothing in the universe that is not the body, the broken and fragmented body, of that being. Every tiny fragment of our earth, of our bodies, of our universe, is the essence of that being. Every tiny speck of the universe is a seed that has the potential of that being within it. There is nothing that is not that being and a seed of that being. The potential to know that is within each of us. It is within each of us to be that wonder. We can grow and realise we are the children of that.

That is what I see as the beginning of things, the origin of our universe and ourselves. But I was also shown that our corner, our small part of the universe, has certain qualities that maybe other parts do not. One of them, especially in regard to ourselves, is the shortness of life. We are tiny, short lived, biological creatures that have emerged out of the amazing processes of this world in its interplay with the cosmos. We can see ourselves in one sense as little bags of shit. We can be thought of as little digestive reproducing bags. But because of that potential in us, there has always been a possibility of more in human life. As this species we have managed to emerge beyond the other living forms of this earth. We have developed complex language and enormous curiosity and creativity. But the shortness of our life is a big factor in our experience of ourselves. I was shown that this shortness of life is really important for us. This because an essential part of the mystery of the universe is death. Therefore death is an enormous key to understanding the universe and life. Understanding death means that we become capable of letting go of ourselves, of delivering ourselves, of being able to give ourselves away to the mystery underlying our existence. The importance of this is because, if what has been said above is correct, then death is at the very centre of the mystery of life. It is at the foundation of our physical being. It is behind the urge that leads parents to a sort of death in giving themselves to the new being that emerges, to parents giving of themselves to their offspring. The sun gives of itself as it is dying. Through its dying life can exist on earth. This is part and parcel of the processes out of which our universe has emerged.

Chris: Need that concept of death have the ideas of love attached to it? Tony: No, but that is what I felt. Maybe it is our definition of what we think of as love. Also, I did understand that I was looking at, or experiencing what arose, out of my own limited human awareness. The experience was interpreted into my own human terms. All I have is my vocabulary and my range of experience. But it did feel like a love beyond what I could understand. It felt like an enormous self giving.

Chris: And that enormous self giving in scientific or, physics terms, is what?

Tony: Well, we can look at from all sorts of perspectives. I don't think any of them are false. We can look at the universe in a purely analytical sense; we can look at it from the point of view of an investigative science; we can look at it from an artistic point of view; we can look at it as a chemical or energetic event; we can look at it with the sense of awe or wonder; we can look at it from the point of view of geometry or mathematics, we can approach it or relate out of feelings of love.

Diagram of the dance Venus and the Earth make during an eight year cycle. (From A Little Book of Coincidence by John Martineau.)

Some people who have a full grasp of, or an eye for mathematics and geometry, explain our solar system in ways that are quite incredible. They can demonstrate patterns and interrelationships between the planets that are of such wonder, order and symmetry, that it leaves us realising that an amazing art and wisdom is embodied in every tiny aspect of the universe and ourselves. So I believe that if we look as closely at the universe as mathematicians have, we also find that embodied in every tiny part of it is what I have called love. Taking an overall view of life on earth and interrelationships of the species in the food chain, it seems to me that life is constantly giving itself to itself in that act of giving.

So coming back to the theme of death in life, I do feel that this is a huge lesson for us to learn as human beings. And something I didn't say about that last enormous projection of love, the incredible emanation in the death throes, is that I believe the human race met that emanation of love very fully 2000 years ago. I want to say that my experience of the radiated love in the death throes I can only describe as being akin to a parent's feelings at their death, and their doing all they can to care for their children in those last moments. Almost like saying, "What can I leave with you to help you?"

Our name in the West for that Comforter that was left is Christ. I don't know if there was a historical Christ, because humans tend to project outwardly what they sense inwardly. It is innate in us to give an outer form to, or to see as something outside of ourselves, what we sense within ourselves of any wonder. So I can see the possibility that humans gave an outer form to what we call Christ. Just as we have given an outer form to what we call the devil.

It is difficult for us to claim as a part of ourselves something of such wonder. So we tend to put it outside of us so that it is not too near. Then it doesn't make us feel small and baby like in our own growth. We often cannot bear to see what we call the Christ as our own personal potential that we are constantly crucifying, denying, and washing our hands of. Nevertheless, we have that embodied in one of our world religions.

Chris: Just one of our world religions?

Tony: Well it is there in the others, but often not as clearly stated. For instance the Indians call it Krishna. And Christianity itself cannot be thought of as a stand-alone religion. It emerged out of what had existed before it. The area of the world in which it arose was a crossroads between East and West, and Christianity in many ways appears to be a synthesis of what existed before it.

Chris: When you talk about Christ, because it is a term that has been hijacked by people, what do you mean?

Tony: What do I mean? I have defined it in various ways. I liken it to something we find in nature -- for instance people have defined the human body in many different ways. Also we can go on and on discovering more and more about any aspect of nature. So I see Christ as no different to any other natural phenomena.

To me, the Christ is a process in the universe that we've become aware of. It is also a process in us, because we are shaped out of the forces of the nature and the universe.

One could of course ask the question as to why, recognising that human beings express love and it is a fundamental part of life, that we do not simply call it human love. I believe the point is that the love I'm talking about is far more than what we see in the relationship between a man and woman or parents and their child or between human beings in general. Much of human love is so interwoven with pain, possessiveness, anxiety, childhood needs, jealousy and fears of abandonment, that we cannot help but see the difference between this cosmic love and what we presently know in our human relationships.

Another way that I have defined the Christ is to call it the highest possibility we have in us. In other words when we meet it we recognise it as something beyond our present stage of growth; something that perhaps we can reach to or grow towards. Because, when we meet the Christ, it seems to be something far beyond ourselves, we tend to project it outwardly and to see it as something outside of and different to ourselves. We believe it to be an external being. What I said about the original being leaving seeds of itself relates to this. Our innate potential is something far beyond what we presently are expressing. This potential is often represented in some form of symbol or other, and Christ is one way we represent it. But Christ is simply a name we give to something I felt was innate in the universe. It is a name that unfortunately has become mired in a lot of dogma.

The times I have met the Christ and communicated with it (and I refrain from using the terms he or she here because I don't think they are appropriate), I always have this paradoxical feeling that what I meet is far beyond me -- yet it is also myself. Sometimes this being is felt to be so far beyond me that I simply fall down on my knees before it in awe. So in this sense we can think of any meeting with Christ as a confrontation with our own amazing possibility, our own potential. Any communication that occurs is therefore a dialogue between what we are at the moment and what we can become.

Christ of the Andes

Some people have been capable of allowing that amazing potential within them to express in some measure through their everyday life. Then we see them as a holy being, or a saint.

As I explained, this sense of the Christ connects with the beginning of things, where that amazing creative death set the scene for the possibility of other beings to emerge. In Genesis the words used and put into the mouth of the Creator are, "Let us make them in our own image." And so this potential carries with it the image of the Creator. Therefore the meeting with Christ is the meeting with the possibility that was given us in the beginning.

I believe that the human race met this potential, this Christ, very fully about 2000 years ago. But of course there are other older religions that also in some way embodied a similar principle by different names, as in India in the use of the name Krishna.

Is Christ an Extra Terrestrial?

There are of course many ways of looking at Christ. Another way that I consider to be a good definition is that of calling Christ a cosmic being. By this I mean a living process that does not need a physical body to have an existence. Also I mean a being that has a much vaster existence than we humans. As far as I can understand, the Christ being has an enormous capability to exist through what we call symbiotic relationships. If it is possible for you to imagine that you had a symbiotic relationship with plants, with animals, with the earth itself, with the sun, and with the countless human beings, then you would perhaps begin to grasp what I mean by the living process of Christ existing through symbiosis.

For instance in our body we have several symbiotic relationships, and thereby we can exist as we do. We have bacteria in our gut that help us to digest our food. Within our cells we hold mitochondria which at one time had separate existence. But now through a symbiotic relationship mitochondria are included as part of our many cells.

Now, if you imagine the being of Christ can do this with anything -- that its existence is totally enmeshed with all life forms and with the cosmos itself, then you have a grasp of what I see as the existence of this cosmic being. I experienced it as being completely linked with all of nature in a way that I can barely imagine. Also, just as we exist and gain our livelihood, if that is the right term, from the bacteria in our gut, and the mitochondria in our cells, then Christ also feeds on the experience gained from human lives and human knowledge. This is fairly clearly spelt out in Christianity where it says that we can become cells in the body of Christ.

This also links with the possibility of gaining eternal life through the giving of oneself to Christ. And you have to understand I am only looking at this in a technical sense and not saying that this is in any way a proven fact. But if we can begin to form the conception of Christ having a symbiotic relationship with us, and that our experience, the harvest of our life experience, is absorbed by the Christ as a form of energy or nourishment, then we can begin to see that our being may very well be digested into that huge cosmic life form and live in an extended way.

If we can see that, then we can understand some of the descriptions of near death experiences, where a Christ-like being asks of the dying person what they have brought, what they have harvested from their life. Then they are taken through a full life review, a re-experiencing of their whole life in an evaluating way. I see this as a form of digestive process where those things that are not compatible with the more universal life of Christ are digested out. I mean this very literally, in a similar way that our being digests the food we eat and only absorbs what is compatible with its own existence. So any aspects of the personality that are destructive, poisonous, hateful, are digested out, and what is compatible becomes a living part of the body of Christ.

However, I also saw at one time that Christ is involved in a long-time caring for the potential that exists in a human being. I saw that Christ is involved in the flow of human life through the river of time, supporting and caring for our growth through millennia.

It is no wonder then that we will meet the Christ in many different ways, in many different guises, as the stories in the New Testament suggest. And here the paradox intrudes again because if Christ is also the best that we are ourselves, then we too are a cosmic being, and we will meet ourselves in many different ways, in many different guises, and in many different periods of time.

See: Near Death Experiences Journal.

Life After Death?

Chris: I am wondering what you understand about the subject of life after death. What do you think happens to you when you die?

Tony: I have formed a fairly clear idea of this from experiences I met over the last 30 years. So from these I have worked out something that, for me at least, is not only based on my own, but also from other peoples experience.

I know that if you went out to people in the street and said you believe in life after death, some would smile and say they do not believe that there is any life continuing after physical death. In fact they might have a sort of supercilious view of those who do believe, because as far as they are concerned there is no evidence at all that consciousness survives physical death.

What I feel about this is that they are simply not educated in this area. They have not read the vast amount of information by serious researchers who have investigated the subject. There is even laboratory research done by Charles Tart showing evidence that consciousness can exist separated from the body.

It is because of this level of disbelief that I am taking time to preface what I want to say.

In the film Contact, Ellie, a scientist played by Jodie Foster, is being questioned about her disbelief in God by Palmer Joss, played by Matthew McConaughey. Ellie says to Palmer that there is no evidence for God scientifically, and that he cannot therefore prove his belief. She tells him she is looking for something tangible and provable. So Palmer very gently asks her if she loved her father who is now dead. Ellie, who in fact loved her father very deeply, says that yes, of course she did. Palmer then, again gently, asks her to prove it to him.

Many of the things we take for granted in life, and believe in very fully, are extremely subjective when we look at them directly as Joss asked Ellie to do. Such things are very difficult to grasp and pin down on a laboratory table to investigate. And when we look at the subject of life after death, we have to remember in the first place that consciousness itself is by no means understandable scientifically. Nobody has yet arrived at an agreeable definition of what it is -- certainly not in any laboratory sense. As far as how it exists or what its possibilities are, we are at the foot of a mountain, most of which is covered in clouds. So to scientifically say there is or is not life after death is not possible. What we can do though is to look at subjective human experience, just as Joss asked Ellie to do. So to prove the existence of consciousness after the death of the body means we are entering an area beyond what we can at the moment measure with instruments.

Therefore what I am going to say is about subjective experience connected with consciousness. My experience of what I'm going to say is as real to me as the pains and pleasures of love that I have experienced, but hard to produce any physical model of. It is not like a piece of tissue you can put under the microscope.

Our physical body, like any other thing that has a beginning also has an end. It dies. Change is a fundamental part of cosmic and physical events. The personality, what we call self, also has a beginning, it develops, and it ends. Those are observable and basic facts of physical life. The question is, does anything of that personality survive? Does self awareness exist beyond physical death?

To answer that question it is also observable that within change there are certain constants. Within the changing seasons of the year, the seasons themselves remain as an overlying constant. This paradox is everywhere in nature. Wherever there is death there is also a constant. For instance the human body that is born and dies, has also been alive since the beginning of life on this planet. It is the unbroken trail of cellular lives from the beginning. Nowhere in that line was there death, otherwise you would not exist as a physical body. Our body is also, in every moment, changing. Yet along with that change there is a constancy that gives us continued life day by day.

We also have to carefully look at what we consider survival after death to mean. Do we mean that our personality, exactly as it is remains in some way? But that doesn't even happen while we are alive. We are constantly going through change and transformation of one sort or another. Strangely enough, despite the incredibly powerful changes that occur from infancy to possible old age, there is still a sense of constancy within all that change.

Then we come to the question of what it is to be a person anyway. If we take a look at your body, as already suggested, it is an outcrop of living cells that have subdivided and subdivided through millions of years. It certainly wasn't formed by you personally, but by the action and lives of thousands of previous beings and various environments.

As for your sense of self, that probably depends on the language you learned and viewpoints it contains about life, and what it is to be a person. Whatever you believe, those beliefs did not originate with you. All of them are thousands of years old. Do you honestly believe you in any way originated what you think or how you look at the world? Do you honestly believe that you exist without any influence from the past? Do you honestly believe that your present personality has not inherited massive amounts from other beings who pre-existed you?

Well, you may agree that you have inherited, incorporated, and are expressing a great deal from what pre existed you. But in common with a prevailing belief that also pre-existed you, you may see this as a purely physical phenomena. But we come back to question of what is consciousness. What is this consciousness that knows itself? Evidence suggests that it is not simply a product of the brain. In fact, Sir Auckland Geddes, and one-time British diplomat to the US, who himself met a powerful near death experience, said that the mind is not in the brain, the brain is in the mind.

However, remember another fundamental. If you were born blind no careful words on my part, no crafted explanations, could give you an experience of light and colour. If you lived amongst people, the majority of whom were blind, and only a few talked of light, you would probably think them quite irrational and a little crazy. Perhaps they would need to be pitied. Similarly, if you knew nothing of love, no talk of mine could convince you of its existence.

So, take time to consider what constancy within change means in your life and your death. Take time to consider what it means that your life is an expression of what lived prior to your own physical birth. Read the investigations into near death experiences. Ask yourself what you are at the very base of your being. In the widest sense, how is it you exist? Somewhere in those speculations I believe you will gain insight into how your living and dying body and personality can also be a part of a constant that does not die.

A death scene as witnessed by Andrew Jackson Davis

The strongest personal evidence for me of survival arose from an incredible out of body experience I had. During it I became aware of what was happening hundreds of miles away, and this was later verified. From this I understood that whatever my personal consciousness was, it could operate quite separately from my physical senses and body. In a way that I still do not understand, in that state I could observe what was happening in what we call the physical world, and could in a very limited way, interact with it. Since that time I have had many other experiences that have developed my view of life after death more fully. My present viewpoint is perhaps explainable by something that we each experience. Early in each day there are things that you do that you pass on during the day to other experiences. But even late in the day you can look back and remember what you did. The strange thing about this is that the event and its direct experiences are gone. In a sense they are dead, yet the memory of them remains. You might even say that the person you were at that time, during those moments, died. Yet here you are, remembering the events, and having a sense of continuity. If there is survival after death, there must presumably be something that continues to exist despite the body and brain dying. Well, that isn't an unusual thing in nature. In fact it is quite an everyday process. The tulip that blooms in spring dies and rots away, yet beneath the soil the bulb remains and will next year produce another tulip flower that is quite unique, yet emerging from the same source. It absorbed the essence of the previous flower and creates anew.

Life within Change and Constancy

Rudolf Steiner explains parts of this process very clearly. He points out that from conception through to death our physical body goes through a process of continuous change. There is never a moment when changes are not going on in the body. Also, part of this change is that physical impressions last for moments only. One impression gives way to another continuously through the day and the years. But as mentioned above, something in our nature builds up a sense of self and meaning from these fleeting experiences. In fact, without these experiences through our senses we would not develop as a person. So in quite a real way our personality, or our soul as it used to be called, feeds on physical experience and develops a defined self from them. This is similar to the way the body builds up its defined shape through the continuous passage of food water and air -- physical substance -- through it.

So, in both cases, from ever-changing and transitory experiences, something more permanent is built. In the case of our physical self we build a body that has a certain level of constancy during change. With our personality or soul, we similarly build a sense of self from experiences we gained through our physical experiences. Again there is a level of constancy during continual change.

It is fairly easy to see that there is yet another level of this within our everyday experience. Our personality or sense of self that we build through our many and changing experiences, and that in itself is also changing, builds up concepts that are more lasting than the shifting sense impressions and ideas it experiences. As humans, in this way we have built up concepts about the physical nature of the world, gravity, music, astronomy and the many other things that can be passed from one person to another as ideas. Such ideas can survive not only during one's lifetime, but pass from one person to another for immense periods of time. Here again we have constancy during change.

If we are lucky, during our lifetime we can observe that not only our physical experiences lead to the development of our personality; not only does our personality gather understanding from the many separate experiences we meet; but occasionally the concepts we arrive at are seen to gather into a higher synthesis again. At such times we glimpse or experience a universal understanding. We see how the everyday things that we experience, the concepts that arise from them, in some way connect with the universal principles in the cosmos and in life. With wonder we see that the ordinary everyday things and events around us are expressions of processes and human endeavours that flow through our lives from ancient times, perhaps even from the timeless.

This sense of the universal which in some cases is called enlightenment, or cosmic consciousness, is an experience of what we have called the spirit. In other words it is an experience of the constant underlying the ever shifting experiences of our body and our personality. And just as our personality gathers the shifting impressions of our senses into a realisation of its own continuing existence, so the spirit gathers experiences of the personality into its own continuity. This is like the tulip bulb hidden behind the short flowering of the tulip.

One way of understanding this might be in saying that just as your genetic material is the gathered experience of thousands of lives, so your personality is the gathered material, the essence of thousands and millions of experiences; and your spirit is the gathered material of the finest realisations and concepts gathered by your personality. It is very likely that the cosmic processes that we experience as humans and see as universal in nature do not stop there, but have yet a higher synthesis.

The difficulty with accepting these ideas is not that we cannot see them working in nature, but we fail to grasp what our spirit is. Only a few of us have the wonder of a direct realisation of it. This is because it is the very thing with which we try to grasp it with. As Laing says in his poem The Bird of Paradise, “The truth I am trying to grasp is the grasp that is trying to grasp it.” Your spirit, the constant within change, is the very foundation of your personal awareness. It is what exists behind the constant shifting sense impressions, thoughts and feelings. It is the blank mirror in which all your personal experiences seem to have existence. Take away all the images of your thoughts and emotions, your sense impressions, and you have the clear beingness of your spirit. Try looking at the mirror of your consciousness instead of the images, thoughts and sense impressions the mirror reflects.

While I was working in Greece I experienced something that puts all this in a more human context. I had led a Seed Group meditation, and then took a turn in being the Seed myself. (See: Meditate). Being a Seed in such a group is often a very strong experience. At that particular time I met death in a way I have never done before. If you have never used the Seed meditation in such a way, it needs to be explained that it is rather like having a very vivid dream while you are awake. In a dream we are convinced that what we are meeting is really happening. We feel all the feelings and experience it as a reality. So what I met was an experience in just that way. It wasn't a daydream. It wasn't a sort of, 'what if' type of experience.

As I entered into the process I felt my life coming to an end. To see that everything you have lived for and done is finishing was what I met. I felt that I was losing my children and I would be dead to them. I would be dead to everything that I had hoped for, reached for, it was all ending. It was an extraordinary experience to feel myself dying in that way.

I died. The experience carried on, so I was then an exterior observer of what was happening. I was a point of awareness watching, and there was my dead form lying on the ground. As I watched I saw my father -- who was already dead -- approach the dead body and lift it and carry it across a threshold. He placed it in a meadow and stood back. As I watched the dead body was resurrected. A wonderful change took place in it. The body, no longer physical, was brought to life. As I watched I was a witness of what brought it to life. It was a wonderful and joyous experience to see that resurrection. What brought life to that dead form was everything that I had given of myself to another person. I may have given an idea; I may have given anger that reached into their being and taught them something. I may have given that person warmth or support. I may have been a parent for them, or given myself in some other way. But I realised as I saw the resurrection that it is not simply the thought of giving something to another person, but it is what reaches into them and is absorbed to become a part of their nature. It is something that then lives in them. It therefore has life. It may even pass on from them to others and have life in many people.

But I also saw that what I had received from other people, that I had left myself open to receive from others, their ideas, their love, their anger, their personality, their traits, their abilities; whatever I had taken into myself from them was also what gave me a spiritual life after death.

What I understood from the experience was that we only gain a life beyond physical death from what we have given to and received from others. It is only what life itself takes up and absorbs of our nature; it is only what life in us has taken from others that continues our life after death. It is only what exists beyond the boundaries of the personal self that can live on.

Death is Life Without Form

I had another similar experience, again in a seed group, while working in Spain. This time the experience led me to see that what we call death is in fact life unclothed. What I mean is that when we look at each other, or at the world of nature, we see life expressed in form. But usually we do not look to see what is behind that form. We do not see the universal principle that enters into the myriad forms of life.

So what I experienced in Spain was that as the forms drop away, what we are left with is life without its clothing. We meet the essence of what gives us life, what gives the people around us existence, what exists in animals and plants, what animates and informs the children and people we love. Then we know we have met death in every moment of life, because life and death are one and the same. We have seen death in every face we look upon.

I tried to put my experience into words in the following way:

Of a sudden I see the face of Death. I hear its voice. I know it - For we have met Often and always. Death has the features of A child I made cry; The profile of My loved woman; Your countenance. Have I known you? Then I have known Death. Have I betrayed any? Then I have betrayed Death. And its face is beauty. For it is all things - Naked, Undressed of flesh, Leafless, Exposed, Unclad Life - Without the garment That our selfhood is.

And the waters in me rose To tears. Bathing me in regret That I had So often Forgotten My love For the Naked Beauty.

The message of this experience is very similar to what I learned from the first experience in Greece. It is that because the essence of life lies behind all its forms, what we give or receive from each other we give and receive from life itself. Therefore life itself remembers, and our life exists in the essence that lies behind all things.

Another experience explains something that is again very similar in its message, but looks at it from another angle. This time it was during an exploration of a dream that I met death face-to-face.

I dreamt I was in my bed and was woken by something falling onto the foot of the bed -- or that I could feel moving at the foot of the bed. The dream was very real because all my surroundings were exactly the same as in waking life. I was very frightened of whatever it was crawling up towards me over the top of the bed. I caught hold of it in my right hand, gripping very tightly, and saying, "I will destroy you. I will destroy you!"

When I explored the dream I came across a very strong fear of death. This was so strong I could hardly breathe and felt I was having an asthma attack. But in fact it was fear that was paralysing me. I had noticed the signs of ageing in my body and this had prompted my feelings about death. But here it was creeping up on me, and if it touched me I felt it would pervade my whole body and kill me. But I wanted to confront death. In the imagery of the dream here it was, and I wanted to walk up to face it and know the truth of it. So I let feelings of fear consume me without trying to suppress them or run away from them. It felt as if I were walking way up close to this threatening creature to look it in the eye. And when I did that suddenly all fear and tension had gone. I could breathe easily again. That was surprising and I couldn't understand how I could move so fast from one feeling to another. So I backtracked to see if I could play the whole thing through again in slow motion to understand how to meet death with calmness. What I saw as I did this was that it was all to do with identification. My fear had arisen because I identified my real self with my body. And my body I identified with the corpses of rabbits I had seen in the field, eaten away by maggots, and that was my image of death. Because I identified with the rotting corpse my feelings responded with fear and paralysis as I came face-to-face with death. But there was a part of me that felt so alive despite what was happening to my body. In that way I was identified with life, with the spirit, the essence that gave life to my body. As soon as I identified with that the fear disappeared.

An Egyptian burial - British Museum

So once again we have here a reference to the constant, the permanent, the unchanging that lies within or behind the changing and impermanent. That is really the kernel of anything I have to say about death.

We only miss seeing this when we hold on to concrete ideas about what our life is or means. We only miss it when we believe we know what life and death are really about. Such rigid certainty about what is in the end our own ignorance shuts us off from any further knowing. It is only as we drop our concrete ideas of things; only as we learn the art of unknowing, that we open to the mystery of things and perhaps can gain a glimpse beyond the boundaries of our everyday concepts.

Can We Prepare for Death?

Chris: Do you think we can prepare ourselves for death?

Tony: I believe there is a great deal to the learned from the accounts people have given of their near death experiences. Very often in these accounts we learn that the person goes through a review of their life. This review enables them to fully experience each moment of their life, each aspect of relationships, what other people felt in such relationships. They experienced again the many decisions or turning points in their life. Such reviews are a sort of harvesting of their experience. In some cases the person even says that a being of light led them into and through the review and asked them what they had brought, what they had gathered from their life.

Today, many people have learned, through various forms of psychotherapy, through drugs or meditation, to experience such reviews of their life. They are seldom done in one full session as happens in the near death experience. But they are still a profound meeting with what one has harvested and what one has thereby learned from the powerful moments in one's life.

To me this is a form of dying before you die. To do this requires a level of openness and surrender to what we have defined as ones spiritual life. So the surrender, the review, is to me a way of clearing the past, so that when you do die there is less work to be done as you have already learned to do the work and have carried out some of it.

The only other preparation for death that I can see as being really relevant is to recognise what you identify with. Do you fully identify with your body? Or have you managed to glimpse and identify at all with the permanent aspect of yourself? If you begin to find an identification with the constant in your being, then that is perhaps one of the most powerful ways of preparing for death.

Chris: You told me that when you were at my mother's funeral something happened to you that was very impressive. What was that?

Tony: In describing this I have to say first that I did not go to your mother's funeral with any sense of seeking an experience or looking for some sort of insight into what was going on. I went to be with you as your friend. And, as you know, the service was far from inspiring. The priest was stumbling over what he was reading, didn't remember your mother's name, and so there was some level of irritation with most of us because of what was happening.

Chris: He couldn't even get the right name. It certainly wasn't a celebration of my mother's life in any sensitive way.

Tony: So I wasn't moved by the ceremony. I was there involved in what was going on around me. But suddenly it seemed that something opened in me and I could see or sense that all the people there, although they were not attempting to do what I was now sensing, were producing something by their very presence as a group. The funeral itself, the fact that everybody was there to be part of your mother's funeral, acted as some sort of focus. It focussed their attention, their feelings and their thoughts as a lens might do. It focused all their mental and emotional energy on your mother's spirit. I saw her lifted, buoyed up by it. I suppose it would be right to say it was almost like she was brought awake by it also. So she was energised and lifted up to be with her chosen spiritual love, who was Christ. And what I had thought to be a funeral became a wedding as she was united with her love. That was a very wonderful thing to see.

Do You Believe in Reincarnation?

Chris: Do you then believe in reincarnation?

Tony: I don't necessarily believe in it in the sense of one's personality being transported into another lifetime. But taking into account what was said about life being a balance between the changing and the constant, about the essence that lies behind the forms, and that the essence absorbs experience; taking that into account I believe the essence dips into different forms again and again.

However, I realise that sounds somewhat impersonal and I find my experience of it is not impersonal at all. I don't think, for instance, that Tony as a distinct personality will be reincarnated at some time. What I do see is that Tony is a small part of the spirit that has existed throughout all-time. That spirit, of which I as Tony only reflect a small part, when I die will absorb the lessons of this life. At some other period that spirit will dip into human life again.

The reason I believe that is because I appear to have memories of past individuals whose lives link with mine in the present. There are aspects of those lives that influence this life.

This same rose will never bloom again, but a similar rose will arise from the same roots..

But there is a way of thinking about this that I believe makes it reasonably straightforward. It doesn't seem to be a mysterious thing, and I don't know why people make of it such a mystery. If you look at a tree, you can see it incorporates many, many past trees. It didn't suddenly emerge out of a vacuum, out of nothing. It has its present existence out of what existed in the past. Of course, because in our culture we still are labouring under the world view that the atom is the fundamental particle or material in the universe, we still see ourselves and a tree as simply a physical process. All our calculations about this leave out the factor of consciousness. Even trees have a form of sentience. They respond to light, to weather conditions, to their environment. Did Tony suddenly gain the type of awareness, perceptions, concepts suddenly in the here and now? Of course I didn't. Thousands of people pre-existed me who gave words, concepts skills that have together formed who I am. There are ideas, longings, weaknesses and blindness of which I am a very particular mixture. As I have gained insight into my being it really does seem that I am part of a stream of influence flowing through history.

Your Body is a Work of Art

In my life, the stream has bubbled up from under the surface again. It carries particular influences, minerals, qualities, from the past. Therefore I don't believe Tony is a reincarnation of a particular being. But he is a working out of things from the past.

If we look at a painting, we see certain colours on it. That particular painting exists because of the texture, the minerals, the earth and chemicals that go into the paint or ink used. It is also a result of the movements, the skill the artist has put into it. It is an incorporation of all those things and many other things we have not mentioned. It is also an expression of the light that falls on it. Without the light it is not apparent. In different lighting conditions it will change its character in some way.

So the painting is partly an expression of a human being and their qualities and skills; it is partly an expression of the chemicals and minerals and surfaces involved. It is an extraordinary thing. When we look at it we are witnessing all of that. Maybe we don't realise it; perhaps we don't see all that goes into it. And of course, the painting is unique. There will never be a painting exactly like that. It might appear on the surface as the same, but there will never be quite the same mixture of minerals, chemicals, movements, human qualities, that entered into the painting.

Our body is just such a work of art. It is an extraordinary blending of an enormous number of people. Not just our parents, but our forebears going back into prehistory. There is also the powerful influence of the time and period in history in which we are born. The culture we live in weaves itself into who and what we become. A child born in today's world will be influenced by the extraordinary number of chemicals and additives, medicines and drugs, alcohol and nicotine, that are part and parcel of life today. They are all factors that go into the make up of who the person is and becomes. They are the chemicals in the 'paint' of personality.

Then there are the unique events and circumstances of that individuals life. The people met, the relationships encountered, the opportunities and traumas that events bring. All of those factors are like the paint, the surface, the artistry and skill that go into producing a painting. The uniqueness of those factors reflects very particular colours in the light that is our life.

Of course this is an analogy but I think it is a useful one. Light has in it every conceivable colour. It is the surface that the light falls on that brings out qualities. So it is the uniqueness of our body and consciousness that bring qualities out of the infinite possibilities of life. Innate in the forms of life are all the lessons and experiences it has gathered through unimaginable number of lives and creatures. The surface our body provides draws out of that infinite potential very particular qualities. We are the person we become because of the blending of all those unique factors.

How can anything in the present rule out factors from the past?

Chris: Well, people think that way because they see reincarnation as a certain thing. People think they have a former life as some particular person, and that person will be born again in a new situation.

Tony: I suppose what I feel about that is people often leave certain factors out of their thinking process. Everything in the present, whether it relates to agriculture, politics, religion or art, has arisen out of past influences and things learned. People see that and of course recognise their present life and feelings are connected with their immediate family and culture. What they often fail to see is that there are influences existing in them from the far past. So we can say that the present is an incarnation of the past in a new form. How is it we can't say that I am an incarnation of the past in a new form? We are not an incarnation of a tiny bit of the past, but a whole spectrum of it.

So the wonder of this is not that Tony is a reincarnation of a particular past personality, but that Tony is an expression of something that has always existed, and carries past wisdom and experience.

We Are Co-creators in the Cosmos

Chris: This has reminded me of something you talked about in regard to physical substance -- matter. You said that modern physics has shown that we change it by looking at it. What are the implications of that?

Tony: That is an amazing idea isn't it?

Considering that quantum physics now assures us that subatomic particles can change their very nature simply by us observing them, I often wonder if, when we look at a flower and feel how beautiful it is, we in some way change it.

In his book Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot gives an understandable description of this. He says that, 'Physicists have found compelling evidence that the only time electrons and other “quanta” manifest as particles is when we are looking at them. At all other times they behave as waves. This is as strange as owning a bowling ball that traces a single line down the lane while you are watching it, but leaves a wave pattern every time you blink your eyes.'

We usually see the world as bounded by time and three dimensions. But another extraordinary statement about the world around us is one put forward by Irish physicist John Stewart Bell. It is a quantum theorem that has revolutionised the way reality is considered. In brief, the theorem states that when two sub-microscopic particles are split and moved to a distance from each other, the action on, or of, particle 'A', is instantaneously reproduced with particle 'B'. This interaction does not rely on any known link or communication and is considered to stand above normal physical laws of nature, as it is faster than light. Prior to such findings it was thought nothing could transcend the speed of light. See Feature by Talbot.

Despite these findings we still hear scientists talking about the solid and time bound world in which nothing can move faster than light. I guess we all live in the past in one way or another, and in fact our world view, considering these new findings, is still dragging somewhere in the 19th century.

The everyday events in life are still miraculous

Newtonian physics, in which the atom was the fundamental and immutable particle in the universe, gradually robbed us of a magical view of our environment that existed previously, and still exists in many tribal cultures. This reminds me of something I read in Lyle Watson's book Supernature. He said that having written about some of the strange things that could be observed, which many scientists would never investigate because they appear to be completely impossible from their present view of the universe, a man in Italy wrote to him asking for Lyle to come and witness something his young son did. Lyle followed through on the request, and while observing the young boy of about four years old, the father rolled a tennis ball to his son. The son played with it for a while, and without any apparent struggle rolled the ball back. But now the ball was inside out without any break in its surface.

Lyle then took another ball and wrote his name on the outside of it. He rolled the ball to the boy and in a few minutes it was rolled back inside out.

Later, with witnesses, Lyle cut the second ball open and there was his signature on the inside of what had been an unbroken ball.

What Lyle says is that our present scientific view sees what he witnessed as completely impossible. It is against most of the fundamental things that our science states are laws of our universe, making what happened out of the question.

Having said that, here we are living in the world where it seems impossible for us to turn tennis balls inside out without cutting them in some way; distances have to be crossed physically by some means of transport; people appear to be completely separate from us in mind and body; death appears to be a final end; we feel hemmed in by the limits of our ability to know -- so what does it mean that a four year old boy turned a tennis ball inside out?

Well, the new physics begins to give us evidence that we live in the midst of a universe that is far more amazing than we have ever previously thought. We live in some ways as co-creators of this universe. But my deepest feelings about what this means is that we each have a phenomenal potential. We each have possibilities beyond anything we can imagine. As human beings we haven't even begun to really explore that potential and to use it in our everyday life. To me that is the most important path forward for each of us.

Personally I find it amazing that many Christians, who profess deep belief in their Bible, can't see and accept that. In Genesis it says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness .... And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." That means we have the potential of being godlike. Miracles are part of our nature!

Are There Parallel Universes?

Chris: So what do you think about the idea of parallel universes?

Tony: David Deutsch, an Oxford University Professor describes parallel universes as the multiverse. What has been discovered in exploring quantum mechanics is that a universe must exist for every physical possibility. He goes on to say that quantum theory leaves no doubt that other universes exist in exactly the same sense that the single Universe that we see exists. He states, "This is not a matter of interpretation. It is a logical consequence of quantum theory."

For us to make any sense out of this we need to understand a little bit more about fundamentals of quantum physics. Classical physics maintained that an object or an action can only be what it is and where it is. It cannot be in one position in time and space, and also in another position in time and space at the same moment.

However, because of the findings in quantum physics that a subatomic particle when observed is a particle, and when not observed a wave, a new way of looking at the universe had to be arrived at. In quantum mechanics particles can be two things at once.

This paradoxical state has been applied to the idea of building a quantum computer. In conventional computers working with digital code, something is either a 0 or a 1. Digital code is built up from a combination of these two numbers. But a quantum computer can work in a paradoxical way. It can calculate using the 0 and 1 as a single possibility. One of the experiments in quantum physics is to project a single photon of light to a half silvered mirror that allows the photon to both continue straight on in its direction, and also to reflect it at right angles. Classical physics would say that a single particle such as a photon cannot do the two things at once. It would either continue straight on its path or be reflected at right angles. But quantum physics shows that it can in fact be both at once. These are some of the factors that underlie the statement that there are parallel universes. The nearest I have come to understanding this in any personal sense came about through using the technique of meditation called enlightenment intensive. During this something happened that seemed to me to be an experience of the central situation of our universe. It is very difficult to describe, and so I have to use a story to help produce a particular idea or realisation.

Are you looking at this from above or from the side? The cube is both things at once, but you can only see it as one or the other.

So imagine for a while that you are sitting looking at a wristwatch that has a second hand moving around the dial. As you look you notice that the movement stops, and you gradually realise that time has stopped. You begin to think about this, and after many speculations arrive at some understanding of it. But no time has passed.

You now begin to think about your life, and in doing so you explore all possible choices you could make, and the directions that could arise from those choices and actions. This is an incredible undertaking, but you finally arrive at every conceivable possibility. But no time has passed.

So you begin to think about another person that you know, and likewise you explore every possible direction they might take, and all the consequences that could arise out of being who they are, and what the results in the world would be of the many possibilities of their life. Having done this, no time has passed.

In this way you explore every living human being and the consequences of their lives through infinite duration. No time has passed.

What I am trying to illustrate by the story is that my experience during the meditation suggested that at the very core of our universe, and therefore of our existence, is a condition outside of time and space. And in that condition every possible direction, thought, action, decision and outcome has already been explored and is, at that level, already a reality. At the time I really felt that each of these realities could have physical existence. At that level, I as a person was in reality all of the many possibilities that I could be. I was a murderer, an alcoholic, a genius, a pervert, an artist, a dropout, single, married, everything!

What I sensed at the time, and I still fail to understand intellectually in detail, is that any of those possibilities could be made real in the here and now. I could claim any of those possibilities, and because they already exist, they could manifest in my life now. This, I understood, as being how spontaneous and immediate miracles of healing occurred to some people.

However, there are other ways of looking at the possibility of parallel universes. One of these is to realise that our sense organs give us a very limited view of the universe around us. There is the possibility that there are forms of life having no need of a physical body. Just as radio and television transmissions and signals picked up by mobile phones, exist, or coexist, in the space we move around in and make our life in, so other beings can exist and coexist in the space we know without us being aware of them.

Many years ago when I had an out of body experience, I stood before my mother and she could not see me. That was very strange because I was very apparent and real to myself. I existed in the same room, the same space, as she did, and yet she had no awareness of me. Yet my dog, who had been asleep in front of the fire, did see me and responded. What I realised from this was that if my mother could have been aware of my thoughts and feelings, then she would have known of my presence. But because she, in common with most of us, cannot be aware of what I think and feel unless I express it physically in some way by facial expression, or words, then beings existing at that level are invisible to us.

So in that sense